End Game

CHAPTER TWO

The emptiness of the Indiana cornfields swallowed the headlight beams, revealing nothing but miles of darkness. “Graham, are you okay?” Jolaine shouted over the wind noise from the shattered passenger window. When he didn’t respond, she wrenched her body around in the driver’s seat to look in the back. The boy was still on the floor, his head wrapped in his arms. “Graham!”

“Make it stop!” he yelled.

“Are you hurt?”

“Why are they doing this?”

“Are you hurt?”

“No! I’m not hurt! Why are they doing this?”

“I don’t know,” Jolaine said. “Mrs. Mitchell? Sarah?” She could smell the blood.

“We can’t go to a hospital,” Sarah said. Her voice was soft. Jolaine didn’t know if it was because she was weak or because she didn’t want Graham to hear.

“How bad are you hit?”

Sarah shook her head. Jolaine saw it as a shift in her silhouette. “It’s not good. I’m hit in my middle.”

“So we do need to go to a hospital.”

“No. That’s where they’ll be looking. The doctors will have to call the police for a bullet wound.”

“Yeah!” Graham said from the back. “We need to call the police.”

“Not for this, sweetie,” Sarah said. “We don’t want the police involved.”

“Where’s Dad?”

Sarah shot a look to Jolaine that said it all. But she didn’t respond.

“Mom?”

“Dad’s staying behind,” Sarah said.

“But he’s okay? He’ll be joining us?”

Silence.

“Mom?”

“Let’s talk about this later, okay, Graham?” Sarah asked.

“Is he okay?”

“Later, Graham.” That tone cut the conversation off at the root.

Jolaine said, “What’s going on, Sarah? Tell me why this is happening.”

With effort that seemed to trigger a spasm of pain, Sarah stretched her leg out to gain access to the front pocket of her jeans and went fishing for something.

“Mom?” Graham said. “Why aren’t you answering?” His voice trembled in a combination of anger, fear, and sadness.

Sarah was holding herself together pretty well, especially with her bullet wound. Since she hadn’t bled out already, and clearly no bones had been clipped, Jolaine had hope for her. But she needed a doctor, and she needed one now.

“I’m sorry, Graham,” Sarah said. “I’m okay, really. I’ve just got a lot of things going through my mind right now.”

“So, are we going to the police?”

“No, not tonight.”

“A hospital, then,” Graham said. “You’re hurt. You’ve been shot.”

Sarah’s hunt through her pocket produced a cell phone. Jolaine was hoping for something else. She wasn’t sure what, but some kind of a solution would have been nice.

“You’re going to make a phone call?” Jolaine said. “How about you answer my question? We’re all in danger here, you know. Not just you.”

Again, Sarah ignored her. The smart phone’s screen bathed her in a silver-blue light that highlighted her pallor. As she swiped at the screen, she left bloody streaks.

“What are you looking for?” Jolaine insisted. Ahead, the twisting country road was an opaque black ribbon.

“I found it,” Sarah declared. She pressed a button and brought her phone to her ear. Whoever she was calling had better be of calm temperament, Jolaine thought. Ten-thirty at night was late for anyone.

“Doctor Jones, please,” Sarah said into the phone. “This is Mrs. Smith.”

Ah, Jolaine thought. They’re spooks. I should have known.

“Four seven four bravo,” Sarah said after a pause. “Gunshot. Serious.” After another pause, Sarah said, “I’m sorry, but I’ll never remember all of that. Let me hand you over to someone who will. Yes, a trusted source.” With that, she handed the Droid across the center console to Jolaine. “This is Doctor Jones,” she said.

Sure it is, Jolaine didn’t say. She brought the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“What’s your name?” the voice asked from the other side.

“What’s yours?”

“Don’t trifle with me, missy. You already know my name. I am Doctor Jones.”

“Fine,” Jolaine said. “My name is Doe. Jane Doe. Don’t trifle with me, either, Doc. The last few minutes have been really, really intense. I’ve got a seriously injured woman sitting next to me who needs help, and you want to do small talk. Seriously, Doc, who’s trifling whom?”

Five seconds of silence convinced Jolaine that she’d either made her point or driven the doc to hang up. “You sound like you’re part of the Community,” Jones said.

“On the periphery,” Jolaine confessed. “A contractor, never official.”

“I see. How bad are her wounds?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them. There’s a lot of blood. She’s pale but she can talk, and she seems to have it together cognitively.”

