The End Game

62

Vienna, Virginia

It hadn’t been Tomblin’s best weekend.

He didn’t like this-playing a waiting game. Not this type, anyway. A lot of the intelligence work he oversaw involved waiting and often felt like watching slow, ponderous moves on a chess board: you put something in play, you hoped your counterpart reacted the way you wanted him to, then you made your next move and so on, in the hope of getting the result you wanted. A result on which lives, often many lives, depended. Then there was the other type of waiting: the nail-biting, pulse-racing wait while an op was underway, monitoring it from hundreds or thousands of miles away in the comfort of a windowless, climate-controlled Langley room, hoping a radio confirmation of a successful outcome would come through.

This was different. They’d planted the seed on Erebus late Friday night. He’d sat with his analyst and watched as the brief, typed exchanges had popped up on the monitor facing them. The message had been received and understood. The question was now about when Reilly would act, when he’d show up at Roos’s lodge, and what the outcome of that confrontation would be.

Until Reilly showed up there, Tomblin was uneasy. The agent had shown himself to be an unpredictable bastard and a loose cannon. Tomblin wasn’t comfortable having him out in the wind. Even though he’d fed him Roos’s name and location, he still felt vulnerable. It had been on his mind all weekend-the wait for the call from Roos telling him it was over-and was still on his mind as he slipped on his coat, grabbed his briefcase, and made his way to the garage that abutted his six-bedroom house.

Moments later, the garage door glided open and he pulled out in his car, an imposing dark grey Lincoln Navigator. He paused at the end of the drive as he always did, glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure the garage door shut properly, then he stepped off the brake pedal and motored away.

As he drove in the cossetted comfort of the large SUV, he felt good about going to work. There would be a lot going on to distract him from the discomfort that was gnawing away at him. Before long, he’d be immersed in situations and strategies that required his decisions. And the call from Roos would come. Tomblin knew Reilly would not be able to resist going after him, even knowing the odds were stacked against him.

The snow was still falling, and an inch or so of it had settled on the quiet residential lane, not enough to worry the big tires of his four-wheel drive. He was adjusting his climate control as he reached the stop sign at the T-junction with Wolftrap Road where an attractive, full-figured redhead was waiting to cross the street.

He brought the Navigator to a complete stop and found himself staring at her, his attention sucked in by the alluring woman who turned and gave him a warm smile to acknowledge his having stopped. His eyes studied her as she started to cross the road, trying to divine the exact contours of what looked like a fetchingly curvaceous body that lay cloaked under her flowing coat. His imagination basked in the moment, transforming her into someone he fantasized about, a broadly similar female actor from a television drama series that was set in the advertising world of the 60s. The show bored him, its machinations far too simplistic for his taste-but he still watched it with his wife in an effort to find more common ground in their increasingly diverging tastes, and enjoyed every second she was on screen. He pictured her as the woman who was now mere feet from his bumper, taking it slow, using careful, elegant steps to avoid slipping, glancing around again to jolt him with her smile-and he was relishing the moment until he sensed a shadow rushing right up to his side window a split second before the window exploded inward and showered him with shards.

He didn’t even have time to react before a balled fist rocketed in and punched him in the jaw, rattling his brain and sending him flying sideways against the seat belt. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a hand reaching in and yanking the door handle open, then Reilly was stuffing a gun in his face while his other hand hit the start/stop button and killed the engine.

“Get out, quick,” Reilly ordered as his free hand fiddled with Tomblin’s seat belt and unhooked it.

Tomblin was too stunned to react. That, his rattled brain, and the handgun pressed against his cheek, made him obey. He climbed out of the car, which was when he saw someone else standing by the back door, also holding a gun, though that one wasn’t aimed at his face. It was a woman he didn’t recognize.

“Get in,” she said as she opened the rear door.

He did, hoping a neighbor was watching and was calling it in or that another car would drive by and do the same. Neither seemed to be happening.

The woman clambered in after him. Reilly was already in the driver’s seat.

Eleven seconds after the car had come to a halt, it was off again, trailed by an unmarked Crown Vic with the seductive redhead in the passenger seat and headed for the Blue Ridge Mountains.

63

Nelson County, Virginia

Despite the clear plastic sheeting I’d duct-taped in place of the shattered window, it was still pretty cold in Tomblin’s beefy SUV as I drove it down Route Twenty-nine. The snow was intermittent and the temperature gauge was reading minus two, but that wasn’t counting the effect of the wind. I wasn’t too bothered by the cold. It helped keep me alert, especially given what my body had been through, juicing me up with adrenaline and kick-starting any parts of me that were still a bit sluggish. It also helped prepare my esteemed guest for what was to come. I was more worried about the plastic sheeting, and the fact that I had two passengers in the back and no one next to me, attracting the attention of some bored state trooper. I had Deutsch in the car, though, and her badge would come in handy if that were to happen. The flex-cuffs around the wrists of the guy sitting next to her, and the duct tape over his mouth, would probably be less of a help.

I didn’t want to listen to him, and I didn’t want to talk to him either. We had a two-hour plus drive, and I wanted him shut out and seriously rattled by the time we got to our destination. I imagined the panic that had to be building inside him. CIA big shot, head of the National Clandestine Service-I don’t care who you are-getting grabbed like that by someone with my skill set who you know to be out to settle a score and who looks like he has nothing to lose is going to trigger some major panic in you. I imagined he was also wondering how we got him, how we even knew who he was. After all, he’d tried to subvert our efforts by stepping in quick and having one of his minions log into Erebus and hand me Roos on a silver platter. I was sure he was behind it. According to Tomblin’s plan, I was supposed to be hightailing it straight to where Roos was holed up-where I would no doubt have a few determined heavies and a sniper or two waiting for me-instead of coming after him with the help of a buxom redhead. And yet, we’d found him. His name had risen out of the sewer, courtesy of another anonymous poster on Erebus, one Tomblin’s minions couldn’t-and clearly hadn’t-have seen.

Kudos to Daland and his programming genius.

The genuine mystery informant, whoever he was-assuming it was a “he”-hadn’t elaborated on why he was selling them out, and although he hadn’t said-typed-much, I was pretty sure his native language wasn’t English. Still, he got me the name I was missing. “FF” was actually Edward Tomblin, of the CIA, the “Frank Fullerton” to Roos’s “Reed Corrigan.”

Kurt and Gigi had had a hard time fleshing out his persona beyond the broadest of strokes of his career. The guy clearly valued his privacy and hadn’t exactly embraced social media either. They were helped, though, by the fact that Tomblin wasn’t a particularly common name, and they ended up getting his home address pretty easily. His wife was one of a hundred and forty-five million eBay users whose personal details were on a database that had been hacked from the site a few months back, the only Tomblin within commuting range of Langley.

We’d disabled the trackers on both cars before setting off, and I’d removed the battery from Tomblin’s phone and the SIM card from his car phone. It wouldn’t be long before they realized he was missing. We had a limited time in which to act. So we set off as quickly as we could and, a little over two hours out of the DC metro area, we were skirting Charlottesville before continuing on south.

The landscape got progressively more dramatic around us as the traces of human settlement receded-forests of tall trees, both bare and evergreen, cushioning the parallel two-lane strips of blacktop that hardly had any cars on them, and glimpses of the Blue Ridge mountains beyond, all filtered through a glaze of light snow and set against a white-grey backdrop.

It wasn’t long before we were cutting through some glorious Virginia country. Abundant mature hardwoods on either side blanketed rolling hills that climbed up to the mountains, nature’s full majesty gone wild over centuries and millennia, an outstanding corner of the planet within a stone’s throw from several big cities. This country was truly blessed in that sense. Tess and I had driven through these parts a couple of years back, one of those idyllic road trips through Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. We’d timed it perfectly, cruising down in the full glory of fall, visually drunk on a surreal palette of blazing reds, russets and gold of the ridges and the smell of woodsmoke in the air. The landscape was no less heart-stirring this time of year, but I felt it for entirely different reasons. What we were doing here was obviously far from idyllic.

We reached the area we had reconnoitered online and I veered off onto a narrow, single-lane road. I guided the Navigator a couple of miles up into the Miran Forest, then turned into a dirt track that didn’t seem like it had seen much traffic lately. It felt as if the mountain was preparing to swallow us up. We followed the narrow, winding trail for about a mile and a half until we reached the strategically placed small clearing we’d chosen.

I pulled into it and killed the engine.

Gigi, driving the Crown Vic, tucked in behind me and did the same.

Leaving Tomblin in his SUV, the four of us got out and walked up the clearing. We checked our location using Gigi’s tablet, confirmed we were in the right place, and got a visual sighting of the direction our target was in.

Then we got to work.

“Eddy?” Roos asked as he answered the phone.

He hadn’t expected to hear from Tomblin. It was more Tomblin who was waiting to hear from him, once it was done.

He knew something was wrong the second he heard the caller’s voice.

It wasn’t Tomblin.

“Try again, Gordo.”

Roos’s grip tightened around his phone. He’d never spoken to Reilly, but-besides the fact that he’d heard his voice on surveillance tapes-he knew it wouldn’t be anyone else. “You do know how to ruin a party, I’ll give you that.”

“Next time, maybe you should draw up your invitations more carefully. And put an RSVP to avoid disappointments.”

“Oh, I’m not disappointed,” Roos said. “I’m looking forward to meeting you. That’s what this call is about, isn’t it?”

“You know me so well,” Reilly said. “Hang up. I’m going to call you from another phone. This one could be a bit hot right now.”

Clever bastard, Roos thought. He hung up. Seconds later, his phone rang again. “So what’s on your mind?”

“I’ve got your boy here,” Reilly said. “And I’ve got this decision to make.”

“What’s that?”

“The reasonable, rational side of me is thinking: why take any more risks? Why not just make Eddy here tell me all he knows about everything you two have been up to all these years-everything about the janitors, the heart attacks, the accidents, all those deaths… and everything about my dad. Get him to clear my name while he’s at it, for the record, and throw in everything he knows about you too. Get it all on video, hand it over to the DA, and be done with it. Then I can come back for you with a warrant and a SWAT team to back me up. That sounds like the sensible move, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, sounds reasonable to me,” Roos said without missing a beat. “I mean, Eddy’s a high-ranking intelligence officer. Hell, he could be running the whole Agency before long. People would believe what he says.”

