The End Game (33 page)

56

I flung the battering ram aside as the door burst inward and following it right in with the Remington in both hands.

It was dark inside, but in the light coming in from the outside hallway, I caught sight of my shooter regaining his footing from being hit by the door. I spun around and swung the shotgun towards him, but he was already charging at me and grabbed its barrel before I fired, using my turning momentum to fling me around and slam me into the wall just as I pulled the trigger.

The explosion was deafening, but the shot was wasted. My shooter was clear of it and all it did was blast a framed art print and the wall around it into confetti. I held onto the shotgun as I hit the wall sideways, hard, barely having time to recover before he flicked it up ferociously, its stock connecting with my jaw like an expertly placed uppercut. I yelped as he then drove a boot into my shin, an instant before his right hand reigned several quick blows into my ribcage, sending me recoiling back, though not far enough to feel the full brunt of his left landing a hammer blow to the side of my head. I somehow managed to keep hold of the shotgun throughout this onslaught, but it was impossible to take aim. I tried twisting my entire body and stepping back, swinging the shotgun around toward his head, but he grabbed my wrist with his left hand and sent my aim down at the floor before slamming my hand against the wall and sending the shotgun to the ground.

He shoved me off to one side and dived for it, but I launched myself back and stomped on his hand just as it reached it, kicking the shotgun away and sending it skittering off to some far corner of the room at the same time as I heard some snapping tendons and his sharp grunt. He span around and sent a hammer of a punch with his left hand at my kidneys, winding me and causing me to go light-headed for an instant—enough for him to move in with his injured hand, aiming it right at my throat.

I saw it in time and ducked it, grabbing his arm and flinging him past me and spinning him around so I had him from behind, my arms now tight against him, one around his chest, the other around his neck—and I tightened my grip. He couldn’t move. I had my legs planted firmly and out of range and I could feel the momentum had shifted—I was choking the life out of him and he was waning. He was strong, though, and it was still taking everything I had to keep him locked in. He tried kicks, elbows, and punches, but nothing connected, and each one was getting less potent than the last.

I had him—at least, I thought so—his right arm stopped trying to pull me off his neck or pound me off him, and weirdly, his hand went down and he seemed to be doing a frenzied rummage through his pocket, and before I realized what was happening, I felt it: a stab, deep and sharp, like a bite—the bite of an injection, some kind of pressurized delivery, deep into my thigh.

My senses went haywire—I instantly knew what he’d done to me.

I was already dead.

Every neuron in my body went into hyperdrive, acutely aware to the poison that I knew was coursing through my veins, winding and weaving its way from my thigh across my torso and all the way up to my heart, where it would soon wreak havoc and cause some catastrophic failure that would kill me right there and then, in Gigi’s loft, in mid-fight, with my own killer in my hands.

I could feel odd sensations happening all over me—my arms going a bit numb, a tightening in my chest, a heaviness in my head, though I couldn’t tell if they were real or if I was imagining them. Either way, I knew I didn’t have much time left.

I had to end it here, right now.

I couldn’t let him walk away. Not after he’d killed me.

I wouldn’t be able to save myself, but at least Kurt and Gigi would walk away from this. Maybe.

I summoned every ounce of strength I could muster and went for the kill—I tightened my grip around his neck, then I quickly brought up my other arm, took his head in a vice-like hold and twisted it as brutally as I could. One move, the most unflinchingly savage and rage-filled act of my life. I just wanted him dead. I knew how hard it was to pull off, but I also knew enough about the body to know which vertebrae I needed to break in order to sever the spinal cord so as to kill him almost instantly and not just cause him slow respiratory failure or some kind of survivable paralysis. I haven’t killed that many people—my career is about locking people up, not playing judge and jury—and those I did kill, usually in self-defense, I’d dispatched with the help of some kind of weapon. I’d never killed anyone with my bare hands, though right now I could think of nothing I wanted more.

