The End Game (20 page)

SUNDAY

32

Federal Plaza, Lower Manhattan

Seated at the conference table, Deutsch didn’t think it was possible to feel angrier, sadder, more tired or more frustrated that she did at that precise moment. It was twenty-hours since she’d last sat in that same chair, twenty-four hours since her boss had chewed her out publicly in front of the same collection of grim faces. Déjà vu all over again, except for the fact that Lendowski wasn’t at the table—or anywhere to be found, for that matter.

They’d found his car parked by a gas station a few yards away from the thruway’s overpass. There was no sign of foul play. His work cell phone was missing and turned off, its battery pulled—meaning there was no way to track him. There was no one at his home, either.

Gallo had driven into town again and was chairing the emergency proceedings for the second day running, and on a Sunday morning at that. The two CIA liaisons, Henriksson and his silent partner, were also back in the room, as were four other agents from the New York field office that Deutsch barely knew.

“We know Reilly left the city in a car he stole from a parking lot on Fulton Street shortly after he escaped custody,” one of the agents said. “A 1994 Caprice Classic. We’ve got the car heading north on the I-95 at around two thirty in the afternoon yesterday, so around twelve hours after his escape. We don’t know what he did in the meantime.”

Deutsch noticed Henriksson studying her impassively and knew her face must have looked like thunder at the renewed mention of Reilly’s escape. She tried to shrink into herself in a vain attempt to disappear from the room.

“We have another couple of street camera sightings in and around Mamaroneck last night. Nothing after that. So either he dumped the car or—”

Henriksson seemed to lose patience and interrupted. “We’re wasting time. We all know what happened. Reilly drove up there to see Chaykin. They met somewhere, Lendowski stepped in and Reilly got the jump on him. Whether Agent Lendowski is still alive or not is the only question here, although given we haven’t heard from him yet, my guess is he’s no longer around to tell his side of the story.”

Deutsch jolted to life. “Hang on a second—that’s a pretty big assumption to make with no evidence.”

“Oh?” the CIA agent asked, his tone chillingly calm. “You have a more likely scenario about where your missing partner is?” His sardonic emphasis on “missing partner” was hard to miss.

Deutsch tried her best not to look like a jackrabbit trying to stare down an eighteen-wheeler. “No, but—why didn’t he call in his position or ask for backup?”

The robotic Scandinavian wasn’t going to be deterred that easily. “Maybe he didn’t get the chance. Maybe Reilly jumped him before he had a chance to call it in.”

“But why didn’t he—”

“What?” He cut her off firmly. “Reilly already assaulted you and Lendowski once. It’s not like he has an aversion to using force. And if I may offer some advice here, Agent Deutsch—I wouldn’t go out of my way to defend an agent who escaped while under your expert custody. It might make people wonder.” Without giving her a chance for an indignant rebuttal, the CIA agent turned to Gallo. “We need to bring in Chaykin. She knows what happened. We need to question her.”

Gallo glanced at Deutsch, frowning, then swung his gaze back on Henriksson. “I agree, Chaykin’s lying to us. I mean, that whole story she gave Agent Deutsch about her feeling trapped and needed to clear her head—it’s total bullshit. No question. But we can’t prove otherwise and we can’t just wheel her in here based on conjecture. Her lawyer would have a field day.”

“Then don’t give her a chance to lawyer up. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a national security matter. In fact, we wouldn’t be sitting here today if you’d handed Reilly over when we asked you to instead of giving in to his Fifth Amendment bullshit.”

Gallo adjusted his position in his seat, visibly uneasy with where this was going.

“Reilly’s history here might be checkered, but it’s only checkered in terms of his unswerving commitment to getting the job done. And I don’t appreciate your coming in here and—”

Deutsch slammed her hand down on the table, harder than she had meant. The noise succeeded in gaining her the attention of everyone present. “He’s not a killer,” she said.

Henriksson looked at her like she’d sprouted a second pair of eyes. “You do realize he’s wanted for murder?”

“This isn’t some crazy psycho we’re talking about, OK?” She glanced around the table. “You know this guy. You’ve worked with him for years. I mean, Christ. Doesn’t that count for anything around here?”

She looked around the table. She seemed to have struck a nerve.

“Look, I agree,” she continued. “Tess Chaykin probably did give us the slip to see him. I can’t see any other reason for it. But I don’t think Reilly is a cold-blooded murderer. There’s more going on here. You must know that.”

She hazarded a glance at Henriksson and felt like slapping that narrow-eyed, immutable expression off his face.