“I think they would,” Reilly said. “He’s a respectable pillar of the community. And even if there happened to be a few cuts and bruises on him, which I would hope we could avoid-he’d give us a pretty compelling testimony. There’s only one problem with that.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m not in a reasonable mood.”

Roos smiled. He hadn’t expected anything less from Reilly. Not after everything the agent had gone through to find him. “No?”

“Not really,” Reilly said. “Besides, to be frank with you, I don’t really trust the system anymore.”

“You should,” Roos said. “You’ve fought for it all your life. It’s a sad day when an agent of justice loses his faith in it. It’s almost like you’re saying you’ve devoted your whole life to something worthless.”

“I wouldn’t go so far, Gordo. But it’s true that lately, it’s been letting me down. And I’m not fully convinced that you and Eddy here wouldn’t manage to pull a few strings or do a dirty and use some kind of leverage to make that tape disappear and ride back into town on your high horses. With all the nasty implications for my friends and me. We could put it on the Internet, but that wouldn’t work either. You’d just spin it off as another hoax from some conspiracy nut jobs.”

“I know what you mean,” Roos said. “It’s tough to beat the system sometimes.”

“So you see my dilemma.”

“I empathize. I do. But you said you had a decision to make. What’s option two?”

“Option two is: justice can wait.”

Roos wasn’t sure what Reilly meant. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“It means, let someone else deal with the big picture and the crimes of the past. Me, I’m a simple guy. I’ve got more focus.”

“And that focus is?”

“Beating the truth out of you with my bare hands.”

Ross chortled. He’d read a lot about Reilly-surveillance reports, case files-but he’d never spoken to him until now. He was actually starting to like Reilly, though it wouldn’t have any effect on what he had in store for the agent.

“Well, you know,” Roos said, “focus is good. And you and I-we’ve had this coming for a long time. From way back, in fact. Around the time you were ten, right?” He paused, knowing the words would have the intended effect on Reilly. “Why involve anyone else?”

Roos heard the slight pause, the one the agent would have loved to snuff out entirely, before Reilly said, “Exactly.”

“So what do you propose? I’d invite you up here for a chat and an Irish coffee, but something tells me you have something else in mind.”

“No, that sounds great. A sandwich would be nice too-I haven’t had lunch yet. But you did say we shouldn’t involve anyone else.”

“That, I did.”

“Then I need you to send those boys away.”

“What boys?”

“I need to see at least six guys leave your place before I come up.”

Roos snorted. “All six of them?”

“Actually, make that eight.”

“Eight? I think you overestimate my importance here. Or maybe you’re overestimating yourself.”

“Eight guys, Gordo. I want to see eight of them leave your cabin or I’m going to work on Eddy.”

Roos was curious. He wanted to see them leave?

Reilly was nearby. Had to be.

“Ah, well. Let’s say I could rustle up eight of my boys. How am I going to prove to you that they’re gone?”

“Have them drive down to the bottom of the mountain. Tell them to get out of their cars once they get to the main road, then get back in their cars and head back where they came from.”

Roos needed more information about where Reilly was. “And you’ll be watching?”

“I’ll see them, don’t worry. I’ve also got a spotter some ways up on Route Twenty-nine, on the way to Charlottesville. When he calls to say your boys have passed him, I’ll come to you. Just to make sure they don’t decide to double back ’cause they forgot something.”

“How do I know you’ll come alone?”

“It was my idea, wasn’t it?”

“What about Eddy?”

“I cut him loose.”

Roos thought about it. “OK,” he said. “I’ll need proof that you really have him.”

“Hang on.”

Roos heard some buffeting from the wind, then Tomblin’s voice came on. “Gordo?”

“You OK, Eddy?”

“I’m fine. Listen-”

More abrupt buffeting, like a phone being snatched, then Reilly’s voice came back. “We good to go?

“Sure. When are we doing this?”

“No time like the present,” Reilly said. “We’ve waited long enough, right? Ten minutes enough for them to hit the road?”

“Make it fifteen.”

“OK. I’ll see you soon,” Reilly said.

He clicked off before Roos could reply.

64

We had lift off.

On several levels.

The most literal, however, concerned the drone Kurt had brought with him.

I’d never seen one of these, but apparently they were all the rage, a brilliant piece of playful technology that was as much as a game changer as the original iPhone and the Oculus Rift.

I hadn’t been entirely facetious with Roos. Yes, I had Tomblin. Yes, he was Roos’s partner back in the day, which meant he probably knew a lot of what I wanted to know, maybe even about my dad. Yes, I could have made him talk and got the whole thing on video. But I really did think they would find a way to bury it. And I wasn’t sure we’d survive long enough to suffer that disappointment. I was holding the head of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA’s most secret department. You don’t just walk away from that. No, it really was about Roos and me. Any answers I wanted had to come from him and nobody else. What I’d do once I got them-well, I’d figure that out if I made it that far.

I was stunned by how easy it was to get the drone airborne. Kurt had brought a DJI Phantom, the Vision 2+ model, he explained, which had a built-in full HD camera hanging underneath it. It had only taken him a couple minutes to get it prepped, which involved taking it out of the box, manually screwing in the four plastic propellers, snapping the battery in place, doing a quick compass calibration and getting a GPS lock on our position by spinning it around itself on both axes, and syncing up the drone to the remote control unit he’d use to fly it. Easy enough, although we were lucky he’d done it before and knew how to pilot it with ease-he had one back at his place, but since that was a no-go zone, he had to buy a new one. It was small, a sleek white X-shape made out of plastic, with each of its arms not even a foot long. It was also light, weighing less than three pounds. It still managed to pack enough clever technology in that compact package to justify its thirteen-hundred-dollar price tag.

Our present location had been chosen to allow three things: we needed it to be close enough to Roos’s cabin so that it was within the flight range of the Phantom, which was about a mile; we needed it to also allow the drone to monitor the departure of his goon squad, follow them until they were well on their way out of here, and make sure they didn’t double back; and we needed it to give us the privacy to get on with our work.

We sent the drone up a first time before my call to Roos to get a closer, real-time picture of the situation. The weather was borderline-not so much the snow as the temperature, but the Phantom didn’t seem fazed by it. Kurt sent it up to around five hundred feet. It was so small that we stopped seeing it long before that, and its buzz was so discreet anyway that we stopped hearing it even longer before that. I was confident that Roos and his entourage wouldn’t know it was there.

Kurt had flown it across the hill toward Roos’s property, its remote-controlled camera relaying what it was seeing to the remote control unit in Kurt’s hands, which in turn beamed the footage by Bluetooth to Gigi’s laptop. The image was surprisingly stable thanks to the three-way brushless gimbal that held the camera, and it gave me a great aerial view of what I’d be facing.

Roos’s cabin sat at the end of a long dirt trail that snaked its way from the main road up the mountain, carving a path through his eighty acres of land. Kurt flew the drone in a big circle to see what else was around, which was basically rolling hills of forest, forest, and more forest. At one point, the camera caught the mountains at an angle that looked familiar, and I was pretty sure it was the same mountain range that was behind Orford, Padley and Siddle in that picture of them in full hunting gear, the one I’d snatched from Orford’s office.

This was a hunting lodge, pure and simple, a secluded retreat to escape to and stalk black bear, whitetail deer and turkey, as well as predators like coyote and fox. It was also, it seemed, a lodge where far deadlier kinds of predator roamed around, no doubt plotting their own special brand of hunt.

Kurt had brought the drone around again and put it in a fixed hover so as to give us a clear view of the front of the lodge. It was a rustic log cabin, about a thousand feet in footprint, two floors with a couple of dormers on the roof, a wraparound porch, screened deck at the side. There were three cars out front, parked haphazardly in the small clearing that faced the house, large black SUVs, standard issue for hard-asses with attitudes. I couldn’t see them cramming more than four men per car, given the gear they had to be lugging. So it was likely Roos had eleven hired guns up there. We could see two guys standing outside, by the cars. The others weren’t visible. I’d decided the most I could ask Roos was to ship off two of the three vehicles, hence my request for eight men. I’d be left with Roos and three others to deal with. Twelve-to-one didn’t sound promising. Four-to-one I could live with.

I’d asked Kurt to give me another look at the road up to the cabin and I tried to memorize its turns by matching the visual with the satellite picture on Google Maps. Then he’d brought it back and swapped its battery for a fully charged one while I’d prepared the car for my drive up to the cabin.

Once everything was ready, I’d called Roos just after Kurt had sent the quadcopter back up. I’d made sure Tomblin hadn’t seen the drone-we had his eyes covered with duct tape too, and we flew it away from the car so he didn’t hear it. I didn’t want him telling Roos we had a bird up. It was amazing to be able to do this with something anyone could pick up at any halfway-decent electronics store or just buy online for next-day delivery. We had live coverage of the cabin all while I spoke to Roos. There was no action to watch, though. He was obviously inside, and the men outside were just standing there, waiting for orders.

Things changed after I hung up.

After a couple of minutes, three men came out of the house and joined the two who were already outside. The drone was too far for us to get a look at any of their faces. They just looked like small, dark figures against a dirty-white background. Then three others came outside, followed by two others.

They all held position for a moment, the first eight clustered close to each other, the last two closer to the house, facing them. I moved closer to the screen, sensing one of the two was Roos-the general addressing his troops. Then the eight men climbed into two of the SUVs, which drove away and took the long trail down the mountain.

“Where do I go?” Kurt asked. “You want the cars, or you want me to stay on the cabin?”

Ideally, I needed both. The guys at the cabin would be setting up whatever ambush they had planned, while the guys in the departing SUVs might be putting in place a trap of their own. And there were many more of them to worry about.

“Stay on the cars,” I told Kurt. “Let’s make sure they’re really gone.”

He nudged the two joysticks expertly to control the drone’s flight, and I took one last look at the tiny figure on the screen that I imagined to be Roos, burning his image into my memory before he headed back in and the cabin disappeared from the picture.

