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“We’re supposed to stop you,” Kat said. “That’s all. Stop.”
“You think it will be that easy? You underestimate me. I know some of the other lines,” Raakel said. “We watch each other. The Harappan. You will not ‘stop’ him. And the Mu. And probably many others. You will fail. And then what will you do?”
“We will stop them,” I said. “We will.”
My heart rate was skyrocketing, and I felt sick to my stomach. We were going to have to kill her. One of us had to draw our gun and fire it before Raakel could swing her vicious sword.
I hadn’t shot anyone since I killed the sheriff back in California. That seemed so long ago, but so present. I still saw that man’s face down the sights of a gun, no matter how many rounds I had fired down the shooting range.
“Stop us how?”
Neither Kat nor I said anything. We sat, tense, staring at Raakel and the sword in her hand. This was not how this discussion was supposed to go. She was supposed to see reason. She was supposed to know that the game didn’t have to be Played. But I saw now how naïve we were being.
One of us is going to die.
Raakel was going to swing her sword and kill one of us, and if we were lucky, the other one would draw their gun and shoot before she turned on them. And that was the best case. The worst was that neither Kat nor I would make it out of here alive. We were going up against people who had been trained by mentors like Walter. The Players were too good for us. And they had been indoctrinated from birth. They weren’t going to be convinced in a 20-minute conversation. They weren’t going to give up on everything they’d been raised to believe.
“There’s more to this book from the Brotherhood of the Snake,” I said, trying to get Raakel to think about something other than killing us, and the meaning of “stop.”
“What else is in there?” she said, but she was smiling, toying with us. This was the start of the game for her. She was enjoying it. Two easy kills before moving on to the real Calling.
“It gives the history of the game,” I said. “It explains how the Makers started Endgame as just that: a game.”
Kat jumped in. “You don’t have to fight. The Makers started all of this as sport for themselves—initially they just hunted us themselves.
Then they turned us on each other.”
As I sat there and watched her, I realized something: this was real.
I had had my doubts all summer, while we were at the ranch and hearing John and Walter talk to us every night about the Players, the Calling, Endgame itself. Even while we were delivering invitations, there was a voice in the back of my mind that said that Agatha, Walter, and all the others were delusional. That aliens weren’t real. But now I had to face the facts. There really were Players. They really had responded to our bizarre invitations. They didn’t just have to Play. They were eager to.
Raakel stood up, and we did the same. I felt the gun heavy and cold against my back.
“We are done,” she said.
“Here,” I begged. “Read the pages.” I pushed the papers to her. If she took them and looked down, we could get the jump on her.
She glanced down at the papers, laughing. “I don’t care what your book says. I don’t know where it came from, and there’s no reason I should believe it. Like I said: maybe you’re from another line? Maybe you’re trying to get rid of your competition.”
“Just read the pages,” I said again. “Please.”
She laughed and took them from me, and immediately Kat and I both grabbed our guns.
There was a flash of movement, the papers dropping from her hands.
She changed the sword back to her right hand—she wasn’t ready; she had been too cocky.
I saw the Beretta in Kat’s hand before I could draw my gun.
Raakel swung the sword just as Kat fired.
The sword hit Kat in the arm, and she screamed. Raakel grunted loudly, reminding me of a tennis player whose racket had just connected with a hard serve.
My gun was out and I fired. We were too close for me to miss her, but I was scared, trembling, and my shots were off target: my first hit her in the thigh; then I hit her stomach three times.
Kat dropped the Beretta from her injured hand, and Raakel dropped the sword.
“Aman tanrım,” Raakel said, as she stumbled back and sat on the bed. There was blood everywhere—spatters all across the blankets, a sure sign that the bullets I’d fired had exited her back. She had her hands on her abdomen.
“Aman tanrım,” she said again, sucking in air as the blood flowed.
“Bok. What did you do?”
“We had to stop you,” I said.
Next to me, Kat ran for the bathroom.
“Kat?” I called.
“I need a towel,” she said. There was a trail of her blood on the carpet.
“We have to get out of here!”
“You’re fools,” Raakel said with a wince. “You can’t stop everyone. You can’t stop the Makers.”
“You should have listened,” I said.
“Someone will take my place.” Raakel’s voice was weak. “Don’t you know that? And someone will take their place. And it will continue.
There’s no way to stop us.”
“We’re going to stop everyone,” I said.
She grimaced, hunching over. “Kill me,” she said. “You want to stop me, so just do it. I’m going to bleed out.”
I held the gun to her head.
There was the sheriff. There was Tommy. Staring back at me with lifeless eyes over the barrel of my gun.
Kat came back. “We have to get out of here.” She had a white hand towel wrapped around her arm. “I need you to tie this.”
“Just do it,” Raakel repeated.
I couldn’t force myself to look at her.
“Do it,” Kat said.
I closed my eyes and fired two bullets into Raakel’s head. When I looked again, Raakel was slumped over, sliding off the bed and onto the floor in front of me.
“You tried, Mike,” Kat said, gritting her own teeth against the pain.
“We both tried as hard as we could.”
“Did we? Well, it wasn’t good enough.” I felt tears welling up in my throat, hot and painful. “Kat, I don’t know if we’re going to convince any of them.”
“I need you to tie this,” she said again, her voice shaking. I turned and looked at her. She was pale and scared.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re going to have police on us any minute now. We probably woke up everyone in this whole hotel.”
