by James Frey
But no sound comes.
Just an open rictus, screaming silently, getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
A warning.
An Liu’s eyes shoot open. His slow breath continues.
In out.
Up down.
He blinks. The wall is only centimeters from the tip of his nose. He smells the sea. He feels a faint whiff of fresh air coming from above.
One of the skylights is open.
He did not open it.
He is not alone.
Marrs says, “He has intel that puts the Aksumite is in Las Vegas, and the Harappan somewhere in northeastern India. He thinks Aisling is still in New York, which isn’t a vote of confidence on his intel, but whatever. Best of all he’s tracking two of them. Based on elimination, he’s pegged these as the Olmec and the Nabataean. The Cahokian is with the Olmec, which is what British intelligence says too. He’s not sure about the whereabouts of the Donghu. I’m copying the files now. Need one minute fifty seconds. But this is an affirmative. An’s been a busy boy, and we got what we need.”
“Proceed on my mark in approximately one minute forty-eight seconds,” Jordan says. “Copy back, one click each.”
Aisling clicks. Hears the others.
Click click click click click click click click.
An slides his hand along the edge of the metal bed frame where it meets the wall.
He feels it. A button, no bigger than a coin.
A Player is here for him. How, he doesn’t know. But a Player is here.
He pushes the button.
In 0.06 seconds the bed frame flips toward the wall, and he’s thrown into a dark crawl space, the bed now flush against the opening, shutting him off from the room.
Clank! Clank! Clink!
Three shots, all from different directions, two of them rifle caliber.
BlinkSHIVERblink.
An shimmies forward quickly. Something metal jams into the crease at the edge of the bed. He doesn’t bother looking. He knows it’s a pry bar.
He double-times it.
SHIVERSHIVER.
Crawls into a slightly bigger space, large enough to sit in, with a weak red light illuminating everything. Other gunshots dot the wall outside, in his exact position.
They can see him, even behind his cover.
They can see him.
And maybe—can they track him too?
Yes. He overlooked something. His friend Charlie from the British Special Forces must have had the paranoid foresight to chip An when he was still on that destroyer in the English Channel.
He will need to get rid of the chip when he has a moment.
More sounds from the bed. The metal panel screeches as it gives way, revealing the space. An looks just as a hand appears and lobs something in his direction.
He hits another button. A steel partition zips up from the floor. The thing clatters into it on the other side.
He covers his ears.
An explosion. The walls shake, but not much. This little armored room protects him. And besides, he can tell by the sound that it was a small grenade with a limited blast radius, meant to harm only whoever was right in front of it.
The kind of grenade he might use in certain circumstances.
The kind of grenade that requires special modification.
A crafty Player. The Donghu maybe, or possibly the Celt. One of the two that he has the least amount of info on.
And, based on the multiple calibers and shooters, this Player isn’t alone.
Very SHIVERshiverSHIVER very crafty.
An slips into a vest. It’s covered with bombs and remote triggers and a pair of semiauto pistols. He flops onto his back and pulls on black cotton pants. He sits. Caresses Chiyoko.
Right over his shoulder comes the chattering cry of a hammer-action power drill.
He has to move.
But first, he has a little surprise for whoever’s outside his little blinkblink outside his little hidey-hole.
Aisling watches An disappear and the rest of the team spring into action.
“Jordan, this is Aisling, over.”
“Copy Aisling,” Jordan says, his voice anxious.
“I’m going in.”
“No,” Pop says. “Not yet. Be patient. Keep your gun ready.”
“Pop’s right, Aisling,” McCloskey adds. “KFE will handle themselves. They always do.”
That’s what I’m worried about, Aisling thinks. That they’re experts, and they think they know what they’re dealing with.
Aisling hears a burst of automatic gunfire, and Clov calls out in pain. She flicks to his feed. He’s on the ground, writhing. On his vitals display in the lower right corner, his heart rate skyrockets. If she could see the look in his eyes, she would see the anger there, the anger that he’s been shot.
