140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  “You mean there were others?”

  “Of course. Others who can’t possibly let this come out. Not now. Not ever. But especially not now.”

  “Who?”

  He chuckled his wheezy, grotesque chuckle again. “You’re just going to have to wait and see about that.”

  I nodded to myself, knowing what was ahead of us. “I wish you hadn’t said that. I really do, Gordo. For your sake.”

  It took another hour.

  The cold, more water. And other stuff.

  And then he talked.

  And he was right.

  It was going to be a problem.

  I thought about it for a minute or two. Deutsch was standing back, in the cold, watching me in silence.

  “Reilly,” she finally called out. “We have him. We have it all on tape. It’s done. Let’s take him in. It’s over. Let’s go home.”

  It wasn’t over. Not with what he’d just told me.

  “You heard what he said,” I told her. “He’s too connected. This thing’s too big. They’ll work out a deal.”

  “We have enough to make sure they don’t.”

  I thought about it some more.

  Then I said, “I can’t take that chance.” I turned to her. “If not for you, or for me, then . . . for Nick. And all the others.”

  I went over to the camera, made sure it was off. Then I pulled out my gun, went right up to Roos, and put a bullet through his head.

  71

  The next two days were intense.

  Deutsch and I hadn’t gone public with the tape. We’d shared it with our boss—the first part of it, anyway—and he’d shared it upstream. Needless to say, it kicked up quite a shitstorm. The immediate result was that the FBI and the CIA got Arlington PD to drop any inquiries about me regarding Kirby’s murder and cleared my name, for the record. The rest—well, they all needed to figure out how they were going to handle it. There was a potential political, legal and public relations tsunami brewing, and I had little doubt a whole bunch of national security honchos and a few select politicos were having long, heated debates about what to do with Roos’s revelations.

  What they ultimately decided wasn’t really up to me, nor would I be able to influence it. To be honest, I didn’t really care. Roos and Tomblin were dead, and I was just happy to be reunited with my family. It felt terrific to be back home with Tess, Kim and Alex. I was ready to sleep for a week, and the bureau obviously had no problem with me taking the next couple of weeks off. It was going to be a great Christmas, just hanging out at home enjoying my family. Enjoying the best things in life, right?

  Kurt and Gigi had managed to hack into Orford’s computer and had found his notes relating to Alex. It made for some pretty shocking reading. I’d be passing it all on to Alex’s shrink in the New Year, right after the holidays, certain that it would help finally eradicate any lingering traces of everything they did to him.

  All of which, of course, left one last thing to deal with. The thing we hadn’t shared with Gallo: the video recording we’d kept for ourselves.

  The last part of Roos’s testimony.

  The biggie.

  I told Tess about it, of course. We’d spent hours talking about it, after I’d had the whole house swept twice for any hidden mikes or cameras. And the simple conclusion was that I couldn’t leave it alone.

  For one thing, it wasn’t safe to do so. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my time looking over my shoulder. Or needing a taster to check anything I was about to put in my mouth, for that matter.

  Besides, I couldn’t let it lie. No way.

  I had to tackle this head on.

  Which was why I was now being ushered into the Oval Office for a private audience with the president.

  Yorke greeted me with a hearty handshake and a big slap on the shoulder. “My God, Reilly, I knew it had to be important for you to miss out on dinner with us like that, but dear Lord—from what I hear, you’ve been through a real wringer.”

  “It’s been . . . intense,” I said flatly.

  “Sit down, sit,” he said as he guided me to one of the armchairs by the twin sofas.

  I wasn’t in the mood to sit down, but I felt I might as well. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Tess, the kids—everyone excited about Christmas? Have you had time to do your shopping yet?”

  “I’m not here to talk about that, sir.”

  “No, of course you’re not. Well, let’s get right to it, then, shall we?”

  I just nodded.

  “Obviously, what you’ve uncovered . . . I’m still having a hard time processing it. We all are. And I’ve got to say, you did a great job getting to the bottom of it, a great job. It’s one hell of an achievement, son. But at the same time, it’s a huge headache. A monster of a migraine, in fact. We’re going to have to think about what we do with it very, very carefully. Revelations like that—they could cause the kind of damage our country might not recover from for years.”

  I didn’t say anything back. I just fixed him squarely, trying to get a read of the man.

  The problem was, I liked him. Up until that miserable evening in the Blue Ridge Mountains, up until I’d heard what Ross had to say about him, I liked our president. I’d always thought Hank Yorke was a good guy. He was reasoned, he was smart, he was respected. He’d guided our country through four decent, stable years. He wasn’t a polarizing figure, and the raging wars of partisanship had somewhat calmed down under him. I was proud to have saved his life and I would have been voting for him next year.

  Not any more.

  “It’ll take a while,” he continued. “In the meantime, I hope you’re going to take some time off and enjoy the holiday season with your family. You sure as hell deserve it.”

