End Game

by John Gilstrap

  “Here’s a nicer picture,” Venice said. She clicked, and the screen revealed a younger version of the same face, this one vibrant. Her broad smile revealed a row of white, uneven teeth that to Jonathan looked more attractive than the engineered perfection that passed for pretty these days. “This one is from six years ago, before she got into the war-fighting business.”

  Jonathan looked back to the pistol to concentrate on reinserting the slide stop. “Are those the only two images?”

  “She’s got a Facebook photo, too, but that looks even older.” Venice clicked and the screen filled with what appeared to be a smiling college student, framed in the familiar setting of a Facebook profile. Jonathan glanced long enough to see that it appeared to be a professionally composed portrait shot, and then looked back at the pistol.

  “She’s got only a hundred and twenty-four Facebook friends,” Venice said.

  “Only?” Boxers interrupted. “That’s a lot of people.” With the current mag filled, he tapped the back edge against the table to seat the rounds, and then picked up another empty.

  “Not in the world of social media,” Venice corrected, “and especially not for someone her age. I haven’t been able to turn up much on her earlier years, except for the fact that she appears to be some sort of orphan.”

  Jonathan looked up. “How many sorts of orphans are there?”

  Venice’s jaw dropped. “You fund an entire school for sort-of orphans.”

  “Ah.” He slid the recoil spring into place and reached for the plug that would hold it in place.

  “Jolaine Cage grew up in a series of foster homes, starting, from what I can tell, at a very young age. I’m talking four or five. I haven’t yet tracked down whether her parents are dead or were druggies or criminals.”

  “Are we talking good foster homes or bad foster homes?” Jonathan asked. He twisted the barrel bushing back into place and cycled the 1911’s action a couple of times. The pistol was whole again.

  Venice said, “If you’re in enough orphanages, I imagine you live the whole spectrum. She didn’t excel in school, but she did slog her way through a history major at the University of Florida.”

  “What about the kid?” Jonathan asked. “Graham, right?”

  “Nothing,” Venice said. “He’s fourteen and in school and otherwise unremarkable.”

  “Don’t forget scared shitless,” Boxers said. “I bet he’s that.”

  Jonathan holstered his Colt and pulled his shirt over to conceal it. “What else do you have?” He walked to the gun locker and helped himself to his own pile of thirty-round mags and a box of 5.56 millimeter ammo.

  “Since the Antwerp shoot-out flew below the radar, I thought I’d do a little extra digging on ICIS,” Venice explained. “Turns out that shots fired were reported just a few hours ago in Defiance, Ohio, a short drive from Antwerp.”

  Jonathan placed the ammo and mags onto his workbench and started loading. “Close enough to maybe be the same incident but with different labels?”

  “I don’t think so,” Venice said. “The times are too far off. The strange thing with the Defiance incident is the lack of follow-up by police.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “There’s a report on ICIS of a call being placed about a shots being fired, but then there’s no follow-up. No report filed, not even a report of a unit being dispatched.”

  “Maybe the cops thought it was bogus,” Boxers said.

  “Possible,” Venice said. “It’s just an interesting confluence of events, especially with the boss’s views on coincidences.”

  “They don’t exist,” Jonathan said. “I know this is all the result of a lot of work, Ven, but it’s not much to go on.”

  “There’s more,” Venice said. “And this is probably the most important of the lot. Arrest warrants have been issued for Jolaine Cage and Graham Mitchell.”

  Jonathan paused with his hand hovering over the ammo box. “What’s the charge?”

  “Interstate flight to avoid prosecution.”

  “That’s a federal rap,” Boxers said.

  “To avoid prosecution of what?” Jonathan asked.

  Venice pulled from her coffee. “The warrant doesn’t say. Or if it does, no one put it up on ICIS, which would be very unusual.”

  Boxers asked, “Does ICIS say which agency is looking for them?”

  “DHS.”

