End Game

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Venice fist-pumped the air. The fugitives had in fact made a phone call from their motel room. She didn’t know the content, of course, but she did have the number they called and the duration of the conversation. It was a Michigan number, from the greater Detroit metropolitan area, and the conversation lasted for just a little over six minutes.

“Why would they do that?” she asked aloud. “Why would Jolaine allow that to happen?” She was supposed to be smart about such things.

The fact that the call went to Detroit rang a big warning bell. Michigan sported a greater concentration of Muslims per square foot than anywhere else in the country, and as much as Venice knew in her heart and in her brain that the vast majority of Muslims were wonderful, peace-loving people, she was enough of a realist to embrace the fact that the religion also fielded the lion’s share of the world’s terrorists.

“Stop it,” she said. “Let the facts drive the conclusions.” It was one of the most important lessons she’d learned from her boss: always sideline presumptions until such time as they can be supported by facts.

Right now, the only fact she knew was that a phone call had been made, and that wasn’t necessarily a causal link to anything. At least not yet.

The link materialized about thirty seconds later, when she cross-referenced the time of the call to Detroit with the time of the first calls to 911 to report the shooting. Less than thirty minutes’ difference. That raised the coincidence to the level of undeniability. The call triggered the shoot-out.

How?

“By tipping their hand to their location.” Venice often talked her way through difficult problems. Somehow, when she heard her voice say the words, her thoughts fell into place more easily.

“And that makes the person on the other end of the phone a bad guy!” She supposed it was obvious from the beginning, but it felt like a real ta-da moment.

“Okay, Mr. Bad Guy,” she said. “Who are you?”

The number traced to a physical address in Highland Park, Michigan — another surprise, because if Venice were going to be a bad guy, she’d use only disposable cell phones. The fact that he didn’t could mean any number of things, but in this case, she assumed that he was a rookie at this terrorism thing. There was a lot of that going on around the world now.

The address in Highland Park was an apartment rented to Muhammad Kontig, who, according to the databases that Venice could access most quickly, was something of a nobody. Certainly, he was not on any of the publicly accessible terror watch lists, and he didn’t have a known criminal record.

Not that that meant anything. It just reinforced her first thought that the guy was a rookie. He owned a car, though, and the car had a license plate number that traced to a two-year-old Chevy Impala. Beyond that, she had nothing.

It was time to bring Jonathan into the loop.

The room in the farthest corner of the basement hospital suite was a slaughterhouse. All but the deepest pools of blood on the floor had coagulated. Great fans of blood reached high on the walls, with even a few spatters on the ceiling.

“Jesus Christ,” Boxers said. He sounded like he had a bad cold. Like Jonathan, he had developed a knack for using his soft palate to shut off his smeller. It was a skill that had saved Jonathan from a lot of puking.

At first glance, the bodies were unrecognizable, just lumps amid the gore. Upon closer examination, though, Jonathan noticed that the body that sat tied into the hard-backed chair — he guessed it was stolen from a dining room and brought down — was that of a naked female, and that the body trussed to the cylindrical steel ceiling support was that of a middle-aged man. Three other men lay dead of bullet wounds to the head.

It was the sight of the children that turned his stomach. A preteen boy and a younger preteen girl sagged against the wall opposite the man, each of them bound and mutilated. This wasn’t so much the scene of torture as it was the scene of ritual murder.

Jonathan had seen too many horrible sights to even catalog them, let alone rate them in order of awfulness, but this one was beyond the pale.

“Whoever did this wanted information that came too slowly,” Boxers said. “Looks to me like they tortured the kids in front of the parents.”

“I bet one parent,” Jonathan said. “I think the lady is Sarah Mitchell. This is a covert hospital. She came here to be treated, but the bad guys caught up to her.”

“And who, exactly, are the bad guys?” Boxers asked.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “But I have every intention of finding out.”

“So long as I get to pull the trigger,” Boxers said. Big Guy had a thing for kids in jeopardy. Jonathan had never asked the questions to pursue it further, but there had to be something in Boxers’ past that made him particularly homicidal when it came to protecting kids. All things considered, it was hard to think of that as anything but a strength.

“Are you okay?” Jonathan asked.

Big Guy puffed out a little. “I’m fine,” he said. Lest anyone doubt, Big Guy was far too tough to be affected by something so simple as a couple of gutted kids. “Like I said, I get dibs on pulling the trigger on whoever did this.”

Jonathan said nothing for long enough to draw Boxers’ gaze.

“I got this, Dig.”

Jonathan acknowledged his friend with a quick nod. “You say you’ve got it, you’ve got it.” Part of the job was to accept reality for what it was, free of the demonstrative emotion that defined humanity. For Jonathan and Boxers, the job required an ability to project false normalcy.