We watched as the two black SUVs snaked their way down the dirt road. They hung left when they hit the main road, pulled over, and the eight men got out. Kurt had moved the drone well up to make sure they wouldn’t see or hear it. The eight tiny figures stood there aimlessly for a moment, like they were stumped, then they got back in the cars and headed north. Kurt brought down the drone and had it follow them as long as it could, to the limit of its range. Once it reached it, its return-to-home feature kicked in automatically and it just reversed direction and started flying straight back to us. Kurt stopped it after a few seconds and held it in a stationary hover to monitor the road and make sure they weren’t coming up yet. We watched the road for about ten minutes and nothing showed up. I doubted Roos believed my story about a spotter, but it was worth a shot anyway. I figured they’d pull over somewhere within reach and wait for the call that would tell them I’d arrived at the cabin, then they’d rush back. Which meant I wouldn’t have much time up there.

Kurt brought the drone back while I got the Navigator and Tomblin ready. He swapped the battery for another fresh one and we were set. I’d have a guardian angel in the sky and a comms piece in my ear. Deutsch would have the other one. She’d be monitoring the situation and giving me some live updates, for which I was grateful. Assuming I made it up to the cabin alive.

I glanced at my watch. Almost an hour had passed since I’d spoken with Roos.

It was high noon on the shortest day of the year. I didn’t know whether to take that as a good sign or not.

Either way, it was time to go.

65

The black Lincoln Navigator stormed up the mountain, making mincemeat of the narrow trail and swallowing up the slushy bends in its stride.

From behind an open window inside the cabin, Roos waited, scanning the tree line for any sign of movement. The mountain was entirely still, with nothing but the distant sound of water cascading over rocks to disturb it. The snow was still falling lightly, the sky behind the carpet of hardwoods a dull grey. Then he became aware of a growl at the edge of his hearing, the throaty gurgle of a large engine. Its noise grew and grew, sending his pulse spiking up with every added decibel, and then the black SUV appeared from behind the trees as it rounded the last bend eighty-five yards downslope from the lodge.

Roos looked through his binoculars. Straining to get a clear picture through the irregular reflections bouncing off the SUV’s windshield, he was able to make out one solitary figure inside it, behind the wheel: male, as expected, in a black baseball cap, sitting straight up. There could be others ducking low inside there, but it wouldn’t really matter anyway. If anyone else was in there with Reilly they’d also soon be just as dead as he was.

He watched as the Navigator rushed up to the mouth of the clearing outside the cabin-and didn’t slow down. It kept going, accelerating now and heading straight at the cabin.

Roos gave the signal, and a barrage of high-powered rounds erupted out of the trees.

The relentless feed of bullets, coming from outside on both sides of his cabin, drilled through the SUV. Roos watched as the 7.62mm NATO rounds rained down on the charging car, obliterating its windshield, side windows, body panels, as well as its driver, whose body was visibly shaking around violently with each impact. It was less than forty yards from the cabin when its wheels exploded from the gunfire, which hobbled it until more rounds ate into its engine and crippled it three car lengths away from the cabin’s front steps.

The gunfire stopped. The stillness returned to the mountain, apart from a light hiss and some irregular clinks from the crippled car.

Roos wasn’t smiling.

Something was wrong.

Reilly wasn’t suicidal. He had consistently shown himself to be way too clever than to attempt a blind charge like that. Roos looked again through his binoculars, focusing on the head of the driver. Too many rounds had found their target-and even though the man was a pulped, bloodied mess, his head was still upright. With wasn’t natural. And the man wasn’t damaged enough for Roos to recoil when he saw enough to recognize the dead driver.

It sure as hell wasn’t Reilly.

I struggled to keep the car properly aligned as I guided it up the mountain.

It wasn’t easy, given that I wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor was I driving it by remote control. I was crouched in the footwell of the passenger seat, wearing a helmet and goggles and a vest, surrounded by body armor panels, with one hand on the selfie stick that I’d taped to the gas pedal and the other on the steering wheel.

Above and to my left, Tomblin was in the driver’s seat, held in position with enough duct tape to ensure he couldn’t move an inch. I’d even made sure Tomblin’s head would stay upright by running some tape around his neck and the headrest. His mouth was also taped shut. Only his eyes were free to roam, and they were darting back and forth between the road ahead and an intense, terrorized scowl that was directed right at me.

Kurt and Gigi had set up the visual aids for me: a smartphone taped to the big Lincoln’s front bumper, linked by video call to a 4G tablet they’d taped under the dashboard, where I could see it. It was cramped and awkward, but it was the only way I could see myself even getting close to the cabin in one piece.

The gunfire erupted the second the cabin appeared clearly on the monitor, remorseless large-caliber rounds raining down on the SUV from somewhere up ahead. I crouched lower and floored the pedal, aiming at the house as bits of the car and of Tomblin exploded all around me, showering me with all kinds of debris, hard and soft. Some rounds found their way to the Kevlar panels and punched into them, hard, kicking them back onto me, but I kept the pedal floored and kept it moving until the car shuddered and plowed into the ground for a full stop. Then the shooting stopped.

A panicked voice in my earbud blurted, “Reilly? Reilly! Jesus, are you OK?” It was Kurt, back at the clearing, at the controls of the Phantom.

The plan had worked in the sense that I’d made it up to the door of the cabin in one piece, but I needed to stay that way, which meant I needed to take one of those big guns out. Given the sound they made, the cycling rate and the damage they’d caused, I figured it was something like one of the M240 family of machine guns, positioned under cover outside rather than inside the house to allow for a quick repositioning and a bigger playing field.

“I’m fine, relax,” I whispered into my throat mike. “What do you see?”

“You’ve got two gunmen-on either side of the cabin.” He was flying it lower now, although I didn’t think it was visible or within earshot yet.

“The one to my right. I need a lock on him. Where is he, off the car’s nose?”

“I’d say, two o’clock.”

“I need more precision than that, Kurt. Give it to me in minutes. And be accurate, for God’s sake. I’m only going to get one shot at this.”

“OK, OK, hang on. I think, uh, thirteen.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, yes. Thirteen.”

I quickly asked, “Distance?”

“OK, uh, it’s around, uh, thirty yards. Yeah, I think that’s about right, I’m measuring off the length of the car. He’s behind what looks like some fallen logs.”

“OK. Hang on.”

I focused on my positioning, imagining the front-to-back axis of the car and locking it in my mind relative to everything around me. Then I closed my eyes and conjured up a mental picture of what Kurt had told me about my position relative to the shooter. I’d only get one shot at him and it had to count.

I adjusted my position and got the M4 ready, then I pulled out a stun grenade, pulled out its pin, focused my concentration, then lobbed it out the opening where the front windshield used to be, to the left of the car, the opposite side of the shooter I was going for. Flashbangs had very short fuses, two seconds in this case, so the small, perforated cylinder had barely left my hand when it went off in a deafening bang and a blinding flash. I knew its effects wouldn’t be as disorientating as they would if this were inside a room, but the blast was so powerful that, even inside the car, I was rocked by its concussion wave. It instantly created the desired result as more rounds erupted from the trees, but were directed away from the car. With my eyes closed, I spun around and came up from my crouch, M4 ready and already aimed in the direction and at the distance Kurt had spotted for me-and I opened my eye, looked through the scope, and there he was, for a second, the top of his head and the barrel of the gun barely visible through the light snowfall, the red dot inside the optic aligned on his forehead.

I squeezed the trigger and saw his head snap back in a burst of crimson.

One down, maybe two-and Roos-to go.

“Guide me out of here, quick,” I rasped.

“OK, I’m looking at your side of the car. There’s that large rock to your right that we saw before, at one o’clock,” he added, “and the trees are just beyond that, about ten yards farther.”

“Got it.”

The belts these guns used held a couple of hundred rounds at best, and given that they fired at upward of six hundred rounds per minute and seeing as how many hits the car had taken before this last onslaught, I figured whoever was manning them should be needing to restock their feeding tray by now. Regardless, I had to move fast. They now knew I was alive and in the car. I sucked in a couple of quick, deep breaths, then I pulled on the door handle and kicked the door out, following it out in the same frenzied move. I rolled on the ground before coming up in a crouch and I sprinted towards the rock, bullets kicking up the slush around my feet. I didn’t shoot back, saving the rounds of my M4 until I had something viable to shoot at. I made it to the rock just as more bullets ate into it, sending shards of it flicking around me. The shooter was on the other side of the house from me now and I knew the rock would protect me. I had no idea where the third guy, if there was one, was, nor if Roos was in the cabin or elsewhere.

I figured I couldn’t stay where I was for too long and I couldn’t cut across in the open, so the best option seemed to be to get to the cabin and work my way around it or through it to take out the guy with the big gun on its opposite side. I peeked out, took in my position. I couldn’t see any movement. I figured that if I took the direct route to the cabin, I’d be exposed longer than if I went parallel to its side initially, then cut across to it-longer, but safer, unless there was a shooter in one of its side windows. It had three-two on the ground floor that gave on to the porch and a third on the floor above. I debated going the extra ten yards away and using the edge of the tree line, but the soil there would be less even than the clearing I was in; more snow would have settled there under the bare branches, and I’d be moving less confidently while risking a fall.

I steeled myself for the move, then sprinted out from behind the large rock, running parallel to the side of the house. Snowflakes licked my face as gunfire erupted immediately from the same shooter but, surprisingly, nothing came from the cabin. I ran as fast as I could and, within seconds, the shooting stopped as the gunner lost his bead on me. I cut across the field, headed straight for the cabin now, and hurdled onto the porch before slamming to a stop against the log wall.

Everything went silent again.

I didn’t like it. Playing cat and mouse like this, facing an unknown number of shooters who’d brought major firepower to the fight. Then Kurt’s voice came through my comms, and his words only made things worse.

“Reilly! Reilly,” he hissed.

“What?” I whispered.

“I just sent the drone on a quick perimeter swoop. The two SUVs, the ones with the heavies? They’re back.”

66

I couldn’t worry about that right now. I had enough to deal with here. And the sooner I cleared this kill zone, the sooner I could start figuring out how to deal with the new threat.

I used the stock of my carbine to smash through the window closest to me, then I chucked in another flashbang. Between four walls, its effect was much more potent this time and I charged in after it, loosing quick bursts left and right. And hitting nothing.

The space was empty. My eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. I was in a large, open area, typical of an old log cabin, with a large fireplace as its central focal point and six-point buck heads staring down from the bare wood walls. I scanned around, looking for signs of life, but saw and heard nothing. I sensed the cabin was empty-it didn’t offer enough cover to make tactical sense to remain in it. The forest outside was a much better option. Still, I advanced cautiously, if quickly, swinging my weapon from side to side, my senses alert to any disturbance. I was all the way across to the opposite side of the cabin, the side of the other shooter, when I heard a rustling outside. I rushed to the side of the window and slammed against the wall just as something crashed through the glass and flew into the room.

