End Game (Jack Noble #12)

by L. T. Ryan

  Bear was staring past me, held his glass up, pointed over my shoulder. “What do you suppose they’re talking about out there?”

  I looked out the window and saw David and the pilot standing close to one another, having a conversation. Kate was standing off in the distance next to the car.

  “Hopefully not about which prison to drop us off at,” I said.

  “Or which country that prison is,” Bear said. “We’ll be flying past some places we weren’t exactly authorized to operate in.”

  “Allegedly,” I said. “And, yeah. A few of those prisons in Central America are nothing to laugh at. Inmates run the show. Those places take on a life of their own.”

  “You two have worked together for a long time,” Lexi said.

  “You could say that,” Bear said.

  “You were in the SIS as well?” She lifted an eyebrow.

  Bear shook his head. “I have had no desire to follow someone else’s orders since the day I retired from the Marines.”

  “Is that where you met?” she asked.

  “Recruit training,” Bear said.

  “I hated that asshole right there,” I said.

  “Feeling was mutual, partner.”

  “How’d you two become friends?” she asked.

  “If I recall correctly,” Bear said. “I beat the ever-living hell outta him and basically made him my bitch.”

  I almost fell out of my seat laughing. “Is that right?”

  Bear had a huge grin plastered on his face. “Something like that.”

  “Fact of the matter is they didn’t give us much choice. We were shipped off mid-way through Recruit Training to a new program the CIA had recently started. They wanted guys that weren’t completely molded in the Marine way. Guys like me and Bear who stood out as complete and total hardheads, but fit to serve. They’d have broken us sooner or later, but since we were holding out, they had another option for us.”

  “So we ended up doing time with a bunch of Agency jackwagons.” Bear stretched his legs and folded his arms over his chest. “Spent a number of years all over Europe, Asia, Africa. Good number of them with Jack, until he left and went to work with Frank.”

  “When was that?” she asked.

  “Round about oh-two,” I said.

  Bear looked down, shook his head. “What a shit storm that was.”

  Lexi leaned forward, elbows on her knees, like a little kid hanging on every word. “What happened?”

  “Unfortunately, there were some very powerful people involved and now it’s so classified we can’t talk about it.” I looked out the window. “At least not until we’re over Brazil.”

  “You guys had any fallout over the years?” she asked.

  “You grilling us for a reason?” Bear smiled, but only out of charm. It was a legitimate question.

  She leaned back and shrugged it off. “Just curious.”

  At that point the pilot stepped on board and our conversation dropped off. He smiled and introduced himself and told us we were cleared to depart and to let him know if we needed anything at all during the flight. He joined his co-pilot at the front of the plane, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “Well, that’s my cue.” Bear put on a pair of headphones and closed his eyes. His massive arm muscles rippled. His pecs clenched and unclenched. It was a technique he used to release anxiety. I’d adopted it over the years whenever stress hit me hard.

  There was no long lead up to us taking off. The plane spun a hundred-eighty degrees, then lurched forward as though we’d been shot out of a cannon. Seconds later we were in the air gaining altitude rapidly. A couple thousand feet up, we banked hard to the left. Lexi flinched forward, grabbed my thigh.

  “Feel free,” I said over the roaring engines.

  She leaned in and said, “Sorry.” Her breath was hot against my neck.

  A few minutes later, the noise level dropped and the plane leveled out. Bear remained hooked up to his headphones, eyes shut. He’d remain that way for a little bit longer, but soon enough the anxiety would subside and he’d rejoin us.

  I got up and excused myself, found a fridge and grabbed a couple drinks. The pain meds had done a number on my leg. Almost felt like I could run on it. Downside was it felt as though a cloud had descended upon my head. When I returned to my seat, Lexi had a magazine draped over her lap. I looked around in an attempt to figure out where she found it. Eight hours was a long time, might as well fill it with some reading. She didn’t look up when I handed her a bottle of water.

  Soon after I slipped into a codeine-induced sleep. When I awoke, four hours had passed. Lexi was reading a Clancy novel now. Still wasn’t sure where she’d found it. I leaned against her, brushing shoulders with her. She lifted her head, looked over at me.

  “What’re you gonna do when this is all over?” I asked her.

  She folded the corner of the page she was reading and closed the book. “I hadn’t thought much about it. I guess I’ve kinda figured everything would just work out, you know.”

  “Come on, don’t feed me that garbage. We’re the kind of people who are thinking not only five moves ahead on our current op, but ten moves ahead in life. I know you’ve got some sort of plan in mind.”

  She sighed, dropped her head back against the rest and closed her eyes. “I’ve been pursuing this for so long, Jack. I’m just hoping that whatever we find from this guy in Brazil, that I can use it against the men who screwed my life up.”

  “Your husband?”

  Shaking her head, she said, “No, not him. For one, I have no idea where they placed him. And I don’t want to know. I’m talking about those bastards I was working to bring down.”

  “You think they’re all connected?”

  “Thanos is the link in all of this.” She unscrewed the cap off the water bottle, held it close to her mouth without taking a sip. “We just have to hope that this ties it all together, because I’m having a hard time putting a couple of puzzle pieces in place.”

