The End Game

1

Allentown, New Jersey

I really didn’t want to be here. Then again, who would?

Three o’clock in the morning, me and my partner Nick Aparo, in our unmarked SUV, parked on a dark street in the middle of nowhere with the engine off, freezing our nuts off, watching, waiting for the go signal, making sure our target didn’t vaporize before we nabbed him.

Don’t get me wrong. This is my job. I do it by choice. I do it because I believe in it, because I think what we do, as special agents of the FBI, is important. And the guy in our crosshairs on this particular night deserved our full attention, no question.

It’s just that I had bigger fish to fry. White whales, in fact, ones neither Nick nor the Bureau could know about. But more on that later.

Right now, all I can tell you is that we’d spent countless hours staring through the condensation-clouded windscreen and the snow flurries outside at the single-story house up and across the street, the one with the hypnotic, mind-numbing Christmas lights twinkling along the edge of its roof, and I was exhausted. We’d been at it for days.

Whatever our target was doing inside his house, he was doing it in considerably more warmth than us poor saps who were sworn to bring him to justice. We were sitting in north of a hundred thousand dollars of customized FBI vehicle and the heated seats had still managed to conk out, leaving the two of us shivering like we were being continuously tasered. Running the engine while the whole street slept was not an option. Not unless we wanted to give our target a clear heads-up.

On the positive side, at least no one could see us. In terms of discretion, sitting in a snow-covered vehicle in a line of snow-covered vehicles was pretty much ideal. It just meant we had to rely on the four video feeds on our laptop, the ones coming from cameras we’d managed to set up on our target.

The blizzard had stopped an hour ago, adding a more substantial covering to the inch that had refused to thaw. Now it was snowing again. This cold front was definitely winning in terms of historic meteorological bragging rights. I’ve got to admit, it was exhausting. The body burns up energy trying to stay warm, and at three in the morning, after several nights of this, I was running low on juice.

I watched my breath billowing out in front of my eyes as I zipped up my FBI parka, the cold metal of the zip reaching its endpoint against my nose. Any more coffee and there was zero chance of sleep when I finally made it home-in time to watch the sun rise as I zoned out against a deeply asleep Tess.

Nick, on the other hand, had no such concerns and was pouring himself yet another mug from the five-liter flask before sipping the steaming, bitter liquid like it had been lovingly made by his favorite barista. He looked ridiculous in his big, Russian-style fur hat, the flaps of which he had pulled right down over his ears, but nothing I said was going to make him lose it. At least he was watching the house with me and not sitting there flicking through an endless array of female Tinder offerings while subjecting them to the incessant vocal critique that usually accompanied his left- and right-swipes, which was his MO on previous stakeouts. Small mercies, I guess.

The subject of our impromptu igloo huddle was called Jake Daland.

Daland was an interesting target, a nice change from the Jihadist scumbags hogging our work load. He was the founder and head honcho of Maxiplenty, which had taken over from Silk Road after we shut down that online drugs marketplace and arrested its kingpin. Like Silk Road, Maxiplenty was a bazaar that sat in the hidden part of the internet, the dark net, but it was bigger and better, and it had one crucial innovation: it was a barter-only site. Daland had come up with a neat way to try to avoid the fate of Silk Road by avoiding financial transactions altogether: no cash, no checks, no credit cards, no Bitcoins. At Maxiplenty, you could do anything you wanted-get hold of drugs, guns, explosives, launder money, or have someone killed-provided you had something you could trade for it. Despite its tongue-in-cheek name, a Daland twist on a Newspeak term from George Orwell’s 1984, Maxiplenty had become a virtual clubhouse for the depraved, a hub for some pretty nasty stuff. Which is why we were here, waiting for word that power had been cut to Daland’s house before we stormed in and shut him down.