Jonathan keyed the mike on his radio. “Mother Hen, I think we’ve found Sarah Mitchell and Doctor Wilkerson,” he said on the air. Boxers had already pulled a camera from his pocket to take pictures of the bodies. “We’ll have images coming to you in a few seconds. Prepare yourself. They’re pretty awful.”

“They’ve definitely been tortured,” Boxers said. “Look at this. The lady’s had her skin peeled away, and the guy on the floor looks like his legs and arms are broken.”

Jonathan walked out of the room. He’d take Big Guy’s word for it. “Take care not to leave any trace,” he said. Sooner or later, these bodies were going to be found by law enforcement personnel, and the last thing they needed was to leave evidence that could be traced back to either of them.

Thanks to the work they’d done in their previous lives for Uncle Sam, no record existed of either Jonathan or Boxers. No fingerprints, no DNA, no hair samples, no pictures, no anything. Jonathan harbored no fear of being identified through forensics. He did, however, worry about someone connecting the dots of various “crime scenes”—every hostage rescue done in the private sector technically violated the law — and creating a road map of sorts for curious reporters or prosecutors. If that happened, and the various pieces of the puzzle were tracked around the world, the emerging profile would threaten everything.

Even when the chances of getting caught were infinitesimal, it paid to take precautions.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” Jolaine said. “East for now. We’re putting distance between us and last night.”

“Do you think those cops last night know who we are?” Graham sat in the front passenger seat with both legs drawn up beneath his butt.

“I think if they did, we would have been stopped by now,” Jolaine explained. “I think we got a bye.”

“At the motel,” he said. “Did they really think we were… lovers?” He snorted out a laugh, but Jolaine knew that he secretly lusted after her. In all fairness, though, fourteen-year-olds lusted after any girl with a heartbeat.

“Actually, no,” she said. “I think they suspected prostitution.” As soon as she said it, she knew she’d made a mistake.

He laughed. “Ha! They thought you were a hooker!”

Jolaine smirked and let his laughter peak before she said, “Feel better?”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“Well consider this,” she said, shooting him a glance over the console. “You were the one without any clothes on. I think they thought you were the hooker.”

“What?” The look of horror was everything she’d hoped for.

“Sure,” she said. “There are boy whores just like there are girl whores.”

Graham laughed again. “Paid to have sex. Huh. I might have found my career plan.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “I don’t think it’s the carnal carnival that you think it would be,” she said.

“I’d get paid,” he reiterated. “To have sex. How could it get better than that?”

How should she put this? “You watch cop shows,” she said. “Do you know what the police call prostitutes’ customers?”

It took him a few seconds. “Johns, right?”

She tilted her head and waited for him to get it.

“Oh,” he said. “You mean dudes?”

“I mean dudes,” she said. Beyond the windows, farmland continued to expand. Inside, the stink of mildew from the upholstery was beginning to irritate her eyes. “And not to be unkind, I’m not sure what a boy your age would have to offer to a more… experienced woman.”

“Like you, you mean.”

Okay, this conversation just crossed the line into weirdness. She started to answer, but didn’t know what to say.

Graham sensed the hesitation and went for the gold. “First of all, you obviously haven’t peeked at me in the shower.”

“Oh, good God.”

“No, I mean seriously,” he said. “We’re talking eight or nine inches.” He held out his hands marking the appropriate separation.

She’d opened the door for bullshit guy banter, and she knew from her years with Sandbox boys barely older than Graham that the banter quickly became self-perpetuating.

“Plus, I’m young,” he went on. “I have stamina.”

“Is that what you call it?” she countered, rising to the bait. “Is stamina the reason why your right arm is so much bigger than your left?”

Graham laughed hard, loving this. “Jolaine!” he mocked. “You’re talking dirty to me.” He made a muscle. “Wow, it is big, isn’t it? My arm, I mean.”

Jolaine made a chopping motion in the air. “Okay,” she said. “That’s it. We’re done with this topic.”

Graham fell silent, but pantomimed two-handed masturbation of something the girth of a two-liter soda bottle.

“Graham!” she snapped through her laughter.

“Oh. Oh. Oh, almost there.”

She smacked his arm. “Stop!”

He retreated against the door. “Oh, yeah, baby. Beat me. Make it hurt.”

She repeated the chopping motion. “Okay, you win,” she said. “Just please make it stop.”

Graham still seemed spun up for more, but he controlled himself. All that was left was the residual laughter. Somewhere inside all the adolescent swagger and attitude, there resided a pretty decent kid, she thought. A handsome kid beyond the gangliness, with dark hair, bright brown eyes, and a quick smile when he deigned to employ it.

