The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2)

by Sean Chercover

  “Nice to be not full of holes,” said Daniel.

  Kara rounded the corner and froze, letting out a startled cry.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” said Daniel.

  “Sorry,” said Kara. “I just”—she nodded at Pat—“your friend looks like those men . . . yesterday.”

  “He is like them. But he’s on our side. You can trust him.”

  “Y’all know I’m right here in the room, doncha?” said Pat. He pointed at his ear and stage-whispered, “I can hear you.”

  Kara laughed and stepped forward to shake Pat’s hand. “Pleasure to meet you . . . ?”

  “Pat Wahlquist at your service, Miz Kara.”

  Daniel filled another mug and held it out to Kara.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I need it, feel like I barely slept. I had another episode. Even in my sleep, I could taste cinnamon.”

  “How much do you remember?”

  “All of it—a short but nasty little nightmare. Somewhere in Africa, or maybe the Caribbean. I didn’t know the location the way I did with the Norway dream, but the place looked tropical and everyone was black. A poor village, but in modern times. The buildings were behind me, I couldn’t see them, but somehow I know it was a very small village. I stood by the side of a dirt road facing a huge freshly dug pit, like a giant trench. About fifty or sixty people stood side by side with their backs to the trench . . . men and women, old and young, even kids . . .” She sipped her coffee. “And then gunfire rang out—like the guns you and that man shot at each other yesterday, you know, rapid-fire, machine guns—and the people fell back into the trench. Everyone. The shots came from behind me but I didn’t turn around, never saw the gunmen. I looked to my left and saw one of those big metal prefab buildings, you know, with an arched top?”

  “A Quonset hut.”

  “Yes but huge, maybe an airplane hangar. Some of the people were still alive, their voices crying out from the pit, but I just turned away from them and started walking toward the giant Quonset hut as the gunmen finished the job behind me. That’s when the dream ended.”

  “Nothing about people not being allowed to die?” said Daniel.

  Kara gave him a strange look. “Should there be?”

  “You talked in your sleep.”

  She raised the coffee mug to her lips, stopped short. “You could hear me down the hall through two closed doors?”

  “You were sleepwalking. You came into my room.”

  “I was . . .” She looked away, suddenly shy.

  “Yes,” said Daniel, “you were. And incredibly beautiful.”

  “Wow, that was awkward,” said Pat.

  Daniel shot him a look, turned his attention back to Kara. “You stood in my room and described dozens of people restrained—held somewhere between life and death, you said—not allowed to live, not allowed to die.”

  “No, these people were definitely allowed to die,” she said. “Must’ve been another dream. I don’t remember it at all.”

  “Try,” said Pat.

  “I said I don’t remember it, don’t be a bully.”

  Pat grinned broadly at Daniel. “She’s a pistol.”

  “I knew you two would hit it off,” said Daniel. “Kara, put yourself back in the dream you do remember, see if you can notice any other details. Close your eyes.”

  She did. “I . . . oh. A river ran past the village. It was in front of me, beyond the trench. Um . . . I don’t see—wait.” Her eyes opened. “One of the men wore a dirty white T-shirt with a faded flag on the chest. Like the Stars and Stripes, but the blue square in the corner was smaller and it had just a single large white star in it. The bullet struck him right in the middle of that star.”

  Daniel grabbed his phone and launched the web browser. He ran an image search, handed her the phone. “Like this?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s the flag of Liberia.”

  “Hot damn,” said Pat, “you’re the real deal, Doc.” He shifted his focus to Daniel. “You and I need to have a little powwow.”

  “We can powwow right here,” said Daniel. “Kara’s working this case with me, she can’t do it in the dark.”

  Pat shook his head. “Your mother’s gonna be displeased.”

  “He’s always displeased.”

  “A’right . . . she’s your asset, long as you realize you’ll catch hell for this later back at the office.”

  “I’ll worry about later, later.”

  “Excuse me?” said Kara.

  Uh-oh . . .

  “I’m your asset, am I?”