Fingering Daland was as the man behind the curtain wasn’t easy. Maxiplenty used a highly sophisticated network of servers located around the world along with a seemingly infinite process of IP spoofing to disguise both the site itself and those using it. When two of his users successfully swapped murders, the US Attorney’s Office went into overdrive. It took the techies at Quantico’s Cyber Division lab weeks to finally crack his invisibility cloak and secure enough evidence to ensure an arrest stuck. Evidence we now finally had, as of four hours ago, along with the signed confessions from both murderers. Which is why we were here, waiting for word that power had been cut to Daland’s house before we stormed in.

We weren’t alone. The whole team, including a couple of specialists from Cyber Division, was waiting close by, equipped with night vision goggles and, with a bit of luck, a little less frozen than us. The aim was to disconnect all the computer equipment-along with any battery backups-before we turned the power back on and began the bagging and tagging. I didn’t want Daland to have the tiniest window in which to hit some kind of nuke switch and wipe his hard drives.

So here we were, poised, waiting for the engineers from Jersey Central Power & Light to tell us they were ready to hit the switch. They were fairly used to being called out at ungodly hours this time of year. The bad weather and overloading from seasonal light displays meant they had to be available 24/7. Still, it was taking longer than I expected.

“Heads up, Reilly,” a voice announced through my earpiece. “Looks like it’s feeding time at the zoo again.”

I looked out through the near whiteout on the other side of the windows and saw the now-familiar pizza delivery car with half a plastic forty-eight-inch pepperoni sticking out of the roof glide past.

“More pizza?” Nick grumbled, peering out through the windshield. “How in God’s name can he eat so much pizza and stay so thin? Bastard.”

I turned to face him, a slight grin on my face. “Maybe he doesn’t chase it down with a bowl of lasagna.”

My partner was fairly legendary for his appetites, particularly when it came to Italian food and generously proportioned blonds. The former had provided something of a distraction when the latter ended up getting him divorced. Nowadays, he was happy to indulge in both, having finally come to terms with the court-appointed bi-weekly weekends with his eleven-year-old son. He’d also stuck with the spinning classes. I lost that bet, along with most of Twenty-six Federal Plaza.

“What’s wrong with having a pizza as a starter? That’s how they do it in Italy, you philistine.”

I smiled. “Maybe he’s got a gym in there.”

His face got all bent out of shape. “At home? Alone? What’s the point of that?

“The point of exercise being to meet the babes, right?”

“D-uh. But, hey, if I get to live a couple of extra years, that’s cool too.”

The delivery guy kept his engine idling as he hurried up to the door and rang the bell.

The snowflakes were getting meatier.

I adjusted the screen brightness on the laptop sitting at my elbow. I concentrated on the feed from the camera showing the house’s front door.

Jake Daland-elegant as ever in a short, silk kimono over a deep V-necked white T-shirt that exposed a mat of black chest hair-opened the door with the same calm, nonchalant demeanor. No stepping halfway through the door, no furtively peering to left and right. Zero interest in what was outside the house at all. Either he knew we were out here and didn’t care, or-and though possible, it was by now fairly improbable-he didn’t have a clue that he’d been under surveillance for days.

Daland took the pizza box and handed the delivery guy some money. The delivery guy seemed a bit thrown. They exchanged a few words as he struggled with his oversized puffer coat, fishing through its pockets, then shook his head, the cash in his outstretched hand.

“What’s he doing?” Nick asked.

“Daland must have handed him a large bill and the kid doesn’t have enough change.”

Nick shrugged. “We’re so on the wrong side of the law.”

They exchanged a few more words, then Daland waved the driver inside. The guy went in and the door closed behind him.

Moments later, the delivery guy re-emerged. He was holding a gift-wrapped box from his most loyal small-hours customer.

Nick said, “Now he’s giving the guy a Christmas present?” He shook his head. “I’m telling you, Sean, we chose poorly, man. Poor-ly.”

The delivery guy got back in his car and drove away.

It was at that precise moment that my earpiece burst back to life. “We have a go. All teams: get into position.”