The silence after the laughter didn’t last long, but it brought a palpable drop in the mood.

“How will you know when we’ve gone far enough?” Graham asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. Again, it was tough not to sugarcoat things for him. “I hope that — oh, shit.” A flash of blue and red drew her attention to her rearview mirror. A jolt of adrenaline lit her up like a horse kick.

A cop car was on her tail, demanding that she pull over. As she eased to the shoulder, she tossed her pistol onto the floor of the backseat. She pulled to a stop.

Graham looked horrified. “Jesus, Jolaine, what’s happening?”

Jolaine didn’t look at him as she said, “Do whatever they tell you to do. It’s going to be scary. They’re going to have their guns drawn.”

In one fast eruption of panic, Graham thumbed the seat belt and flung it away. He rose to his knees and peered out the back window.

“No!” Jolaine yelled, but it was too late.

Graham understood the instant he saw the two cops react to his movement. They flung open both cruiser doors and ducked behind them for cover. They had their guns in their hands, and they looked ready to shoot.

“Shit!” Graham shouted, and he ducked for cover.

“No,” Jolaine said. She continued to sit tall in her seat, her hands poised at ten and two on the steering wheel, as if mocking a bitchy driver’s ed teacher. “Sit up,” she said. “Keep your back to them and sit so they can see you.”

“The hell I will. They’ve got guns!”

“Graham, do what I tell you. Of course they have guns. They’re cops.”

Graham pressed himself harder against the floor. “I’m not going to get myself shot.”

“Please listen to me, Graham,” Jolaine said. “What you’re doing is what’s going to get us shot. The police don’t like sudden movement, and they sure as hell don’t like people ducking out of sight after they’ve been seen.”

As if to confirm the point, a booming voice, propelled by a loudspeaker, said from behind, “In the car. Sit up and be seen. Keep your hands visible.”

“We need to run, Jolaine,” Graham said. “This is about the killings. We can’t just give up. You said yourself that we can’t trust—”

“I also told you that you had to trust me. You said that you would.” She glanced back into the mirror. “We can’t outrun a radio. Running will just make it harder on us.”

“How do we even know that they’re real cops?”

Jolaine hesitated. She hadn’t thought of that.

Graham drove his point home: “Aren’t we just making it easier for them to kill us?” He rose from the floor to the cushion of the shotgun seat, but he slumped way down, careful not to expose himself.

Was he right? she wondered. Was this really the end if they surrendered?

“Come on,” he said. “Give us a chance.”

“Respond to my orders,” the cop’s voice boomed. “Do not make this worse for yourselves. Do not escalate this to a level where you don’t want it to go.”

Jolaine’s shoulders fell. The cop was right.

Graham made his last pitch. “I thought your job was to protect me,” he said. “So now you’re just going to give up and get me killed?”

“Here’s what I need you to do,” Jolaine said, “and listen carefully because we don’t have much time before they’re on us. When they come, do everything they say. Follow every order, and do not resist. They’re probably going to hurt you when they put the handcuffs on, but that will just be to get a rise out of you, an excuse to charge you for resisting. It’s a favorite trick when arresting kids your age. Do not give them the satisfaction. Just let them do what they’re going to do.”

Graham felt his breathing taking off like a steam engine. “But Jolaine—”

“Listen. To. Me. They’re going to ask you questions. I don’t have any idea what they’re going to be, but they’re going to ask them. Don’t lie, but don’t confirm or deny anything. I mean nothing, understand?”

Shit no, he didn’t understand. He didn’t have a goddamn clue about a single goddamn thing that was going on.

Jolaine didn’t wait for an answer. “I cannot emphasize that point enough. Everything that has happened since last night — everything at your house, and in the car and in the doctor’s place and at the motel — represents the key to everything.”

“Do they know that I know about the code?”

“I don’t think so,” Jolaine said. “These are local police. I don’t think that local police would know about that. The code would be more of a concern for the feds.”

Graham’s stomach flipped again. “Then it has to be about the shooting in the parking lot.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Say nothing about that.”

“I get it!” Graham shouted. “Don’t say anything about any—”

“We are not telling you again,” the cop boomed over the loudspeaker. “You in the passenger seat. Sit up straight and let me see your hands.”

“Look,” Jolaine said. The rhythm of her words had increased, almost to the point where they were indecipherable, like the guy who reads the disclaimers at the end of car commercials. “There are different groups of information. There’s what the police don’t know, what they do know, what they think they know, and what they want to know. You won’t be able to tell from them which is which. So your best bet is to say nothing.”

