End Game

by John Gilstrap

  The news feed on her other screen had settled down to something viewable. She saw two SUVs arranged in a kind of haphazard formation in the middle of the motel’s parking lot. Their doors were all open, and bodies lay on the ground next to the vehicles. As was frequently the case with the early moments of video news collection, the camera operator zoomed in as tightly as he could on the faces of the victims and their wounds. These were the more prurient details that the general public would never see, and she wondered if newsroom personnel secretly grooved on the gore.

  Venice had hoped that the location of the victims relative to the PCs’ motel room would provide some insight, but that turned out to be a disappointment. The layout of the place was such that about half of the rooms were all more or less equidistant from any one spot in the parking lot.

  So, she thought, what could she do with the room number before the police could? What would they want to check? Obviously, they’d do all the physical forensics stuff—fingerprints, DNA, et cetera—but that had to be done on-site. What could she do from—

  “The phone.” She said it aloud and grinned. She could check the phone records! Okay, it was a long shot because they’d be out of their minds to use a hotel phone. But in the years she’d worked with Jonathan, she’d lost track of the number of forehead-smack dumb things people had done. There was always a chance.

  Accessing said records could be a challenge, but what was life without the occasional challenge?

  Jonathan didn’t even bother with the knob. He knew at a glance that the lock was demolished, that the door was held in place only by inertia. With his weapon poised, he gently shouldered the door open and let it drift in of its own momentum. Elsewhere in the house, presumably from somewhere in the back, he heard a giant crash and knew that Boxers had taken a less subtle approach.

  “I’m in,” Big Guy said in Jonathan’s ear.

  “Me, too,” Jonathan said. “Report everything you see.”

  “How about what I smell?” Boxers said. “I don’t see any flies yet, but they can’t be too far behind.”

  Jonathan smelled it, too, and it was a stench unique to death. Sweet in the most awful, perverted form of the term—like rotten meat, but with hints of shit and piss. To the uninitiated, it was a smell that triggered a gag reflex. Sadly, Jonathan thought, he’d smelled it often enough that it was no more offensive than charred wood, gun oil, or any of the dozens of other pungent smells that were part of his professional world.

  Dead was dead. If no one touched a corpse, it would eventually turn to dust right where it lay, never posing another threat to anyone. What was a threat, however, was whatever person or thing had caused the dead person to die.

  Jonathan knew that the bad guy was already gone in this case. The strength of the death smell made it certain that the killings had occurred hours ago. Still, he refused to lower his guard. In his experience, complacent operators died younger than paranoid ones.

  The house showed no sign of violence, at least not yet. The owner of the place was clearly of significant means, though the interior was far more impressive than the exterior. Somehow, what appeared to be maybe twenty-five hundred square feet from the outside felt more like five thousand once he was in. Maybe it was all the marble and polished wood. Certainly, this was not the home of a man who wished to fly under the radar. In Jonathan’s world, plain vanilla equated to survivability.

  “The foyer is clear,” Jonathan said as he swept the area with his pistol. Without looking, he used his foot to push the front door closed again. Behind closed curtains, the lights were on, so the main floor remained brightly lit. Did that mean that the violence here happened at night?

  “I’m stepping into the main hall,” Boxers said. Jonathan heard it simultaneously over the radio and through reverb against the walls. That was Big Guy’s way of making sure Jonathan didn’t shoot him.

  “I’m checking the front rooms,” Jonathan said. The first room to the left off the marble circle was the dining room. Keeping his weapon in play, he stepped in and pivoted like a gun turret, his .45 poised and ready to shoot. No targets showed themselves. “Dining room’s clear,” he said.

  Beyond the dining room lay a butler’s pantry and beyond that, he assumed, a kitchen. He heard Boxers moving around in there, so Jonathan stayed to the front and crossed the foyer to what he imagined they called a living room. Maybe a parlor in this part of the world. A sofa and two chairs flanked a very traditional fireplace. It, too, was clear, and he announced it as such right after Boxers declared the kitchen to be clear of bad guys.

  Jonathan returned to the central hallway to head deeper into the house. “I’m coming your way, Big Guy,” he said.

  The death stench skyrocketed as he passed the massive stairway to the second floor, causing him to pause and look around more. Where the hell was it coming from? He saw no blood on the floor, no signs of a struggle.

  He moved on. Past the stairway, the foyer gave way to a cross hall, where Jonathan and Boxers joined together to clear a warren of rooms that showed no signs of people or violence. As time went on, Jonathan felt progressively safer. He didn’t reholster the .45, but he eased his stance to low-ready.

  “I believe this is what we call a McMansion,” Big Guy said. “Or what you would have called the servants’ quarters growing up.”

  They found a back stairway to the second floor, climbed it, and explored the bedrooms.

  Up here, things turned ugly. There were no signs of struggle in the master bedroom, but the other two bedrooms were wrecks. Both bore the standard décor and detritus of mid-grade children, one a boy and one a girl. Covers were strewn across the floor, as if their occupants had been dragged out of bed. In the boy’s room, the entire contents of the top of the dresser—a lamp, a television, a bunch of action figures—had been pulled to the floor. In Jonathan’s mind, he could see a kid trying to grab hold of the dresser and being pulled along anyway.