Nick and I climbed out of the Expedition. We were wearing Kevlar under our FBI parkas, even though I thought it was highly unlikely we’d meet any armed resistance. Four SWAT members were already skulking up to the house’s front door, while two other agents, Annie Deutsch and Nat “Len” Lendowski, climbed out of another unmarked vehicle and approached from the opposite direction. We had other men covering the rear of the house. The tech specialists would wait till the house was secure.

We fell in behind the SWAT guys. “One in position,” I said into my cuff mike.

“Two in position,” came the confirmation from the rear of the house.

“Hold,” the voice in my ear said. A brief moment, then it came back. “In five. Four. Three.” Two seconds later, the Christmas lights on Daland’s roof snapped off as the power was cut.

We flipped down our night vision goggles and drew our sidearms as the SWAT team leader swung his battering ram through the door, but just as we were about to follow them in, an alarm burst to life inside me as my brain spontaneously highlighted something I’d seen as I walked up to the house.

Something I’d barely noticed out of the corner of one eye.

Lying innocuously by the edge of the curb, obscured by the shade of some parked cars, barely noticeable: a flash of red ribbon.

The Christmas gift that Daland had given to the delivery guy only minutes earlier. Discarded, tossed away like garbage.

I was electrified with the feeling that something was wrong.

“Nick! Car -now,” I shouted as I pulled off my goggles and stepped back, toward the sidewalk. I saw Deutsch and Lendowski looking at me, all confused, and just waved them on. “Go, go, go!”

They disappeared into the house as I passed the gift and jabbed a finger toward it, telling Nick, “The gift’s a prop. He faked us out.”

We hurried into the Expedition, Nick’s face shooting me a sizeable question mark as I slammed the big SUV into gear and floored it.

We fishtailed away from the curb, with me shouting over the revs, “The delivery guy’s still in the house. Daland drove off in the pizza car.”

Nick shook his head. “Bastard’s got a couple of minutes on us.”

The roads were covered with snow, but the four-wheel drive of the Expedition was rock solid as it ate up the miles. There were no cars driving around, not at that hour, and we soon hit an intersection. I stopped, clueless about which way to go.

“He knows he’s burnt,” I said. “Which means he knows everyone else is burnt too. So where’s he going?”

Nick rubbed his face, trying to force his brain into gear. “Daland knows we’ll be looking for the car and it’s not the most discreet ride. He needs to ditch it fast.”

“Yeah, but where? And swap over to what?”

The onboard satnav flickered through screens as Nick worked it. I couldn’t wait for it to suggest some answers. I scanned the road’s surface and could just about make out a set of thin tracks that turned left.

I followed.

Nick watched as I turned onto another residential street, then his attention went back to the navigation system. Thick walls of snow were now making it increasingly difficult to see where we were going. Even at full speed, the wipers were straining against the weight of the heavy flakes and the trail I was following was getting progressively more shrouded by the new snow.

We were going to lose him.

I adjusted the traction control. “He can’t stay out in this. Either he’s got somewhere to lay low nearby or he’s got a fallback drive stashed somewhere.”

Nick shook his head and said, “I can’t see him having that much foresight. Doesn’t seem in character.”

I nodded. “A cab, maybe? Or maybe he’s ordering an Uber.”

Nick grabbed the car radio’s mike. “I need the location of all twenty-four-hour cab companies around the target’s house.”

Moments later, the radio squawked, “Millpond Cabs, corner of North Main and Church.”

The radio squawked again, another voice this time. It was Lendowski. “Daland’s in the wind,” he said. “The pizza guy is freaking. Daland told him he needed to avoid an angry boyfriend. Told him the angry guy’s girlfriend was in the bedroom and gave him three hundred bucks. Reilly, where the hell are you?”

So it wasn’t about change after all. Not that it mattered.

