End Game

EPILOGUE

The battered old Fiat passed the stadium around two in the morning, Alex riding shotgun beside the Executive Solutions driver who had picked her up at the airport in Baghdad. It was a 250-kilometer run, and after her hasty departure from Andrews, she was beat.

“We want to take Highway 4 to the east, just past Akhi Husayn,” she said.

The driver, who’d only identified himself as Bob glanced over at her. “You’ve been here before.”

“Years ago, before the second war.”

“I imagine it’s changed.”

“Not that much.”

They hadn’t said more than a few words to each other since the airport, and now, driving through Kirkuk and heading toward the hills out of the city, she wasn’t disposed to changing anything. Bertie was at least six hours ahead of her, but there was no telling how much time he’d spent with some of his old cronies down in Baghdad. He’d always been a man who loved the military — though most U.S. troops were long gone, leaving behind only a couple of thousand advisers and trainers, plus the contractors.

Highway 4, which was the Sulaimani-Kirkuk Road, passed through a plain that gradually rose to the hills. The main oil fields were to the north and south, and after twenty kilometers or so, Alex sat forward in her seat.

The countryside hadn’t changed as much as her memory had. When she and the others were last here, they were the enemy, the advance scouts, and until they had become acclimatized to the place, they had been strangers. In fact, it hadn’t been until after George had been with them for about a week that any of them had felt reasonably at home.

An ancient stone building, its wooden roof gone, sat just off the highway on a narrow dirt track that led northeast into the darkness. She remembered it.

“Here,” she said.

Bob slowed down and pulled off the paved highway and onto the rock-strewn track, and almost immediately had to change gears as the road jogged to the right and started to climb.

Alex looked over her shoulder at the lights of the city, home to a polyglot population of nearly a half million people, most of them drawn here from a dozen other countries because of the oil in the ground. She was seeing it through different eyes now — everything was different for her since the events of the past week.

But this whole business that had excited her at first, then frightened her, and just lately had become almost comforting in an odd way was coming to an end, and she was damned glad of it.

About five kilometers up the increasingly steep road, they came to a slight widening in the track where it was possible for a car to turn around. They were at the base of a fairly steep hill that rose another hundred meters or so. The terrain was rocky and devoid of just about any vegetation except for some low scrub brush. In the spring, though, Alex remembered, there had been small patches of violet flowers, tiny delicate things. Color in a bleak landscape.

“Turn in here,” Alex said.

Bob pulled off and Alex got out.

“Where the hell are you going?” he asked, jumping out after her.

Alex spotted the goat track that meandered to the crest of the hill, on the other side of which was a series of hollows and narrow ravines, some with rocky overhangs, impossible to penetrate even by low-angle satellite passes.

“What, are you fucking nuts?”

Alex laughed. “Probably,” she said. “Turn around now and go back to Baghdad.”

Bob looked up toward the crest. “I’ll wait for you.”

“No,” Alex said, and started up the goat path.

“Do you want a gun?” Bob called after her.

“Get out of here, you dumb son of a bitch!” Alex shouted without looking back.

Forty-five minutes later, following one of the narrow canyons, she came around a narrow cut. Bertie was sitting there, perched on a boulder a couple of meters above her, and she pulled up short, her heart skipping a beat.

“I saw the lights,” Bertie said. “Figured it had to be you.” He looked to be in high spirits, the rare Cynic grin on his simple round face.

“I think I can understand why you wanted all of us dead — you wanted to guard the secret here. But why the way you did it?”

“It’s a long story, Alex, my dear.”

“We have the time.”

“Actually, we don’t. Kirk McGarvey and Ms. Boylan — though she was wounded — have survived, and with their friend Otto Rencke, they have figured out all the pieces of the puzzle. I suspect someone will be here before too long.” He looked up at the sky; the stars were the only things visible. The horizon was lost to the cliffs and hills.

“Give me the short version.”

“I’m nuts. Crazy. Insane. Psychotic. Schizophrenic. But I was always able to hide my condition, even from the Company psychologists. They put me down as creative but high-strung. Perfect as an NOC, and especially as an NOC trainer. Did you suspect?”

“We respected you.”

Bertie nodded and said nothing for a longish time. When he spoke, he sounded sad. “Why are you here?”

“Closure,” Alex said. She had given a lot of thought to it. “I have nowhere to go. Nothing to do.”

“How about survival?”

“Not as great as it’s cracked up to be,” she said. “How much time do we have?”

Bertie looked over his shoulder at something lying behind him, just out of Alex’s sight. “I set the trigger when you came around the corner,” he said. He looked down at her. “Forty seconds.”

“You knew I wasn’t going to turn around.”

“And why?” Bertie said. “Roy had it almost right when he carved AND GOD SAID LET THERE BE LIGHT. Only it won’t be God, will it? Just us.”

Alex was almost glad. “What do you suppose they’ll think about it?”

“The world?” Bertie asked.

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “The same as they think about everything else that happens. There’ll be no consensus. No one will agree on what it means. But almost everyone will blame the US, even though the radiation signature will prove that we stole the device from the Russians. The Israelis will be blamed, of course. Muslims everywhere, even the God-fearing, kind, gentle ones — the women and children and fathers trying to make their peaceful way in the world — will be blamed. The UN will be blamed for not stopping it. The New York Times will be blamed for not unearthing the story. People in Florida will be blamed because everyone there has stepped away from the real world and does nothing but play golf. New Yorkers will be blamed for chasing after the almighty buck instead of keeping their eyes on the real world. The scientists who invented the thing will take the heat. And naturally so will the military — every military on the planet — along with every insurgency, terrorist, and fundamentalist group.”

Alex couldn’t help but laugh. “Everyone will finally agree,” she said.

She finished the sentence, but the nuclear blast was so instantaneous — less than one millionth of a second — she had no knowledge of it. She was alive, and suddenly there was nothing.