  “That’s the plan,” I finally offered. “But before we do that, there’s something else we need to deal with.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, leaning forward. “You asked for this meeting. What can I do for you, Reilly?”

  “I think it’s more about what I can do for you.”

  He looked perplexed. “What do you mean?”

  “There was a second part of Roos’s testimony. One I haven’t shared with the Bureau.” I paused, gauging him.

  His eyes narrowed just slightly, but it was there. “Oh?”

  I nodded. “Roos told me about Viking. About you and the Janitors. I know everything there is to know about that.”

  His expression clouded, but being the consummate politician that he was, it wasn’t the jolt you would expect to follow me saying something like that.

  “And I’ve got to say,” I added, “whoever came up with your code name—they should have been fired.”

  The city of York, in England, was captured by the Vikings late in the ninth century. It became a Norse kingdom for over fifty years, and the city became known as Jorvik.

  “Yes, well,” Yorke said with a shrug, “those were the days before Wikipedia. And the obvious can also work as misdirection. But I take your point.”

  “I know what you did, sir. I know you were Roos and Tomblin’s boss. I know you ran the Janitors program for all that time and I have the names of all the people you had taken out.”

  Yorke exhaled lengthily and sat quiet for a long moment. All of a sudden, it was like some magical mojo had been drained out of him, like my eyes could see him for how old he really was, without any filters. Then he finally got up and stepped around his desk and looked out the big windows.

  It was a gorgeous day outside. Blue sky, perfect sun, a crisp bite to the air. Not a great day to accuse the President of the United States of having run a secret assassination squad that had targeted Americans. On home soil, too.

  “It was a different time,” he finally said. “The guys we’re dealing with now . . . Al Qaeda, ISIS? They’re a joke. A bunch of primitive savages. They’re piss-ants compared to the threat we were facing back then.”

  “I don’t care—”

  “They had nukes, Rei
lly,” he blurted angrily. “Thousands of nukes, aimed right here, at our homes. This was an existential battle, a fight for survival. They hated every fundamental thing about our way of life, they wanted to take over the world, their goal was to wipe us out but you know the difference between them and these jokers we’re dealing with today? They were real. They meant business and they sure as hell had the means to get the job done.”

  “Desperate times, desperate measures, right?” I replied evenly. “Keeping the country safe, making the hard decisions so people can sleep safely at night? I’ve heard it all before. Roos gave me the same speech. Still doesn’t make it OK to do what you guys did. Which was murder, plain and simple.”

  That really riled him up. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he growled. “You didn’t live through it like we did. You didn’t know what we knew, you didn’t see what the intel was telling us on a daily basis. You have no idea how thin the ice was under us and you think you can just stand there, all smug and righteous, and pass judgment on us when you weren’t around to see what we were up against?”

  “You had people killed. Civilians, Americans, foreigners—”

  “And you think it was easy?” he rasped, slamming the desk with his palm. “You think we took it lightly? You think we didn’t do everything possible to try to find another way every single time we had to make one of those terrible decisions? You think each one of them didn’t haunt me?”

  “I don’t know if they did,” I shot back. “I’d like to think so, but either way, it doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change what you did.”

  “And you think you would have done things differently? Knowing what it could mean, knowing the risk of what could happen? How do you know you wouldn’t have done what we did?”

  “I would have found another way. Because there’s always another way. Maybe you just didn’t look hard enough. Maybe it just got easier with each one.”

  Yorke kept his gaze locked on me, his mouth tightly clenched. Then he looked away, nodding in silence, deep in thought.

  After an interminable pause, he muttered, “Why are you here, Reilly?” He turned to face me. His face was all shriveled up. “Why are you here? You’re telling me you know what you know. Presumably, you’re sitting on some compelling evidence or you wouldn’t be here, right?”

  “I have enough, sir. Enough to cause you some very serious problems.”

  His expression darkened, and his voice went sharp. “So what do you want?”

  It was a question I’d been wrestling with ever since Roos had finally talked.

  “To be frank with you, I’m not really sure. Because you’re right about one thing. If this came out, and if your part in it came out, it would be catastrophic for our country. The country I love, the country I’m sworn to protect. But I know two things. I know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. And I know I can’t let you get away with it. You and your people had my father killed.”

  Yorke stared at me, then he pursed his lips and he looked away. His head was bowed down a little. “It won’t change anything to say I’m sorry, but for what it’s worth … I am. Hugely. Some decisions were . . . impossible. But the inevitable outcomes of not taking them were even worse.”

  Maybe he was a great actor, or maybe it was my own wish fulfilment, but I sensed some genuine remorse. Regardless, I said, “I know all about how the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, but we’re still talking about murder. Multiple murder.”

  He nodded in silence, deep in thought. After a few moments, he said, “So we have a problem.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  Yorke breathed out again with frustration. His shoulders stooped as he padded back over to me and sat down in the armchair facing me. “I’m not going to insult you by saying I could make things very, very comfortable for you, career-wise. We’re talking a fast lane at warp speed.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “I thought as much.” He nodded to himself. “So where does that leave us?”