Nick nudged my arm and pointed urgently to the left. I swung the Expedition accordingly, heading west as Nick answered for us both. “We’re closing on him. You and Deutsch secure the house.”

“Already done. Power’s back on.”

“Are we good?” I asked.

“We’ve got several computers. The hard drives were already over-writing. He had battery backups, but tech disconnected them. There’s also a laptop, but it’s got no hard drive.”

“He pulled it. It must be on him. That’s what we need.” I gunned the V8 engine, the four-wheel drive now winning a one-sided battle against the fresh snow.

The houses were larger now. Set farther back from the street.

Nick pointed up ahead. “Five hundred yards more, then we need to cross over North Main onto Church.”

I was scanning every alleyway as we moved. I peered into a lot shared by a fitness center and a gas station. Nothing.

“Sean, right there!” Nick shouted as he opened his window to take a better look. I slowed the SUV to a crawl.

A narrow street ran about thirty degrees off our position. Almost completely obscured by snow-covered trees was the top of a giant pepperoni pizza.

I swung the Expedition to the left, ready to turn right in another fifty yards.

Nick gestured toward the fast-approaching junction.

A single vehicle was midway through a left-hand turn onto North Main Street.

As we got level with the vehicle, a Toyota Camry, I registered the “Millpond Taxicabs” livery. The cab had pulled away before I could look inside.

I spun the wheel around, breaking hard. The Expedition skated a few feet in the original direction of travel, then completed the U-turn as the wheels regained traction.

“That’s him.”

Nick hit the siren as I swung the Expedition into the empty oncoming lane, accelerated beyond the Camry and swerved back into its path.

The cab’s driver hit the brakes. Its wheels locked and the Camry slammed into Nick’s side of the SUV, blocking his door.

I climbed out of the Expedition, pulled my sidearm, and edged around the front of the stationary SUV.

The shotgun-side rear passenger door opened and Daland emerged, both hands high over his head.

“Down,” I barked. “On your knees!”

Nick had climbed over the seats and was now covering the taxi cab’s driver, who had stepped out of the Camry, both hands in the air.

Daland dropped to his knees, shouting, “Easy with the guns! I’m unarmed.”

I stepped toward him. “The hard drive. Where is it?”

“What hard drive?”

The taxi driver turned toward me, all panicked and jittery. “He threw something out the window as we turned out of Church.”

Daland lowered his head, then turned toward the taxi driver, his face tight with anger. “They watch everything you do, every website you read, every keystroke you tap in. They know everyone you talk to, everything you buy. They own you. And you’re no one. Imagine what they do with people who matter.”

I held my position as Nick moved to cuff Daland. “Save the rant for your Twitter feed.” I gestured at the taxi driver. “Show me.”

He led as we jogged back toward the junction with Church, our footfalls crunching in the snow.

The radio squawked as I called it in. “Target secure, repeat, target secure. We’ll meet you back at the house. And tell the pizza guy his car is safe.”

The snow was falling heavier now and sticking to the ground with purpose, but it didn’t take long. We found the hard drive, half-buried in the snow, by the base of a fence.

I brushed some snowflakes from my face, enjoying the sharpness of the freezing air as it hit my lungs.

It was good to be done with Daland. It always felt great to close out an assignment successfully. We’d done our part. From here on, the ball was in the DA’s court. Right now, though, that familiar euphoria was tainted by something else, a foreboding about what I needed to get back to.

I looked up at the snowflakes, watched them cascade down onto my face which tingled under their gentle, cold stings, and shut my eyes.

The season, I sensed, really wasn’t going to be particularly jolly.

2

Boston, Massachusetts

Dr. Ralph Padley was a creature of habit, or so he liked to tell himself.

To his wife, colleagues and students, he was a massive control freak with borderline OCD-and, more often than not, just a massive pain in the ass.

This last year, though, his finely-orchestrated life had been thrown into chaos by something over which he had no control. That, combined with the absolute dread he felt at knowing that his days were now quite literally numbered, had only made him even less bearable.