They’d wanted to draw me into the cabin all along. That was their kill zone. And now that I was inside, one of the bastards had just fired a grenade launcher at me.

The lead SUV veered off the main road and bounced onto the trail that led up to the cabin, its big tires kicking up a spray of slush onto the windshield of the second vehicle, which was right on its tail.

It accelerated uphill, its powerful engine propelling it up the gentle slope with ease, and about twenty yards before the trail veered right around a large rock outcropping, its tires suddenly hit something and shredded to bits, causing the heavy car to crater into the ground and come to a shuddering halt.

The driver of the SUV behind it, his vision already hampered by the slush flying onto his windshield, didn’t have enough time to react and just plowed into the back of the lead vehicle, hard.

Which was about when the gunfire started.

I didn’t think. I just reacted.

Pure instinct, zero lag time. Just neurons firing an instantaneous reflexive order and muscles reacting without hesitation.

I launched myself through the glass of the window shoulder first and was airborne when the blast tore through the space behind me.

I hit the porch hard, curled into a roll, my ears and my skull reeling from the explosion, but I couldn’t let it affect me just yet-I needed my senses to function for just a second or two more; I needed to push away the heaviness and the ringing and the blurred vision and just focus every nerve ending I could muster to lock onto my target while he was within striking range and before he could get a shot off at me.

I caught him at the edge of my perception, a wraith with a white face and dark camo gear, and my arms somehow managed to bring the carbine up and line it up on him and my finger pulled back on the trigger as I aligned the red dot of the CCO sight on his chest. He staggered back as my three-round burst punched into him and dropped out of sight just as I rolled onto my back and shut my eyes to try and recalibrate my senses.

The whine in my ears was manageable-I’d had worse-and I guess the helmet had helped dampen the full brunt of the blast on the insides of my skull. I stayed like that for a few long seconds, breathing in, letting the blood rush around and reboot my shocked operating system.

I hit my comms and said, “Kurt?” but there was no answer.

I called out again, but nothing came back.

I pulled the transmitter out of its shoulder pouch and checked it. It was cracked. I switched it on and off, tried again, and got nothing. My heavy landing must have busted it.

I was on my own.

I pushed myself back on my feet and, hugging the log wall, I crept to the back of the cabin and the forest beyond.

I still had maybe one shooter out there, then there was Roos.

I scanned left, right, couldn’t see any movement. The ground rose away from the cabin in undulating hillocks and the tree cover was dense, some of it with good visibility in the case of the deciduous oaks and maples, other parts much darker under the evergreen firs, spruces and beeches. The snow cover was accordingly irregular and patchy: thicker and whiter where the leaves above were bare, and thin to nonexistent where the canopy was forbidding. More flakes were falling, though, and they were getting meatier.

Then I spotted something: tracks, in the messy scree around the base of the porch. Boot prints, one pair, leading away from the cabin, into the forest.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Roos had only brought ten men with him and not eleven.

Ten, a round number. An excessive one, if you asked me. I mean, I really didn’t think I merited that much of an effort. Eleven-that was just overkill.

I checked my carbine, slammed in a fresh clip just in case, and headed out.

I’d barely taken a step when distant machine gun bursts cut through the silence, angry, intense volleys echoing out from behind me. In that split second, I noticed a flash of movement, a shift of tones, a silhouette that was darker than its backdrop of leaves and branches, about thirty yards ahead of me, high up. I dropped to one knee and brought the M4 up just as several bullets cut through the space my upper body had been occupying and slammed into the logs behind me.

I squeezed the trigger, and the silhouette jerked before dropping thirty feet to the ground. He’d been waiting for me, up in a tree stand.

There had been eleven after all.

I was pretty sure Roos was now on his own.

And I was coming for him.

Deutsch let rip with full dedication.

She’d set up the spike strips at the end of first relatively straight stretch of trail, before it swept gently right around a large rock outcropping that served to shield her parked Crown Vic and to offer her a great vantage point from which to unleash her assault.

She knew what she was facing, but it didn’t worry her. She was committed, and she was ready. She was kitted out in helmet, ballistic vest, comms; she had the M4 carbine with its suppressor in place and its laser sight ready and she’d laid out her gear within easy reach around: five extra magazines, flashbangs, a fully loaded handgun, even the big knife.

Everything she needed to maximize the kill.

She started firing mere seconds after the long metal barbs of spike strips had shredded the SUV’s tires, just as the vehicles were immobile, before the doors even cracked open. She wasn’t off to one side but was almost in front of the cars, at a slight angle perhaps, which allowed her to cover both sides of the vehicles. Anyone trying to get out from either side would be within her reach.

She started with the two men in the front seats of the front car, moved to the two in the front of the rear vehicle, then came back to the front car and its back seat passengers before returning to the rear vehicle and the final two targets.

Thirty rounds per clip, three-round bursts, ten bursts per clip. Ten different targets, ten chances to take out an enemy. Six clips, one hundred and eighty rounds, sixty chances to take out the eight targets. If she connected with one out of seven bursts, if one out of twenty-one bullets managed to find its mark, they were all out of play.

Her mind was clear, her focus full, her aim true. With each red dot aligning on a target, with each pull of her trigger, she thought of Nick Aparo and nothing else. With each splatter of blood, she thought about what men like these had done to him. She allowed no other thought any breathing space, none whatsoever. She was just fully, totally, exclusively committed to wiping out each and every one of those sons of bitches that appeared in her sights.

The last two required a little more effort. She had to use stun grenades to rattle and tame them, had to come out from her cover and climb down to the kill zone and execute them at closer range. She didn’t mind it, though. It was what she was there to do. And after it was all done, after all eight of them had taken their last breath, a voice cut in and intruded on her serenity.

Kurt was hailing her through her earbud. “Annie?”

He needed to call for her twice before she responded. “What?”

“Annie, I can’t reach Reilly. I can’t see him either.”

Her mind folded itself back into reality and she started moving towards her car. “When did you last hear from him?”

“About ten minutes ago. Then we heard that explosion.”

“I know,” she said as she reached her car. “I heard it too.”

“He might need help,” Kurt said.

“I’m heading up there now,” Deutsch said as she slammed the car into gear and floored it.

67

It was eerie and uncomfortable.

It was also slow going. Very, very slow going.

Making my way up the mountain wasn’t easy. Loose footings, boulder fields, slippery rock outcroppings, and the snow, heavy and damp on the ground, in patches of irregular thickness and consistency. It wasn’t too easy to see either, what with the continuous snowfall layering a ghostly veil on it all.

It was desolate and quiet, the bare trees and the rough terrain giving it a grim, otherworldly feel, the dense evergreens then changing it into one that was brooding and mysterious. I knew the area was teeming with wildlife, and the multiple tree rubbings I saw confirmed it. But I didn’t see any bears, deer or elk. Not even a turkey. The only wildlife up here right now seemed to be two predators who were out hunting each other. It was as if the rest of the animal kingdom had vacated the mountain to give our confrontation plenty of room to play itself out. Maybe the blasts and the gunfire had just scared them off. Or maybe they knew better and didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire.

My senses, still jarred by the grenade’s blast, were doing their best to cut through the haze and stay focused, to try and pick out the tiniest movement, the smallest sound.

Roos was out here, somewhere.

This was his territory.

It was where he hunted, and the realization made every step I took more hesitant.

He knew these woods. I didn’t. But I wasn’t leaving here till I found him.

Roos huddled under the blind he’d built at the mouth of the rock tunnel, listening intently as he scanned ahead for any sign of Reilly.

He didn’t have to worry about his back. He knew Reilly would be coming up the mountain. All he had to do was wait. Then he’d just pick him off and make his way back to civilization.

Waiting for a kill wasn’t new to Roos. Far from it. He was a natural hunter, a talent his father had spotted and helped nurture ever since Roos was a young boy. Stalking prey, whether on land or at sea, was a feeling he was very familiar with, a hobby he enjoyed greatly, and one he’d been able to indulge to his heart’s delight ever since his father, a successful dentist who’d ridden the popularity surge of orthodontics in the mid-70s, had bought that huge piece of land for a song after Hurricane Camille had savagely devastated the area in 1969. An only child, Roos had inherited the lodge from his father after the man had died prematurely from a heart attack almost ten years to the day after buying it.

He’d put it to good use, for all kinds of hunts.

Over the years, Roos had built many blinds across his property. Nature provided a lot of the materials that made the best blinds: trees torn down during heavy storms, densely leaved branches from conifers, large boulders to tuck in against. He’d build them early in the season, give the animals time to get used to them. Then he’d go up and spend hours huddled inside them, watching, waiting-making sure no noise and no smell scared off his prey. Then they would appear, out of the trees, oblivious to the danger he posed. There was nothing more satisfying than watching a bull elk or a white-tailed doe walk by, mere feet way, so close he could reach out and touch them. Observing them at eye level, stretching out the time before the kill as long as he could, toying with their lives before he took them away.

Those same emotions were channeling through him now, only it wasn’t a bear or a buck he was waiting for.

He sensed something in the distance and slunk lower, slowly, carefully.

Movement, through the thin, white haze down the mountain.

He flattened himself completely and calmed his breathing. He knew from hunting hungry bucks how crucial it was to remain quiet and immobile. The smallest sound, the minutest movement, could spook his prey.

He looked out intently through the light snowfall, then adjusted his rifle and peered through its scope.

A lone figure was making its way closer to him, headed in his direction. Taking slow, hesitant steps. A dark silhouette against the white backdrop, disappearing in and out from behind the army of bare chestnut oaks that dotted the hillside.

As the figure got nearer, his concentration deepened. He could sense the imminent kill, intoxicated by the endorphins that were rushing through him in anticipation. God, he loved a good hunt, and this one would cap them all.

And then he got a glimpse of his quarry’s face and his pulse spiked and flushed his euphoria away.

It wasn’t Reilly.

It was a woman.

Annie Deutsch advanced cautiously as she made her way up the mountain.

She hadn’t found Reilly in the charred cabin, hadn’t seen any sign of him outside. She’d seen Tomblin’s body in his chewed-up SUV before stumbling upon a dead shooter by the side of the cabin and she figured Reilly had gone up the mountain, tracking his prey. She also figured two guns would be better than one.

