End Game (18 page)

Graham saw something flash behind Deputy Price’s eyes. She’d just pissed him off. “Just what are you suggesting?” he asked. “Are you
threatening
this young man?”

Graham took a step closer to the deputy.

Peggy walked toward them. A stroll, really—unhurried and deliberate. Graham pivoted around Deputy Price, keeping the man’s body between him and the dragon lady.

She stopped when she was just a foot away from the deputy and she glared. Graham could feel the reflected heat of it, but Deputy Price seemed unbothered.

After a few seconds, Peggy walked on down the hall and disappeared out the door on the far end.

Graham’s heart raced, and he found himself trembling. “Who
is
she?”

Deputy Price patted him between his shoulder blades. “She’s nobody,” he said. “Just a lady who thinks she’s way more important than she really is.” He gave Graham a nudge. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you that comfortable bed I promised you.”

“S
corpion, Mother Hen.”

Jonathan keyed the mike on his portable radio. “Go ahead.” They were only two hours into their three-hour drive. He sat in the shotgun seat as always, and he turned the volume up so that Boxers could listen in.

“ICIS is beginning to light up about our friends,” she said. “Graham is going to be transferred to a foster home in the next half hour, forty-five minutes.”

“Do you have specifics?” Jonathan asked. If they could get a name and an address, they could lie in wait and grab the boy as he arrived at the foster home. Typically, that was the simplest kind of snatch, when the parties thought they were beyond any danger.

Venice relayed the name of the foster family—Markham, in Lambertville—and the address.

Jonathan wrote it down on the pad that always resided in the pouch pocket on his right thigh. “And the girl? Jolaine?”

“That’s a little more interesting,” Venice said. “She’s scheduled to be transferred from her current location in the adult detention center in Lambertville to a federal facility in Chicago.”

Jonathan exchanged confused glances with Boxers. “Any word yet on the specifics of the charges?”

“That’s a negative,” Venice said. “But it gets better. On a whim, I decided to call the federal facility in Chicago. They don’t know anything about the transfer.”

Jonathan scowled. “You just called them?” he asked. “An inquiry out of the blue is going to get a don’t-know response nine times out of ten.”

“I told them I was calling on behalf of Andrew Barron, an AUSA from Chicago.”

Jonathan recognized the acronym for an assistant United States attorney, a federal prosecutor. “And you think they bought it?”

Venice did not respond to the question. Of course they bought it. Venice had a telephone voice that was unlike any other that Jonathan had ever heard. It pissed her off when he called it her phone-sex voice. Fact was, she could talk anyone into believing anything over the phone.

“Okay,” Jonathan said, breaking the silence. “What should we conclude from them not knowing about the transfer?”

“I think we have to assume that the transfer isn’t real,” she said. “I think we have to assume that the bad guys are going to take her when she’s in the car.”

Jonathan recoiled in his seat. That was a hell of a leap.

“I have a hard time connecting those dots,” Boxers said. Because Jonathan hadn’t yet pressed the mike button, his comment did not go out over the air, but Scorpion could not have agreed more.

“Help me with logic,” Jonathan said on the encrypted channel.

“I assume we’re hunting for ducks,” Venice said.

Jonathan laughed. In that one sentence, she’d spoken paragraphs. If a creature looked like a duck and walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it was unreasonable to conclude that it was a penguin in disguise.

He got her point. Someone was after Jolaine with the intention of doing her harm. She was in custody on a nonspecific charge that now involved a transfer that no one know about.

“I got it,” Jonathan said. “When does the transfer happen?”

“That’s unclear,” Venice said. “The best I can estimate is when they get their stuff in order enough to make it happen.”

“Tell you what,” Jonathan said. “Get your new buddy Maryanne on the phone and patch her into this conversation. Let’s get her take on this.”

Hesitation. “You know I object, right?” Venice said.

“Duly noted. The way I look at it, there’s no harm talking. Surely she’s as dialed into ICIS as you are.”

“You know that begs a different question,” Venice said. “It’s counterproductive for anybody on her side of the equation to know that we are even aware that ICIS exists, let alone that we have access to it.” Access to ICIS was among Venice’s early victories as a brilliant tickler of electrons.

“Then we won’t mention it,” Jonathan said. “Get back to us when you have the patch ready.” He didn’t want to discuss this anymore.

“We’ve got ourselves a dilemma, Boss,” Boxers said. “It’s entirely possible we’re going to have two transfer events happening at the same time.”

Actually, it was close to a certainty, Jonathan thought. The question was, on which event should they focus their intervention?