  Jonathan chuckled. “Does DHS actually issue warrants under their own name?” Following a series of reorganizations in the months after 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security was created as a new repository for federal agencies, among them the Secret Service, and the Coast Guard. Jonathan never liked the idea. “Homeland” sounded too much like Fatherland or Motherland, European constructs that had resulted in far too many wars.

  “Aren’t warrants issued by the constituent agencies?”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing it before,” Venice said. “Maybe it’s just a smoke screen.”

  Jonathan put the mag on the table. “Why hire us to bring these folks to safety and then swear out warrants for their arrest?”

  Venice said, “Maybe the FBI wants to bring them in, while the CIA wants to put them in jail.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “The CIA can’t do that. Not on American soil.”

  Venice rolled her eyes. “Okay, then the Secret Service. Or maybe the CIA drags them out of the country and renditions them. Work with me. Since we’re only guessing, there could be a thousand possible scenarios.”

  Jonathan turned his attention back to loading. “Let’s go through it again,” he said. “What did the police reports say about the shooting in Ohio?”

  “Nothing,” Venice said. “That’s my point. A call was made and a complaint was filed. After that, there’s nothing. It’s as if nothing happened.”

  Jonathan looked over to Boxers. “In context with the other non-shoot-out and the warrants, that’s very strange,” he said.

  “Maybe the arrest warrant is really a protective custody thing,” Boxers offered. “You know, bring them to safety long enough for the FBI to shelter them from people who would hurt them.”

  Jonathan dismissed the idea. “Why spin up every police department in the Lower Forty-eight to be looking for felons when the real point is to give them an administrative hug?”

  “What’s your theory, then?”

  “I don’t have one,” Jonathan said. “What I have are fears. If one arm of the federal government is fighting against another arm, we’re in the middle of a fight that we can’t possibly win.”

  “Who do you think the two arms are?”

  Jonathan had no idea. “I think the smart money says the FBI is one of them. After that, I would guess CIA, but only because they’ve been such a pain in the ass over the years. But if that’s so, why aren’t the warrants issued by them?”

  Venice fell silent for long enough to pull Jonathan’s attention back to her. “You’re troubled,” he said.

  “You mentioned context,” she said. “Well, let’s go to an even bigger context. This Maryanne Rhoades chick makes my skin crawl. Just the way she comes on. First, there was the familiarity, and then there was the aggressiveness. I learned a long time ago to trust my instincts, and she makes my instincts uncomfortable.”

  “You suspect she’s lying?”

  Venice gave him that look. “I think everyone’s lying, thanks to you,” she said. “Hanging with you is to take a master class in mistrust.”

  “You’re welcome,” Jonathan said with a smile. In Washington, DC, mistrust was a survival skill, particularly when it came to senior political appointees. It wasn’t that they were unpatriotic—in fact, they were so friggin’ patriotic that they believed their zeal to be better than the words in the dusty old Constitution. They scared Jonathan more than the crooks. Crooks did what they did for personal gain. Jonathan might not agree with their logic or their approach, but at least he understood it. The ones who purported to speak for the public’
s own good gave him the willies. Paging Adolf Hitler . . .

  “Why would Maryanne lie?” he asked.

  “I have no idea. I’ve only just begun my investigation into her.”

  “Give me a theory,” Jonathan pressed. “Why would Maryanne, handpicked by Wolverine, want to work both ends against the middle?”

  Venice counted off on her fingers. “Okay, there’s money, sex, secrets—”

  “In other words, you don’t have a theory,” Jonathan interrupted. He went back to his bullets.

  Venice explained, “Last night at the gala, Maryanne approached you at what, ten-thirty, eleven o’clock?”

  Jonathan hitched his shoulders. “Sounds about right.”

  “And that was maybe an hour after what happened in Indiana, right? If that?”

  Jonathan saw it. “How did she know so many details so quickly?”

  “Pretty well dressed at the spur of the moment, too,” Boxers added.

