The End Game

61

New York City

We had shopping to do.

Some of it was Kurt and Gigi’s doing. They had some ideas-good ideas, ones that would help us. They went out to stock up, mainly at the B &H Superstore by Penn Station, and came back to Deutsch’s place with a couple of large bags. Given what I knew about them in terms of their love of tech toys I was surprised they didn’t bring back a GoPro and a selfie stick. But what they did bring back would come in handy, no doubt. We needed all the help we could get.

Deutsch, on the other hand, went to a different kind of superstore: the armory at Federal Plaza. She finessed her way into signing out a small arsenal for me, which was now stored in the trunk of her car. When she got back I followed her down to the parking garage of her building to check out her haul, and that’s when I noticed the problem.

She’d managed to bring all the items we’d talked about: helmet, vest, gloves, night vision goggles, stun grenades, M4 carbine with suppressor, CCO optical gunsight, Springfield.45, extra mags for both weapons, spike strip, Smith & Wesson folding knife, comms package. Everything, in fact, short of an MRAP truck-a heavy armored Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, which would have been ideal, given what I imagined I’d be facing-though it might have raised eyebrows if she’d requisitioned one.

What she’d chosen wasn’t a problem.

The problem was that she’d brought two of each.

Standing there in the garage, I turned to her quizzically a second after she’d popped the trunk.

She cut me off before I spoke. “I’m going in with you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Sean. I’m coming.”

I felt my insides contract. “Annie. I’ve had enough people around me die because of these pricks. I’m not letting that happen again. It’s not your fight.”

She didn’t flinch. “It is.”

“Annie, this isn’t Bureau business anymore-”

“Screw the Bureau, Sean. This is about me. And you. And Nick.”

She held my gaze, and for a second there, my eyes scoured her face for a better understanding of what she meant-then it sank in. Nick’s Tinder booty call had been nothing of the kind.

“You… and Nick?”

She didn’t react for a breath, then she nodded.

“The night I ended up at his place, after the shooting,” I asked. “He was with you?”

She nodded again. “He was going to spend the night, but he’d messed up his shirt with some pasta sauce and, well, you know how the guys at Twenty-six Fed can be total dicks.”

I pictured him walking in, his surprise at seeing me that night. “So you and-”

“Two months,” she said, anticipating my read, given Nick’s dating history. “We’d been seeing each other for two months. No one knew. Once we both got comfortable with what we were doing, with being together, he said he was going to tell you. I guess he never got the chance.”

All I could say was, “I wish he had.” I flashed back to Nick and I outside Daland’s house, all those long nights, and how he hadn’t spent those hours swiping through his Tinder, and I felt bad that I’d missed it, that I hadn’t realized he and Annie had a thing going and that we hadn’t had a chance to talk about it.

“It doesn’t matter, Annie. I can’t have you do this.”

“And I can’t have you do it alone. It’s that simple, Sean. It really is.”

We just stood there for a moment, in the dim light of the garage, face to face, a trunk-load of SWAT weaponry at our disposal.

I couldn’t object. I had no right to object.

She was in.

I waited till we were all set to go, then I called Tess using the safe Viber protocol. It was killing me not to have her here, not to be able to see her and hold her tight against me and kiss her before setting off, knowing the dangers ahead, what we were going up against-but it was better this way. It would have been hugely tough on us both to say goodbye face to face and it was still too risky to have her come down here again, for both of us. It was also better to keep her at a distance from it all, knowing she’d have serious objections over what my makeshift crew and me were about to do. Which, sure enough, didn’t take long to materialize once I had her on the line.

“Sean, you know who these people are,” she said, her exasperation growing with every word since the beginning of the call. “You know what they’re capable of, you know what resources they have to draw on. This is nuts.”

“Tess, please. Like I said-”

“Just take a night to sleep on it,” she interjected forcefully, “to think it all through again. Maybe you’ll see something you missed.”

“We’ve been over it, Tess. I know what I’m doing. And this is the way it has to be.”

“It’s a trap, you said so yourself.”

“Yes. A trap we instigated. They’re playing into our hands, Tess. We’ve got to strike before they have too much time to think things through.”

She went quiet for a moment, just a long, leaden exhale. I could just picture the way her face would be all crunched up with frustration, the way her eyes would be set, all fierce and fired up.

“I won’t be able to talk to you until it’s done,” I added, breaking the heavy silence.

“I know,” she said, subdued now.

“It’s going to be fine. I know what I’m doing, Tess.”

“I damn well hope so.”

We’d said all that needed to be said. It was time to go.

“I love you,” I said.

“I damn well hope so too,” she said, her tone cracking a bit.

“Give the kids a kiss from me. And I’ll see you… soon.”

“OK.”

Then I hung up.

We drove out of New York City that evening after putting the finishing touches to the plan of action I had proposed while cleaning out some takeaway Chinese at Deutsch’s place.

Four of us, in Deutsch’s Crown Vic: me, her, Kurt and Gigi. Our minds were all busy playing out what we imagined the next day would bring. We’d already gone over what we were about to do several times and the fact that, during the whole drive down, the only time one of us spoke up was to question some aspect of our plan aloud just showed how it was all any of us was thinking about.

The traffic was fluid heading out of the city on a Sunday night, and with no major roadworks to impede our progress and the snow not strong enough to cause problems, we passed the signs to Philadelphia around two hours later and skirted Baltimore an hour after that. An hour more, and we were checking into a Marriott at Tysons Corner, west of Washington DC and almost exactly halfway between Vienna, Virginia and the CIA’s headquarters at Langley. Two rooms, one for Deutsch and me, the other for Kurt and Gigi.

We all needed a good night’s rest, although I wasn’t sure we’d be sleeping sound.

We had an early start tomorrow if we were going to catch the first of our worms.