Endgame Novella #5 Read online

  I held the bomb. It wasn’t heavy. There was five pounds of C4 in it, the clock, and the detonators. It seemed so innocent. I knew that this much C4 would make a decent crater, but I really had no idea what to expect. This was just a shoe box. It could have been holding a pair of loafers, not explosives that could level a building.

  And we carried the guns we’d hidden in our luggage. They would be hard to get to in a fight, considering the big robes we wore, but at the hotel Kat had cut a slit in both our robes at our waists so we could access our weapons. Kat had a holster for her Beretta. I tucked my M1911 into my belt. We didn’t expect to need them. We’d watched the compound since we arrived in Turkey, sitting at the same café. There was never anyone coming or going from either the warehouse or the office building. The lights never came on at night, and no one even tried the knobs.

  Kat went to the warehouse and I went to the office. I stood on the empty street and watched as she smashed into the wooden door with her shoulder—once, twice, and then it broke open. She turned to pick up the thermite tarp and a small box of tools and then disappeared into the building, pulling the wrought-iron gate closed behind her. I knew the tarp was heavy, but she never looked like it was a burden.

  I stood in front of the office building. Three cars were coming down the street, blasting music and swerving back and forth. I tried to look innocent and casual as they passed, but it was a good thing it was two a.m. Standing on the street, loitering in front of an abandoned building, must look suspicious. But they were too preoccupied with their race to care about me.

  I set the box down and kicked in the flimsy wooden door. Shards of wood flew as the doorjamb split, and the knob was wrenched free, skittering loudly onto the cement floor.

  I was expecting a musty smell—the odor that houses get when no one lives in them—but instead I immediately noticed the cigarettes. I’d cleaned more than my fair share of dorms, and I knew what old smoke smelled like, and this wasn’t it. This was new smoke. This was someone smoking nearby.

  I ran to the wall, knelt down on the concrete, and placed the box.

  Watch your back, I thought.

  This wall was the other side of the parking area’s south wall. My plan was to blow this building to bits and, with a little luck, have it collapse into the Minoan compound. It was sure to destroy the expensive cars out there and, at the very least, make an enormous explosion that they couldn’t ignore. There would be fire and smoke, and they’d come running out of their compound just in time to see the sheet of thermite hanging from the warehouse wall, outside a third-story window. Kat should be doing that right now.

  I opened the shoe box. Bakr had written the instructions on the inside of the lid, and I turned on a flashlight to read it.

  I pushed the detonators into the bricks of C4 and attached the batteries to the clock. Immediately the display lit up and started counting down from four minutes.

  “Durmak,” a male voice said.

  He sounded like he was just behind me.

  It had to be just as dark for him as it was for me. I quickly replaced the lid, turned off my flashlight, reached under my robe, and readied my pistol. Slowly I turned around to face the voice.

  There was a figure in the darkness, illuminated by just the dim lights out the door and in the street. “Kprdama.”

  If we were as concealed by darkness as much as I thought we were, the man shouldn’t be able to see my hand pulling out my gun.

  “I don’t speak Turkish,” I said.

  There was a pause. “American?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was stalling for time, but I didn’t know what he expected me to do. I started to stand up.

  “Kprdama!” he shouted. “Do not . . . Hold still, please.”

  “Look,” I said. “This is just a mistake. I thought this building was empty. I didn’t expect you to be here. Just a mistake.”

  I was talking quickly, not expecting the Turk to translate and understand what I was saying. It was a distraction. But a distraction for what? I needed a plan.

  “It’s a mistake,” I repeated. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to be in here. Not that it makes much difference, I suppose. I haven’t touched anything.”

  “Durmak!”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said, keeping my voice as calm as I could.

  I had to make a move. I took a breath and turned on my flashlight, pointing it into the man’s face while I pulled my gun out from underneath my robe. He immediately squinted at the light, and there was a loud bang. For a second, I thought I’d been shot. But as I waited for the pain to start, the Turk slumped to the floor.

  “Shit,” Kat said from the open door as she lowered her pistol, her voice wavering. She’d just killed a man. “There goes the element of surprise. Is that bomb running?”

  “Yeah.” I took off the lid and the red timer lights shined up at me. “Three minutes, fifteen seconds. Are you done?”

  “No,” she said. “I saw him follow you in. Is this building part of the compound?”

  “I guess so. We have to hurry!”

  She ran out the door and I followed, sprinting down the street to the warehouse. The door was ajar, and we ducked inside, hoping that this place wasn’t also part of the compound and guarded. It didn’t look like it. There were rows and rows of boxes stacked to the ceiling. A freight-elevator shaft was there, but Kat didn’t want to wait for it. She ran to the steps in the corner and climbed them, two or three at a time, until she reached the top floor. I was only a step behind her as we ran to the windows.

  She was standing at an open window.

  “This building could come down in the explosion,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Don’t have a choice, though. If it comes down, we’re screwed.” Kat reached out the window, holding nails in her lips. I held the heavy fabric up as she began pounding a nail into it. I could feel every second, as if the timer was giving me electric shocks as it counted down.

