Endgame Novella #7

by James Frey

  I get out and cross the street. The building’s front door is unlocked, and I go inside and walk quickly up the stairs to the second floor, then to the third. There is only one apartment, so I don’t have to wonder which one belongs to Anaïs. I walk to it and knock. No one comes, and there are no mumbled words from anyone I might have woken up. Still, I am very quiet as I pick the lock of the door, which luckily is a simple dead bolt. It opens easily, and I slip inside.

  A quick check shows me that the apartment is empty. I return to the car and get Boone and the others. We go back inside, and while Lottie attends to putting Bernard to bed in one of the two bedrooms, Boone and I see what there is for food in the kitchen. We find some cheese, bread, and sausage, which we eat as we sit at the kitchen table.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner,” I say. This has been on my mind ever since the fight at the factory.

  “You got there,” Boone says. “That’s what’s important.”

  There’s more that I want to say, but I don’t know how to say it. “I’m sorry. About your brother.”

  Boone nods. I don’t ask what he intends to do with the body.

  “How’s your side?” he asks me.

  Instinctively, I touch the place where he stabbed me. I haven’t had time to sew up the wound yet. “It’s just a scratch,” I joke. “How’s your nose?”

  “I should be able to smell in a month or so,” he says. “Take your shirt off.”

  I look at him, surprised.

  “So I can stitch you up.”

  I feel my cheeks burn, and quickly pull up my shirt to cover the burn I’m sure is flushing my cheeks. Luckily, Boone has gone in search of something to treat my wound with.

  He returns with a needle and thread. “Good thing your friend likes to do cross-stitch,” he says. “Sit.”

  I sit on one of the kitchen chairs. Boone kneels on the floor beside me. He tries to thread the needle, but his fingers are clumsy, and he keeps missing the eye.

  “Here,” I say, taking it from him. I push the thread through on the first try and hand the needle back to him. I could do it myself. Easily. But I can tell he wants to do it. Besides, I think it might help him take his mind off what happened to his brother.

  He is gentle but awkward. I find myself wondering if he’s ever touched a woman like this. Fortunately, the knife went in cleanly and didn’t cut muscle, so closing the wound takes only a few stitches.

  “There,” he says when he’s done. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.”

  I look down at his handiwork. “Maybe you should finish Anaïs’s sampler for her.”

  We look at each other and laugh. It feels good. A relief after all the death we’ve faced tonight. Then Boone looks serious again. “I have to get Lottie and Bernard out of Berlin as soon as I can. They’re not safe here. I think Ott is the one who sent the men to the museum, and he was behind the kidnapping.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I say. “But who is he working for?”

  “Maybe himself,” Boone says. “Or he’s part of a group. The problem is, he knows where the weapon is.”

  “Not precisely where,” I say. “Only that it’s supposedly in the museum. He needed us to find it for him. For all he knows, we have the weapon now. And even if he does somehow find the room, it’s flooded.”

  “Maybe,” says Boone. “I don’t want to take a chance, though. We have to get whatever is in that chamber.”

  “How?”

  “I have an idea,” he says. “It will depend on whether or not a buddy can help me.”

  “Another Cahokian?”

  “No one involved with Endgame.” He doesn’t tell me who it is. “It means leaving here for a few hours, though.”

  I know what he’s really asking me: Can I be trusted to come with him?

  “Boone—” I begin.

  “There’s something else,” he says, stopping me. “If I can’t get to the weapon, I’m going to make sure it’s destroyed.”

  The Player inside me recoils instinctively at this announcement. All of my training tells me that any weapon that can give us an advantage in Endgame needs to be protected.

  “I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt until tonight,” Boone continues.

  “Until Jackson was killed. Sitting there on the floor, holding him while he died . . .” His voice trails off, and I can see that he’s remembering.

  “It changed me.”

  “What are you saying, exactly? You don’t want to be a Player anymore?”