  Boxers made a growling sound.

  “Yeah,” Jonathan agreed.

  Beyond the signs of violence, and a couple of spots that might have been blood on the walls and the carpet, the second floor was empty. They holstered their weapons more or less in unison and headed back to the first floor via the main stairs. Here, the putrid smell was at its worst.

  Jonathan stopped. “Where’s the basement?” he asked. “I never saw steps to the basement.”

  “Maybe there isn’t one,” Boxers said, though clearly he didn’t believe that to be true.

  “Gotta be,” Jonathan said. “I walked on those floors down there. Those hardwoods are not on a slab.”

  “Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice’s voice said in his ear. Scared the shit out of him. “There is definitely a basement.”

  The two men exchanged smiles and continued to the first floor. “Found the building plans, did you?” he said, stealing her thunder.

  “I did,” she said. “According to the drawings, there’s a door to the basement in the wall under the curved part of the main staircase.”

  “And to think we missed something so obvious,” Boxers said.

  “That was sarcasm, wasn’t it?” Venice said.

  “Yeah, just a little bit.”

  On the main level again, Boxers and Jonathan stood together at the spot where the door should be, but a decorative bench sat crosswise at the spot, under a huge painting of red flowers against a black background. The painting was maybe five feet wide by eight feet tall, and now that he looked at it—really looked at it, as opposed to noticing it through his peripheral vision—Jonathan thought that it looked out of place.

  “Damn, that’s a big painting,” he said.

  “Almost big enough to be a door, isn’t it?”

  Together, they dragged the bench out of the way to gain better access, and saw why the bench was there in the first place. It disguised the bottom two feet of what was most definitely a door.

  Jonathan ran his fingers down the back side of the left edge frame, expecting to find
some kind of latch, but when none was there, he pulled. He felt some give, so he pulled harder. On the third tug, he heard a thunk, and the picture floated away from the wall, suspended by a recessed hinge on the right-hand edge.

  “Look what you did,” Boxers said.

  “The door is masked by a painting,” Jonathan said for Venice’s benefit.

  That door led to a second door immediately behind it, but the second door was locked.

  “Step away,” Boxers said. “I can open that.” He took a preparatory step back, prepared for a kick.

  “Stop!” Jonathan said, raising his hand. “Look.” He’d found the buttons for the elevator, recessed into the jamb. This was definitely a custom-built job, much larger than most household elevators.

  Boxers looked disappointed that he didn’t get to kick anything. They both drew their pistols again.

  The instant Jonathan pushed the button, the elevator began to hum, and the floor vibrated. Together, through shared instinct, the two men flanked the door. It never made sense to stand in front of a closed door.

  “We’re going off VOX,” Jonathan said, and he flipped the appropriate switch on his radio. This was a time of high concentration. He didn’t need the distraction of knowing that he was broadcasting live.

  Jonathan could tell from the hissing of the mechanism that the elevator operated on hydraulics, and that the basement was either very deep, or the elevator moved very slowly. A bump announced the car’s arrival on the first floor.

  “How do you want to handle it?” Boxers asked.

  “You pull and I’ll shoot,” Jonathan said.

  Since Boxers was on the hinge side of the door, it made sense that he would nab the knob and pull it toward himself while Jonathan took a position in front of the expanding opening. Jonathan prayed that all he’d see was empty elevator car.

  His prayers were answered. But the stench of decay, driven by the breeze of the opening door, hit him like a wall. Blood smears painted the floor of the car. And when he looked behind him, back into the foyer, he could see evidence that someone had cleaned blood from the floor out there.

  Boxers recoiled from it. “Ah, shit. I’m gonna have nothing but nightmares, aren’t I?”

  With a growing sense of dread, Jonathan led the way into the elevator car, closed the door, and pressed the down button, triggering another bump and another hum. Jonathan found himself breathing through his mouth as they descended.

  “I don’t expect to find any threat,” Jonathan said. “But—”

  “We’ve got to be prepared,” Boxers said, finishing his sentence for him. “We’ve danced this number a few times, you know.” His Beretta M9 hung by his thigh.

  When the elevator settled on the basement floor, Jonathan steeled himself with a deep breath—through his mouth—and reached for the doorknob. “You ready?”

  “No.”

  Jonathan understood that to mean yes. “All right, here we go.” With his pistol held high, nearly under his chin, Jonathan dropped to his right knee and pushed open the door. “Ah, shit.” Even without looking, he knew that this was the kill room.

  He stepped out of the elevator into a modern medical suite, complete with blinding lights and stainless-steel everything. He recognized it right away as a clandestine hospital, a place where government agencies sent patients for treatment that never officially happened. The suite explained the opulence of the house, as well. Uncle Sam did a shitload of things wrong, but when it came to taking care of his damaged covert operators, no expense was spared, no corner cut. Jonathan himself had had a foot or two of colon removed in one such place not all that long ago.

  “This is not what I expected,” Boxers said, taking in the details.