She wasn’t comfortable out here. She was a city girl through and through and hadn’t spent much time out in the wilderness. She’d skied in Vermont a couple of times, years ago, at the insistence of a college boyfriend, but apart from that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in such an alien landscape.

It was a shame, she thought. It did possess undeniable beauty, and she could understand why people made the effort to get away to places like this. But right now, that appeal was completely wasted. All she could see around her was suffering and death.

She stopped for a moment, looked around. Nothing but bare trees, boulder fields, a couple of large rock outcroppings, and snow. A cold, bleak canvas of white and various shades of grey, punctuated by the occasional dash of dark green from some mountain laurel or a huckleberry shrub.

She couldn’t see any sign of life. She wished she could call out to Reilly, make sure he was still alive-make sure she wasn’t the one being stalked. But she couldn’t.

Instead, she just panned left and right, made sure she wasn’t missing anything, and continued on up, her mind picking out the large outcropping on the ridge to her right as a heading to follow.

Roos watched the woman get closer and closer.

She was fifteen yards away and closing. He had her in his crosshairs now. One gentle pull on his trigger and she’d drop to the ground without knowing what hit her.

He held his breath, adjusted his aim. At this distance, in these conditions, it was an easy shot. Almost unsportsmanlike. No challenge whatsoever. It was also almost unfair. Does and bucks had highly tuned senses. They could see, hear and smell even the slightest of clues. This woman was, by comparison, like an astronaut in full gear. Slow, lumbering, strained. Incomparable. He’d be able to call out to her, wave at her and ask for her name before he pulled the trigger, and he’d still drop her.

But then, he didn’t think killing her would be a wise move.

She’d be dead, no question. But the shot would ring out across the woods, and Reilly would know where he was. He’d need to try and make his way to another blind before Reilly spotted him. Staying in this one and using the dead woman as bait was too dangerous. Reilly would anticipate that move. And no matter what, he’d still have Reilly out there, on the loose, stalking him.

No, killing her now would be a mistake. He had a far better use for her. Much simpler, much more straightforward, but knowing how righteous Reilly was, it was bound to work.

He watched her climb up, seemingly drawn to the outcropping that shielded him. He knew he was perfectly camouflaged, knew she wouldn’t spot him until it was too late.

She kept coming. Slowly, but inevitably.

He waited until she was a few feet away, then, in one swift move, he launched himself up at her and slammed the stock of his rifle into her back.

She grunted heavily and stumbled forward, falling to her feet, her carbine tumbling out of her hands.

She turned around slowly, groaning with pain, but he was already on top of her, his rifle right in her face.

“Shh,” he said. “No noise. Not yet. Now turn around.”

68

I was tired. Exhausted, actually.

My body was starting to flag. I hadn’t been too kind to it lately. It had been a pretty intense couple of weeks that had included hours when I was technically dead. But I couldn’t give up now.

I kept advancing, my legs moving on their own, carrying up farther and farther into the mountain, trying to avoid a fall or even a slip. Up here, right now, a damaged ankle or a busted knee would be fatal. And there’d be no Frankenstein machine to bring me back this time.

I heard the air move above me and glanced up to see a turkey vulture glide by. It banked, made a full circle over me, then with a flick of his wings, it was gone again, disappearing into the white mist. I wondered if that was a good omen. It had to be-for one of us, anyway.

There were more than a few blowdowns up here, maybe casualties from some recent hurricane. I either climbed over them or made my way around them, long bare trunks that were just making my advance more difficult.

And then I heard her, a call that echoed through the trees.

“Reilly! Reilly?”

It was Deutsch.

I almost shouted back, then I held back.

He had her.

Shit.

What was she doing up here?

I gritted my teeth to swallow my anger, then I summoned up more resolve and increased my pace, heading in the direction I thought her shout came from.

She hadn’t sounded too far-a hundred, hundred and fifty yards, tops, I figured. I was moving faster now, breathing hard, eyes focused intently ahead of me, acutely aware of a potential ambush.

“Reilly!”

Her voice rang out again, acting like a compass heading.

I kept going, my fingers tighter against the carbine. And after a long climb that left me almost breathless, something appeared out of the haze that was shrouding the mountain, something foreign to this desolate landscape.

It was Deutsch, standing in front of a large rock outcropping at the top of the ridge. Only she wasn’t alone. A figure was standing behind her, and he was holding a handgun to her head.

Roos.

I slowed my pace, swung my gun slowly so is was pointed in their direction, and kept moving until I was about ten yards away from them.

There he was. Gordon Roos. After all these months-after all these deaths, I was finally face to face with him.

I have to say, in the flesh, he was a disappointment. Mid fifties, give or take, I imagined, although he had to be older. Lean, short cropped hair, focused gaze. Seemed in pretty good shape. Nothing noteworthy, nothing particularly vile or evil in his features. No glass eye, no scarred face, no deformed fingers. My nemesis looked disconcertingly normal, and his face was very similar to the one in the drawing Leo and Daphne had sent me. They had really done a phenomenal job.

“Nice to put a face to the voice,” I said, trying to play down the fact that Deutsch and I were truly and genuinely screwed.

“I figured it was about time we met,” Roos said. “You’ve put enough time and effort into it.”

I wasn’t in the mood for games. “Let her go,” I said. “This is between you and me.”

“You’re such a Boy Scout, you know that? Like you just walked out of a Norman Rockwell painting or something. ‘This is between you and me?’ Seriously? Come on… What are you-Shane? When did that ever work in the real world? You think I’m going to roll around in the snow with you when I can just shoot you? Christ, I could have picked you off minutes ago, while you were still coming up here. But I wanted to see the look in your eyes when you realized you were screwed. When you realized you and this little bitch of yours were both screwed. That look on your face right now? That’ll keep me company for years to come. It’s moments like these… when they come around, you’ve got to grab them. They’re life’s fuel.”

And just like that, he calmly, matter-of-factly, raised his gun at me from behind Deutsch. I thought of shooting first, swinging my gun up quickly as I dived off to one side, but there was no way I was getting a clean shot off at him, not with Deutsch there in the way, not on the move and given how weary I was and how my hands were shaking.

Still, I couldn’t just stand there, and in that instant of deciding whether to duck left or right or charge ahead, something rushed down out of nowhere, a buzzing white flash that came out of the sky and smashed itself against the large boulders right next to them. Roos wasn’t expecting it-none of us were. But the split second of distraction from Kurt’s kamikaze drone was all we needed.

Just as Roos flinched sideways with surprise, Deutsch moved, fast as lightning, grabbing his gun hand with both hands and yanking him forward, almost over her shoulders, causing him to spin and topple over and slam into the ground. I was already charging at them and I covered the ground between us in a heartbeat and got there as Deutsch was wrangling the gun out of his hand. I dove in, hammering his face with a massive downward punch that just planted him in place and loosened his hold on the gun. I gave him another-unnecessary, but what the hell?-then Deutsch and I stepped back and took in our captured prey.

Gordon Roos was finally mine.

Now I had to decide what to do with him.

69

We marched Roos down the mountain.

He tried talking a couple of times, but I shut him down, first with a couple of words, then with another punch. I wasn’t ready to listen to him. I was still gathering up my thoughts and playing things out in my head.

We kept going until we got to a small clearing that was dotted with ghostly birch trees, within sight of the cabin. More snow had settled up here-two, maybe three inches. I knew the temperature was still hovering just below zero, but there was a mild wind blowing, which was what I needed.

I told Roos to sit down by the base of one of the trees. He did as told. I walked over and cuffed his hands around it.

I stepped back and turned to Deutsch. “Is the Crown Vic down there?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“And the jerrycan? Still in the trunk?”

“Yep.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Roos called out. “I’m not telling you anything.”

I walked over to him. “I’d bet otherwise.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “You’re going to kill me anyway. At least this way I’ll enjoy knowing you’ll never clear your name and you’ll never know the full story about your dad.”

“We’ll see.” I turned to Deutsch. “If he makes trouble-try not to kill him.”

“I can’t promise.”

I left them and made my way to the cabin. The place looked like a war zone. The charred cabin, Tomblin’s shot-up Navigator, his mangled body still inside it. It looked, and smelled, like death.

I popped the trunk on the Crown Vic, got what I needed, then headed back up to the clearing.

Roos was still where I’d left him. He was fixing me with a long scowl, his defiant attitude coming through loud and clear. The bastard was solid through and through, no question. Still, you didn’t need to be the Amazing Kreskin to know what he was thinking. A desolate place where no one would hear you, a guy hell-bent on revenge. If he had any sense, some very uncomfortable images had to be spooling through his mind right now. Especially since my left hand was holding a five-gallon jerrycan.

I set it down and stepped across to him. Then, without saying a word, I bent down and yanked his shoes off his feet.

He started kicking around. “Hey, what the-”

I punched him hard to calm him down. “Shut up!”

Then I got back to it. I pulled his socks off, undid his belt, and yanked his pants and his shorts off too, in one go. Then I pulled out the tactical knife and held it in front of me for a couple of seconds, visibly fuelling more uncertainty in Roos. His eyes were just locked on the drop point blade, his forehead now bursting with sweat beads despite the bitter cold.

“I was in California last summer,” I told him. “An ex-girlfriend of mine called me up, asking for help. She was ex-DEA. Some guys were after her. When I got there, I found out I had a kid. A four-year-old boy. Turned out they were really after him, and she died trying to keep him safe.” I jabbed the blade in his direction. “She died in my arms. Because of you.”

“I wasn’t part of that-”

I held up the knife to silence him. He piped down.

“I know. It wasn’t your deal. But it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t stepped in to make it happen. To do what you and your people-my money’s on Orford-did to my boy.”

I studied him for a moment, then I continued. “Still… the guy you were all after? Maybe you know this, maybe you don’t. He thought these bikers were dicking him around, so he came after them with his men. Shot them all up. All except their leader. What he did to get the truth out of him… I was there and I saw the result. It wasn’t pretty. He started with the fingers. After two of them, he got bored. So he moved on to somewhere different. The coroner said he bled out, and let me tell you, when you bleed out from that spot? Not the best way to go. But at least the cut was clean. One go. He had the benefit of using garden shears.”