  Venice touched her nose. Bingo. “More than that, how come she knew all that she knew, yet didn’t know anything else?”

  Jonathan laid the magazine on its side on the table. He was fully engaged now. “Advance knowledge? It would have to be. This is really beginning to smell bad.”

  Venice’s computer dinged, drawing her attention. She scowled as she jiggled her mouse and leaned in closer to her computer screen to take in whatever information was being delivered. “Huh,” she said.

  Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks. It was best to let Venice process information at her own pace. She’d share when she was ready.

  “Now this is interesting,” she said. “I got a hit on a filter I set up through ICIS. There was an interesting incident last night on the outskirts of Napoleon, Ohio. Same general area as all the rest.”

  “Another shoot-out?”

  “No, more interesting than that. There was a potential statutory rape call.” She leaned into the screen again. “The Hummingbird Motel. Sounds like a place where you’d rent rooms by the hour.”

  “And why is this interesting?” Boxers asked.

  “Because it’s within a reasonable drive of Antwerp, Indiana, and Defiance, Ohio,” she said.

  “I think Big Guy meant, why is a statutory rape call interesting?” Jonathan said. Venice’s mind was wired differently than other people’s. Asked to solve the arithmetic problem for the sum of two plus two, she was apt to investigate the origin of the word “two” and the reason why it has a silent w, and in the process still come up with the answer more quickly than a math major sitting next to her.

  Her expression said, Duh. “Because it was all about a young woman and a teenage boy. I thought that might be our PCs.”

  “Of course you did. And?”

  She sighed. “And nothing. The police investigated, and their report says it was a sister and brother traveling together.”

  “I recognize that look in your eye,” Jonathan said. “There’s more.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She returned her gaze to the screen and started reading aloud, skimming and compressing information as she spoke. “The call was placed by the front-desk manager—he said he didn’t like the way she was acting, like she was trying to hide the fact that she had someone else with her. The ICIS file contains a security-camera image.”

  “Jolaine?”

  “Really close,” Venice confirmed. She tapped a few keys, and the image transferred from her screen to the larger one on the wall. “You know how the angles are on those cameras—always just a little bit wrong. But if you ask me, I think it’s her.”

  Jonathan agreed. “Let’s finish up and pack, Big Guy. We’re deploying to Napoleon, Ohio.” He stood.

  “I think that’s a mistake,” Venice said. And then she disappeared into her head and her keyboard while she attacked the keys. “Sit back down and give me a minute,” she said without looking up. “Please.”

  Ninety seconds later, she fist-pumped the air. “Yes!” When she made eye contact again, she was beaming. “The chances of them still being in the motel aren’t very high, I don’t think. They’d want to stay moving, right?”

  “But I don’t want to lose time hanging around in Virginia while the PCs are somewhere in the Midwest,” Jonathan said. “Particularly not with cops looking for them. What do the police have to go on, by the way? What are they looking for?”

  “Just descriptions,” Venice said. “And pictures. They’re the same ones we looked at.”

  “Do they have a license number for a car?” he asked. “Or a make and model?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said, then she gave a triumphant whoop. “But I think I do. The Humingbird Motel uses ProtecTall Security for their alarms and video.”

  Jonathan felt a rush. ProtecTall was a premier low-end physical security company, with contracts for roughly half of the free world, and Venice had conquered their computer backstops ages ago.

  “There were only a few cars in the parking lot last night,” she said. “One of them was a black Mercedes that happens to be registered to a Douglas Wilkerson from—wait for it—Defiance, Ohio.” An image of the car materialized on the screen.

  “The shoot-out town,” Boxers said.

  “Bingo.”

  “And who is Douglas Wilkerson?” Jonathan asked.

  “Give me a second.” Venice started typing again. Over the course of three minutes—enough time to load four mags—Venice’s face ran the full gamut from confusion to discovery and back to confusion. “I have no idea who Douglas Wilkerson is,” she announced. “Ask me why.”