  “David’s working on that, too, right?”

  She nodded as she sipped her drink. “Yes, he’s cross checking every database, every briefing that hasn’t been redacted to the point of being worthless, and every contact he can trust who won’t ask him twenty questions in order to figure out the link between this cast of characters. And like I said, Thanos is in the middle.”

  I glanced at my watch. “He’s got four hours left to figure it out.”

  The cockpit door opened up and the pilot strode out. He smiled at us as he passed. Did he have any clue who his passengers were and what they were doing? I assumed he did, based on the private conversation he had with David. This guy had to be David’s go-to pilot. Hell, he might even have the pilot on some sort of payroll or retainer. A when I call, you come, type of thing.

  He grabbed a couple waters out of the fridge and headed back to the cockpit, humming an old Cole Porter tune. He stopped a few feet past us, turned back. “Fun fact, we’re getting ready to head over the equator. That means we’ll be at zero latitude. If we crossed the Atlantic, about three hundred miles off the coast of Africa we’d be at zero squared, as I like to call it. Zero lat and longitude.”

  Lexi bit her lip as the guy walked away. After the cockpit door closed, she let out a laugh.

  “What was that all about?” she said. “Here we are about to infiltrate some Brazilian politician’s office, possibly setting off an international scandal, and he’s telling us about zero squared?”

  “Coordinates,” Bear said.

  “Nice of you to join us,” she said.

  “I’ve been up for a while, waiting for you two to start making out.”

  “Better go back to sleep then,” she said. “’Cause in your dreams is the only place that’s happening.”

  “The spot he’s talking about is the Gulf of Guinea, three hundred or so miles south of Ghana.” Bear removed his headphones and rubbed his eyes. “Sorry, I’m just an old trekhead. Always enjoyed that stuff. But, every place
has coordinates, and that spot is zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero.”

  I straightened up. “Wait a minute, say that again?”

  He spouted the string of zeros once again.

  “You gotta be kidding me.” I jumped out of my seat. My right leg buckled and I nearly collapsed. Bear extended his arm to steady me.

  “What is it?” Lexi asked.

  “We’re going the wrong way. We need to turn this plane around.”

  56

  “You can’t be up here.” The pilot stood and shoved his hand into my chest. Behind him, we plowed through a floating field of white. “I’m authorized to use deadly force, you know.”

  The co-pilot gripped the controls tightly. Maybe this was their first flight with our kind of clientele.

  “Go back to your seat and I’ll come see you before we land.” The pilot dropped his hand and lowered himself into his seat.

  “Relax,” I said. “I just need to know if you can plug in some coordinates and tell me where in the world they point to.”

  He glanced over at the co-pilot and nodded. The younger man punched a couple of buttons, changing the look on the dashboard computer, then glanced back at me.

  “What are the coords, sir?”

  I read them off a quarter-note at a time, starting with five-five. As he entered them, the imagery changed from our present location over the Caribbean. When it settled, we were looking at eastern Europe.

  “Moscow,” he said.

  We’d almost made the biggest, and likely last, mistake of our careers. If we’d have busted that politician in Brazil, who knows what kind of international scandal would have arisen from it. The location of the coordinates made perfect sense given who we’d been dealing with the past few days. How had I not thought of it before?

  I ran my hand through my hair. “Change your course to Moscow, then.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding,” the pilot said. “One, we’re already chartered for a destination. You can’t just change things like that. Two, getting into Russia is going to be a hell of a lot different than Brazil.”

  He had the look of a teenage boy about to get his butt whooped by three bullies.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Call David and make it happen.”

  David had told me he could get us anywhere as long as he had twenty minutes notice.

  The pilot pulled a phone from the wall beside him and punched in a series of numbers. The pause while the phone rang seemed to go on for hours. The pilot nodded at his co-pilot, cleared his throat and began talking.

  “Sir, we’ve got a situation here. Our passengers are telling us that we’re going to the wrong destination.” He paused a few beats. “Yessir, here’s one of them.”

  “Noble,” I said.

  “This is David,” he said.

  “I figured.”

  David said nothing.

  “Well, what?” I said.

  “I was waiting for you to explain yourself.”

  “Nothing much to explain. We were wrong about Brazil. The real destination is Moscow.”

  “Moscow?”

  “Punch those numbers into your search bar, two groups of six.”

  “You’re kidding me,” he muttered before he ever hit the keyboard. “Coordinates?”

  “You got it.”

  “Five-five, uh, three-seven, that sounds about right for Moscow.”

  “Damn right it does. And you were there with me this morning. You saw who that DNA matched up to.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Put the pilot back on, then contact me on this line when you land. I’ll work on gathering whatever intel I can on that location.”

  “Appreciate it.” I handed the phone to the pilot. “Suggest you turn left right about now.”

  The door slammed closed. The plane banked left. I steadied myself with both hands against the wall, then returned to my seat.

  “What’s the deal?” Bear said. “Why’re we changing course?”

  “Going to Moscow,” I said. “Those numbers we got off that paper from Thanos’s jacket, that wasn’t a phone number to a politician’s office in Brazil.”