I let that simmer for a moment while I tapped the blade on my open palm, then I added, “I don’t have any garden shears. But I have this.” I held up the knife. “It’ll have to do.”

I stopped talking for a moment, just staring him down, giving his imagination time to generate all kinds of horrific visions. Then, with Deutsch standing guard and aiming her M4 at him, I stepped forward.

He flinched and kicked back, like he thought I was going for it. I wasn’t. Instead, I used the knife to cut through his sleeves and the back of his jacket and a minute later he was totally naked.

In the snow.

With a light wind blowing.

I don’t care how fit he was. He was shivering now. Probably from a combination of cold and fear.

I moved back to join Deutsch.

“What?” he asked her, a disturbing leer on his face. “You see something you like?”

She ignored it as I glanced up at the sky, looked around the trees-then set my gaze back on him.

“I want to know everything. I want to know who the Janitors were. What they were. What they did. I know about Padley, Orford, and Siddle. I want to know about the others. I want to know what your role was in it, what Tomblin’s role was. I want to know who else knew about it. I want to know who you killed and who you had killed. I want to know who the guy was that you sent after me, the guy who killed Kirby and Nick. And I want to know about my dad.”

I stopped there, letting him process it for a moment. His eyes were locked on me, the defiance still there, but now I could see some cracks in it. He wasn’t going to break easy. I knew that going in. But we were getting there.

“You’re going to tell me everything I want to know,” I continued. “That’s a given. No way around that, trust me. I won’t kill you before I get what I’m after, and we both have enough training to know that it’s going to happen. The only question is what condition you’ll be in when we’re done. If you’re still in decent enough shape, I’ll hand you over to my friend here and she’ll take you in. I’ll need to make sure she doesn’t shoot you herself, because my partner, the one you had killed? That was her boyfriend. But we talked about it, and I think she’ll get more pleasure out of seeing you go through the humiliation of a trial before marching you into prison. Maybe. Or maybe you’re connected enough that your people will cut some kind of deal or find some kind of loophole and let you walk free. Me, I’d take prison. You wouldn’t want to be out here. Not with my friend and me here knowing what we do. So that’s option one. Option two is, you play hard-ass and I have to cut the truth out of you one piece at a time. In which case it’ll be hard for me to send you back without getting myself into trouble. Sensible move would then be to finish you off here and leave you for bear food. So it’s up to you, really. Crunch time. And just so you don’t feel rushed, I’m going to give you time to consider it. To think about what I said. To see if you reach the reasonable conclusion I hope you’ll reach. But, in the interest of speeding things up…”

I turned, picked up the jerrycan, and undid its top. Then I held it over him, watching him stare up at it in terror, shaking his head, mouthing, “No, don’t-” for me to stop, and I emptied its contents all over him, drenching him top to toe.

He went fetal and curled into himself defensively and shut his eyes tight and sputtered, then he stopped suddenly and shook it off his face and looked up at me with burning, angry surprise.

It wasn’t gasoline. It was just water.

Water, which, on naked skin, in snowy weather, would accelerate his hypothermia.

Dramatically.

“I think we’ve had some of the same training,” I told him. “I don’t know how much you remember about this stuff, but… I figure it’s about minus two or three out here, tops. And the wind is, what-ten, twelve miles per hour? Call it ten. Minus two degrees and a ten mile-per-hour wind gives us a wind-chill temperature of minus twelve degrees or so. Add the water and I’m betting you’re not feeling too comfortable right now.”

I stepped back and took in the sight of him there, tied to that tree. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in such a pathetic, vulnerable state. Normally, I’d be the guy charging in to save someone like that. Here, I was responsible for it.

“That shivering you’re doing?” I said. “That’s stage one. Mild hypothermia. Your body’s trying to generate more heat to warm itself up. Soon, your hands and feet will start feeling numb. You’ll feel tired, and even the smallest effort will feel difficult. Another couple of degrees and you’ll be in moderate hypothermia. You’ll experience violent shivering and a loss of coordination in your muscles until that shivering stops because there’s no energy left to keep it going, which will make your temperature drop even further until you lose consciousness at around thirty degrees and slip into stage three: profound hypothermia. Which is around the time frostbite should start setting in. I’d give it half an hour, tops.” I looked around again, taking in the conditions. I figured it wasn’t far past midday, but the sun was very low this time of year, making the setting feel even bleaker.

“I’ll leave you to think things over.”

Then I nodded to Deutsch, and without another word, we headed down towards the cabin, Roos’s curses fading with each step.

We left him to stew there for twenty minutes, which was pushing it. I certainly didn’t want him dead. But I knew he was a tough son of a bitch, and I wanted this over today. Before the sun set.

We didn’t say much as we waited. I asked Deutsch about the gunfight down the mountain. She said it was no big deal. And that was it.

She could see I’d never done anything like this before.

I wasn’t a fan of “enhanced interrogation” or any other euphemism people came up with for torture. I wasn’t raised that way. It ran against everything I believed in, everything I thought our nation stood for. But I wanted him to talk, and I needed to scare the bejeezus out of him. I can’t say I was enjoying it, but to be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t uneasy about it either. It had to be done, which, I know, is not a politically acceptable excuse. It’s the excuse everyone gives. But there was no way around it and all I needed to do to brush away the first semblance of a qualm, if it arose, was to picture any one of the people that I knew had died because of a few callous words that bastard and his cronies had whispered to their hired guns.

No qualms showed up.

We went back up there twice.

The first time, he was still playing tough even though he looked like shit. He was going through violent shivering and had lost a lot of his muscular coordination. He’d also peed himself. Exposure to this much cold reduces the blood flow to the skin’s surface. The body can only hold so much liquid and responds by ditching whatever it can. That’s usually the first to go.

At this stage, you’d expect him to lose the ability to make rational decisions. Mountaineers suffering from hypothermia sometimes just laid down in the snow to sleep, or failed to fasten the most basic of harnesses properly. I’m not sure whether spilling his guts to me constituted a rational or an irrational decision as far as he was concerned. I was hoping for rational: it might help him survive, even if he only thought that had a small chance of happening. When we’ve got our backs right up against the wall, our survival instincts take over. I hoped his would, before it was too late.

But he was still fighting it. So we left him again, for fifteen minutes this time.

When we got back, he was in really bad shape. His body had stopped shivering, having lost any energy to keep itself warm. His limbs were stiff, his heart rate and his breathing barely there. His skin was pale and icy cold to the touch. More importantly, his resolve had also frittered away. His mind was weakened, he was disorientated, and his speech was slurry. And he was in pain. Lots of pain. His body had also decided his internal organs were more important that his extremities, which were red and hurting. All of them. Frostbite was setting in, fast.

If we left him there, he’d start dying soon. A long, painful death. Eventually, he’d start having hallucinations, then he’d lose consciousness and drift off into oblivion.

I didn’t want that.

He didn’t either.

On my haunches close to him, I asked, “Are you ready to talk?”

To the extent that he could answer, he did.

He wanted to talk.

It wouldn’t just be for my own ears. This would be saved for posterity.

This time, we’d brought up a couple of blankets and a thermos of hot coffee from the cabin. We wrapped him up, let him drink, and waited until he had warmed up enough to become coherent. Then I pulled out the GoPro Kurt had bought in New York, turned it on, and aimed it at Roos. For added safety, Deutsch also took out her phone, switched its camera to video, and started filming too.

70

With the GoPro blinking red as it recorded his words, Roos talked.

A lot.

The Janitors weren’t born out of some evil master plan, he told us. They didn’t come about by design. They just grew out of necessity and took shape gradually, with each new assignment.

It was all about getting rid of liabilities. Eliminating threats. Silencing whistleblowers. Whether they were abroad-or at home.

“All this fuss about JSoc,” he said with a weak, wheezy chortle, his words still struggling to come out. He was referring to the Joint Special Operations Command, a present-day network of highly trained paramilitary assassins who operated outside the traditional chain of command in executing the kill lists they were handed. They’d been the subject of exposés and debates in the news lately. JSoc combined the secretive, unaccountable world of mercenaries with the intel and firepower of the military, and its officials reported directly to the president. Its budget was secret. JSoc was, for all intents and purposes, the president’s personal hit team.

“It makes me laugh,” Roos continued slowly after a dry, pained cough. “Those pussies in the press are outraged, they think it’s a new low for us. It’s not. We’ve been doing it for decades. Only difference is-everyone’s now for it. Hell, JSoc got bin Laden, didn’t they? They ran team six.” He paused, catching his breath. “Let me tell you, back then? Things were different. The Cold War, Eastern Europe and Central America, South-East Asia, back in the day-it wasn’t as sexy. They were too far for people to really care, and there was nothing to show people for them to realize how serious the threat was. No embassies were bombed, no towers came down. It wasn’t the ‘War on Terror.’ We had to stay in the shadows.”

“But the people you were killing weren’t terrorists who were responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians,” I said. “They were innocent civilians.”

He wagged an angry, trembling finger at me. “We never killed anyone who didn’t pose a direct threat to the nation. And that’s a fact. We just did the dirty work no one dared to talk about. People out there-they have no idea. But they owe us. Because it’s not just about terrorists and military threats. It’s also about the bigger picture, about our place in the world. About how other countries see us. About economic power. About making sure we stay on top. I mean, look. You know the damage Woodward and Bernstein did. That whole Watergate mess-that should have never been allowed to happen.”

“You call it damage,” I said. “I call it what makes us strong. What makes us the best.”

“Such a God damn Boy Scout,” Roos spat. “That’s what makes us the best? To have our own president humiliated like that? To get him impeached, watch him crawl away from the White House with his tail between his legs while the rest of the world is laughing at us? How does that make us the best, exactly?”

He shook his head with disdain. I wasn’t about to argue with him. I wasn’t here for a debate. I was here to listen.

“It shook us, I tell you. Shook us all. I was just starting out, but for everyone around me, it was a massive failure. And I can tell you this-had my team been in place, that story would have never come out. Woodward and Bernstein wouldn’t have been around long enough to get the story out. And if we were still around today, you would have never heard of that cocksucker Edward Snowden either. Or any of those other Wikileaks faggots. That would have never been allowed to happen under our watch.”

We were getting off track. I had to reel him back.

I asked, “How did it start?”