And the confusion.
They don’t know what they’re dealing with.
Wi-Fi and Hamm jump to the side and look at the floor. An slid open a little slot near their feet and fired on Clov, whose ankles are mangled and spouting blood. “Phase two,” Wi-Fi says urgently over the comm. Skyline, still on the roof, throws a rope through the open skylight. She catches it, clips it to Clov. “Evac now,” Wi-Fi says, and just like that Clov is being dragged across the floor and up through the air to Skyline, and to safety.
In the meantime, Hamm picks up the drill and resumes his work. His eyes scour the wall and floor for another hidden door, expecting one to slide open and for a gun to peek out at him.
Wi-Fi jumps back several feet and sights the wall, moving her pistol all around. As she does, a muzzle pokes out near Hamm’s feet, and Wi-Fi fires on it. Slugs zip along the floor, the pistol is yanked back.
Hamm keeps drilling.
Another panel opens, this time 10 feet to the left. From it seven black spheres drop and roll across the floor in seven different directions.
“Fire in the hole!” Wi-Fi shouts. Both she and Hamm turn and run as fast as they can around the desks and the computers. On the roof, Skyline slings the injured Clov over his shoulder and runs too.
The explosions come quick—bangbangbangbangboombangboom. Only two are incendiary; the rest are smoke and light. The real ones send shrapnel flying indiscriminately through the space, grazing Wi-Fi on the hip and missing Hamm altogether. Both are knocked to the floor, though, as is Skyline on the roof. He’s unharmed. He looks at Clov, who is losing blood through his ankles. “I’m fine. Get that fuck,” Clov says, and Skyline nods. “Roger that.”
“All secondary units hold positions,” Jordan says over the comm. “That means you, Aisling. If Liu emerges, take him out. Repeat, take him out.”
Inside the warehouse, Hamm leaps to his feet and takes cover behind a column. Wi-Fi ignores her flesh wound and takes cover too. Hamm signals to Wi-Fi—a fist, three fingers, a thumb sticking left.
The message is clear.
An Liu is not going to emerge.
He is going to die.
Aisling fights every urge to move. But the others are right. As much as it pains her, she has to stay put. An could show up anywhere, and if she’s not there to take the shot, it will be a major missed opportunity.
She hates it, but she has to wait.
She hates it.
As soon as the bombs go off, An slides into the main room, now filled with smoke and the acrid smell of sulfur. He doesn’t need to see. He knows where everything is.
Everything except the people who hunt him.
He makes it to the desk in 4.7 seconds. He reaches out, finding the edge of his laptop. He flips down the screen, yanks out its cords, and slips it into a large sleeve in his vest.
He pats the top of the table some more, here and here and here.
He finds it too.
Nobuyuki Takeda’s katana. He slides it through a loop on his pants.
The slith-slith-slith report of a suppressed rifle. A burst of gunfire zips through the smoke, pulling little contrails in its wake. The shots miss An, but
barely.
An draws both pistols and fires blind, four shots with each gun in a syncopated rhythm. He aims for the columns at the other end of the room, which is where he would take cover if he were them.
All eight shots hit the metal beams, and he can’t see just how close he comes to blowing Wi-Fi’s head off or putting a massive hole through Hamm’s neck.
Wi-Fi and Hamm slide to the floor.
Skyline skids along the roof, adjusts the settings on the HUD in his monocle. Adjustments that will reveal An’s location via his British tracker instead of his heat signature.
Skyline just needs a few more seconds. Then he will send the settings to Hamm and Wi-Fi and everyone else, and Kilo Foxtrot Echo will have An Liu dead to rights.
While Skyline works, An stalks through the smoke in the direction of the shipping containers. He flips a trigger guard on a little box on his vest. He presses and holds the red button underneath. When he releases it . . .
Aisling receives Skyline’s HUD modifications and—pop!—just like that she can see An Liu’s tracker, which she knows is embedded in his thigh, swinging back and forth as he walks through his warehouse.
