“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.
She sat alone in a holding cell that looked more like the pictures she’d seen of supermax prisons than what she’d envisioned a county jail to look like. Assuming the tiles on the floor were one foot square, her rectangular corner of the world measured roughly five by seven. A heavy steel door occupied the narrow dimension at the front of the cell, with a tiny wire-reinforced glass window that looked out into the hallway—or would look out into the hallway if the sliding panel on the far side were open. She imagined that the other panel in the door, this one about waist high and made of metal, was a hinged flap that would allow the guard staff to pass food to her without opening the door. It looked just big enough to accommodate a cafeteria tray.
Her cot was actually a concrete half wall that ran the length of the long dimension of the cell, and it was topped with a thin mattress that had been rolled up around her pillow and nudged up against the back wall. Hospital-green sheets and a blanket sat folded in front of the bedroll. The most prominent feature in the left-center of the space was a squatty, mushroom-shaped stainless-steel bar stool that served as the chair for the stainless-steel desk that folded up to reveal the stainless-steel toilet. Efficiency at its most hideous.
Aware of the fisheye camera in the corner of the ceiling nearest the door—enclosed, of course, by what appeared to be bulletproof glass—she wondered what bizarre pleasure some of the guards must have gotten from watching prisoners take care of bodily functions. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn that there was a porn channel devoted to just that.
As she placed the sheets onto the desk and began to unroll the mattress, she took inventory of where she was and how she’d gotten here. As far as she could recall, the arresting officers had never told her what she she’d been arrested for, and she hadn’t asked because (a) it would violate her rule of saying nothing, and (b) it would all be revealed sooner or later.
Imprisonment was a first for her. There’d been a close call back in her teen years where a kindhearted magistrate had overridden the desires of a county cop following a DUI charge, but to date, she’d never spent a moment in jail. She surprised herself with her own calm. Sure, it was scary, but she’d scored a single room where she didn’t have to deal with the politics and violence of other prisoners, and the entire ordeal was only a few hours old.
Give it a few more, she thought. Once nighttime came, and the boredom of her own company began to crush her
, she imagined that there’d be plenty of panic to deal with.
For the time being, she committed herself to treating this mess as an adventure. If nothing else, she was experiencing an adrenaline rush of a magnitude she hadn’t felt since the Sandbox.
Jolaine’s sole experience with the rigors and processes of the criminal justice system was limited to what she’d seen on television. As she spread the nearly see-through thin green sheet across the mattress, she thought through the events of the past couple of hours, and she tried to reconcile the facts of her situation to the fiction that she’d seen so often.
They never read me my rights, she thought. The realization startled her. Wasn’t that a requirement whenever someone was arrested? Yes, she was certain of it.
Come to think of it, they’d never actually said that she was under arrest. That thought brought her bed-making to a halt. She stood there, with the top of the sheet tucked in and the bottom of the sheet suspended like a flag as she tried to figure out what that might mean.
I’m in jail, but I haven’t been arrested.
The thought paralyzed her. She dropped the sheet and sat heavily on the bed. She felt the blood draining from her head, but she forced herself to sit upright anyway so as not to give whoever was watching her camera feed any indication of fear. She didn’t know why that was important, but it was.
Jolaine told herself to calm down and to think through exactly what she did and didn’t know. What she thought and what she feared were irrelevant. It was too easy to shoot out to the worst-case scenario, and to extrapolate from there that all roads and all options led to tragedy. Panic was the only result of bad assumptions, and panic always resulted in tragedy. She needed to think it all through.
Fact: Her arrest violated all of the rules she was aware of regarding arrest procedures.
Counterfact: She wasn’t a lawyer, and not everything you saw on television was true. Hell, depending on what channel you watched, only half of what you saw on the news was true.
Fact: Graham was the sole possessor of some kind of code that a lot of people thought was worth killing for.
Fact: If her observations about her nonarrest were true, then someone was asleep at the switch because—again, if television lawyers knew what they were doing—any case against her would be fatally flawed and the government would be guaranteed to lose.
Unless they don’t care about losing.
But why would that be? This couldn’t all be some scare tactic, could it? Could that possibly be legal? Wouldn’t there be consequences to pointing guns and pulling people out of their cars just to make a point?
No, she thought, it was more than that. Just as she had seen the terror in Graham’s eyes, she had also seen genuine fear in the eyes of those cops who took them down. They’d been expecting bad things from Jolaine, and that expectation had driven all of the rough handling that had followed. Even down to manhandling a fourteen-year-old boy.
Where did such fear come from?
Clearly, the police had been alerted to be on the lookout for them. That in turn meant that someone had told them what and who to look for. But who? Who would even know what car she was driving?
Fact: No one had asked her any questions. They hadn’t even fingerprinted her.
After all of the drama and all of the violence and near-violence, why would there be such silence? It was almost as though they’d been instructed not to say anything.
That’s it. She didn’t know why, exactly, but in that moment of clarity, she knew beyond all doubt that the jail staff had in fact been instructed not to speak with her. Just the basics, to make sure that she didn’t pose an unreasonable threat, and then nothing else. All the praise she’d awarded herself for holding her tongue had in fact been a gift delivered by others. She hadn’t needed to speak because no one wanted to speak with her in the first place.