“Cognitively,” Jones mocked. “That’s a high-dollar word for a grunt.”

“Why did you want to speak with me?” Jolaine pressed. She didn’t have time for bullshit, and she figured the best way to avoid it was to stay away from the bait.

“I want you to bring Mrs. Smith to my clinic. We can care for her here.”

Translation: the Company had a contract with a quick-quack that would keep serious injuries off the grid.

“How do I know I can trust you?”

The doctor laughed. It sounded like genuine amusement. “Well, Jane, you don’t. You can’t. But let’s be honest. You have no option.”

Jolaine didn’t answer.

“All right, then,” Jones said. “I’m going to give you an address. Do you have a GPS system to punch it into?”

“I have my phone.”

“Are you ready to copy the address?”

“Stand by,” Jolaine said. Then into the rearview mirror: “Graham, listen up. Are you listening?”

“To what?”

“Just listen.”

“Who’s Graham?” Jones asked.

“He’s the patient’s son.”

“He can’t stay here.”

“Let’s do that later,” Jolaine said. “Let’s have the address.”

Jones gave an address in Defiance, Ohio, and Jolaine repeated it. “Got it, Graham?”

“Yes,” he said. The kid was blessed with perfect recall — literally, he remembered every word said to him and everything he read.

Jolaine asked the doctor, “How far is that from Antwerp, Indiana?”

“Worst, worst case, thirty minutes.”

Jolaine clicked off, whipped the BMW onto the right-hand shoulder, and hit the brakes.

“What are you doing?” her passengers asked in unison.

“I’m figuring out where we’re going,” she said. “Recite back the address, Graham.” As he regurgitated the house number and street, she entered them into the phone’s navigation program. Good news: fifteen miles, seventeen minutes.

She bet that she could make it in thirteen.

With an utter disregard for speed limits, it actually took twelve. Doctor Jones lived slightly north of nowhere, off a road that was marked only with a caduceus.

“What is this place?” Graham asked.

Jolaine resisted the urge to extinguish her headlights to provide less of a target. To do that would be to commit them to total darkness, which could mean driving into a ditch or a tree.

“It’s the doctor’s house, sweetie,” Sarah said. Her voice had become breathy, and there was a grunt of pain between “house” and “sweetie.” “He’s going to make me all better.”

Sarah often spoke to her son as if he were three years old, and the tone made Jolaine wince.

“Dad’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Don’t talk of such things,” Sarah said. In those words, Jolaine caught the hint of the Eastern European accent that Sarah worked so hard to camouflage. Jolaine thought it was a sign that the woman was becoming weaker.

Jolaine also noted the absence of an answer to the boy’s question. That could mean any number of things, but in Jolaine’s mind, it only meant one: Yes, Graham, your dad is dead.

If there was a paved roadway in here, Jolaine couldn’t see it. Navigating — if that was indeed what she was doing — was mostly a matter of not hitting the surrounding foliage. By default, the road was where a bush or a tree was not.

Judging distance was an exercise in futility, as was assessing the passage of time. After what felt like several long, whole minutes, she saw another caduceus just like the previous one, but this one was underlined by a reflective arrow that pointed to the right. Jones hadn’t mentioned the driving gauntlet during their telephone conversation. Spooks thrived on mind games. She’d known a lot of spooky people when she was tromping through the Sandbox, and most made her want to take a shower after speaking with them. Even “hello” needed to be treated with suspicion.

Finally, the driveway opened up, and she saw a house in the distance. Barely discernible in the dark, it would have been invisible had a single coach light not burned in the front.

“How sure are you that this is a good idea?” Jolaine thought aloud.

“How many other options can you think of?” Sarah responded. The accent was even thicker.

As Jolaine cleared the woods, with fifty yards or more separating them from the house in the distance, she cut the lights. The risk of getting raked by gunfire from the building trumped any worries about wrecking the car.

“I’m scared,” Graham said.

“I am, too,” Jolaine said. The words were out before she could stop them. She wished she had a plan. Back in the day, she and her comrades from Hydra Security would never have made an approach like this out in the open. Of course, she would not have been the only operative wielding a weapon, either.

They were open and exposed — targets to anyone who wanted to take them out.

“I’m not liking this,” Jolaine said.

No one answered, and that was fine.