  Daniel turned to Pat. “Thanks, buddy. So glad you’re here.”

  “Whatever,” said Pat. “The mercs you did battle with yesterday—I’ll give you one guess where they flew into Norway from.” He pulled out his cell phone, speed-dialed. “Let’s get the geeks in on this. Hey man,” he said into the phone, “I need you to hack me into satellite imagery over Liberia. Yup, send it to my laptop.” To Kara, “What direction does the river run?”

  Kara shrugged.

  Daniel said, “Close your eyes again, put yourself back in the dream, try to remember what it looked like.” She closed her eyes. “Okay, what time of day is it? Can you tell?”

  After a moment, Kara said, “Afternoon, I think.” She kept her eyes closed. “Yes, late afternoon.”

  “Good. Now face the river and look for shadows—any trees you see, or shadows of the people standing in front of the trench. What direction do the shadows fall?”

  Kara opened her eyes, looked at Pat. “They’re parallel to the trench and the river,” she said. “They fall from left to right.”

  Pat spoke into the phone. “We’re looking for a small village with a large Quonset hut, hangar-sized, standing just south of an east-west river. Start near Monrovia and work your way out. Yup, thanks.”

  Pat brought his duffle bag to the dining table and pulled out a Toughbook computer, opened it. Within a minute, a window opened on the screen, a satellite photograph encompassing Liberia, along with parts of Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and a blue slice of the Atlantic in the bottom-left. It zoomed in until Liberia filled the screen. “Could take a couple hours,” Pat told Kara. “Don’t feel obliged to stare at it.”

  “In that case,” said Kara, “I’m going back to bed to stare at the inside of my eyelids. Wake me if something happens.” She headed for the stairs.

  Daniel said, “What’s our timeline for getting outta here?”

  Pat said, “Tonight. We drive to Denmark. Got dummy passports in the bag—you and Kara will have to memorize your legends before we hit the road. There’ll be a private jet waiting for us in Copenhagen.”

  Daniel said, “We get a hit from the satellite, we could be in Monrovia for breakfast.”

  33: SECRET AGENT MAN

  When an hour passed with no hit from the satellite feed, Daniel decided to change the channel in his head. He put in twenty minutes of zazen and went through his kata routine a few times, then changed into his running gear and a baseball cap.

  “Call me if we get a hit,” he told Pat on his way out the door.

  He set an easy pace and kept his body loose, running along tree-lined residential streets, along boulevards with boutiques and bakeries and cafes, navigating prosperous Norwegians pedaling spotless bicycles or pushing designer baby strollers, and when his water bottle ran dry, he stopped and realized he’d been at it almost an hour.

  The smell of roasting coffee beans drew Daniel another block to a place called Kaffebrenneriet. Decidedly underdressed in running shorts and a sweaty T-shirt, he took an outdoor table on the sidewalk patio in the sun and ate a smoked salmon sandwich on good rustic bread. His coffee came in an AeroPress and was refreshingly strong, and the lemonade was squeezed from actual lemons and not too sweet. He took his time with lunch and glanced at his ph
one only four or five times.

  Impatient, he decided, but not worried. After everything he’d witnessed with Kara, he had no doubt that her latest AIT episode would pay off.

  He dropped some money on the table for a tip and pushed back his chair.

  “Don’t get up,” said Evan Sage, taking the seat across from Daniel.

  Well, damn . . .

  “Evan Sage,” Daniel said, “this is a hell of a coincidence.”

  “Not even slightly.”

  “What are you doing in Norway?”

  “Was gonna ask you the same thing.” Serious, but not unfriendly.

  “Had some vacation time, thought I’d come see the woods where Edvard Munch used to hang his canvases on trees.”

  Sage just looked at Daniel with a blank expression, giving him nothing, stretching out the silence until it became a palpable thing in the air, letting it linger and grow stale in the sun. Most people can’t stand this kind of pregnant pause very long, so they jump in and start talking just to fill the air with words. And that’s when they screw up.

  Daniel said nothing.