“The kid is the one with the information,” Boxers said, reading his mind.

Jonathan nodded. Graham was for sure the primary target in terms of national security. He was the one with the photographic memory, and, presumably, the arming codes that so many people were willing to kill to obtain.

“Jolaine’s the one who’ll be most under guard,” Jonathan said. “And the guards will likely be cops. We’re not in the business of endangering cops.”

“But apparently the kid is stable,” Boxers said. “At least he’s being taken to a place of safety.”

“Unless he’s not,” Jonathan said. “If the enemy—whoever they are—is coming at Jolaine, doesn’t it make sense that they’ll come at the boy, too? Why go for her and not for him?”

“Agreed,” Boxers said. “But we need to choose, and our single best opportunity to get Jolaine back will be while she’s in a vehicle being transported between points A and B. Once she’s ensconced in another secure facility, we won’t have many options. You worry about tangling with law enforcement personnel, well, that would be one hell of a fight.”

On the other end of the easiness factor from snatching people from a home where they least expected it was snatching people from a facility designed specifically to prevent snatchings.

“It would help to know where they intend to take her,” Boxers said.

“It would help to know who intends to take her there,” Jonathan countered.

The radio popped to life. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

“That was fast,” Jonathan said. “Maybe we’re about to find out.” He keyed his mike. “Go ahead.”

Venice said, “Kit, you are on with Scorpion and Big Guy. I am Mother Hen. Scorpion, I have filled Kit in on what little we know.”

Jonathan got right down to it. “So, what are your thoughts, Kit?”

“That’s us,” Maryanne said. “We’re taking her to safety. It’s over.”

Jonathan looked to Boxers. “What do you mean, it’s over?”

“It means mission accomplished,” Maryanne said. “Uncle Sam thanks you for your service, and wishes you a good day.”

“This feels way too easy,” Boxers said off the air.

Jonathan agreed. “When did you intend to tell us?” he asked.

“I’m surprised you knew,” Maryanne said. “I didn’t even know until a few minutes ago. I won’t ask how you pulled that off because Wolverine cautioned me about asking too many questions about how you do what you do.”

Jonathan found himself silently cursing the doubt that Venice had planted in his head about Maryanne. This should be good news, but he found himself not trusting it. The fact that she was blowing sunshine up his ass didn’t help at all.

Jonathan keyed the mike. “Was it you guys who swore out the warrant for interstate flight to avoid a noncrime?”

“Say again?”

Jonathan said, “The PCs were pulled over and taken into custody—but not arrested—on a charge of interstate flight to avoid prosecution. Was that you guys?”

“How do you know about all of this?”

In his head, he could see Venice getting mad. “Remember what Wolverine told you,” Jonathan said.

“I don’t get the sudden change in attitude,” Maryanne said.

“You know you’re not answering my question, right?”

“At what point in what parallel universe did the FBI start owing answers to its contractors?” Maryanne said. Clearly, Jonathan had thumped a sensitive button.

“Was that a yes or a no?” Jonathan pressed.

“We’re done,” Maryanne said, and there was a click.

“What the heck was that all about?” Venice asked. “Why dial her in and then piss her off?”

“Yeah,” Boxers said, “I was kind of wondering that myself.”

This wasn’t a discussion for the airwaves. “Mother Hen, I’ll be back to you in a while.” To Boxers, he said, “This just doesn’t feel right. It was a simple enough question. Did they cut the warrant? Why wouldn’t she answer it? I think she got pissed when she found out what we knew. But why wouldn’t she want us to know? If we’re all on the same team—and that’s what she promised from the very beginning—why is she trying to shut us out?”

“Maybe because she’s with the FBI and that’s what they do. They compartmentalize.”

“I keep coming back to Venice’s question,” Jonathan said. “How did Maryanne know so quickly about what happened to the Mitchell family? If you think about it, the gunsmoke must still have been hanging in the air when she reached out to Venice and me at the concert. How could she know so fast?”

“Well, it could have been a telephone call,” Boxers said, “but I don’t think that’s where you’re going. You’re thinking that the pretty hot thing is in on this somehow.”

“I certainly think it’s worth looking into. In fact, Venice’s looking into it as we speak.”

Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “And I bet she’s having a ball doing it, too. Full cavity search?”

“She’s looking for anything that looks like motivation.”

“What about Wolverine? What does she have to say about this?”

Jonathan groaned. “I haven’t spoken to her. I don’t imagine she’d take too well to having one of her trusted lieutenants accused of betrayal. I’ve got to be one hundred percent sure before I launch that balloon.”