Player to Player.
The way it’s supposed to be.
She applies the first ounce of pressure to the trigger. Lowers her head. Breathes. The rounds in her gun are armor-piercing, and will have no problem boring through the building and into An’s body.
No problem at all.
But just as she is ready to shoot, the street to the west lights up, and her face grows hot, and buildings and sky and windows glow orange and red, and her ears fill with noise. She pulls the trigger reflexively. The shot hits An’s warehouse, pierces the wall, misses the Shang by two feet, and bores through the armor, skin, bone, lung, bone, skin, and armor of Hamm’s chest before embedding in the concrete floor.
Hamm slumps and dies instantly in the smoke-filled room.
Aisling flops down, covers the back of her head with her hands.
The bomb went off just outside the bay doors of the warehouse. It throws debris and shrapnel at Duck, driving a foot–long shard of steel through his cheek and the base of his brain, severing the very top of his spinal column.
Another down.
On the roof, Skyline is flattened but still unhurt, and Clov, who is in and out of consciousness from blood loss, doesn’t even register the blast.
Wi-Fi crawls to Hamm. Skyline says he’s going in. Zealot abandons his cover in the back alley and moves in too. Aisling lifts her head, scans the side of the warehouse, fire raging, car alarms going off. She hears the far-off moan of a ship’s horn in the bay, completely unattached to what’s going on here, now, in Endgame.
She recovers and gathers the rifle and throws the bolt and breathes, ignores the cries over the comm link, ignores how everything is going to shit, ignores Jordan’s orders for Skyline and Zealot to stay put so that Aisling and Charnel can fire at will.
Ignores it.
She squints through her monocle, tries to get a bead on the tracker that’s in An’s leg. At first she doesn’t see it, but then, yes. A purple blip. She sights down the muzzle. She squeezes, adjusts, squeezes, adjusts, squeezes.
And fires.
A large round cuts through the smoke and misses An’s right leg by only a centimeter.
He walks faster.
Another round, from the opposite direction, misses him by several feet.
Yes, they are tracking me. That bruise on my leg. It is there. I must dig it out when I get the chance.
He runs.
Another large round from the better marksman misses again by only a couple centimeters. The running motion is putting them off.
The better marksman.
The Player, An thinks.
Several smaller rounds zip by him. Shots from within the room. He lays down cover fire in that direction as he runs even faster.
Another sniper shot from the rear, still several feet off.
Another from the front, only three centimeters away.
And now, fire from above, medium caliber, from a suppressed carbine.
He reaches the container with the mainframes just in time. Its doors are open. He steps inside and yanks them shut, throws a bar that will hold off his assailants for a few moments.
Aisling fires at will, and then, poof, An Liu’s tracker disappears. She fires three more rounds until Skyline calls to hold. Wi-Fi says, “I have visual. He’s in the westernmost container. We have him cornered. Moving in.”
Skyline and Zealot move in too. Charnel sprints over the rooftops, whispering the Lord’s prayer.
Aisling pushes up, gets to her knees, stands. She is about to vault over the edge of the building and slide down a drainpipe to join the others when the image of Marcus Loxias Megalos zooms to the front of her mind’s eye.
Marcus, the first casualty of Endgame.
An, the first one to kill.
An, the one who used the gathering in the Qin Lin Mountains to try to kill as many as he could.
An, the one who blew up his hideout in Xi’an with a very large dirty bomb.
Aisling stops.
“Wait—” she says over the comm.
Pop asks, “What is it, Aisling?”
“Why did he corner himself?”
“What d’you mean, kid?” McCloskey demands.
“What if—”
An moves deeper into the container. More rounds bounce off its armored husk from all directions. They make an almost pleasant high-pitched song. An ejects the magazines from his pistols and reloads each. He holsters them. Someone bangs on the door. The firing stops. An pushes over one of the mainframes, crashing it into the door. Sparks fly as the thing comes undone, its circuits crackling.