I put my gun back in my waistband and took the ends of the towel in my hands. “How is it?” I asked, as I tied it into a makeshift bandage. “It’s the back of my arm,” she said. “So no arteries or anything like that. But it went down to the bone. I need stitches.”
I tightened it and then reached down to pick up her fallen gun. She took it with her left hand.
“There’s a back stairway,” she said.
“Okay.”
She took a robe from the closet and pulled it on, putting the Beretta into a pocket. As we got outside into the hall, we saw a dozen other guests, most of them in pajamas or bathrobes; they all looked tired and bewildered, wondering where the noise had come from. Rumors of whatever was going on in the Olympic apartments had to be passing around. Kat and I played it cool, trying to take on the same look that the others had.
An employee of the hotel made an announcement in German that I didn’t understand, but Kat did.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
“The back?” I asked.
“No, the lobby.”
At the front desk Kat asked the clerk a question in German, and he nodded.
He opened a drawer, neatly organized with all kinds of toiletries: toothbrushes, shower caps, fingernail clippers. He pulled out a little packet and a book of matches and handed them to Kat.
“Danke,” she said.
“Bitte.”
We slipped out the front door and crossed the street to a park. It was still dark out, but the eastern sky was beginning to lighten.
“What’s that?” I asked, as she led me to a picnic table.
“A sewing kit,” she said, sitting down and opening the small packet, revealing thread, needles, and a couple of buttons. “You’re going to stitch me up.”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e9dc8b49-255b-565f-b32b-adccc1b3d880)
We had a first aid kit in the backpack and she opened it and took two painkillers. I opened an alcohol swab and wiped the vicious gouge. The Turkish blade had cut cleanly—a straight cut through the sweatshirt, skin, muscle, down to the bone. I lit a match to sterilize the needle and then tried to follow Kat’s instructions to stitch the wound up cleanly. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it—I was timid at first, knowing how much pain she had to be in—but I soon figured it out. It was going to be an awful-looking scar, but she said it had to be done.
While I worked, she got on the walkie-talkie and called to report in. She had the earphone in, so I couldn’t follow most of the conversation. “We had to kill her,” Kat said. “Yes … No, there was no other choice … No. No. At least I don’t think so … Yes. Mike is stitching me up, but I’m not going to be able to use my right hand. It severed the muscle and tendons I think. I need a hospital … We’re in a park across from the hotel … Okay. We’ll see you.”
There was a long pause, and she looked down at the slash. She was far more comfortable with blood and being stitched up than I was. I didn’t know what kind of pain pills she’d taken, but they must have been strong. She’d been the one to make the first aid kits, and I’d have been willing to bet that she’d taken the pills from the clinic where she worked—these weren’t over-the-counter medications.
“How are we going to explain this to a hospital?” I asked. “People don’t normally stitch themselves up.”
“You’d be surprised what people do,” she said. “Lots of patients self-medicate, and do crazy things like try to remove teeth with pliers or try to close a wound with superglue. That one’s not so crazy. It works pretty well for small stuff. Medics use it in Vietnam. I don’t know if it’s been studied for toxicity, though.”
“You’re not going to be able to use your hand?”
“No, since you’re not suturing the tendons. That’s going to need a hospital.”
“Then what good is stitching?”
She smiled through her pain. “It stops the bleeding.”
“What did John have to say?” I asked, gesturing to the walkie-talkie.
“Mary and Tyson had to kill their Player too. The Koori. Tyson took a bullet, and they’re in the hospital. Walter is off meeting with the Cahokian. He thinks he’ll be able to reason with him, since they know each other.”
I concentrated on the last little bit of the wound, as Kat instructed me how to close it and tie the thread off. When I finished, I took her injured hand in mine. She moved her fingers a little, just to see what they could still do.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought that I could draw my gun faster than she could attack.”
“It’s okay,” Kat said.
“You know what, though? I honestly thought she’d be a lot harder to kill. I thought she had some kind of trick up her sleeve. Walter and Agatha really made these guys out to be worse than they are.”
“I don’t know. You’re not the one who got hacked with a sword.”
I laughed a little. “Fair point. You know what’s weird? No police are going to the hotel. We fired, what, five shots? Six? And nobody is there to investigate.”
“Maybe they came and they just don’t have their sirens on. I can’t see the entrance to the hotel from here.”
I nodded. They could be going room to room with a SWAT team, searching for bullet holes, looking for bodies. They’d find Raakel and her sword and that would be that. It would be a puzzle that they never solved.
At least I hoped they’d never solve it. No police department would ever believe in Endgame, would they? Not even when they found Raakel and the Koori.
“What are we supposed to do about the Aksumite?” I asked, suddenly worried about everybody. “Rodney and Jim and Julia never came back from Ethiopia. Agatha never spotted the Aksumite Player. I think we have to assume he killed them?”
“Maybe the bomb went off too soon and killed them.”
“Either way, that’s a loose end we need to tie up.”
“Maybe.” Then she stopped. Her face grew even paler than it already was. “Wait. Mike. Did you get the pages off the floor—the Brotherhood of the Snake stuff?”
My heart dropped. “No. And that’s my only copy.”
“That’s our only copy,” she said. “But that’s not what I’m worried about. Our fingerprints are all over that thing.”
“They’ll be all over the table and chairs too,” I said.
“Yeah, but there will be a thousand fingerprints on the table, from everyone who has stayed in that room. But those papers lead directly back to us—just our prints and Raakel’s. We’ll get put into a database from Interpol or something.”