He ignored her outburst and turned to Gallo. “I don’t think it’s advisable to keep Agent Deutsch on this case. I think her perspective is, at the very least, skewed by her—”

It was Gallo’s turn to interrupt. “You know what? It’s not your decision, is it? The last time I checked, the FBI wasn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA. So how about you rendition your ass out of my bureau and leave this case to us, given that this is a domestic situation which, I think, just happens to be outside your agency’s remit?”

Deutsch sat back and breathed out, zoning out of the tail end of the confrontation.

33

Richmond, Virginia

Roos guided his Cessna Skyhawk through the low-lying clouds and landed at Chesterfield County Airport without difficulty. The bad weather that currently had the East Coast in its grip was giving Virginia a break, and his time in the air was only marginally longer than the two-hour flight to which he had become accustomed.

Ten minutes later he was in a rental car on his way up the Richmond Beltway toward Midlothian.

He and his old partner had felt the need to discuss the current crisis face to face. They’d met at the golf club many times; it was a convenient midway point for them both, as far by plane for Roos as it was for Tomblin to drive to from his home further north in Virginia and his day job at CIA headquarters in Langley.

While in the air, Roos had exiled the call, the one that had awakened him well before he had planned to get up, from his mind. Instead, he allowed himself to savor skimming the frothy blanket of clouds below him, totally cut off from the complications of the world below.

Now that he was back on the ground, the facts as he was aware of them had rushed back into sharp focus, and they required his urgent attention.

He took the Midlothian Turnpike into an area to the west of Richmond which had morphed from having originally produced the very first commercially mined coal in what would become the United States to becoming home to several golf clubs. In the decades that he had known the area, the last remaining forests had almost entirely given way to suburban sprawl, leaving a couple of small parks and the lush, undulating hills and managed woodland of the clubs as the only reminder of how the land had looked. This continuing spread of subdivisions—and the highways that serviced them—was one of the prime motivating forces in his move to the Outer Banks and then later to Ocracoke, the simple fact being that the island had extremely limited capacity for development along with a community that understood the raw beauty of their environment.

Salisbury Country Club had genuine history, something he always looked for when selecting a location where he would regularly spend even the smallest amount of time. The clubhouse, built along Colonial lines in the 60s, had replaced the original eighteenth century hunting lodge which had burned to the ground in 1920.

Roos waved to the valet as he pulled up to the clubhouse. Although he came here fewer times with each passing year, he was still well known by the staff, and they kept the formalities to the barest minimum whenever he was here. The club was civilized enough to have no need for security cameras, except at the perimeter, the member vetting process alone being enough to ensure this would suffice. None of them would be signing in or out. If anyone asked, none of them had been here.

The door swung shut softly behind him as Roos walked into the largest of the wood-paneled private rooms. A large oil painting of Thomas Jefferson—who had saved the property from being confiscated by the British when its owner was captured coming back from Scotland on revolutionary business—hung over a massive stone fireplace, which took up most of one wall.

Edward J. Tomblin was sitting in a burgundy leather armchair drinking tea. He wore a dark brown tailored corduroy suit, handmade loafers and a forest-green V-neck sweater over a cotton shirt that appeared to be at least ten years old. Along with his Yale University tie, his attire made him more like a college professor than one of the most powerful men in the intelligence community—a position few people who met him would suspect, as he exuded the kind of easygoing authority that had always perfectly complemented Roos’s more intense manner. As befitted his position, though, Tomblin was a very shrewd operator. He had the influence and inside knowledge to move between the agency’s often warring factions and always come out on the side that appeared to have won, even if it hadn’t. Running the National Clandestine Service was the culmination of his career management skills. The only step up from there would be running the whole agency, which was a remote but not an inconceivable possibility.

Tomblin looked up from his tea. “I’m not sure I approve of what they’ve done to the back nine.”

Roos sat down on the floral-patterned couch to the right of his friend. “I’m not sure someone with a handicap that’s almost as high as his age is entitled to an opinion on that matter, Eddy.”

Tomblin snorted. “Maybe, but I still have to look at it every time you drag me down here. Are you going to join us for Christmas this year? Mary was asking.”

“As she has done every year since my divorce,” Roos replied. “It’s still no. Regretfully, of course.”

“Of course. I’ll pass it on.”

A waiter brought Roos the coffee he had ordered, then left again. Roos glanced around the room as he took his first sip. There was no one seated within earshot. The large room was silent except for the crackle of logs in the huge fireplace.

“This is a total clusterfuck,” Tomblin said. “How the hell did Reilly get out?”