“Ah,” Boxers said. “That whole loyalty thing. You know, you’d think after Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen and Edward Snowden, the three-letter groups would start looking at themselves a little more closely.”

Jonathan sensed the birth of a political rant, so he retook control. “Here’s where I see it. Kit says our work is done and that we’re off the case, and Wolverine hasn’t been dialed in. That means we’re alone if we keep going.”

Boxers grinned. “We’re not backing off, are we?”

Jonathan shook his head. “No, we’re not. At least not for a while.”

“Fine by me,” Big Guy said. “But I always like messing with people. Why are you staying in? What’s in it for you? For us?”

“Start with the stakes,” Jonathan explained. “We’ve dealt with Chechens before. I know they’ve got solid grievances with the Russians, but their methods are ten clicks too brutal even for the Hadji. The thought of them with a nuclear capability is just too much. That can’t be allowed to happen.”

“Okay.” Boxers drew out the last syllable, clearly waiting for more. “So you think that Maryanne and the FBI are going to hand the PCs over to the Chechens so that they can blow up Mother Russia? Why would they do that?”

Jonathan realized that he was thinking faster than his mouth could move. “No,” he said. “I’m not convinced that the people running the pickup are FBI. That’s the significance of Venice’s discovery that the field office or whatever it is in Chicago doesn’t know that the PC is on her way.”

“So, you think it’s a snatch,” Boxers clarified. His expression said that he wasn’t yet completely on board with that.

“No,” Jonathan said. “I don’t think that it
is
a snatch. But I think it
could
be a snatch.”

“One that’s being organized by Wolverine’s girl Friday.” Boxers didn’t seem to like the taste of the words. “I just want to make sure I got this right.”

“It all comes back to the stakes,” Jonathan said. “I keep running the outcomes through my head. If Maryanne is in fact a good guy and is in fact telling the truth, then the FBI gets their hands on our PC first, and presumably, there’s no harm, no foul. We’ll just have wasted a lot of time.”

“And if the Chechens snatch them, a lot of Russia will go boom,” Boxers said. “And Wolverine’s girl Friday would have started that ball rolling. That’s the part I’m having trouble with, Dig. I mean, God knows my cynicism has no limits, but even I have—”

“I might be wrong,” Jonathan said. “Let’s stipulate that I probably am. What are the consequences if I’m not? That’s a lot of dead people. And then there’s the retaliatory strike. How do you think President Dar-mond and his team will handle a crisis like that?”

“Jeez, Dig. That is so desperately not my problem. If I start thinking in those terms, the world gets pretty dark.”

“There’s a third possibility, too,” Jonathan went on. “The Russians by far have the most to gain by getting their hands on the PC. They kill him and the codes die with him.”

“Doesn’t that solve everything?” Boxers asked. “I mean, that would suck for him, but that might be the perfect thing for the rest of us here on the planet.”

“He’s a kid, Box,” Jonathan said. “Nothing good comes from killing a kid, I don’t care who he is. But more than that, you’re missing the point.” He felt his impatience growing. “Or maybe I’m not stating it well. These PCs—Jolaine Cage and Graham Mitchell—are just trying to survive. He’s a kid, and she’s a young vet doing her job. The Mitchells hired Jolaine to protect the kid, and then all hell broke loose. Now they’re in danger, and in one of our three outcomes, Graham is killed by Chechens after he gives them what they want, and in a second, he’s killed by Russians to keep him quiet. From the bad guys’ point of view, there’s no other option.”

“And in the third scenario?”

“The third scenario is to deliver the PCs to Wolverine’s FBI, the one that really does care if good wins out over bad.”

“Isn’t Wolfie part of the problem? At least maybe?”

“For now, no,” Jonathan said. “I think she’s in the dark. But you know Wolfie. Presented with the evidence, she’ll come around to our side.”

Being processed into jail was every bit as humiliating as Jolaine imagined it would be, right down to the oft-rumored cavity search. To their credit, the staff of the jail remained courteous and professional through the whole thing.

Taking her own advice, she said nothing. She answered questions regarding her identity and her physical state—she had no known diseases or allergies, she was in excellent physical health, had not had any recent surgeries, blah, blah, blah—but otherwise offered nothing. She didn’t even ask where they had taken Graham.

She’d never seen such a look of terror as she saw on Graham’s face, and that included young grunts who found themselves in a war zone for the first time. At least in combat, there was an element of empowerment, a way to affect the outcome of your own life. There on the street, on his belly, with his hands ratcheted into handcuffs, there was only misery. She had no idea what the next chapter in his life was going to be, and she didn’t ask because she was confident that no one would tell her.