So, who was doing this? Why was she here? Who had she pissed off so badly?
Whoever it was, they were important and they were powerful—powerful enough to mobilize a law enforcement agency. FBI, maybe? CIA? She imagined that a conspiracy this complex had to be run by some kind of alphabet agency.
What’s their next move? she wondered. Why take her to jail and then just let her sit? That didn’t make sense.
Then she got it. As the realization bloomed, her heart rate doubled. This was only the beginning of her journey. This was a holding place—a place to be only for as long as it took for whoever was in charge to move her someplace else.
And she knew with certainty that when that transfer happened, she would come face-to-face with the agency that was pulling the strings. And then what?
That answer was obvious, wasn’t it? They’d take her away and squeeze her for information that she didn’t have.
Jolaine stood again and paced her cell. To hell with what the camera watchers thought. She needed a plan, and she needed it before people arrived with keys and took her away. Just as certainly as she believed she’d landed on the reality of her nonarrest, she knew that after she left this place—after the bad guys, whoever they were, came to take her away—the fuse on her life would burn down to nothing. Once these people got from her what they wanted, they would stuff her into a shallow grave and never look back.
The damn stool in the middle of the cell made it impossible even to pace. She needed to pace. She needed to scream. What the hell was she going to do?
She hated the Mitchells for putting her in this spot. What had they been up to?
She wanted to think that the Mitchells were patriots, and as such would never try to pass along a secret that could harm her country.
But to learn otherwise would not surprise her. She knew that there were some foreign affiliations, and that not all of them were friendly. When Bernard and Sarah argued, it was always in their native language—someplace in Eastern Europe—and consequently, Jolaine never knew the true substance of what they were saying. But she’d sensed growing tension over the past weeks, and she’d sensed that it had something to do with the visitors who’d been coming by with greater frequency. They gathered with the Mitchells for meetings in the same foreign tongue that she could not understand. Voices were often raised, however, and the visitors rarely departed happier than when they’d arrived.
It was possible, she supposed, that the substance of those meetings was to conspire against the United States, but how could she know? And if that were indeed the case, that would mean that the Mitchells had willingly and willfully recruited her as a coconspirator. Would they really do such a thing after all she’d done for Graham and for the family?
How could she know?
Jolaine sat on the shiny stool. The fact of the matter was that she couldn’t know, not with any certainty. By extension, then, she had no choice but to assume the worst and act accordingly.
So, now what? She asked herself that question as if she had choices. Locked in a concrete room, her options were limited to one: Wait. For what, she had no clue, but the wait was a guarantee.
Sooner or later, that door would open, and when it did, options would arrive. She suspected that they would all be terrible ones, but at least they’d be options. She could not allow herself to be taken into the next stage. If a transfer lay in her future—and now she was certain that it did—she needed to make sure that the transfer would never be completed successfully.
If it came to that, she’d die trying, because the one thing she knew beyond all doubt was that she intended to survive.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Deputy Price led Graham down the hallway and through a locked door into a part of the building the boy hadn’t seen before.
“Is this a jail? Graham asked.
“Technically, no,” the deputy said. “This is just a police station. We have some holding cells and some interrogation rooms—you know all about one of those—but the jail itself is down the road a bit.”
“Why am I here?”
The far side of the locked door opened up on a much
larger area that looked like a hospital waiting room—or at least what Graham imagined that a hospital waiting room would look like. Molded plastic chairs, blue and orange, littered the area in what looked to his eye to be a random order, as if people moved them throughout the day to form their own conversation groups and then never put them back where they belonged. The yellow and brown theme continued out here, but the floors and walls seemed dirtier. Most of the chairs were empty now, and the occupants of the ones that were taken had all pulled theirs away from the others. No conversation groups were currently in session.
“Not sure how to answer your question,” Deputy Price said.
“You could just tell the truth,” Graham said. He’d meant it to be a flippant remark and it hit its target squarely.
Price got a little taller. “I’m cutting you a break, kid. Don’t make me regret it. Have a seat.”
Graham felt a gentle pressure on his shoulder—there was no way to call it a push—and he helped himself to a blue chair. Deputy Price pulled over an orange one and he sat sideways in it, with his legs crossed and his left arm slung casually over the back. Now that they were sitting, the difference in height was almost nothing.
“Graham, I’m going to be honest with you. I have no idea why you’re here. We got orders to stop the car you were in and to take the occupants of that car into custody.”
“Why?” Something about the way Deputy Price handled himself put Graham at ease. As long as they were just talking like this, he felt safe.
“I don’t have an answer for that,” Price said. “Sometimes that happens. We get an order to pull someone over and bring them in, and sometimes we don’t find out what the reason is. Doesn’t happen often, but sometimes. This was one of those times.”
“So, am I under arrest?” None of what was happening fit into any of the Law & Order episodes he’d watched with Jolaine.
“No. You’re in custody, but you’re not under arrest.”
“So I can leave?”
“Do you have someplace to go?”
End Game Page 20