He spins to the rear of the container. He walks toward a hazmat suit, inserts his legs, his arms, makes sure Chiyoko is comfortable around his neck, pulls up the zipper. Straps on the helmet, lowers the hood over the helmet, secures the hood to the rest of the puffy astronaut-like suit, emblazoned with the exact colors and markings of the Tokyo Fire Department. He flips the gloves over his fingers, opens a panel on his left forearm, pushes a series of buttons. The air begins to flow.
He lies in a metal capsule and hits another button on his arm. He hears the doors of the container being torn open. The capsule closes. He puts his arms at his side. Airbags inside the capsule inflate, pressing on him from all sides.
I Play for death, my love. For death.
He pushes the last button, on the heel of his right hand. Before releasing it, he closes his eyes.
Here comes salvation.
I Play for death.
“What if he’s about to set off another dirty bomb?” Aisling yells.
“Oh shit,” Jordan says. “All units, abort. Repeat, abort, abort, abort!”
Aisling abandons her rifle, runs across the roof toward the water. Runs so fast, the wind screaming in her ears, her breath churning, her feet slamming, her thighs like rocks, her calves like springs, her blood pumping and pumping and pumping. She is scared, but invigorated. Running from what would be certain death were she stupid enough to be lured into An’s trap, which she almost was.
The running excites her. Endgame fills her with fear.
This is Playing, even if, in this moment, she only has a slender chance of surviving.
She runs so fast.
Fifteen feet to go.
So fast.
Ten feet.
So exciting.
Five.
She opens her mouth, fills her lungs.
One.
She leaps over the edge.
Brings her hands together, pitches her body forward, dives.
The sky lights up so so bright just as she hits the water and shoots into the depths. She swims down and down and down. Kicks and scoops at the cold darkness as things of all sizes land above her. She spins, goes to the submerged structure that supports the man-made island above. Pushes her back against it, holds herself in
place, her hands pushing into the pilings. All she can see is black below and muted orange above, slashed here and there by white as things splash down and sink. She hears bubbles and her own heartbeat. Her personal record for holding her breath underwater is three minutes and five seconds.
She will need every one of those seconds tonight.
Every single one, and more.
SARAH ALOPAY
Casa Isla Tranquila, Private Room, Juliaca, Peru
How could he do this to her?
How?
She’s going to kill him. She’s going to kill him. She’s going to fucking kill him.
It has been 25 hours since that queen bitch brought her to this room. Sarah has slept for only three. She has sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at the door, hoping that one of the Tlalocs comes in.
Hoping that he comes in, the Olmec, the Player, her friend, her lover, her confidant.
Her betrayer.
She is going to fucking kill him.
He hasn’t come in.
She has sat and paced and screamed at the door and the window and the people in the garden, who either ignore her or can’t see or hear her.
She tries to stay calm, tries to reason out what’s happening. She lies on the bed and tries to sleep in 10-minute spurts. She doesn’t want to miss one of them coming in, and she knows they do, because sometimes when she wakes up there is fresh food.
She doesn’t eat it.
When she’s feeling groggy or generous or sporadically calm she thinks: He’s doing this on purpose. He wants me in here. He hasn’t betrayed me. He loves me.
But then she remembers that he has Earth Key, that he took it from her while she was sleeping, defenseless, powerless.
No.
She seethes and paces, seethes and paces. Like an animal.
She hates him.
Hates him.
Hates.
She is going to kill him when she sees him again.
Fucking kill him.
JAGO TLALOC
Casa Isla Tranquila, Juliaca, Peru
Jago doesn’t pace his room—the room where he broke his foot when he was seven while jumping off the bed, and sliced his hand open when he was nine while sharpening his knife, and shared his first kiss with his second cousin, Juella, when he was 12 and she 14. He doesn’t curse the walls or forgo the comforts of home or scheme about who he’s going to kill next and how and when. He doesn’t forgo sleep. He doesn’t refuse to eat. He doesn’t convey worry or fear.