I saw Deutsch appear in the doorway, saw her aiming her gun at us in a two-handed stance as her mouth formed the words “Stop! Hands in the air,” but I was oblivious to her presence and her voice; all I could feel were the muscles, bones and tendons between my hands as I heard the telltale crack and felt his body twitch before it went limp in my arms.

I let go of him and he dropped to the ground like a rag doll, lifeless—just as I soon would be.

I spun around for a three-sixty, my eyes not really registering anything, unsure about whether Kurt or Gigi were still alive, unable to see much in the darkness and through the haze shrouding my senses, then my eyes settled again on Deutsch, and I staggered towards her.

Her face was locked in shock as I told her, “He hit me with a . . . Alami. Get me to Alami, fast.”

Then I hit the ground and all sight and sound faded to nothingness.

FRIDAY

57

New York - Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan

Much later, when we’d talk about it, I’d often get asked if I saw the “white light” or some kind of tunnel. To everybody’s disappointment and contrary to what Alami had told me many of his patients had experienced in those hours and days when they were technically—in the traditional, loose sense of the word—dead, I could only say I didn’t see anything like that. No lighted tunnel, no angel to guide me, no heaven either. It was simply the deepest sleep I’d ever had. Twenty-seven hours of it, I was told.

I didn’t hear the panicked shouts between Deutsch, Kurt and Gigi at the apartment after I lost consciousness. I didn’t remember or feel the ten minutes of relentless chest compressions Deutsch gave me or any of the six defibrillator shocks the paramedics hit me with before resuming the CPR as they rushed me to NewYork-Presbyterian. I have no memory of everything Alami and his team did to me during those long hours: shoving the hose down my throat to intubate me, cutting into my veins to siphon out my blood, cool it down and re-oxygenate it, hitting me with more shocks, injecting me with all kinds of intravenous drugs and plugging various monitors into me to bring me back to life. But they did. Those brilliant, dedicated human beings—my real-life angels, I guess—all of them brought me back, and I’ll forever be grateful and humbled by their actions.

The first thing I became aware of was the blurred face of Tess hovering over me. Deutsch had driven up and escorted her out of the house, past the FBI and local cops who were watching it, saying she needed to ask her some things down at Federal Plaza. Tess later told me my fingers had twitched unexpectedly and she’d jumped out of her seat by the bed and looked down on my face, willing me to wake up. Within seconds, other familiar faces came into focus: Kurt and Gigi, someone I eventually remembered to be Alami, and some other people I didn’t know but who I’d soon realize were doctors and nurses. They all had faces intensely contorted by worry and relief, which confused me. It would take me a while to understand what was going on. I couldn’t remember what happened, I didn’t even know what I was doing in the hospital. I couldn’t speak because of the tube down my throat, and when I tried writing out a question, I was shocked to see my penmanship looking far more like that of a toddler than my own.

I spent most of that second night asleep again. The next morning, Tess wasn’t around. It was too risky to have her come down here on her own or to have Deutsch bring her over again. Instead, Deutsch had promised to keep her appraised using Viber VOIP calls to Kim’s laptop, which wouldn’t be picked up by any taps on Tess or Kim’s phones. Still, one thing helped make up for her absence: they took out the tracheal tube they’d shoved down my throat. I could speak again—more of a croak, really, but still. It was a huge relief.

Deutsch came by early, long before going into work. She, Kurt, and Gigi filled me in on what had happened, starting with Deutsch’s surprise at seeing the couple shouting to her from deeper inside the loft space and finding a guy dressed entirely in green leather and a striking-looking but bruised redhead struggling to work their way free of flex-cuffs.

In the heat of the moment, Deutsch had made a couple of quick decisions to keep me off the radar. She’d asked Gigi to call in the emergency services and say Kurt had had a heart attack. When a couple of cops who’d been part of the aborted SWAT raid had taken an interest as they wheeled me into the ambulance, she’d used her FBI creds to defuse their interest and say it was an unrelated matter, some random guy in the building who’d had one hamburger too many. At the hospital, she’d also used her shield to register me under a false name, saying it was a matter of national security, two words that wield huge power these days.