  Jonathan sensed that he already knew, but he played along. “Why?”

  “Because he doesn’t exist.” They said it together.

  “Yet there’s an auto registration,” Jonathan said.

  “With a real physical address,” Venice said. “When you’re dealing with a motor vehicle bureau, real addresses are important. I did a search of the address and learned that the same fake citizen, Doug Wilkerson, is listed as the resident.”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers.

  “What the hell?” Big Guy said. “How bad can a place be when it’s named Defiance?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Graham peeked out of the curtains again. Where the hell is she?

  Jolaine was gone, and she’d taken the car and the guns with her. The note said that she’d gone shopping, but how long could it take to snag a T-shirt and a pair of shoes at Walmart?

  Graham had been awake for nearly two hours now. It was going on ten o’clock, and according to the sign on the back of the door, checkout time was eleven. What was he supposed to do if it got to be 11:01 and Jolaine wasn’t back yet? What kind of coward must she be to disappear on him like this? She was supposed to be protecting him, for God’s sake!

  He deeply wanted to take Jolaine at her word—take her note at its word—but after a while, when everyone you’ve known or loved is being shot at, faith is hard to come by.

  Daylight made everything more real, and he hated that. Thinking back to the events of the past twelve hours made him dizzy. It was hard to differentiate reality from nightmare. If he were to believe the evidence, his father was dead, his mother was grievously wounded, and some undefined, anonymous entity was trying to make him dead, too.

  It couldn’t all be true, could it? There had to be some semblance of his life left as it used to be. Otherwise, what had he done to deserve all of this? What had his parents done? The harder he thought about it, the less he could identify the holes in the fabric of his living nightmare.

  Graham Mitchell was a nobody among nobodies. His parents went to work every day, doing whatever it was that parents did when they went to work every day. Then they came home and were boring. What could they have done to make the kind of enemies that would bring so much violence? Some of the awfulness had to have been imagined. He had to believe that.

  His imagination couldn’t explain away the blood, though. Or the dying man in the foyer of his house, or the stream of men with guns, or the blo
od that he’d had to wash off his chest and hands and legs last night. He had the towels on the floor of the bathroom to prove the reality of that.

  There was the reality of the hole in his mother’s stomach. The reality of the weird, twitchy doctor.

  “Oh, my God,” he said aloud, bringing a hand to his mouth to stifle a sob that rose from nowhere. I’m an orphan.

  That thought shut down all others.

  Tears streamed down his face, but he wasn’t aware of them until one of them tickled his nose. He wiped it away and tried to clear his eyes, but it didn’t work.

  Dad is definitely dead. He had to be, and for evidence, he needed only to remember that Dad had never left the house, and that when Graham had asked Mom about him, she had dodged his question.

  Jolaine.

  The mere fact of her presence in his life was testament to the fact that he’d been living in real danger for three years. Why hadn’t he put that together in his head before? Mom and Dad had told him that Jolaine was merely a security precaution, that he shouldn’t worry about anything. Hell, Jolaine had told him that herself. Had people been hunting them for all this time, and he’d just never known it? Was last night just a realization of the inevitable? Had the last peaceful months actually been the accident, and the shoot-out preordained?

  He swiped again at his eyes. He couldn’t let Jolaine see him crying like a little boy. She had little enough respect for him as it was.

  He needed to think of something else. Anything else.

  The television in this dump of a motel room sucked, both the machine itself and the programming it showed. At this hour, the broadcast networks were all about shows that attracted consumers of erectile dysfunction medicine, and there were no cable programs to speak of—unless you wanted to listen to a bunch of screaming newsreaders, or watch people cook or fix houses.

  He pressed the power button and killed the set.

  The silence brought demons.

  Graham was tired of depending on everybody else for his survival. He was supposed to trust Jolaine, but where the hell was she?