End Game

by John Gilstrap

  Jolaine felt a chill. “I don’t do suicide missions. Let’s establish that up front.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “How much danger is this kid in?”

  “I really don’t know,” Maryanne said. “His mother and father feel threatened. This is their demand—that the boy have protection.”

  “So they’re working for you,” Jolaine said. “Why else would you be concerned?”

  Maryanne said nothing.

  Jolaine nearly apologized for wandering into territory that had already been declared off-limits. “Would the family be my responsibility, too? Would I be part of a larger team?”

  They stopped on the sidewalk to allow three cars to exit the driveway for the Maple Inn, while two others entered the same lot. There were no better chili dogs in the world than those from the Maple Inn.

  “No team,” Maryanne said. “Just you. You’ll be the body man for the boy—sorry, body girl. You’ll go where he goes, and take him to and from wherever that is. During the day, the mom and dad will fend for themselves however they intend to do that. We’ve paid for a good alarm system at the house, so at night, once the boy is tucked in, you’ll be more or less off-duty.”

  “More or less?”

  They started walking again. “You go where the kid goes. As long as he’s in motion, you’ll be in motion, too.”

  “That’s a lot for one person,” Jolaine said. “When I pulled gigs like that over in Afghanistan, we had four-to six-person teams for ’round-the-clock coverage.”

  “That’s interesting,” Maryanne said in a tone that made it clear how little she was interested. “You’re free to say no. Remember, though, you’re not going to have to worry about IEDs, and I’m predicting that the sniper risk is virtually nil. You won’t have to do advance work, and, frankly, there’s a whole world of honest local law enforcement to keep the technicals off the street.”

  Jolaine recognized a “technical” as a rust-bucket pickup truck fitted with a machine gun and laughed in spite of herself. Point made and taken. Perhaps it was a waste to attempt to compare the two missions.

  “How old is this boy?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “What’s wrong with eleven?” Maryanne asked. “There’s no butt-wiping involved.”

  Jolaine said, “Eleven is all whiny insecurity and drama. I’m not sure I want to sign on for drama.”

  Maryanne laughed, amused by whatever she saw in Jolaine’s face. “You won’t be his mother. You’ll be his protector.”

  “Why on earth would the mother and father want a woman to be in charge of a developing hormone factory? I’d think they’d want a stronger hand.”

  Maryanne stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, just in front of the town’s new war memorial. “I’ve met this kid. I’ve met the whole family. He’s . . . less than respectful of authority. I believe their thinking is that a male bodyguard would just not work.”

  “So, I would be his mother.”

  “Only if you let that happen. Like I said, I know this family. They’re not bad people. Mom and Dad don’t have a real strong hand on the parenting tiller, but Graham is basically a good kid.” She blinked as she let his name slip.

  Jolaine felt a rush as she heard the mistake, but right away wondered if Maryanne had let it slip on purpose to make Jolaine feel a victory. This was precisely the kind of second-guessing and mistrust that made Jolaine hate so much of the security industry.

  Maryanne sensed that something was wrong, and gestured to the benches in the sun on the far side of the memorial. “Let’s take a seat,” she said. She led the way past the granite disk that praised “those who served our country” and past the poles that flew the flags of the United States, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Town of Vienna. This was a slice of tranquility in the midst of commuter chaos.

  Maryanne sat on the north end of the bench and waited for Jolaine to help herself to the other seat. Jolaine sat sideways, her left calf tucked under her right thigh.

  “Talk to me,” Maryanne said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Jolaine steeled herself. Should she open up and tell the truth, or should she play the same game she suspected that Maryanne was playing?

  “I’m thinking that this is coming out of nowhere,” Jolaine said. “I’m thinking that I don’t know you from Adam, and that this is a bizarre assignment. I think that you’re holding out important details, and that those details define the reason why you’re coming to me when the FBI is fat with salaried, career agents. Then, when thinking about those assets that you’re choosing not to use, I begin to think you’re here because I’m considered expendable.”

  Maryanne gave her a long, hard look. “How old are you?”

  “You already know that,” Jolaine said. “I suspect that you know just about everything about me. And the fact that you just asked that question does nothing to make me feel better.”

  “The question was more rhetorical than real,” Maryanne said. “I’m just amazed that you can be burdened with so much cynicism when you’re only twenty-four years old.”

  “Cynicism is born of experience,” Jolaine said. “As you so eloquently said, war is hell. Remember, I’ve done two tours soldiering as a non-soldier. I’ve seen what happens to careers and futures after contractors have done their jobs exactly as they’d been instructed, only to have official Washington shove a knife in their backs as soon as something goes a little wrong. I don’t want to be one of those people.”

  “You’re in the United States now, not in Afghanistan. The rules are different here.”

  Jolaine waited for more.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” Maryanne said. “In broad strokes. Do you know what a double agent is?”

  “A spy.”

  “A very special kind of spy. In this case, a man whose foreign bosses think he’s spying on us when in fact he’s providing information to us about the other guy.”

  “I assume we’re talking about the father now?” Jolaine asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “And one of his rules for helping you is that his son be protected from retaliation.”

  “Correct.”