  Sage’s gaze came to rest on the scratch on Daniel’s left cheek. “Cut yourself shaving?”

  “Clocked myself in the face getting my carry-on from the overhead bin.” Daniel smiled. “Know how they always say, ‘Items may shift during flight’? They ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.”

  “I never put anything up there,” said Sage. “And the woman you’re traveling with, Kara Singh?”

  Just keep dancing the dance . . .

  “What about her?”

  “She a fellow Edvard Munch enthusiast?”

  “Not yet.” Daniel put on a sheepish expression. “Okay, busted. We just started dating, and I thought a culture trip to Norway might impress her.”

  Evan Sage glanced over Daniel’s shoulder and nodded to someone just so Daniel would know there was a man behind him. “Okay. Let me tell you a story: That bioweapon tip sent to Descia Milinkovic I told you about? It came from a military doctor in West Virginia named Astor. Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Astor bought the farm. Skidded his car off a perfectly paved dry road under a cloudless sky at exactly the spot where a gap in the guardrail allowed him to plummet two hundred feet into a gorge. And he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, not that it would’ve helped. He strike you as the kind of guy who doesn’t wear a seatbelt?”

  Daniel shook his head. “I don’t know the man.”

  “No, of course you don’t. I mean a doctor . . . you’d expect a doctor to wear his seatbelt, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Lot of doctors smoke.”

  “True enough. Anyway, Dr. Astor had a connection to a Colonel Michael Dillman at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Ever hear of him? Ever meet him?”

  Daniel’s training kicked in. When accessing a mental picture, the eyes unconsciously shift—slightly up and to the right for a remembered image, or up and left when constructing an imaginary picture. For an auditory memory, they shift straight to the right. It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty reliable, and Daniel knew Evan would be trained to watch for it, so he shifted his eyes straight left—signaling not an auditory memory, but sounding out something unfamiliar in his mind’s ear.

  “Never heard the name,” he said.

  Sage dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “No reason why you should have. Colonel Dillman is a black ops guy—”

  “Black ops. I’ve heard that in movies, but what does it really mean?”

  “Secret projects, everything off the books, total deniability.”

  “Oh. Just like in the movies.”

  “Right. Dillman works with a lot of private military contractors—what used to be called mercenaries in pre-Orwellian times—and two of his favorites arrived in Norway day before yesterday. I came here to find them. Imagine my surprise when you popped up.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m just a business consultant.”

  “I know you are, I’ve checked you out. Also know Tim Trinity was your uncle, and you’ve got some kind of hobby helping Julia Rothman try to solve the Trinity Phenomenon for her book. I know a lot about you. And I don’t think you’re involved in bioweapons. But perhaps someone else does. Like those two mercenaries who arrived in Norway shortly after you did.”

  Daniel assumed the role, looking aghast. “What are you saying? Am I in danger?”

  “You could be. It’s possible you may have stumbled upon something without knowing it, sometimes we know things we don’t realize. Or maybe you don’t know anything, but they think you do. These aren’t the kind of men who take chances.”

  “Oh my god.” Daniel put a slight tremor in his voice. “I can’t believe this is happening. What happens if they catch up with me? I don’t even know anything.”

  “We’ll work this out, Daniel, don’t panic.” Sage pulled out his badge wallet and handed Daniel another of his business cards, then glanced at his watch. “Here’s what you’re gonna do: Go back to your hotel and stay there for a few hours. At four o’clock I want you and your girlfriend at the American embassy. Give my card to the reception desk. We’re gonna sit down and have a long talk, find out what it is you might know, or what it is they might think you know. And then I’m gonna take these bastards down. And you can get on with your life.”

  “Thank you,” said Daniel. “We’ll be there.” He stood up and so did Sage.

  “Let’s be very clear, Mr. Byrne: You and Kara Singh are both US citizens, and your government requires your assistance with a possible bioterror threat. Whether you think you know something or not, you are going to report to the embassy and answer my questions, or the Department of Homeland Security will have you both on terrorist watch lists you never even heard of. You won’t be able to fly, rent a car, use your credit cards, access your bank accounts, or wipe your own ass until I say so.”