He found himself trembling. “Can I tell them my name?”

“Do you have identification on you?”

“No.”

“Then if they don’t have it, I wouldn’t give it to them.”

“So I just sit there and say nothing.”

“If you can get away with it, yes.”

“Isn’t that going to piss them off?”

She nailed him with her eyes. “First, you wanted me to start a high-speed chase, and now you’re worried about pissing them off with silence?”

He started to answer, then stopped. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, and he sat up.

“I assure you that I do not,” Jolaine said.

“Hands in the air!” the cop yelled.

Graham did as he was told, pressing his palms into the roof liner. “What are you going to do about the gun?” he asked.

Her eyes softened. “Not touch it,” she said. “Oddly enough, in this part of the world, having the gun is one element of the law that we haven’t broken.”

Jolaine’s eyes darkened, and he could see that she was focusing on a spot beyond him. “Here they come. Good luck, Graham. Do your best.”

“At what?”

Graham’s peripheral vision caught sight of a uniformed cop just beyond his window, his gun drawn and pointed at Graham’s right ear.

The same voice as before boomed over the loudspeaker, “You are surrounded. We do not want to kill you, but we will not hesitate to do so. Do exactly as we say.”

Graham saw movement on his left now as another uniformed cop revealed himself. This one had a rifle pressed against his shoulder, with the muzzle leveled at Jolaine.

“Driver, do not move!” the voice of God commanded from behind. “Keep your hands where they are.”

Graham’s sense of fairness was offended by the fact that she got to rest her hands on the steering wheel while he had to hold his in the air.

“In the passenger seat, keep your right hand in the air, and reach with your left hand to open the door.”

It took Graham a few seconds to process the stage directions. “Okay,” he said aloud, “I can do this.” Keeping his right hand held aloft, he leaned to the left, across Jolaine, and reached for the driver’s door handle, which was at least five inches beyond his reach.

Jolaine pushed him away. “What are you doing?”

“Freeze!” He heard the command as a unison chorus from three different sides. “Sit up, asshole!” one of them yelled. “Sit up, or I swear to God I’ll shoot you in the head!”

Graham froze. What did they want him to do, freeze or sit up? Why were they yelling in the first place, when he was doing exactly what they’d told him to do?

“Good God, Graham,” Jolaine said.

“What? I’m doing—”

The passenger door opened, and a talon of a hand closed around Graham’s ankle. They pulled him feetfirst across the seat. The effect was to force him to fall back across the gearshift. As he felt himself sliding along on his side, he realized that very soon, his shoulders would be free of any support, and that gravity was quickly destined to become his enemy. He flopped over onto his back, figuring that having the back of his head flop down onto the concrete was a better option than going face-first. He’d spent too many years in braces to smash out all his teeth.

The impact to the back of his head wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, but it was hard enough to ignite stars behind his eyes. On his back now, on the ground — it felt like the street, actually — he held his hands up and splayed his fingers. “Dude, look,” he said. “I’m not fighting.”

“Gun!”

Someone must have seen the pistol on the floor. It was important enough for a kick into Graham’s ribs, propelling the air out of his lungs and launching a lightning bolt of pain from his pelvis to his jaw. He yelled.

“Shut up,” someone said as they rolled him onto his face and pulled his hands behind his back just a few clicks further than his shoulders were designed to accommodate. “You ain’t felt nothing yet.”

Something cold and hard impacted the sweet spot between his thumb and his wrist bone, the nerve that apparently connected his thumbnail to his elbow, because that was the path the lightning bolt took. He heard the ratcheting sound of the handcuffs, and he understood that Jolaine had been right on the money. Then he wondered how she could know such things. Had she been arrested before?

The process of shackling his left hand hurt less than his right, and fifteen seconds later, Graham Mitchell was completely immobilized. Despite his efforts to keep his head arched up away from the black pavement, he was certain that there’d be road rash on his cheeks, chin, and lips.

“On your feet, kid,” someone said, and his arms were pulled tight behind him. The pulling continued until he was leveraged up to his knees. From there, they gave him five seconds or so to find his balance and stand.

On the other side of the car, Jolaine lay pressed face-down over the hood, her arms behind her and cuffed. One of the beefier cops kept her pressed against the metal hood with the pressure of a horseshoe grip around the base of her skull. To his right, at the head of the vehicle, a cop — good God, where did they all come from? — displayed Jolaine’s pistol like a friggin’ Stanley Cup trophy, holding it aloft so that everyone could see it.

Graham heard light applause from somewhere, but he had no idea who it was or where it was coming from. All he knew was they were happy, and he was terrified.

When Jolaine looked up and made eye contact, she was crying.