As they closed to within one hundred feet of the house, a rectangle of light appeared in the center of the structure. It grew to reveal the silhouette of a man standing in the opening. From his posture, he might have been holding a pistol or he might not have. Jolaine reached under her shirt and drew her Glock from its holster.

“Do you know this guy?” Jolaine asked.

“No,” Sarah said.

“Then how do we know—”

“We know,” Sarah said, cutting her off. “The system works. Trust it.” She reached across the console and grasped Jolaine’s arm. “And trust your training. All of it.”

Jolaine jammed the brakes and the transmission, threw open her door. Shifting her Glock to her weak side — her left — she brought it to bear on the figure in the doorway, using the structure of the car for cover.

“I’m not armed,” said a male voice from the doorway. He sounded a lot like the voice she’d spoken to on the telephone. “Put your firearm away, please. We have a patient to treat.”

With that, the man approached. The farther he moved away from the light of the doorway, the more invisible he became, but he kept his hands to his sides, his fingers splayed. She broke her aim and lowered her weapon, but she did not re-holster it. Not yet.

“Where is she?” the man asked.

“Are you Doctor Jones?”

“I think we both know that I am not,” the man said. “The real name is Wilkerson. Doug Wilkerson. I’m a good guy.” Even in the dark, Jolaine saw him smile. “I’d shake your hand, but you look like you might shoot me.”

Wilkerson had a youthful look about him. He had thick dark hair that could have used some serious combing at this hour, and a thin face that looked as if it hadn’t smiled in a while. His voice had a reedy, almost adolescent quality to it.

“I very well might,” Jolaine said. She tried to keep her tone light, but she was stating the truth. She’d done a lot of shooting tonight. One more wouldn’t hurt a bit.

“So, since you have the firepower, tell me what you want me to do.”

The passenger-side door opened, startling both of them. “I’ve been shot,” Sarah said. “Forget what she wants. Patch me up before I bleed to death.”

Wilkerson acknowledged her with a glance, but otherwise, his eyes remained locked on Jolaine. “And who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Jolaine Cage,” she said. “And I think this is Sarah Mitchell.”

“You think?”

She shrugged with one shoulder. “On a night like tonight, I assume that I don’t know anything. The boy in the backseat is Graham Mitchell. That I know for sure.”

Illuminated now by the BMW’s dome light, Jolaine saw the doctor’s face darken. “Ah, the boy.”

Graham opened his door. “Right here,” he said.

Wilkerson glowered at Sarah. “You didn’t say anything about children.”

“I thought we agreed to talk about that later,” Jolaine said.

“I don’t want children here.”

“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to be here, either,” Jolaine said.

“Do you think this is a good time for humor, Ms. Cage?”

Jolaine didn’t understand the dynamic of what was going on. “We need to get Sarah inside,” she said. “I’ll help.”

She holstered her pistol, then reached back into the car for her M4, which she slung over her shoulder, muzzle down. She walked around the front of the car to join the doctor. Graham climbed out, too.

“Stay in the car, kid,” Wilkerson said. “You’re not coming in.”

“We’re not having this discussion now,” Sarah said. “Not while I’m bleeding to death.”

Jolaine was prepared to push Wilkerson out of the way if it came to that — the guy had a wiry look to him, like he might have done some time in the military, but he didn’t look like much of a fighter. “I’ll help you carry her inside,” she said. “You can help, too, Graham, if the doctor doesn’t want to.”

The boy moved slowly. Jolaine wondered if the reality of the situation was just beginning to settle on him — if he was just beginning to recognize the trouble they were in. His eyes had a look of hyperconcentration, as if examining a particularly difficult math problem. He responded to commands, but he seemed focused on a spot that only he could see.

Jolaine took Sarah’s left arm while the doctor took her right, and together they hefted her to a standing position and gave her a moment to settle herself.

“Can you do this?” Wilkerson asked. “Can you walk?”

Sarah nodded, but Jolaine questioned the sincerity. Pallor had given way to ashen gray, and her eyes seemed recessed into dark holes. Her body trembled with the effort of standing, and her skin felt cool and wet. These were the early signs of shock, and shock was a giant step toward death.

“We need to move,” Wilkerson said. “While she’s still conscious.” He pointed with his forehead to the door he had just exited. He and Jolaine walked in step as they navigated the walkway, and then the two steps that led to the stoop, and the one step that led to the foyer. It wasn’t until they reached the dim illumination of the porch light that Jolaine saw the blood trail. They were running out of time.