  “You needn’t threaten, Mr. Sage,” said Daniel. “You think I want mercenaries chasing me? I said we’d be there.”

  “Don’t be late.”

  “Got a hit,” said Pat with a triumphant grin as Daniel came in the front door. “Couple hours’ drive north of Monrovia, next to an offshoot of the Lofa River.” He pointed at the laptop. “Check ’er out.”

  “We’re blown,” said Daniel. “We gotta go.”

  Pat immediately started packing his duffle bag. “What happened?”

  Daniel bent over the laptop screen, looked at the satellite photo—most of the screen densely packed with green treetops, intersected horizontally by a thin, winding brown ribbon, a red-dirt clearing just south of the muddy river. “Evan Sage happened. Homeland Security guy.” He clicked on the image, zooming in closer. Twelve small dwellings were scattered around the clearing, and the arched roof of a large Quonset hut appeared at the northwest edge of the clearing, close to the river. “Sage ordered me to the embassy at four o’clock, said to bring my girlfriend.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know. I played dumb, but . . .”

  “What?”

  Daniel looked up from the screen. “Just the way he was playing me. He’s hard to read.”

  Pat unplugged the computer’s power brick and coiled the cord and stuck it in the bag. “He put a tail on you?”

  “’Course he did. I lost them.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, Pat, I’m sure.” He pointed at the screen. “This rectangle, next to the structure. Semi-trailer?”

  “Yeah, converted into one big-ass diesel generator, and the roof is wall-to-wall solar panels. And those two smaller squares? Big-ass AC units. So, not an airplane hangar. Whatever they’re doing inside draws a lot of juice, and they’re keepin’ the place cool.”

  Daniel closed the computer and handed it to Pat. “Let’s go find out.”

  He headed upstairs and knocked on Kara’s door. She opened it and
put a hand on his forearm.

  “You were gone a long time, I was worried,” she said. “Did Pat tell you? We got a hit.”

  “He told me. Pack up, we’re leaving in fifteen minutes. I’m just gonna jump in the shower, I’ll meet you downstairs in ten. We gotta go. Now.” He gave her a quick kiss. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  34: DEMOLITION CITY

  London, England

  9:05 a.m.

  Michael Dillman sat against the edge of the desk in Dr. Kara Singh’s room of horrors and flipped back to the front page of the file folder for the third time.

  She was one of them.

  What’re the chances?

  He stood and speed-dialed Conrad Winter.

  Conrad answered on the first ring. “Give me good news, Colonel.”

  “Roger: Stockholm is confirmed and I supervised London myself last night. That’s five, and as expected, the Internet’s lit up about it. Our seeds have sprouted—six of our theories are getting major play on the conspiracy forums—and the Illuminati theory has even started up without us. We’ll keep watch and keep it fed as necessary. The final three bodies drop over the next forty-eight.”

  “Okay, now let’s have the bad news.”

  Spoken just like his father, thought Dillman. He said, “We got a hit from facial on the woman with Daniel Byrne. Kara Singh, a medical doctor here in London. I’m standing in her apartment right now.”

  “And?”

  “Sir, have you ever heard of Project Cassandra?”

  “Saw a file on it once but . . . long time ago, wasn’t it? Some failed AIT initiative?”

  Didn’t seem such a long time ago to Michael Dillman, but when you get to a certain age, nothing seems very long ago.

  “About thirty years ago, my first project after joining the Council, actually. The Air Force thought I was developing a next-gen psyops weapon, a machine that could direct scripted auditory hallucinations into the mind from a distance. And in fact I was, and I did. But for the Council, Project Cassandra had much greater ambition. Because schizophrenics are disproportionately affected by AIT, the idea was that if the auditory hallucinations were the trigger, and we replicated those symptoms, perhaps we could trigger AIT artificially with this weapon. We had a prototype working by early eighty-four, shut the project down in early eighty-six. The weapon failed to trigger AIT.”