“We don’t know. They said he got sick so they were taking him to a hospital when he made the break.”

“What about your inside man? Is he still missing?”

Roos nodded. “Last time we spoke, he was trailing Reilly’s woman. He thought she was going to meet with him.”

“So Reilly took him out.”

“Looks that way.”

“That’s what happens when you use a non-vetted asset.” Tomblin thought about it. “We need to find his body. It only makes Reilly look worse. In case.”

“Screw the body. We need to take Reilly out. That’s all.”

“Does Sandman have any leads?”

“Nothing at the moment. But Reilly’ll resurface. He has to.”

Tomblin said, “At least the Feds are taking our lead on this and keeping it shuttered. But we need to shut him down before we lose that window.”

“I’m down with that, as the kids say. What about the penetration attempts? Have they stopped?”

Tomblin didn’t seem alarmed at all. “No. Someone’s still trying to break into our servers. Looking for you. This guy’s got a real hard-on for you.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Roos cursed the day he’d accepted to help out an old friend at the DEA with his offbeat plan to bait a major Mexican drug baron—a favor that had first put Reilly on his trail.

“Reilly’s got someone helping him. Whoever it is, they’re very good. Not many people out there with that much talent. If we can backtrace their location, it’ll lead us to him. We can’t let this get any further, Gordo. No more screwups. Any of this comes out and . . . you want to spend the rest of your years behind bars?”

“It’s not going to happen.” Roos struck the arm of his plush chair with each word.

“We need to put Reilly down. Fast.”

“Have you put the Fort on him?” he asked, using his preferred nickname for the NSA.

“As of this morning,” Tomblin said. “I got one of our guys there to set it up quietly. Full spectrum, priority one. We’ve got a lot of videos and recordings for the cameras and voice taps to work off, which helps. He’s bound to turn up soon.”

This pleased Roos. He knew how pervasive the NSA’s reach into surveillance camera networks was and how effective their face recognition software—to say nothing of voice-match monitoring of phone lines and keyword tracking. “Who gets the alert?”

“Just you, me and Sandman. We’re keeping it in the family.”

“Good.”

“Speaking of family . . .”

Roos set his mug down. He sensed there was more at play here.

“I’m worried about contagion and our favorite brainiacs.”

Roos knew where this was going. He just shrugged. “They were always going to be a weak link. That’s why we’ve have them on such a tight leash.”

Tomblin leaned in. “They’re civilians, Gordo. They’re old. And they’re not like us; they didn’t join up for the cause. They’re scientists who more or less stumbled into this. They gave us their expertise out of, I don’t know, a sense of duty, an intellectual curiosity, maybe for the thrill of it . . . but at the end of the day, they’re still civilians. With all the vulnerabilities and failings that entails.”

“And we can’t risk that any more.”

“Padley had his Road to Damascus moment and decided to clear his conscience. The three of them—they talk to each other. Especially Padley and Orford. They were close back in the day. How do we know it’s not a feeling they all share? How do we know one of the others won’t do what Padley did?”

“Won’t try to do, you mean,” Roos corrected him.

Tomblin brushed the comment away. “I think we should clean house.”

Roos let the notion sink in. He’d already considered it himself, but thinking about it and
doing
it were two different things. He knew these people. He’d worked with them for years. They’d done everything asked of them, without fail.

And now they’d have to die. Simply because they were a security risk.

Roos let out a small chortle. “You want the Janitors cleaned up? Not all of them, I hope. I’m kind of partial to sticking around a bit longer so we can enjoy these little chats before I embarrass you out on the course yet again.”

“You know what I mean,” Tomblin told him.

Roos nodded. “OK. We should start with Siddle. He’s the more clued-in of the two.”

“Sandman’s going to have his hands full.”

“It’s what he does. Let’s finish our tea and head out. I’ll send him instructions from the first tee while you go through your mulligans.”

Roos studied his old partner. “Did you tell Viking what’s going on?”

“No need,” Tomblin said. “We can take care of it.”

Roos nodded and leaned back into the couch. He could see two problems. One was that Sandman was indeed going to be a busy man. The other was not so much a problem as a subtle alarm going off deep in the folds of his experienced brain: he needed to make sure any blowback from this whole mess didn’t end up catching him in its blaze.

Ex-partners and old friends counted for a lot, but every relationship had its breaking point, and he knew things were getting stretched unbearably thin. Beyond the fact that they would all end up in prison if this thing ever blew up, some of his old partners had even more to lose if that ever happened.

He’d need to watch his back from here on.