  Jolaine wasn’t buying. It didn’t all add up yet. “This circles back to my previous question,” she said. “Why just the boy? Why not the whole family?”

  “Because the boy—Graham—is the best leverage point. The family and the FBI both agree that if the bad guys discover that they’ve been betrayed, they’ll just kill Mom and Dad outright. There’d be no reason to do otherwise. But if the bad guys only suspect that they’ve been betrayed . . .”

  Jolaine finished the thought for her: “They could kidnap the boy and use him as leverage to make sure.”

  “Yes.”

  “And my job is to make sure that they can’t get close enough to make that happen.”

  “Right.”

  “By myself. How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

  Maryanne pressed her lips together. “There are a couple of moving parts here,” she said. “The first is what we just discussed. The second is the fact that Graham doesn’t know about any of his parents’ behavior. They don’t want him to know—another condition of moving forward.”

  Jolaine scowled. “Then how are you going to explain the lady with the gun going to school with him?”

  “We’ll create a cover story. The nature of his father’s work is sensitive—that’s true, by the way. That’s why we’re working with him and why the bad guys want information from him. We’ll tell Graham that the extra security is just an abundance of caution.”

  It still sounded like a lonesome loser of an assignment to Jolaine. She waited for more.

  “Which brings me to the final set of moving parts,” Maryanne said. “I believe that this whole exercise truly is one of abundant caution. Overkill caution. I think the danger involved is miniscule.”

  “That’s abundantly dismissive,” Jolaine observed. “Especially fr
om the vantage point of one who will not be in the crosshairs if things go bad.”

  Maryanne shrugged. “What can I say? That’s the nature of the job. We’ll make sure you’re well armed and well trained. There will be communications protocols in place. In addition to your salary, we’ll also pay for you to finish your degree.”

  Jolaine laughed. That last part came out of nowhere. “My degree? When would I have time to pursue that while working twenty-four seven?”

  “You’ll be staying at the house,” Maryanne said, the very essence of reason. “You can take online courses during the nighttime hours.”

  Jolaine couldn’t see that working out, but she supposed it was a nice benefit to offer. She fell quiet.

  “Look,” Maryanne said. “We know what you did for the Azizi family while you were working protection for them.”

  Jolaine felt something stir in her belly. Was it possible that she was about to be arrested after all? “I don’t know—”

  “It’s okay,” Maryanne assured. “You’re not in trouble for that. You just did your job.”

  Toward the end of her most recent tour, Jolaine and her team had been escorting Behnam Azizi and his two children, eleven-year-old Afshoon and her nine-year-old brother, Fahran, from their armored SUV into a local coffee shop when a car erupted in an enormous fireball less than a hundred feet away, launching shrapnel like hundreds of bullets toward every compass point. Knocked down by the pressure wave, Jolaine rolled back to her feet, scooped the Azizi children into her arms, and ran. She’d assumed—correctly—that the bomb was an attempt to assassinate Behnam Azizi, and she wanted the children as far away from any ensuing gunfight as possible.

  When it was all over, Behnam Azizi and three Taliban gunmen were dead—along with eight civilians who just happened to be on the street when the bomb detonated. Some of the locals who’d seen Jolaine running away with the panicked children had assumed that she was kidnapping them. Her teammates had assumed that she’d turned cowardly and fled the gunfight. Both assumptions led to her being prematurely rotated out of Afghanistan.

  “Your instinct was to save the children,” Maryanne said. “The instinct of the penis possessors on your team was to stand and fight. Your approach is more compatible with the job we need done.”

  And so, after some negotiation on pay, Jolaine accepted the offer.

  Reflecting back on that conversation, and the training that followed, Jolaine remained stunned by the degree to which everything that could have gone wrong did.

  If the Mitchells were so damned important, why didn’t they have a security detail of their own? And what could they possibly know that could justify this kind of carnage?

  Once she started down this road of inquiry, the questions wouldn’t stop. If Maryanne—Jolaine’s only lifeline in all of this—was so securely on top of all that was happening, where was her warning to the family when everything was going to hell? Where was her phone call, or her FBI SWAT team? Why did the FBI seem to care so little about things alleged to be so important?

  Who was the wounded little man who stumbled through the front door in the opening moments of this nightmare? Clearly, that goddamn code was something that the good guys wanted and the bad guys wanted them not to have. Those numbers were the key to everything. And now that Graham had seen it, it was imprinted forever. Sarah had deliberately pulled her son into the kill circle. Why would she do that?

  Jolaine had to get back to Graham. It was entirely possible—maybe even likely—that he was awake by now. Despite the note she’d left him and his boisterous declarations of independence, it wouldn’t take long for him to feel abandoned. Nothing good could follow from that.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ten feet under the parking lot that separated Jonathan’s firehouse home from the basement of St. Katherine’s Catholic Church, Jonathan and Boxers worked together in the twenty-five- by twenty-five-foot armory, selecting the weapons and tools they might reasonably need to meet the requirements of the upcoming 0300 mission. Built of reinforced concrete, and accessed by an enormous steel door that was originally designed for a bank vault, the armory was a place of solitude for Jonathan. Something about the combined smells of Hoppe’s solvent, gun oil, and the hints of isocyanates from the explosives brought him comfort.