The downside of her decisions was that my shooter’s body had remained in Gigi’s apartment and Deutsch couldn’t call it in, get the body taken to the coroner’s lab and trigger an investigation into finding out who he was. It wasn’t a great loss, in that I didn’t think he would show up on any of our databanks. I imagined he was part of that same invisible group of spooks that officially didn’t exist. It was a problem for Gigi and Kurt, though, because it wouldn’t be long before the busted door to the lobby would attract attention, as would the one to Gigi’s apartment. Deutsch had made Kurt drag the shooter’s body away from its highly visible position and hide him in the bedroom to avoid letting the paramedics spot him. The people who sent him—Corrigan and his CIA ally or allies—had to know where he was when he went missing, and if they hadn’t done it already, they’d soon have someone there to find out why he’d gone dark. Deutsch didn’t know if that had happened already, since she wasn’t about to go asking and they weren’t about to announce it. Either way, Gigi and Kurt would be the obvious candidates to finger for his death, if his body ever made it into the system, but so far Deutsch had seen no sign of it. Perhaps they’d make his body disappear and that would be the end of it. Deutsch was still struggling to figure out what she could do to defuse things for them if things got heated, without landing behind bars herself.

For the time being, though, what was clear was that Gigi’s apartment was off limits. She had checked herself and Kurt into a small hotel close to the hospital using a fake ID. Gigi had planned for the day she’d need to hit the eject button and get out of there quickly, and while the paramedics were busy working on me, she’d hit the kill switch she’d built into her systems and purged them. Anything of importance, though, was still contained in a four terabyte hard drive the size of a paperback novel and accessible by her beefy laptop, both of which were still in her possession.

Which was critical to me because the next day, a message would land on her laptop, a message that would finally break down the walls of secrecy that I’d been bashing my head against for months.

Someone responded to the anonymous posting Gigi and Kurt had uploaded onto Daland’s darknet site.

And we were game on again.

58

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Edward Tomblin had been through major crises before. He’d been shot, even tortured, and he’d had field ops go bad on him. The worst were two occasions when he and Roos had been undercover on foreign soil and had contacts sell them out, one for material gain while they were in Sudan, and the other under torture in Nicaragua. Both times, they’d had to exfiltrate themselves out of hostile territory with only the thinnest of margins separating them from extreme unpleasantness.

Tomblin was never fazed by crisis. Like his old partner Roos, he had the reputation as one of the calmest tacticians in the business, a man who could face down calamities with a sang-froid that bordered on unsettling.

He wasn’t calm now. Not after one of his inner circle of trusted OSINT geeks had informed him that portraits of him and someone else—who Tomblin knew to be Roos, even before the Open-Source Intelligence analyst had messaged him a copy of the drawings—had popped up on an underground darknet marketplace, offering a reward for anyone who could identify them.

Tomblin hadn’t been out in the field for years. As the current head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, physical danger wasn’t on his radar, not any more. He’d done his time, and he now left the dirty business up to others. Sure, he still had to negotiate tricky political situations himself and maneuver to keep certain secrets from threatening his career. But physical threats? A thing of the past—until now.

This was different.

This was a left-field attack from an unhinged, obsessed man who possessed a highly dangerous skill set and seemed like he’d never give up. And for the first time since the crisis started, Tomblin wasn’t only worried about the possibility of exposure and prison time. He was worried about his life.

“So what are you waiting for?” Tomblin asked the analyst. “Take them down. Take them down or just kill the whole damn site.”

“We can’t,” the analyst replied. “That’s not how this thing works.”

“What do you mean, we can’t? It’s running on Tor, isn’t it? We own the damn thing.”

Which was, in some ways, true.

As an anonymity online network, Tor—the name came out of its initial incarnation as The Onion Router—was Shakespearean in its origin. It was a privacy tool, free software that was supposed to shield Internet users from being spied on by the US government’s intelligence agencies—a somewhat unrealistic expectation, given that they were the very people who had created it.