  “I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a solution for this. Because, until now, I’ve had nothing but respect and admiration for you. I think you’ve been good for this country. Someone handed you responsibility for more than three hundred million people and you’ve done them proud. And I can’t ignore that.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a murdering son of a bitch who should be rotting away on death row.”

  I took a breath. Part of me wanted to just walk up to him and strangle him with my bare hands, but I obviously needed to control myself.

  “I can’t overlook what you did,” I continued. “Regardless of whether it involved my dad or not. But I’ve been trying to think of what he would do if he were in my shoes, not that I knew him well enough, but I know his values. I know how much he loved this country, what he was about. And I could only think of one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You give it all up. You drop out of the re-election campaign.”

  His face crumpled with confusion and shock. “You want me to walk away from the presidency?”

  “Yes.”

  I could see the wheels spinning away frantically inside his brain. “You’d be satisfied with that?”

  “Right now, and hard as that is, I think I just might be able to live with that, yes. Because the alternative would rip the country apart at the seams. Political meltdown, the economy, international standing down the toilet . . . Just massive pain, maybe for generations. And much as part of me feels, well, that’s justice, that’s what needs to happen, the truth will set us free and all that bullshit . . . Maybe the country’s better off living with that lie. So I’ll keep my mouth shut if you walk away, leave DC and devote the rest of your life to trying to atone for what you did.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve been doing just that, from this office? It’s one hell of a place to get things done.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t live with having you stay here.”

  Yorke took a long moment to reflect on it. As he turned to look out the window, I could see that his eyes had taken on a faraway, doomed stare. The consummate politician, having to walk away from . . . this room. Maybe I wasn’t sending him to death row, but I was certainly condemning him to a life of hard labor, if only in terms of coping with what he’d had taken away from him.

  Not my preferred outcome, but maybe it was the right one.

  He finally asked, “How do you know the next guy won’t have even worse skeletons in his cupboard?”

  “I don’t. But I know you do. And I can’t ignore them.”

  He nodded, then frowned and shook his head, his expression suffused with a newfound resolve. “Well, we’ll need to come up with something else,” he said, his tone firm. “That can’t happen. You don’t just walk away from the Oval Office. It’s not that easy.”

  I didn’t expect anything less. Not from President Yorke. He was no pushover.

  But I wasn’t biting.

  “Of course it is,” I insisted calmly. “You’ll find an excuse. Family priorities. Health issues. Make something up. Happens all the time. We live in a world of spin, remember?”

  He pondered some more, then he said, “Let me think about it. I’m sure I can come up with something else that’ll satisfy you. Some other solution that’ll work for us both. How about that? Will you let me do that?”

  For all I knew, he’d be giving the order to have me shipped off to Guantanamo or set into the concrete foundations of some highway overpass the second I stepped out of his office. But somehow, and despite everything I now knew about his past, I didn’t think Hank Yorke, the president, would do that.

  “No,” I told him, firmly. “There are only two possible ways this plays out. You do as I ask. Or it all comes out. And FYI . . . Janitors or anyone else comes after me? The whole thing goes live. Big time. The cork pops and there’s no way of putti
ng that genie back in the bottle. You really don’t want to go there. Trust me.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that for a moment, Reilly.”

  We didn’t shake hands.

  I walked out of there, hoping I hadn’t unleashed a trunkload of pain on myself.

  I didn’t think I had.

  But I guess only time will tell.

  THE END

  * * *

  Enjoyed THE END GAME?

  Then find out how Reilly and Corrigan’s paths first collided by reading Raymond Khoury’s last two novels

  The Devil’s Elixir

  Rasputin’s Shadow

  and enjoy his previous thrillers

  The Last Templar

  The Sanctuary

  The Sign

  The Templar Salvation

  Sean Reilly and Tess Chaykin, the heroes of Raymond Khoury’s New York Times two bestselling Templar novels, return in an edge-of-your-seat thriller that reaches from the present day back to 1700s Mexico—and beyond…

  One phone call from three thousand miles away—a cry for help from an ex-girlfriend—is about to throw FBI agent Sean Reilly’s life into a tailspin.

  What if there was a drug, previously lost to history in the jungles of Central America, capable of inducing an experience so momentous—and so shocking—that it might shake the very foundations of Western civilization?

  What if powerful forces on both sides of the law, including a revenge-bent DEA agent, a rogue CIA agent, and a savage drug lord only known as El Brujo—’The Sorcerer”—launched a ruthless, no-holds-barred pursuit to get their hands on it?

  What if Reilly and Tess were the only ones who could stop the unthinkable from happening?

  And what if they’re already too late?

  Buy THE DEVIL’S ELIXIR by clicking here

  Raymond Khoury, the international bestselling author of The Devil’s Elixir, is back with another ingenious, fast-paced thriller that straddles present-day NYC and Russia in the early 1900s—the time of the infamous Rasputin and his mysterious rise to power.