The only person other than Padley who knew the origins of his near-pathological need for control was the psychoanalyst he had been seeing once a week for over a decade. When Padley was eleven-fifty-eight years ago almost to the day-he had failed to save his seven-year-old brother from drowning in a swimming pool during a family holiday at his grandparents’ place in St. Augustine, Florida. He blamed himself. After all, he was the older brother who was supposed to take care of his younger sibling. His sense of guilt, according to his shrink, made psychological, if not emotional or practical, sense, but Padley couldn’t help it. His nascent personality was more significantly affected by the fact that his parents concurred with his sense of guilt and decided he was indeed to blame. The failure of either parent to restart their son’s heart-and both were family doctors-had seeded an idea that would later flower when Padley selected his specialism after his initial four years of study at Harvard Medical School.

Before the prognosis, before he’d started losing weight and his skin had taken on a jaundiced tint, Padley had stuck to a rigorous routine. Nowadays, as well as the regular weekly appointment with his shrink and Sunday mornings in church, he went swimming four times a week, attended a concert of classical music once a month and made love to his wife every other Saturday. This last routine suited his significantly younger third wife very well, as it meant she always knew when she’d be free to nip next door and unleash her libido on one of Boston’s leading theatre critics, who despite a host of effete mannerisms and other evidence to the contrary-enough to convince Padley that his neighbor had zero interest in his wife-was most definitively not gay.

Padley was a Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at Harvard, a post he’d held since 1985. As a surgeon, he’d saved many lives. He’d also taught many others who’d gone on to save even more lives. Over the years, he’d taken no small dose of solace in knowing that. He’d always considered it some kind of atonement for the other work he did, the work only a handful of people knew about.

The work that had the exact opposite effect on its subjects.

It had all started when he was his early thirties, at a time he was deep into some potentially ground-breaking research in the field of cardiovascular pharmacology. His declared aim was to create a next-generation drug that could maintain a stable cardiac rhythm-a “pacemaker in a pill” that would, within a generation, render both pacemakers and beta blockers obsolete as interventions for heart attacks.

The world of medical research being as secretive and competitive as it is, Padley kept his work to himself. Five years and hundreds of lab rats later, however, his experiments took a wrong turn and he ended up creating the very opposite of what he was looking for.

The discovery first confounded, then terrified, him.

For a while, he struggled with what to do about it. He considered destroying any evidence of his work and forgetting about it. He knew the latter would be impossible and came close to doing the former several times, but he also found that impossible. The potential for his discovery was simply too powerful to ignore. He decided on another tack. Being a staunch patriot at a time when his country was embroiled in hot and cold wars all over the globe, Padley contacted the CIA. They promptly dispatched someone to interview him and turned out to be very, very interested.

The understanding was simple. He would be paid handsomely to continue to work covertly on perfecting his discovery and its delivery methods while carrying on with his official work at the university.

Not long after, the scope of his secret work was broadened.

He’d led a double life ever since. Compartmentalizing his life like that didn’t present a problem for someone as maniacally organized as he was. It was actually quite a thrill to feel part of a covert, select group of people who were doing great things for their country. He enjoyed the meetings he was called to attend and, despite not knowing much about a couple of members in that group-not their real names, not a thing, in fact, about their lives-he’d felt a strong sense of kinship with them all and, by extension, with the agency.

Over the years, both lines of work had progressed successfully. Some ground-breaking research into hearts grown from adult stem cells had eventually put him squarely back on the medical map. Padley had found a way to grow cells that were capable of maintaining a stable electrical charge, without which even the most perfect artificially grown heart simply wasn’t viable for use in a living human being. He resolutely failed to see the irony that someone with no sense of humor had spent his entire professional career to date working with what had been christened the “funny current”, that is, the current that spontaneously occurs in the sinoatrial and atrioventricular nodes of the heart. Or to put it more simply, as he did to his students with a tone as patronizing as it was lacking in self-awareness: the electrical current that provides life to everyone in the lecture theater unless they’re wearing a pacemaker.