Not that most Tor users were aware of that.

It was developed, funded and built by the US government—specifically, the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—to allow its agents to work online undercover without leaving a trace of government IP addresses that could unmask them. It was then released as free software and today, millions of people used it. Using “onion routing,” which consisted of bouncing traffic randomly through a parallel peer-to-peer network that was wrapped in layers of encryption to confuse and disconnect its origin and destination, dissidents and activists in countries with restricted Internet reach could use Tor to publish out of their governments’ reach. At the same time, illegal child porn and drug marketplaces could also thrive in its supposedly untraceable cloud.

What most of its users didn’t know, however—not until Edward Snowden’s leaks, that is—was that Tor actually provided the very opposite of anonymity. It helped red-flag targets for NSA and law enforcement surveillance and gave the watchers access to all of those users’ online activity.

“Not in this case,” the analyst said. “It’s not a pure Tor play. Whoever built Erebus knew we had our claws all over Tor, so they built it to use Tor in a way we didn’t foresee. A couple of our guys at Fort Meade and me have been working on it since I spotted the post with your face on it, but we can't find a way into its core. We can see the sketches, but we can't take them down.”

Tomblin was standing by the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of this office on the northwest corner of the sixth floor of the New Headquarters Building, facing the courtyard and the white triple vault that housed the dining rooms beyond it.

“Of course you can,” he said as his eyes roamed across the Kryptos sculpture that sat alone and undisturbed in a quiet corner of the courtyard. A ten-foot tall, curving verdigris scroll that contained an 865-character coded message, it seemed to flow out from a petrified tree near a water-filled basin that was bordered by a stone garden.

“I’m sorry, sir, but right now—we can’t.”

Tomblin stared through the sculpture as he contemplated the analyst’s words. It had taken another Agency analyst more than seven years to crack its code and reveal the hidden message inside it—although one of its sections, consisting of ninety-seven characters, still waited deciphering. He’d done it in his spare time, during his lunch breaks, using nothing more than pencil and paper and a brilliant mind. Over seven hundred hours of quiet contemplation and brain gymnastics to uncover what another inspired mind had created in the privacy of his studio.

Such was the caliber of the analysts Tomblin had got to know at the Agency.

Tomblin wondered if the Erebus darknet site would prove as stubborn in giving up its secrets. He had full confidence in his team’s abilities to break down any barriers that prevented them from achieving what needed to be done. Now, more than ever, he needed that same determination, that same dogged pursuit of a solution—he needed a result, only he needed it fast.

“Shut it down,” he told the analyst. “I need this done quickly. Am I making myself clear?”

“We’re trying, sir. But even when we use the source's login credentials, the most we can do is create a fresh account using our plant as a nominator. Given enough time, we might be able to identify regular users and their locations by analyzing entry and exit patterns, but that will take days—if not longer. And if they're smart, whoever uploaded the sketches will only log in once more when they get the alert—and that's if someone recognizes you and decides to take up that offer to sell you out.”

Tomblin closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s not good enough.”

“I know, sir. I can tell you, whoever built it wasn’t some DoD contractor or a Naval Research brainiac out to make a fast buck. This came from true motivation, one of these crusaders who thinks protecting the Internet from Big Brother is like Orwell going to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists and managed to create a site layer which is as close to artificially intelligent as anyone's come. The site’s servers are totally virtual and self-perpetuating—they behave exactly like a virus. They move around the world from server farm to server farm, over-writing their trail as they move along. The guys over at the Bureau found Silk Road because it was physically hosted somewhere. The their cyber crimes team found the server with a little help from the NSA, they cloned it, they combed through the transaction records and used what they found as evidence to indict the guy who set it up. Whoever built this learned from that—this baby’s a couple of generations up on it. It has no physical location, no owner in law, no administrator logging into it to keep it running. It's the ghost in the machine—literally—though in this case, we didn't kill the victim.”