  Bear’s gaze danced along the ceiling. I saw the moment of clarity hit him. “Coordinates. Fifty-five and thirty-seven, guess what would put us near the damn Kremlin, huh?”

  “Something like that.” I turned to Lexi. “This isn’t the same as stopping off in Brazil. You get that, right?”

  She nodded. “I’m aware.”

  “Plenty of people think things are all hunky-dory between our countries. They’re not. A lot of the same stuff going on in the early eighties is still happening. They’re constantly trying to plant people amid our intelligence community, and we’re doing the same. The spying that goes on between the two countries is higher than ever, and if I had to predict it, it’ll continue to get worse. You see what I’m getting at here?”

  She sighed. “Of course. We need to watch every step, be invisible.”

  I lowered my head, took a breath, looked back up at her. “I need to know what kind of man David is.”

  “He’s a good man, Jack. We can trust him.”

  “If I didn’t feel that way, I never would have stepped onto this jet. That’s not what I’m asking. I need to know if this goes horribly wrong and we end up in custody, can he get us out? ‘Cause if he can’t, I’m gonna have to place a call to Frank and brief him on what we’re about to do.”

  Bear groaned. “And if he doesn’t like it, we’re guaranteed to be picked up.”

  “I still don’t know exactly what’s going on here,” I said. “I’m inclined to believe Frank knows a lot more than he let on. Those gaps you have in this story, Lexi, my bet is Frank can fill them in.” I stopped, looked out the window right of Bear’s head. “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this. Somehow I just convinced myself that I should call him.”

  “David started his career as a code-rigger for the NSA,” Lexi said. “The guy’s a genius. Unchartered territory is how they described his mind. They pulled him out of school when he was fifteen years old and put him to work in a think tank. It was fun and games to him, but the work wasn’t challenging, for the most part. Then one day, he sees the results of a task he completed. Pictures most of the world never sees. A village bombed. Women, children, innocent, dead on the streets.”

  Bear and I nodded slowly. We’d seen the harsh realities of war up close. Those images flashed in my mind fresh as the day they were imprinted in my memory.

  “So he decides that he wants to stop. Problem is, now he’s twenty-one and spent his teenage years in a box. He has absolutely no social skills with people his age, not that they were great before the NSA snatched him up. He has no family. There’s nowhere for him to go, except someplace within the intelligence community. He moves into a role as an analyst and again excelled at his job. Over the course of the next thirty years or so he advanced. Moved laterally to the CIA for a while, deputy director of SOG.”

  “Special Ops guy,” I said. “Wonder how much he knows about that program I was in?”

  “I’d assume a lot. He probably didn’t need any database to gain access to your files. With a mind like his, that information was probably locked in his mental vault. Anyway, that was his last stop, but retirement was only a formality, as you can see. He’s still very much active, very much supported by certain people in the Pentagon.”

  David’s background intrigued me, and eased some of my concerns. I didn’t get the feeling that he knew me from the past, or had any ill will toward me. Hell, we’d been up in the air more than four hours. I only had a few options once the plane touched ground. So if the guy wanted me hauled in, it wouldn’t take much to do it.

  “OK,” I said. “I’m all in with him. Frank can wait, for now. At some point he’ll need to be notified of what’s going on.”

  “David’s got our backs, Jack. I wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t. We can’t say the same for Frank.”

  I s
ettled back in my seat. We had a long flight ahead, with no idea what was going to happen when we landed.

  57

  We landed on a pitch black runway a hundred miles north of Moscow. I couldn’t see a thing out of the window and nearly broke my seatbelt when the plane surprisingly lurched upon touchdown. We had stopped in Gibraltar to refuel, but none of us got off there. It’d been a solid fourteen hours since I’d placed my foot on the ground. I stood behind the co-pilot as he opened the door and dropped the stairs, taking in my first look at our surroundings. If anyone was watching, the Gulfstream would’ve stood out like a Christmas tree amid the blackness of night.

  We were at David’s mercy here, having traveled with limited documentation and supplies, with an original destination of Brazil, a friendly country. Russia wouldn’t take so kindly to the three of us on their soil. David had arranged for an asset to meet us at the airstrip to provide us with everything we’d need.

  I descended the stairs quickly and scanned the area after my eyes adjusted. There was a feeling of naked helplessness that went along with standing exposed in every direction. A lone assassin could take each of us out with a rifle and we’d never know where they were positioned.

  At the far end of the airstrip a set of headlights flashed on and off three times, and then remained on. The vehicle drew nearer, though I couldn’t hear it over the whining of the jet’s turbines. Instinct kicked in, pleading with me to head back up the stairs. I fought off the urge and stood my ground.

  The pilot thumped down the steps, leaned over the rail next to me. “I’m armed. You know, in case something goes wrong.”

  “You’d be better off giving that pea-shooter to me,” I said.

  He pushed off the rail. His right hand traveled to his poorly concealed pistol.

  “You’re gonna get yourself shot.” I gave him a look that said back away from me. “Get back on the plane so the others can come down here.”

  The pilot retreated to the cabin. Bear took his place.

  “What’s going on out here?” he said.

  “That car, that’s what. Been sitting there for about thirty seconds, idling.”