  Coming off the elevator, there was only one direction to turn, and that was to the right. Jonathan led the way, as he always did because of his relative size. Ahead and to the right lay a brightly lit operatory, its curtains pulled wide open. The blood-smear motif continued on the floors, though less concentrated than in the elevator.

  Jonathan approached cautiously, with Big Guy half a step behind him.

  There was no way he could have prepared himself for what he saw as he button-hooked the corner.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Venice fist-pumped the air. The fugitives had in fact made a phone call from their motel room. She didn’t know the content, of course, but she did have the number they called and the duration of the conversation. It was a Michigan number, from the greater Detroit metropolitan area, and the conversation lasted for just a little over six minutes.

  “Why would they do that?” she asked aloud. “Why would Jolaine allow that to happen?” She was supposed to be smart about such things.

  The fact that the call went to Detroit rang a big warning bell. Michigan sported a greater concentration of Muslims per square foot than anywhere else in the country, and as much as Venice knew in her heart and in her brain that the vast majority of Muslims were wonderful, peace-loving people, she was enough of a realist to embrace the fact that the religion also fielded the lion’s share of the world’s terrorists.

  “Stop it,” she said. “Let the facts drive the conclusions.” It was one of the most important lessons she’d learned from her boss: always sideline presumptions until such time as they can be supported by facts.

  Right now, the only fact she knew was that a phone call had been made, and that wasn’t necessarily a causal link to anything. At least not yet.

  The link materialized about thirty seconds later, when she cross-referenced the time of the call to Detroit with the time of the first calls to 911 to report the shooting. Less than thirty minutes’ difference. That raised the coincidence to the level of undeniability. The call triggered the shoot-out.

  How?

  “By tipping their hand to their location.” Venice often talked her way through difficult problems. Somehow, when she heard her voice say the words, her thoughts fell into place more easily.

  “And that makes the person on the other end of the phone a bad guy!” She supposed it was obvious from the beginning, but it felt like a real ta-da moment.

  “Okay, Mr. Bad Guy,” she said. “Who are you?”

  The number traced to a physical address in Highland Park, Michigan—another surprise, because if Venice were going to be a bad guy, she’d use only disposable cell phones. The fact that he didn’t could mean any number of things, but in this case, she assumed that he was a rookie at this terrorism thing. There was a lot of that going on around the world now.

  The address in Highland Park was an apartment rented to Muhammad Kontig, who, according to the databases that Venice could access most quickly, was something of a nobody. Certainly, he was not on any of the publicly accessible terror watch lists, and he didn’t have a known criminal record.

  Not that that meant anything. It just reinforced her first thought that the guy was a rookie. He owned a car, though, and the car had a license plate number that traced to a two-year-old Chevy Impala. Beyond that, she had nothing.

  It was time to bring Jonathan into the loop.

  The room in the farthest corner of the basement hospital suite was a slaughterhouse. All but the deepest pools of blood on the floor had coagulated. Great fans of blood reached high on the walls, with even a few spatters on the ceiling.

  “Jesus Christ,” Boxers said. He sounded like he had a bad cold. Like Jonathan, he had developed a knack for using his soft palate to shut off his smeller. It was a skill that had saved Jonathan from a lot of puking.

  At first glance, the bodies were unrecognizable, just lumps amid the gore. Upon closer examination, though, Jonathan noticed that the body that sat tied into the hard-backed chair—he guessed it was stolen from a dining room and brought down—was that of a naked female, and that the body trussed to the cylindrical steel ceiling support was that of a middle-aged man. Three other men lay dead of bullet wounds to the head.

  It was the sight of the children that turned his stomach. A preteen boy
and a younger preteen girl sagged against the wall opposite the man, each of them bound and mutilated. This wasn’t so much the scene of torture as it was the scene of ritual murder.

  Jonathan had seen too many horrible sights to even catalog them, let alone rate them in order of awfulness, but this one was beyond the pale.

  “Whoever did this wanted information that came too slowly,” Boxers said. “Looks to me like they tortured the kids in front of the parents.”

  “I bet one parent,” Jonathan said. “I think the lady is Sarah Mitchell. This is a covert hospital. She came here to be treated, but the bad guys caught up to her.”

  “And who, exactly, are the bad guys?” Boxers asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “But I have every intention of finding out.”

  “So long as I get to pull the trigger,” Boxers said. Big Guy had a thing for kids in jeopardy. Jonathan had never asked the questions to pursue it further, but there had to be something in Boxers’ past that made him particularly homicidal when it came to protecting kids. All things considered, it was hard to think of that as anything but a strength.

  “Are you okay?” Jonathan asked.

  Big Guy puffed out a little. “I’m fine,” he said. Lest anyone doubt, Big Guy was far too tough to be affected by something so simple as a couple of gutted kids. “Like I said, I get dibs on pulling the trigger on whoever did this.”

  Jonathan said nothing for long enough to draw Boxers’ gaze.

  “I got this, Dig.”

  Jonathan acknowledged his friend with a quick nod. “You say you’ve got it, you’ve got it.” Part of the job was to accept reality for what it was, free of the demonstrative emotion that defined humanity. For Jonathan and Boxers, the job required an ability to project false normalcy.