  Working on the last nail, she spoke. “If they didn’t hear the gunshot, they’re going to hear this hammer.”

  “I haven’t heard any alarm.” Looking out the window, I could see down into the compound. Behind the wall was a squat, sprawling one-story house. There were no lights on.

  I checked my watch under the flashlight. “We’re all going to hear a lot in about sixty seconds.”

  “Did you lay the fuse?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” she said, smacking her head for forgetting it. She dug through the bag to find the coil.

  “Forty-five seconds,” I said.

  “I’ve got it,” she answered, twisting the end of the long coil of fuse onto the two-foot fuse Lee built into the thermite.

  “Twenty-five seconds. Come on,” I urged, and Kat started unrolling the coil, both of us retreating to the stairs.

  “Ten,” I said, and stopped looking at my watch. “Light it.”

  She pulled out a match and struck it against the wall.

  But before she could light it, there was a tremendous crash, and our building shook, knocking Kat and me down the stairs to the landing at the second floor. Everything turned white and then black.

  Kat was above me, looking down into my face, pointing my flashlight into my eyes.

  “What happened?”

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here. You probably have a concussion. You got knocked out pretty good there.”

  I couldn’t see straight, and I put my arm over her shoulders, and she held me around the waist.

  “What time is it?” I asked. I felt like I was waking up from a deep sleep.

  “You’ve only been out for a couple seconds,” she said.

  “What happened?” She helped me walk. I could feel wetness on my face as we descended the last flight of stairs. “I’m bleeding.”

  “It’s not bad. Let’s just get to the truck.”

  We got out of the building with
no problems and found that the street outside was shrouded in dust. Kat was holding me around the waist, but I pulled away from her and stumbled, confused, toward the fallen building. It was hard to see because of all the white dust, but the office building was flattened. All three of the expensive cars outside the Minoan compound—the Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, and Bentley—were twisted mounds of steel. The wall with the compound door was gone, revealing the house beyond. Half a dozen people had come out of it, dazed and sleepy.

  But there was a brilliant fire on the wall up to the east—the thermite was burning. Kat must’ve lit it while I was knocked out. Right now it just looked like a spiral, but once the fire died down, the logo of the Munich Olympics would be obvious. I turned, about as stable as a man made out of Jell-O.

  Kat pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and had me press it to the gash on my head.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you okay? You fell down too.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m going to be black-and-blue tomorrow, but right now I’m fine. I kind of landed on you. Sorry about that.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “We need to find a clinic somewhere,” she said.

  “I’m going to be fine.”

  “But you don’t look fine,” she said. “Security will definitely question a foreigner walking around the train station with a homemade bandage strapped around his head. We have to look like regular, unremarkable people.”

  I nodded as we hobbled to the truck. “Just buy bandages and gauze from a pharmacy. We don’t want anybody paying that much attention to my face.”

  She paused, dabbing at the wound. “Yeah. It’s probably not too serious. It’s a head wound, and head wounds bleed a lot. If you start feeling worse, we’ll take you to the hospital. For now, let’s get to the train station. We’ll have time on the train to rest up before we have to do this whole thing a second time in Baghdad.”

  Two police cars came flying past us, but the cops didn’t look our way. We were only a block and a half from the bombing—almost to our truck—but they didn’t stop to worry about us. We might show up in a police report or witness statement later. But there was so much confusion, and so much dust, that no one could be sure of what they saw. And we would be long gone by then.

  The truck was right where we had left it, and I climbed into it and then slumped against the closed door. As we drove, Kat kept reaching across the seat to see how the wound was doing and whether or not I was sleeping.

  We stopped at an all-night pharmacy, and she went in to get the things we needed.

  Sirens blared in all directions, but they were far away. I ducked down anyway.

  “Are you okay?” Kat asked me as she got back in the truck.

  “I’m going to be fine. I just need to lie down.”

  She drove the truck and I wished I could recline the seat and sleep. But she forced me to keep pressure on the cut on my head. We finally ended up at the train station, and she stopped in the long-term parking lot. She told me it wasn’t going to hurt as she treated my wound, and then she spent 10 minutes hurting me—scrubbing the wound with gauze and alcohol. She said it was full of dust and grit from the explosion, and she had to dig it out, and that normally something like this would be done with a toothbrush, which sounded awful. Finally she trimmed a bandage to fit the gash. It wasn’t that big once it was cleaned—about two and a half inches long—and the bleeding had mostly stopped.

  She had me hold it in place while she got the surgical tape.

  “You know,” she said, “we haven’t made any plans for after Munich. Everyone is supposed to scatter. But we haven’t bought any plane tickets. Some people have money tucked away—not everyone contributed all of their life savings. I kept some of my money, just a couple hundred dollars. But we really don’t have any plans. Maybe you and Mary can find a place to live where no one will ever find you. We’re all criminals now. We all need to go underground. I can go back to my life, but everyone will ask me where I went for three months, and what am I going to say? I joined a cult and sacrificed some teenagers to save the world? If we ever get caught, there will be a lot of explaining to do.”