He paused, gathering more strength, catching his breath. “We were at the CIA. Me, Eddy… we had an op going on in London with a Dutch contact. We were arranging some cocaine shipments to him in exchange for some favors in East Germany. And this fucking reporter for the Telegraph,” he said, “he got wind of it, cornered the guy, and got the whole story. And he was going to put it out there. Well, we found out in time. We talked to him, asked him to back down, explained the bigger picture. Explained that lives and careers were at stake. He wouldn’t. We tried threatening him. That only made things worse.”

“So you killed him?” I said.

“You’re damn right we did,” he said. “Made it look like an accident. No one suspected a thing. The guy rode a motorcycle, one of those crappy old English models. Piece of cake. And we got all his notes, everything. It was easier back then, before email and all that. Physical, paper, you know? Photographs and negatives and audiotape. Things that, once they were gone-they were gone for good.” He shrugged. “The op went through without a hitch.”

“Then you did it again?”

“We got asked to take care of another problem the agency had in Istanbul. We did that. Then another in Zurich. Pretty soon, it became our sole focus. We were the go-to guys when there was a problem.”

“And you operated outside our borders and on home soil,” I added.

“We took care of any threat, anywhere. It didn’t make any difference to us. An enemy’s an enemy, I don’t care what passport they’re carrying. Traitors are enemies. Treason is a capital crime. What difference does it make if they’re in Santiago or Poughkeepsie?”

“You and Tomblin-you ran it.”

“Yes. We had a good team. Small. Covert. No leaks. Three whiz kids, each of them with his own specialty, to figure out the best way to do it without raising suspicion. We’d meet up to discuss the situation. We’d do it up here at the blind when we could-it was within easy reach for everybody. Come up with the best option. Then we had an operative to go out and execute what we came up with.”

“The specialists. Padley, and the other two,” I said.

“Padley, for the medical option. Siddle for anything technical. And Orford for mental breakdowns.”

“Mental breakdowns. Like my dad,” I asked, feeling my blood boil over.

He looked up at me with tired, desensitized eyes. I tensed up. It was now or never. He’d either talk-or he’d leave me hanging forever.

“Yeah,” he slurred a bit. “Your dad. Stubborn man.”

I didn’t know if that was good or bad. “What happened?”

He studied me, the manipulative wheels of his mind still managing to spin despite his battered body. “You would like to know, wouldn’t you?”

“I would.”

He hummed, and nodded slowly. Then it was as if he came to some kind of realization, something that gave him some inner satisfaction. And he raised his tired eyes at me again.

“You know about the October Surprise, don’t you?”

I told him I did. The US embassy hostages in Tehran during the Reagan-Carter election year, their release within minutes of Reagan’s inauguration, the allegations of foul play.

“Iran was under a weapons embargo, right?” he said. “But they needed guns. They were about to have an eight-year war with Iraq. They were already in talks with Carter’s people. They had a deal, the hostages were coming out. In October. Which would have got Carter re-elected. Then Reagan’s people stepped in behind the scenes, made them a better offer, and bullied them into accepting it. They didn’t want the hostages released until after he won the election. And in return, Reagan would give them what they really wanted: weapons. Five billion dollars worth. But it had to be done under the table. Because of the embargo.”

“What’s that got to do with my dad?”

“Your dad,” he said, quite matter-of-factly, “he had this friend, this old college buddy of his. A Portuguese guy.”

“Octavio Camacho,” I offered.

Roos looked at me, a little surprised. “Exactly. Well, it seemed Camacho had done pretty well for himself back home in Portugal. He’d turned into this hot little reporter. And he came to see your dad because he had some documents. Some information.”

“About the October Surprise?” I asked. “It was already out there. People were talking about it already.”

“Well, true,” Roos said. “But they didn’t know the whole story.”

“And Camacho did,” I said.

Roos nodded.

“But-you said he was in Portugal? What did that have to do with Iran and us?”

“The guns had to come from somewhere. Some of them were shipped out from Israel, like with Contra. But the rest-they came from us. And they went through Lisbon airport and a couple of others, smuggled through with the help of the Portuguese military.”

“And Camacho found this out?”

“No. He found out what happened after that.”

“What?”

“The Portuguese defense minister, Da Costa-he found out. He wasn’t happy about it. He was their first civilian defense minister and he had an idealist boy scout view of the world, much like yourself. So he dug around and he got himself all the evidence he needed.”

I could see where this was going.

“He was going to take it to the UN. We had to move fast. He’d chartered a small Cessna to go to an election rally. It was three days before their own presidential election. Then, at the last minute, his buddy who’s given him that post, the Prime Minister, Sá Carneiro-he decides to hop on board too. The plane crashed just after take off. The investigation decided it an accident.”

“Siddle?” I asked.

He nodded. “One of his first gigs. High-pressure job, though. A lot at stake.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You murdered the Portuguese prime minister and their defense minister?”

He shrugged. “Their military weren’t unhappy to see him go. The defense minister, I mean. He wasn’t a team player. And he was going to put a lot of them in jail.”

“But you had them killed?”

“Hey, I would have done it again,” he said. “This would have devastated the country worse than Watergate. Reagan was a massively popular guy. A man of the people. Carter had screwed things up and we needed to get the country back on track. To hear that Reagan had fifty-two American diplomats and civilians kept in chains in some Tehran cell for three extra months just so he could win the election… how do you think the country would have reacted to that?”

I was trying to keep my anger in check and stay focused. “So Camacho found out? And he came to see my dad?”

“He was scared. The military in Portugal had eyes and ears everywhere. He thought the safer way to go about it would be to put the story out here first. So he got in touch with your dad. He told him what happened and asked him to find a way to go wide with it. Your dad had a solid reputation. He wasn’t someone you could bend.”

“He was a threat to the nation?”

Roos shrugged. “We knew about his affair. We tried to lean on him that way but he didn’t care. He didn’t leave us a choice.”

An immense weight had lifted off my shoulders, but it was coupled with a profound sadness for this noble man that I never really got a chance to know. A profound sadness-and a raging anger at the bastard sitting in front of me.

“Orford?” I asked.

“No, actually. We staged it. But we needed a real shrink to convince the coroner and your mom that it was a real suicide. Orford did that. He was a practicing psychiatrist. The three of them had real jobs. Worked better for cover.”

I asked, “Who made the decision?”

“Me and Eddy. We made the threat assessment and decided on what action to take.”

“Who pulled the trigger?”

“Eddy,” he said. “Tomblin did it. We were both in there together.”

Images of Tomblin getting shredded to bits while taped to the car seat next to me flashed through my mind. I guess it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

I got Roos to reel off the names of their victims. Whatever he could remember. Places. Dates. A brief summary. For the record. I’m sure there were more, but the ones he gave me were already shocking enough. Murder victims that no one realized had been murdered.

Like Nick.

Throughout, something was gnawing at me. He was being too open, too helpful. I know he was doing it to survive, but still-he could have held a lot back and I wouldn’t have realized it. But I was getting the sense that he was telling me everything. Which worried me. I didn’t think his brain was that battered by the cold.

No, he had something up his sleeve. And it wasn’t long before it became apparent.

“I’m glad we had this little chat,” he said when we were done. “Because now I can fill you in on one last thing you don’t know. See, now you feel good. You think you have the truth, you’ve got it all on tape on that silly little camera. You think you’re going to go back home, be a big hero and live happily ever after with that woman of yours.”

“That’s the plan,” I told him.

He laughed. Weakly, barely-he was still in bad shape. “You have no idea. All this, everything that happened? It’s not us. It’s bigger than me, bigger than Eddy and the others. You really have no idea. But I can tell you one thing. You’re not even going to make it to breakfast tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, the next day. That tape of yours? No one’s going to see it. Go on, put it out on the Internet. Upload it right now. No one’s going to take it seriously. You’ll see. Well, you won’t-you won’t be around that long.” He turned to look at Deutsch. “You neither, honey.”

“You mean there were others?”

“Of course. Others who can’t possibly let this come out. Not now. Not ever. But especially not now.”

“Who?”

He chuckled his wheezy, grotesque chuckle again. “You’re just going to have to wait and see about that.”

I nodded to myself, knowing what was ahead of us. “I wish you hadn’t said that. I really do, Gordo. For your sake.”

It took another hour.

The cold, more water. And other stuff.

And then he talked.

And he was right.

It was going to be a problem.

I thought about it for a minute or two. Deutsch was standing back, in the cold, watching me in silence.

“Reilly,” she finally called out. “We have him. We have it all on tape. It’s done. Let’s take him in. It’s over. Let’s go home.”

It wasn’t over. Not with what he’d just told me.

“You heard what he said,” I told her. “He’s too connected. This thing’s too big. They’ll work out a deal.”

“We have enough to make sure they don’t.”

I thought about it some more.

Then I said, “I can’t take that chance.” I turned to her. “If not for you, or for me, then… for Nick. And all the others.”

I went over to the camera, made sure it was off. Then I pulled out my gun, went right up to Roos, and put a bullet through his head.

71

The next two days were intense.

Deutsch and I hadn’t gone public with the tape. We’d shared it with our boss-the first part of it, anyway-and he’d shared it upstream. Needless to say, it kicked up quite a shitstorm. The immediate result was that the FBI and the CIA got Arlington PD to drop any inquiries about me regarding Kirby’s murder and cleared my name, for the record. The rest-well, they all needed to figure out how they were going to handle it. There was a potential political, legal and public relations tsunami brewing, and I had little doubt a whole bunch of national security honchos and a few select politicos were having long, heated debates about what to do with Roos’s revelations.

What they ultimately decided wasn’t really up to me, nor would I be able to influence it. To be honest, I didn’t really care. Roos and Tomblin were dead, and I was just happy to be reunited with my family. It felt terrific to be back home with Tess, Kim and Alex. I was ready to sleep for a week, and the bureau obviously had no problem with me taking the next couple of weeks off. It was going to be a great Christmas, just hanging out at home enjoying my family. Enjoying the best things in life, right?

Kurt and Gigi had managed to hack into Orford’s computer and had found his notes relating to Alex. It made for some pretty shocking reading. I’d be passing it all on to Alex’s shrink in the New Year, right after the holidays, certain that it would help finally eradicate any lingering traces of everything they did to him.

All of which, of course, left one last thing to deal with. The thing we hadn’t shared with Gallo: the video recording we’d kept for ourselves.

The last part of Roos’s testimony.

The biggie.