“Find a way,” Tomblin insisted, his tone, though calm, leaving no doubt about his resolve. “And keep it contained. No one outside your immediate team is to breathe a word of this to anyone. And I mean, anyone.”

“Understood.”

Tomblin hung up and looked up from the sculpture at the bleak December sky hanging over him.

He had a decision to make.

The portraits were good. Anyone who knew him and Roos would easily recognize them. It was as if they were done in a professional sitting, and they looked younger in them. They’d been aged a bit, but Tomblin’s expert eye could tell it had just been layered on. They were from someone from their past. From decades earlier, maybe.

He knew it had to be Reilly. The FBI agent had found a way to get his hands on their likenesses, and given Reilly’s recent collision with Tomblin and Roos’s past, Tomblin knew exactly who Reilly’s benefactor had to be.

Sokolov. The slippery Russian scientist had given them up to Reilly.

Tomblin was seething inside.

This was all Roos’s fault. This whole mess had started after Roos had gone and helped his old buddy at the DEA with his cockamamie scheme to flush out a drug baron by brainwashing Reilly’s son—without consulting with Tomblin. A reckless, unwarranted, unilateral act that had ignited Reilly and turned him into a rabid bloodhound.

A bloodhound who, by the looks of it, had his teeth in them already and wasn’t about to let go.

Tomblin’s discontent intensified further when he thought about Sandman. If their assassin had done his job and finished Reilly off when he’d had the chance, none of them—not Tomblin, not Roos, not Viking—would be in this predicament. But that ship had sailed. Tomblin’s men had recovered Sandman’s body from Gigi Decker’s apartment and spirited it out unnoticed. No one would ever find a trace of the dead assassin. Not the way they’d had it disposed of. Alerts and facial recognition surveillance trawls were quickly put in place for both Gigi Decker and Kurt Jaegers, but so far, nothing had come up.

Tomblin had a tough decision to make, and his mind was already homing in on one of the two options open to him.

He knew Reilly’s family was still off limits to them, due to round-the-clock FBI and police surveillance in case Reilly made contact with them. He couldn’t get to them without attracting attention.

Which left him with one strategy—but two different variants of it. He played them out in his mind, then settled on the one that seemed more logical.

He couldn’t not tell Roos. There was a chance Roos would get a similar call from someone who was on Erebus. Tomblin didn’t think it would come from within the CIA—Roos had been working on the outside long enough that the new analysts, like the one who had alerted Tomblin, didn’t know him. Furthermore, they were under strict instructions not to inform anyone about it. Still, a lot of ghosts from their past were skulking around Erebus. Tomblin knew that.

He picked up his encrypted cell phone and called Roos.

His old partner was, not unexpectedly, livid. He said he hadn’t yet heard about the drawings, which was probably true, although given how high the stakes had reached and how good Roos was at dissembling, Tomblin couldn’t be sure.

Either way, he brought him up to speed with the analyst’s assessment.

Roos asked, “So . . . options?”

“I don’t know,” Tomblin said. “There’s a chance no one will sell us out.”

“You want to count on that?”

“Not really. And I don’t want it hanging over me like that, not knowing if and when someone does sell us out.”

“I don’t either. So it’s only a question of time before Reilly knows who at least one of us is.”

“That’s a fair assumption,” Tomblin replied.

Roos didn’t say anything for a moment. Tomblin knew he was letting the thought play itself out, allowing competing scenarios to unfurl in his mind’s eye.

“He’s gonna come after us, Gordo,” Tomblin added, his tone somber and resolved. “Sooner or later, unannounced, and unforgiving. It’s gonna happen. And I think we need to kill off that uncertainty and make it happen.”

“You want to flush him out?”

“Yes,” Tomblin said, already visualizing the endgame that would get rid of his problem once and for all. “On our terms. With a home-court advantage.”

“The blind,” Roos said.

Tomblin wasn’t surprised that his old partner had come to the conclusion he’d expected of him. “Exactly,” he told him. “The blind. I’ll set it up.”