His discovery appeased the faculty that had sunk more over a million dollars into his earlier, “abandoned”, pharmacological research. More than appeased, in fact, since they stood to make many times their investment from patents covering Padley’s work.

So everyone was happy, except that Padley was still the dour control freak he had always been and his third wife had, much like her predecessors, still failed to achieve a single orgasm with her husband. Given that he’d never been able to bless her with children either, he at least had the decency never to question her burgeoning credit card purchases. Their lack of reproduction, though no longer a point of argument, had left a deep hole in his wife’s soul-or so she put it-a hole that she filled with fundraising dinners and the aforementioned trysts with Boston’s foremost theatre critic.

Less than a year before, however, everything changed. His whole world was upended by his test results.

He didn’t have long to live.

The unwelcome, uninvited guest that was metastatic pancreatic cancer was also a very brutal and unforgiving one.

His emotive responses to it were unorthodox.

A life at the cutting edge of medicine meant denial was never going to be an issue.

The same applied to anger and bargaining-the very notions were beneath him.

Acceptance was already well anchored inside him-so well anchored that he refused to go through the rounds of chemotherapy that might slightly prolong his life. He didn’t want to spend the time he had left either in hospitals or sick from the after-effects.

A sense of depression, however, did take root very quickly, and from that depression something else emerged: a fear of what awaited him in the hereafter, and an urgent, rapidly growing need for atonement.

Memories from years of covert operations and replays of hushed conversations were now vividly consuming his days and his nights. The faces of the dead, in photographs or newspapers or on television screens, accosted him at the most unexpected times, clamoring for attention and shouting out for retribution, while the disturbing, subconscious imagery of eternal damnation haunted his dreams.

Much as he tried to shake off this unfamiliar onset of guilt and regret, he couldn’t escape it.

He needed to do something about it. He had to seek out some kind of forgiveness. He feared that he was well past redemption, even though he’d always been taught it was always a possibility if the intent was honest and pure. His wasn’t necessarily so; it was driven by a very deep-seated, primal fear. But it was all he had.

He thought long and hard about what he could do. He didn’t discuss it with anyone; not his wife, not his shrink, not even his priest. He would do this alone. If it wasn’t possible to change the past, perhaps he could, at least, affect the future. But doing it would be tricky-and dangerous. And although he didn’t have much time left to worry about in terms of losing it, he clung, like many people who were suddenly faced with their impending death, to every day he had left.

No, he would need to be careful. And what he did had to be effective too, if he was going to have a chance at the redemption he sought.

His first attempt had proved disastrous. He’d thought he’d chosen well. The man he’d selected had solid credentials. But despite all the meticulous planning, despite knowing what he was up against and being aware of the capabilities of the very people who were now his enemies, Padley had failed. The person he’d reached out to was now dead. That man’s death had, Padley was sure, come as a blessing after the torture he had no doubt been subjected to. But Padley’s planning had at least been successful at one thing: it had kept him safe. No one had come after him. He was still free, he was still breathing. Which meant his precautions had worked.

He just needed to be even more selective in who he approached this time.

Days and weeks of mulling had yielded a handful of possibilities, but one of them stood out more and more with each deliberation. It even had, he thought, an elegant symmetry to it, which pleased his overly ordered mind.

He would make the call today, he decided. He’d be even more vigilant, more careful, than he had been the first time around. He’d use a different prepaid cell phone; one he’d also purchased for cash and that couldn’t be traced back to him. He’d still use the agency-level voice changer for the call, the one he’d used on his first attempt. Most importantly, he’d be very, very clear in warning the man about what not to do.

After that, it would be out of his hands.

He’d just need Special Agent Sean Reilly to be as effective at his job as Padley had been at both of his.