  He doesn’t answer for a long time. So long that I’m about to ask the question again. Then he says, “I don’t know what I want. I know how I feel right now, tonight. I also know that might change too. I’m not making any decision about that right now.”

  I don’t press him. Only a few days ago, what he’s saying would have made me lose all respect for him. Now it doesn’t. Nor do I feel as strong an urge to make sure the weapon ends up in my hands. In Minoan hands.

  “We should go,” he says. “I’ll tell Lottie.”

  He gets up and goes into the other room. I hear him talking. When he comes back, he says, “They’ll be okay. And they have instructions on what to do if we’re not back in three hours. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  We leave the apartment and get back into the car. It feels odd driving around with the body of Boone’s dead brother in the trunk. My curiosity about where we’re going outweighs that, though, especially when I realize that Boone is driving toward the air base.

  “It’ll be best if you stay in the car,” he tells me as we get closer. “If anything goes wrong, and I’m not back after half an hour, get out of here.”

  “What are you going to do in there?” I ask. “Steal a plane?”

  He laughs. “Nah,” he says. “I just need to see a guy about a submarine.”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about. When he parks the car and gets out, I slide into the driver’s seat, in case I need to make a getaway. I watch as Boone walks toward the base, wondering what he could possibly be doing.

  I can’t help thinking that all I have to do is start the car and drive away. I know where the weapon is supposedly hidden. I can’t get to it at the moment, but I could probably assemble a team and get to it. Not before Boone makes his attempt, but he could be dealt with as well. So why don’t I? Why am I sitting here waiting for the Cahokian Player to come back when I should be trying to outmaneuver him?

  The truth is, I no longer feel like his enemy. We’ve been through a lot together in a short time, and it’s made me see things differently. I still want the weapon. I still have that drive to succeed and reach my goal. What happens once I get there is the question.

  I keep checking my watch. The thirty minutes tick by with agonizing slowness. I really have no idea what Boone could be searching for here, and not knowing is driving me crazy. When I finally see him coming toward me through the gloom, he’s carrying something that seems very bulky.

  He reaches the car, opens the back door, and lays something on the seat. I turn my head to see what it is. There’s an air cylinder with something attached to it. There’s also a large bag.

  “It’s called an Aqua-Lung,” Boone says when he gets in. “Invented by a guy named Jacques Cousteau.”

  I’ve heard of the invention but never seen one up close.

  “That hose thing is called a regulator. You breathe through it.”

  “You’ve used one before?”

  “No, but Smitty gave me a crash course.”

  “Smitty?”

  “Supply sergeant here. I met him on the flight into Berlin the other day. Told me to look him up if I ever needed anything. So I did.”

  “In the middle of the night,” I say. “On Christmas. Didn’t he think that was strange?”

  “Fifty bucks makes any request seem totally normal,” Boone says.

  “Now let’s go. I want to get this over with before Ott or anyone else tries first.
”

  I turn the car around and head back toward Museum Island. “I assume you think you’re going to go back down that air shaft with that,” I say. “But what happens once you’re in the chamber? How are you going to get the doors open?”

  Boone grins. “That’s the easy part,” he says. “With a key.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Boone

  Before we go back to the museum, Ariadne and I make a couple of stops at our respective cache points to retrieve weapons and ammunition. By the time we get to the New Museum, in the cold, still hours before dawn on the day after Christmas, we’re armed for battle. I hope it won’t come to that, but I have a feeling it will. A lot of people have died since I arrived in Berlin on Christmas Eve, and a lot of other people aren’t going to be happy about that.

  There’s another pressure that I haven’t told Ariadne about. If I don’t check in with the council within 48 hours, they’ll assume I’m dead and will send someone in to find out what happened to me. That gives me only about ten hours to get the weapon and figure out where to go. I’m thinking that we’ll head for France. Having Lottie and Bernard along complicates things, but I’m afraid to leave them alone, especially if Karl Ott really is involved with the people trying to get the weapon. And I’m positive he is.