I told Tess about it, of course. We’d spent hours talking about it, after I’d had the whole house swept twice for any hidden mikes or cameras. And the simple conclusion was that I couldn’t leave it alone.

For one thing, it wasn’t safe to do so. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my time looking over my shoulder. Or needing a taster to check anything I was about to put in my mouth, for that matter.

Besides, I couldn’t let it lie. No way.

I had to tackle this head on.

Which was why I was now being ushered into the Oval Office for a private audience with the president.

Yorke greeted me with a hearty handshake and a big slap on the shoulder. “My God, Reilly, I knew it had to be important for you to miss out on dinner with us like that, but dear Lord-from what I hear, you’ve been through a real wringer.”

“It’s been… intense,” I said flatly.

“Sit down, sit,” he said as he guided me to one of the armchairs by the twin sofas.

I wasn’t in the mood to sit down, but I felt I might as well. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“Tess, the kids-everyone excited about Christmas? Have you had time to do your shopping yet?”

“I’m not here to talk about that, sir.”

“No, of course you’re not. Well, let’s get right to it, then, shall we?”

I just nodded.

“Obviously, what you’ve uncovered… I’m still having a hard time processing it. We all are. And I’ve got to say, you did a great job getting to the bottom of it, a great job. It’s one hell of an achievement, son. But at the same time, it’s a huge headache. A monster of a migraine, in fact. We’re going to have to think about what we do with it very, very carefully. Revelations like that-they could cause the kind of damage our country might not recover from for years.”

I didn’t say anything back. I just fixed him squarely, trying to get a read of the man.

The problem was, I liked him. Up until that miserable evening in the Blue Ridge Mountains, up until I’d heard what Ross had to say about him, I liked our president. I’d always thought Hank Yorke was a good guy. He was reasoned, he was smart, he was respected. He’d guided our country through four decent, stable years. He wasn’t a polarizing figure, and the raging wars of partisanship had somewhat calmed down under him. I was proud to have saved his life and I would have been voting for him next year.

Not any more.

“It’ll take a while,” he continued. “In the meantime, I hope you’re going to take some time off and enjoy the holiday season with your family. You sure as hell deserve it.”

“That’s the plan,” I finally offered. “But before we do that, there’s something else we need to deal with.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, leaning forward. “You asked for this meeting. What can I do for you, Reilly?”

“I think it’s more about what I can do for you.”

He looked perplexed. “What do you mean?”

“There was a second part of Roos’s testimony. One I haven’t shared with the Bureau.” I paused, gauging him.

His eyes narrowed just slightly, but it was there. “Oh?”

I nodded. “Roos told me about Viking. About you and the Janitors. I know everything there is to know about that.”

His expression clouded, but being the consummate politician that he was, it wasn’t the jolt you would expect to follow me saying something like that.

“And I’ve got to say,” I added, “whoever came up with your code name-they should have been fired.”

The city of York, in England, was captured by the Vikings late in the ninth century. It became a Norse kingdom for over fifty years, and the city became known as Jorvik.

“Yes, well,” Yorke said with a shrug, “those were the days before Wikipedia. And the obvious can also work as misdirection. But I take your point.”

“I know what you did, sir. I know you were Roos and Tomblin’s boss. I know you ran the Janitors program for all that time and I have the names of all the people you had taken out.”

Yorke exhaled lengthily and sat quiet for a long moment. All of a sudden, it was like some magical mojo had been drained out of him, like my eyes could see him for how old he really was, without any filters. Then he finally got up and stepped around his desk and looked out the big windows.

It was a gorgeous day outside. Blue sky, perfect sun, a crisp bite to the air. Not a great day to accuse the President of the United States of having run a secret assassination squad that had targeted Americans. On home soil, too.

“It was a different time,” he finally said. “The guys we’re dealing with now… Al Qaeda, ISIS? They’re a joke. A bunch of primitive savages. They’re piss-ants compared to the threat we were facing back then.”

“I don’t care-”

“They had nukes, Reilly,” he blurted angrily. “Thousands of nukes, aimed right here, at our homes. This was an existential battle, a fight for survival. They hated every fundamental thing about our way of life, they wanted to take over the world, their goal was to wipe us out but you know the difference between them and these jokers we’re dealing with today? They were real. They meant business and they sure as hell had the means to get the job done.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures, right?” I replied evenly. “Keeping the country safe, making the hard decisions so people can sleep safely at night? I’ve heard it all before. Roos gave me the same speech. Still doesn’t make it OK to do what you guys did. Which was murder, plain and simple.”

That really riled him up. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he growled. “You didn’t live through it like we did. You didn’t know what we knew, you didn’t see what the intel was telling us on a daily basis. You have no idea how thin the ice was under us and you think you can just stand there, all smug and righteous, and pass judgment on us when you weren’t around to see what we were up against?”

“You had people killed. Civilians, Americans, foreigners-”

“And you think it was easy?” he rasped, slamming the desk with his palm. “You think we took it lightly? You think we didn’t do everything possible to try to find another way every single time we had to make one of those terrible decisions? You think each one of them didn’t haunt me?”

“I don’t know if they did,” I shot back. “I’d like to think so, but either way, it doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change what you did.”

“And you think you would have done things differently? Knowing what it could mean, knowing the risk of what could happen? How do you know you wouldn’t have done what we did?”

“I would have found another way. Because there’s always another way. Maybe you just didn’t look hard enough. Maybe it just got easier with each one.”

Yorke kept his gaze locked on me, his mouth tightly clenched. Then he looked away, nodding in silence, deep in thought.

After an interminable pause, he muttered, “Why are you here, Reilly?” He turned to face me. His face was all shriveled up. “Why are you here? You’re telling me you know what you know. Presumably, you’re sitting on some compelling evidence or you wouldn’t be here, right?”

“I have enough, sir. Enough to cause you some very serious problems.”

His expression darkened, and his voice went sharp. “So what do you want?”

It was a question I’d been wrestling with ever since Roos had finally talked.

“To be frank with you, I’m not really sure. Because you’re right about one thing. If this came out, and if your part in it came out, it would be catastrophic for our country. The country I love, the country I’m sworn to protect. But I know two things. I know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. And I know I can’t let you get away with it. You and your people had my father killed.”

Yorke stared at me, then he pursed his lips and he looked away. His head was bowed down a little. “It won’t change anything to say I’m sorry, but for what it’s worth… I am. Hugely. Some decisions were… impossible. But the inevitable outcomes of not taking them were even worse.”

Maybe he was a great actor, or maybe it was my own wish fulfilment, but I sensed some genuine remorse. Regardless, I said, “I know all about how the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, but we’re still talking about murder. Multiple murder.”

He nodded in silence, deep in thought. After a few moments, he said, “So we have a problem.”

“Yes, we do.”

Yorke breathed out again with frustration. His shoulders stooped as he padded back over to me and sat down in the armchair facing me. “I’m not going to insult you by saying I could make things very, very comfortable for you, career-wise. We’re talking a fast lane at warp speed.”

“I’ll pass.”

“I thought as much.” He nodded to himself. “So where does that leave us?”

“I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a solution for this. Because, until now, I’ve had nothing but respect and admiration for you. I think you’ve been good for this country. Someone handed you responsibility for more than three hundred million people and you’ve done them proud. And I can’t ignore that.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a murdering son of a bitch who should be rotting away on death row.”

I took a breath. Part of me wanted to just walk up to him and strangle him with my bare hands, but I obviously needed to control myself.

“I can’t overlook what you did,” I continued. “Regardless of whether it involved my dad or not. But I’ve been trying to think of what he would do if he were in my shoes, not that I knew him well enough, but I know his values. I know how much he loved this country, what he was about. And I could only think of one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You give it all up. You drop out of the re-election campaign.”

His face crumpled with confusion and shock. “You want me to walk away from the presidency?”

“Yes.”

I could see the wheels spinning away frantically inside his brain. “You’d be satisfied with that?”

“Right now, and hard as that is, I think I just might be able to live with that, yes. Because the alternative would rip the country apart at the seams. Political meltdown, the economy, international standing down the toilet… Just massive pain, maybe for generations. And much as part of me feels, well, that’s justice, that’s what needs to happen, the truth will set us free and all that bullshit… Maybe the country’s better off living with that lie. So I’ll keep my mouth shut if you walk away, leave DC and devote the rest of your life to trying to atone for what you did.”

“Don’t you think I’ve been doing just that, from this office? It’s one hell of a place to get things done.”

“Maybe. But I can’t live with having you stay here.”

Yorke took a long moment to reflect on it. As he turned to look out the window, I could see that his eyes had taken on a faraway, doomed stare. The consummate politician, having to walk away from… this room. Maybe I wasn’t sending him to death row, but I was certainly condemning him to a life of hard labor, if only in terms of coping with what he’d had taken away from him.

Not my preferred outcome, but maybe it was the right one.

He finally asked, “How do you know the next guy won’t have even worse skeletons in his cupboard?”

“I don’t. But I know you do. And I can’t ignore them.”

He nodded, then frowned and shook his head, his expression suffused with a newfound resolve. “Well, we’ll need to come up with something else,” he said, his tone firm. “That can’t happen. You don’t just walk away from the Oval Office. It’s not that easy.”

I didn’t expect anything less. Not from President Yorke. He was no pushover.

But I wasn’t biting.

“Of course it is,” I insisted calmly. “You’ll find an excuse. Family priorities. Health issues. Make something up. Happens all the time. We live in a world of spin, remember?”

He pondered some more, then he said, “Let me think about it. I’m sure I can come up with something else that’ll satisfy you. Some other solution that’ll work for us both. How about that? Will you let me do that?”

For all I knew, he’d be giving the order to have me shipped off to Guantanamo or set into the concrete foundations of some highway overpass the second I stepped out of his office. But somehow, and despite everything I now knew about his past, I didn’t think Hank Yorke, the president, would do that.

“No,” I told him, firmly. “There are only two possible ways this plays out. You do as I ask. Or it all comes out. And FYI… Janitors or anyone else comes after me? The whole thing goes live. Big time. The cork pops and there’s no way of putting that genie back in the bottle. You really don’t want to go there. Trust me.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that for a moment, Reilly.”

We didn’t shake hands.

I walked out of there, hoping I hadn’t unleashed a trunkload of pain on myself.

I didn’t think I had.

But I guess only time will tell.