  She taped down the bandage.

  “Mary and I aren’t going to settle down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’s not here, and you are.”

  Kat pressed the last edge down and leaned back to look at me.

  “I thought that you guys were split up because you—” She stopped.

  “What? What did you hear?”

  She frowned and began putting the medical supplies back in the paper bag.

  “John told me that both of you were too attached—that you wouldn’t follow the plan if either one of you was in danger.”

  “Did he say that it was his idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “He told me Mary asked to be separated from me for the raids. That’s what Mary said too.” I took a deep breath. “I’m starting to realize how naïve I’ve been this whole time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mary and I . . . I wonder if she’s just using me.”

  Kat stared at me for a few seconds, then touched the bandage again, pressing down the edges of the tape. But this time her hand lingered on the side of my face.

  I stared back at her.

  And then she kissed me. Again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Baghdad Railway was 1,600 miles, three days of travel with all the stops. Kat and I spent the time sleeping and reviewing the brief dossiers on the Sumerian line, making sure we had the plan down cold without Eugene. The planning in the dossiers had already been done by Bakr, who was from Baghdad, and we’d already studied it for weeks. The Sumerians’ compound turned out to be a more public space than the Minoans’. The family ran a hotel and restaurant as a front for their secret activities. Bakr had gotten Eugene set up there, and now we would get a room at the Sumerian hotel as well. It sounded risky, being right under the noses of the people we were supposed to attack, but it also made everything easier: we could place the bomb nearly anywhere. We could just leave it in our room, if we wanted. Or an elevator, or a housekeeping closet. And there was a central courtyard ideal for our thermite stencil.

  Even picking up the bomb and thermite would be simple: Bakr had had Lee and Lin ship it to his uncle’s house. There was no need for code phrases or fake names.

  Or so we’d been told.

  So there wasn’t much to do on the train.

  We’d delivered one invitation, and it had nearly killed both of us. But we had done it. We had completed the first part of our mission. I’d been cracked on the head, and Kat had had to shoot a man, but we had made it.

  Maybe we actually had the chance to succeed at all this. To survive, and go on with our lives. Everything felt renewed and reenergized. So when Kat wanted to introduce me to the world of wine in the plush dining car, I thought for a minute about my policy on drinking, and my insistence that I was never going to be like my father, and said, “Why not?” And when we’d gone through two bottles, laughing loudly and making a scene, we decided to take the third bottle with us back to the stateroom. And when we got back to our room, as the train was hurtling past Aleppo, we slept together.

  Maybe it was the thrill of completing the Sumerian mission, or being nearly killed, or Kat patching me up, or the wine.

  We were trying to save the world, so I didn’t feel like holding back anymore.

  We were going to live.

  When we got to Baghdad, we enjoyed ourselves as much as we could. We were still riding high from the Sumerian raid and since we didn’t have to do any recon on the compound, we sampled everything: the best food, the best wine, and the best bed in the hotel. Kat spent the money she had; I spent the money I had. And we had the best vacation anyone could ask for. Well, for a day, at least.

  The bomb and thermite were easy to get, as Bakr had said they would be. We checked out of the hotel and walked through the plan
dozens of times. I set the bomb in the middle of the street, in front of the building, and Kat laid out the tarp. And then, just like we’d discussed, she lit the fuse and I set the timer.

  We watched as the thermite began to burn hot and white, illuminating the square in front of the hotel.

  Backing up, I saw windows opening, someone throwing curtains aside and opening ornate shutters.

  “Kat,” I said. “Look.”

  “The guests are coming toward the tarp,” she said, horror in her voice.

  I didn’t know “Get away” in Arabic, so I started waving my arms, trying to get people’s attention, trying to get them to duck and cover. But no one was looking at us.

  “Mike,” she said. “The bomb. We have to go.”

  Windows were lighting up all around the square, silhouettes appearing.

  “Come on,” Kat said, and grabbed my hand. “The bomb.”

  I stared at her in fear. We were having too much fun. We weren’t taking this seriously. We were playing lovers while we were supposed to be playing terrorists.

  “Run!” she screamed.

  I finally found my feet, and we ran south down the street. Everyone was looking out their windows, watching the whole scene.

  A moment later there was a flash so bright it lit up the neighborhood like it was noon, and I was lifted off my feet and thrown wildly across the road. Everything went black again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Mike.”

  I was blinking. I could feel the rough dirt in my eyes and my tears trying to wash it away.

  They were dribbling down the side of my face. Tears—or was it blood?

  “Mike.”

  Something was touching my chest. Cold and wet.

  And then, as if a switch had been flipped, I could hear everything—the screams, the sirens, the scraping of rock falling on top of rock.

  “Mary?” I called out.

  “Mike. It’s me.”

  “Mary?”

  “Kat,” she said.

  “I can’t see. Kat, I can’t see.”

  “I’ve put my hijab over your face. Your head is fine. It’s just one deep cut above your eyebrow. Nothing serious. I can stitch that up.”