  The question is: What about Ariadne? Would she come with us? She’s sitting beside me as all these thoughts run through my mind. Although I feel like we’re actually working together now, instead of just tolerating each other until one of us can make a move, there’s no way to be a hundred percent sure. Still, when I feel with my gut and not just my head, I think she’s someone I can trust.

  As we drive, I go over the plan I’ve come up with once more.

  “I’m going to use the Aqua-Lung to go down the air shaft,” I say, “assuming it’s still flooded, which I hope it is because that will slow down anybody else who is trying to get in there. Once I’m in the chamber, I’ll get the key and open the cabinets.”

  “How are you so sure that there even is a key?” Ariadne asks for the fifth or sixth time.

  I’m not sure. But I say, “Sauer kept talking about how the items were locked inside the cabinets. If there’s a lock, there’s a key. And I’m betting that he had it on him.”

  “Why?” Ariadne says. “If he didn’t want anyone to have it, wouldn’t he have just thrown it away? Why bring it into the very place where it could be used if someone found it?”

  “I hate that you’re a Player right now,” I tell her.

  She makes an exasperated sound. “It’s not only Players who would think this way,” she says. “Anybody with any common sense would.”

  She’s right. And of course I’ve thought this very thing myself. But I also have a hunch. “I think Sauer wanted it buried with him in there,” I tell her. “He was a scientist. Methodical. Organized. I don’t believe he would have ever given up the key, not after keeping it a secret for so long.”

  “That’s a big if,” Ariadne says. “And if you’re wrong, you’re going to be down there with no other way to open those cabinets. We should have gotten some explosives.”

  “Can’t use them in such a small space,” I say. “The pressure wave would probably kill anybody in the room.”

  “What about dropping a grenade down the shaft? You wouldn’t have to be in there at all.”

  “True. But it might collapse the room, or the shaft, and then we’d be screwed.”

  Dropping a grenade down the air shaft is my plan if I can’t get the cabinets unlocked, but I don’t mention this. I know Ariadne isn’t in agreement with me about destroying the weapon if we can’t get it.

  “I don’t like any of this,” she says. “We don’t even know what we’re looking for. A weapon? Pieces of a weapon? Plans? Sauer never said exactly what’s in there.”

  “Well, we’re going to find out,” I say as I bring the car to a stop on a deserted street.

  Our first worry is encountering anyone else who is out to get the weapon. Because I’m carrying the diving gear, Ariadne is the one responsible for keeping her eyes open for possible trouble. I can feel her tensed for action, and despite all the pressure and worry, I can’t help but find it attractive. I’ve never met anyone like her before. She’s a walking contradiction, and I still don’t know where I really stand with her. I like being a team, though, and having someone besides my family who understands what it means to be a Player.

  We don’t enter the museum through the front door, but through one of the many holes in the walls. Ariadne leads us through the hallways as if she has map of the place in her head now after being there once, which she probably does. We encounter nobody, which is both a relief and a worry. At every turn I expect to be met with gunfire or confronted by an enemy. It would almost be better than the anticipation. A flesh-and-blood body is easier to deal with than a ghost.

  But we pass through the museum without seeing anyone and find ourselves once more in the basement, where the opening to the air shaft is located. I set down the air tank and gear bag and shine a flashlight into the shaft. The light reflects off the surface of water about 20 feet below.

  “It’s still flooded,” I tell Ariadne, and start to strip down to my undershirt and boxers.

  “It’s going to be freezing,” she says.

  “I’ll work fast,” I promise her. “Smitty didn’t have any dive suits. We’re lucky he had this stuff.”

  “You can’t get through the shaft with that on,” she says, nodding at the tank.

  “I’m going to lower it in and go down after,” I tell her. “I’ll have to hold my breath to make it through the shaft, but once I get into the chamber, I should be fine. I’ll carry the mask and fins with me.”

