End Game

by John Gilstrap

  “Do we know yet what prosecution they’re allegedly avoiding?”

  “No.”

  Jonathan considered the moving parts. Since he wasn’t a cop, he didn’t have intimate knowledge of the procedures used for taking people into custody, but he knew when something didn’t feel right. In the context of people trying to kill other people, it was a feeling that often spelled tragedy.

  “I don’t like this,” Jonathan said. “Download the coordinates of both locations to my GPS. We’re going to—where is it?”

  “Lambertville, Michigan,” Venice said. “What are you going to do when you get there?”

  “I have no idea,” he confessed. “But being closer is better than being farther away.” He leaned back into the elevator and yelled, “Yo, Big Guy! Finish up. We gotta go.” Back on the air, he said, “When you get the photos Big Guy is sending you, I’ll need you to process them quickly.”

  “Is one of them Sarah Mitchell?”

  “That’s what the smart money says, but I need you to verify and get the info back to me. And to Kit.”

  Venice’s silence reiterated her displeasure at trusting Maryanne. She asked, “When you leave, do you want me to call the police to clean up the bodies?”

  “Negative. If we can verify that one of our targets is among the dead, pass that along to Wolverine. She’ll want to use her own cleaners.” Corpses posed a difficult problem in the covert world. You couldn’t just let them fester and rot, but you also didn’t want to get local authorities spun up with a lot of difficult questions. Among the cadre of specialists who took care of things in that world were people who specialized in the removal and disposition of bodies.

  “And just so you’re prepared,” Jonathan said, “some kids are involved.”

  Anton Datsik stood at the corner of Wisconsin and M Streets in Georgetown and considered his options. A turn to the left would take him uphill toward the residential sections, and a right would take him downhill to the Potomac River. When the light changed, he decided to continue east—straight ahead—past the restaurants and chain stores that had ruined the most prime real estate in Washington, DC. This part of the city had evolved into a college town, pandering to the shallow tastes of trust-fund adolescents. He was old enough to remember the days of the Cellar Door and the Crazy Horse, trendy nightclubs that featured the most cutting-edge performers in an environment that was at once sleazy and trendy. Now, it had all turned to plastic.

  His job this afternoon was to remain invisible as the events in Indiana and Ohio played themselves out. Any day that could be spent away from his office in the embassy of the Russian Federation was a good day.

  Datsik had always admired the United States and its people. Compulsively friendly, they also seemed willfully naïve, a combination that resolved to charming. Unlike his bosses, he’d never wished them harm, but he was certain that harm was inevitable. Once fierce and self-reliant, they had evolved into a passive culture that valued politeness over victory. Such cultures always collapsed under the oppression of aggressors who valued power over peace.

  The light turned, and he headed toward Thirty-first Street, Northwest.

  Datsik considered himself a professional—not political—and he believed that it was not possible to be both. Professionals stayed focused on things that were important—what Americans liked to call the Big Picture.

  Being of a certain age, Datsik had witnessed personally the speed with which political priorities can change. He’d witnessed the implosion of security services in his Motherland as the Soviet Union collapsed into disarray. He’d watched as the void of leadership seeded the grounds where the Bratva and the Organi-zatsiya flourished with a brutality that exceeded anything meted out in Russia after the reign of Yuri Andropov.

  After Gorbachev and that fat drunk Yeltsin rolled over and gave a big blow job to successive American presidents, these so-called Russian mafia organizations grew fat and powerful skimming their shares off the billions of dollars the United States pumped into the new Russian Federation. Datsik never ceased to be amazed by the naïveté—the intentional myopia, it seemed—of the American public. Surely they did not believe that the great democratic experiment they were able to launch in 1776 was somehow relevant to the modern world.

  Those US dollars created monsters of unspeakable cruelty, and those monsters were able to buy and sell politicians like the commodities they were. To do what the oligarchs wanted was to become wealthy beyond imagination. To cross them was to find oneself and one’s extended family tortured to death.

  Those had been Datsik’s formative years. He’d been an officer in the KGB for five years when the KGB ceased to exist. He was not senior enough to know how the transition actually happened in the historical sense, but to him, it happened literally overnight. He went home one night as an officer, and then when he reported to work the next morning, he discovered that work no longer existed.

  Throughout the former Communist states, every agency that once was responsible for keeping order either disappeared or dissolved into some weak imitation of its former self. For more than a few men and women less fortunate than he, the transition meant death at the hands of the angry mobs who stormed headquarters buildings and dragged the occupants out into the street. He’d witnessed no such violence himself, but he’d heard stories from multiple sources. It was all far too reminiscent of Benito Mussolini.

  Being nonpolitical didn’t mean he couldn’t work a roomful of politicians. He sensed early on that those who lost power would soon grow hungry for that power to return, and he aligned himself with as many of them as he could. Hungriest of all, it turned out, were those who were ousted from the security services. Theirs was a special kind of power that was rooted less in money—although there was plenty of that—than it was in information. The kind of information that could make a man or ruin him.