  The room was lit as brightly as a surgical suite. Heavy fireproof cabinets lined the walls, and two wooden workbenches with additional lighting took up the space in the middle, their tops covered in a carbon-rich conductive plastic that was connected by braided copper cables to the grounded floors. On the occasions when Jonathan or Boxers would manipulate primary explosives, say in the creation of specialized initiators, they would wear conductive shoes and electrically bond themselves to the workstations via conductive bracelets. Explosives knew few enemies more dangerous than static electricity.

  “Wish we had better intel,” Boxers said. Anticipating the need for quick action, Big Guy had followed Jonathan home and spent what was left of the night in the guest room on the firehouse’s first floor. “We’re packing for every contingency.”

  No argument from Jonathan. He took a sip of his coffee. Not knowing where they were going, or what they were going to find when they got there, they had to plan for both mechanical entry and explosive entry. Not knowing what kind of reconnaissance they would be able to perform, they had to plan for multiple contingencies there, too. And so it went with every element of the upcoming operation.

  “These are all clean, right, Boss?” Boxers stood at the gun locker.

  “Affirm,” Jonathan said. After every operation where shots were fired, the weapons involved needed to be retooled so that they could not be traced to past or future uses. Because of their spooky pasts, both men were so far off the grid as to have no official, truthful pasts or identities, but the additional attention to details improved their already stacked odds of never getting caught.

  Jonathan heard footsteps approaching from the tunnel beyond the door, and recognized Venice’s quick stride. “Don’t shoot,” she said as she closed the distance. It was an unnecessary step, but an understandable one under the circumstances.

  “Come on in,” Jonathan said. When Venice appeared in the doorway, he noted the laptop and notebook in her arms, and he pulled the elements of his deconstructed Colt 1911 closer to make room for her. “Help yourself to some coffee. You’re up early.”

  Venice set her stuff down. “No, you’re up early. I see seven in the morning every day.”

  “And I see it as rarely as possible,” Jonathan confessed. “What brings you all the way down here?”

  Venice took him up on the offer for coffee and headed for the pot. “I’ve been scouring the Internet and other sources looking for some mention of the grand shoot-out that allegedly happened last night.”

  “Allegedly?” Jonathan asked.

  Venice looked into the coffee pot and winced. “When did you make this?” She poured some into a cup—one that bore the logo of the Central Intelligence Agency—and added enough cream and sugar to turn it into a dessert drink. “I say allegedly because I find no mention of the assault anywhere. Not even on ICIS, and if past is precedent, a shoot-out is exactly the kind of event that would have ICIS buzzing like a beehive.”

  Jonathan recognized ICIS (pronounced EYE-sis) as a post-9/11 program that documented ongoing police investigations in real time so that other law enforcement agencies could be aware of what was going on, in case they wanted to weigh in and recognize similarities in their own jurisdictions. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “I’m just making an observation,” she said. “If it was as big as we’ve been led to believe, that would be a lot of people not showing up to work or the breakfast table. You’d think somebody would make a report.”

  Boxers laid a pile of empty thirty-round magazines for his HK417 onto his bench next to the open ammo box filled with loose 7.62 millimeter bullets. “Uncle’s suppressing the news,” he said as began pressing bullets into the first
mag. “That’s what I would do if I had a big secret to keep and unlimited resources to keep it with.”

  “Still no word from the nanny bodyguard?” Jonathan asked as he concentrated on applying a drop of oil onto the pistol’s slide rails.

  “She’s still lying low,” Venice said.

  “That’s the smart play,” Jonathan said. He used a one-by-one-inch fabric patch to wipe away the excess oil. “With the world coming apart around you, it’s easy to feel expendable. I’d hide, too, at least until I knew it was safe to be visible.”

  “Maryanne said that it might even be our guys who are chasing them,” Boxers recalled. “I hope she’s well armed.”

  “If she knows that the government might be on the other team, she can’t even call the police,” Jonathan said. With the oil distributed, he reinserted the pistol’s barrel and guide rod. “You brought your computer, Ven. Do you have info on Jolaine and Graham?”

  “Some,” Venice said. She carried her computer over to the coffee station and hooked it to the USB cable that dangled from the wall-mounted television. Because of explosion-proofing issues, the screen itself was contained within a clear Lexan box. A few seconds later, the television had converted to a computer screen.

  “I wasn’t able to find many pictures of her,” Venice explained. The screen displayed an institutional image of a surly-looking young lady with thin lips and utterly average features. Devoid of makeup, she stared into the camera. Her hair was so tightly pulled back that it was impossible to tell what color it was.

  “This is the picture I lifted from her security badge from when she was a contractor with Hydra Security.”

  “Looks like she’s under arrest,” Boxers said.

  “Probably felt like it, too,” Jonathan said. He was familiar with Hydra, and he was not impressed. “Hydra came late to the game and gave bottom-feeders a bad name.” In the post-9/11 rush to staff private security contractors, it became impossible to keep standards high. Not all of the Hydra guys were pukes, but too many of them were.