  “But—”

  “Are you my trainer now?” I tease. “Trust me. I can swim a long way holding my breath. I used to practice swimming under the ice on the pond behind my grandmother’s house. My trainer would drill a hole on one side and have me swim to the other and make another hole from underneath. I’ll be fine.”

  She sighs but doesn’t put up any more objections. A few minutes later, I lift the Aqua-Lung through the air shaft opening and lower it using a rope I’ve tied to the tank. When I run out of rope, I let go.

  “Now it’s my turn,” I say, taking the mask and fins I’ve brought out of the bag. “Wish me luck.”

  She comes over and, to my surprise, kisses my cheek. Then she kisses the other one. “Good luck. Bring back the weapon.”

  I grin. “Hell,” I say. “Forget about the weapon. I’m coming back for more of those kisses.”

  “Go,” she says. “If there’s trouble up here, I’ll take care of it.”

  Now things get serious. “If there’s trouble up here, you drop a grenade down this shaft,” I tell her. “Promise me.”

  She nods.

  I’m not convinced, but I don’t say anything. I push the upper half of my body into the opening of the shaft. I’m going in headfirst. I pause for a minute, suspended on the edge. I take three deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling to expand my lungs. Then I take one final breath, hold it, and dive.

  I’ve steeled myself for the shock of the water, but when I hit it, it’s almost enough to make me gasp. I fight my instincts and swim as well as I can in the tight space, which isn’t well at all. I wish I could use the fins, but there’s just no room. But gravity is on my side, and I sink through the freezing blackness like a stone, the fins and mask held against my chest with one arm. It seems to take forever, but finally I’m through the opening in the chamber roof.

  I hit the floor and turn on the flashlight Smitty gave me. It has O-rings and wax to seal it, but Smitty warned me that it might not be totally waterproof, as it’s meant to withstand rain, not being submerged 200 feet underground. The light comes on, and I pray it holds.

  Next I open the valve on the Aqua-Lung, put my arms through the straps, and place the regulator in my mouth. I take a breath, and my lungs fill with air. I take a moment to
let my body adjust to breathing again, then get to work. The frigid water is already making me sluggish. First I slip the mask over my head. When it’s on, I lift the lower edge away from my face and blow through my nose. The water inside is forced out, and I settle the mask back on my face. Then I pull the fins onto my feet.

  I swim over to Sauer’s body and start searching him. Between his coat and his clothes, he has a lot of pockets. Each one turns up nothing, and I start to think maybe Ariadne was right, there is no key. Then, in the last one I check, I find something. I pull out an ordinary-looking skeleton key, the kind that could fit a lock on a door, a trunk, or a hundred other things. Will it work on the cabinets?

  I take it and go to the nearest cabinet. My fingers trembling, and not just from the cold, I try to insert it into the lock. It doesn’t go. I try again, and again I’m met with resistance. The key does not fit this lock. I go to the next cabinet and have the same result. And the next. It’s clear that the key from Sauer’s pocket is not for anything in this room.

  I return to his body and search again, hoping that I’ve overlooked something. I turn every pocket inside out. But there’s nothing.

  Despair presses down on me like the icy water. The excitement and hope that was helping keep me moving evaporates, and now I feel every bit of the chill. I know the weapon is here. I know it is. And I have no way of getting to it. After everything—all the killing, the running, the death of my own brother—I’m left with nothing.

  Then I hear what sound like tiny explosions. They come again, and I realize that it’s the sound of gunfire echoing through the air shaft. Something has happened up in the basement. Something bad.

  I shine the flashlight at the opening in the ceiling. There’s no way I can get up there to help Ariadne. It would take too long, and I would be an easy target. My frustration and rage double. I’m useless down here. Nothing I can do will help anyone.

  A tiny shadow detaches itself from the hole in the ceiling, a small circle of blackness that falls quickly through the beam of the flashlight. I know immediately what it is. A grenade. Ariadne has chosen to employ the final option.