  The current leader of the Russian Federation came from that very group, and Datsik was pleased to find himself on the president’s good side when the dust settled and the flow of blood slowed.

  The KGB became the FSB, the oligarchs who spouted democratic thoughts were ripped from power and stuffed in prison, and even the organized crime syndicates were finding it easier to operate elsewhere. Like all criminals, they thrived here in the United States and in the United Kingdom, where the fear of offending trumped the strict rule of law.

  In the middle of the block that separated Thirtieth Street from Twenty-ninth Street, an overweight couple in their sixties made eye contact with him and the husband pulled a map from his back pocket. “Excuse me,” the man said. “Are you a local?”

  Datsik smiled. It was the structure of the question that amused him. He in fact knew this city as well, if not better than, most locals, but the instant he opened his mouth to speak, they would hear the accent, and that might trigger questions he had no desire to discuss.

  He said nothing, and kept walking.

  Among the problems that remained in his Motherland were the Georgians and the Ukrainians. Among the former Soviet states that sought their independence, the Chechens in particular had focused on brutality as the best means to an end.

  The hatred between Chechnya and Russia spanned generations, a mutual loathing so innate that it might have been genetic. Animals that they were, Chechen terrorists didn’t care who died in their attacks that were designed to slaughter by the hundreds or the thousands.

  Now those animals were this close to having access to nuclear warheads, all because of a scheme devised by academicians in the hierarchy of American security to eliminate terrorists by arming them.

  As a professional, it was his job to keep that from happening. And he was getting ever closer to his goal. Two of the Mitchells were dead, and the third would soon be found. Given the resources that Philip Baxter had promised to dedicate to the task, no one could remain invisible for long.

  Mitchell. Did they really think that they could pull off such a quintessentially Middle American name? So desperate were th
e desires of Daud and Lalita Kadyrov to assimilate into American society that they studied the language and the customs, and, with some help from the United States government, they thought they could just shed the bonds of their past.

  With Chechen pigs, that level of change was impossible. Their fellow separatists embedded here in the United States would never have allowed that to happen. Their plan was doomed from the beginning.

  And now here was Datsik, cleaning up yet another mess—doing that at which he was best.

  When his cell phone rang, he checked the number, and he knew that the final stage had begun. “Yes?” he said.

  A female voice said, “I’m afraid there’s been a major complication.” She didn’t bother to identify herself because that would have been a waste of time for everyone. “It seems that our enemies got to the targets first.”

  Datsik spat out a curse. “You told me that you didn’t know where they were. You told me that no one knew where they were because they were impossible to find.” This was devastating news.

  “It’s not as bad as it might have been,” she said. “There was a gun battle, but the Mitchell boy seems to have gotten away.”

  This made no sense to Datsik. “A gun battle? How is that possible? The pigs want the boy alive. He’s useless to them dead.”

  “I can only assume that it was a kidnap attempt,” the woman said. “No other motivation would make sense.”

  “How big a team did they send? And what kind of amateurs could lose—”

  “Datsik, I keep telling you not to underestimate the abilities of Jolaine Cage. You insist on referring to her as a maid or as a nanny, and I’ve told you from the very beginning that that was a mistake. Now you understand why.”

  Though anger boiled in his gut, Datsik nonetheless felt admiration for the young lady he’d never met but about whom he’d heard so much. The Chechens fielded professionals for missions such as this. He could only imagine that they, too, had underestimated their opponent. “What was the damage done to the assault team?”

  “Six dead. I don’t know if any got away.”

  “And how were they able to find them when you and the entire United States government could not?”

  “What’s done is done,” she said. “What difference does that make now?”

  “It makes a great deal of difference,” Datsik said. “It comes down to an issue of competence, doesn’t it? An issue of trust. Wasn’t trust what this was all about in the first place? Isn’t that what you told us?”

  “I don’t know what went wrong,” the woman said. “I think it’s clear that the Chechens had access to information that we did not.”

  “I think more than that is clear,” Datsik said. “I think that you must find a way to become more intelligent, and that that needs to happen quickly. I have people working on this as well, you know. If we find the boy first, there will be no need for you. As we have discussed before, you do not want to become irrelevant. Irrelevance shortens lives.”

  He clicked off without waiting for a reply. In situations like this, it was always best to keep the other party on edge. People achieved remarkable feats when they understood that the alternative was death.

  He’d spoken too long as it was. Whenever on a cell phone or on any broadcast device, he made it a point to speak in single syllables whenever possible, and always as short a time as possible. While his phone was untraceable, he had no doubt that the American security services were listening in, cued by a voiceprint that was buried in the database.

  He needed that boy, and he preferred to have him alive. It was troubling that young Graham knew what he knew, but that was a problem to be solved with a single bullet. More troubling was the fact that he knew anything in the first place. Datsik and his superiors needed to understand the flow of that information. They needed to know at least as much as the Americans knew, and that could take time. Taking custody of the boy would cure the problem of the codes—if, in fact, he even had them, as Datsik’s sources had alleged—but extracting additional information could take both time and patience. And quite a lot of discomfort.

  Datsik wished that he disliked such things, but the truth was quite the opposite. One could not excel in a skill if one did not enjoy the practice of it. He found hurting children to be distasteful, but sometimes it had to be done.

  Besides, the Mitchell boy was, what, fourteen, fifteen years old? For generations, that was the age of soldiers. They and those even younger were heroes of the Motherland during the Great War.

  Graham Mitchell was an adult in soldier years.

  Bringing him into custody was the single hurdle. From there, the diplomatic channels had already been greased, as the Americans liked to say, for the boy to be whisked to Russia, where the real work would begin.

  The lady on the other side of the table had a nice smile, but hard eyes. Graham didn’t trust her. In fact, as he sat there, sipping his Coke and eating his Twix bar, he realized that he didn’t trust anyone anymore. They sat in a yellow-brown concrete block room, where the only furnishings were a beat-up steel table and two chairs that were both bolted to the floor.

  After being beaten up by the cops who arrested him, he’d been put in a car and driven to this building that he assumed was a jail. For a long time, he’d just sat here by himself. They’d taken the cuffs off his wrists, and they hadn’t said anything about walking around, but there was nowhere to walk, nothing to do.

  It was sort of a relief to have another person in the room. At least she was willing to talk—more than he could say about every cop in the building, who pretended that he wasn’t even there. She wasn’t particularly friendly—in fact, she seemed intent on being the opposite of friendly—but at least she was another heartbeat in the room.

  “I asked you if you know why you’re here.” The lady said her name was Peggy, but Graham didn’t believe her.

  “Because the police brought me here,” he said. It was a violation of the say-nothing rule that Jolaine had sworn him to, but he’d learned the hard way that saying nothing pissed people off way more than saying something that sounded like an answer, but really was not.

  “And why do you think that happened?” Peggy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Take a guess.”

  Graham hesitated, worried what the reaction might be, then decided to roll the dice. “Because they had nothing better to do tonight?”

  Peggy’s cold eyes hardened even more. “Do you think this is a funny time?”

  “No,” Graham said. Finally, a chance to be 100 percent truthful. “I think this is a scary time, and I think you are a scary lady.”

  She seemed to enjoy that. “Really.” She said the word as a statement, not as a question. “Why do you think I’m scary?”

  Graham hesitated. Then he said nothing.

  “Come on, Graham. You can answer. What makes you think that I am scary?”

  He hesitated again. He sensed that Peggy was trying to trap him into saying the wrong thing, and that the wrong thing would get somebody hurt. At this point, silence was his most loyal ally.

  Twenty seconds passed. “Graham, you realize you’re in custody, right? You realize that I control your future. That Twix bar could be the last bit of food you get for the next two weeks.”

  “There,” he said. “You just threatened to starve me. That’s what makes you scary. I think you want something from me, and I think you want that something more than you care whether I’m dead or alive.”

  He’d intended that to be startling, but Peggy took it in stride. In fact, she might have looked pleased. “Tell me what has happened over the past couple of days.”

  “You go first,” Graham said. “Tell me what you think has happened.”

  Peggy’s face morphed into something ugly. She probably thought it was a smile, but it looked more like pain laced with raw hatred. “So something did happen,” she said. “I wasn’t sure, but you just confirmed that for me. That’s how it works here. If you don’t
tell me the truth, I’m going to find it out anyway. You don’t want to screw around with me, kid.”

  This bitch wanted him to cry, or panic, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Jolaine’s words raced through his mind—don’t say anything to anyone, don’t reveal any details—but Jolaine wasn’t here to help him. She wasn’t anywhere, in fact. For all he knew, she was dead, or she was saying things that would get him into trouble.

  His mind raced for words that would create the feel of sharing information without actually sharing it. Were the cops even allowed to talk to kids without some other adult around? Didn’t he read a book or watch a movie or maybe a Law & Order episode where everything turned on the presence—or in the case of the program, the absence—of an adult during questioning?

  “I want a lawyer,” he said. In the show, that had been the line of dialogue that changed everything. Once you asked for a lawyer, all the questioning had to stop.

  Peggy laughed. “Gonna lawyer up, are you?” she mocked. “That’s cute. You think you’re in charge. That’s extra cute. Here’s the deal, Graham, and I need you to wrap your head all the way around it. You are not in control. You don’t even have a control to reach for. I control everything that happens to you from this point forward. You need to understand that. You also need to understand that pissing me off is a bad platform to start from. Now, I’m going to ask you again, but I’m only going to ask you once. What happened last night?”

  “Probably something a lot like what you think it was,” Graham said. While he had no clue what was happening, he had the sense that Peggy was more bluster than action. How much could she do, after all, in a place that was teeming with cops? That was another thing: He didn’t believe that she was a cop. He didn’t know what she was, but she didn’t have the swagger of a cop.

  Whether that was good news or bad news was a different discussion.

  Peggy glared. Graham saw real anger behind her eyes. He glanced up at the camera in the corner near the ceiling. He pointed to it. “People are watching,” he said. “You gonna hit me?”