The End Game

He’d turned on a dime. He’d done it before, but never this fast, this radically. What has that monster made you? Who are you now, Matthew?

But she couldn’t let him see she was both afraid and killer angry. She said nothing more.

•   •   •

In another twenty minutes, in the dead of night, Matthew parked the car in the derelict lot next to the building—a car repair shop with an apartment on the second floor. It was a dump, but perfect for his uses. He looked over at Vanessa, still and silent, and got out of the car. He looked up at their darkened apartment, above the auto repair shop with its smelly bays. The whole place stank of gasoline and oil and old sandwiches and dirty men, but it was out of the way, and the owner of the shop had been more than happy to take the wad of cash Matthew had pressed into his greasy palm and shut down the business for an extended European vacation.

Matthew hoped the owner was enjoying himself, since if it came down to it, if necessary, he’d have Andy torch the building, and whoosh, no more business.

He hoped all his other men were cozied in their three different assigned motels in Brooklyn, none more than a mile away from here.

He didn’t like Vanessa’s silence. He knew she was pissed, sulking, but he also felt it was something more. This silence of hers—after a bombing, she was usually on top of the world, but not tonight. Well, things had changed. She’d get used to it. She’d come around. Then he realized that Ian, Andy, all of the men were quiet after Bayway and all the deaths. No, he realized they’d all been on edge before tonight, and he understood now it was because of Darius. He knew all Ian’s men were afraid of Darius, and they were right to be. Matthew knew there was a killing lust in Darius that ran deep, and was as automatic as a snake striking out.

No, it would be all right. They would stick to the plan, the grand plan he and Darius had devised.

But still, Matthew worried about Ian, his best friend, the one man he’d trusted for so long. He thought of those long-ago days when the two of them had traveled through Europe, guns and bombs in their backpacks, targeting those electrical grids and oil refineries that relied heavily on Middle Eastern oil. But now he’d come to see that destroying them in his perfectly executed little bombings had been petty, nearly meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and they hadn’t accomplished very much at all.

But Darius had showed him the way, the new way, and he wanted it so bad he could taste it, the final revenge for his family. Close, so close now. No looking back, only forward, ever forward. He and Darius would stop the madness once and for all, and because of them the world would change. It made him tremble to think about what he was going to do. And he felt, deep down, where it counted most, fear and pride and a sense of infallibility. What he would do was righteous.

He called Vanessa to help him. Silently, they unloaded the car, pulled a dirty tarp over it, and placed a large rock on the hood so it blended in with the other cars on the dingy repair lot, and then went up the oily, stinking stairs to the apartment. It was the middle of the night, no one to see them.

There were blackout curtains on the windows, a good thing, because inside, the apartment pulsed with gleaming monitors and equipment that took up every available flat surface, their screens glowing blue in the night. Andy Tate, firebug and computer expert, too young to be as crazy as he was, always wired, no coffee necessary, was leaning back in a broken leather chair, his legs crossed on top of the kitchen table, alternately playing with a Zippo lighter and eating an apple.

He saw them, raised a fist, and shouted, “I am the master of the universe!”

Matthew felt his heart pound as he hurried over to him. “Does that mean you’re in?”

“Tango down, bitches. Oh, yeah, dude, I pulled down their drawers and slipped it right in. My baby has already infected all the terminals and servers, corrupted all their precious files. I have control of the master boot records. Everything’s offline and I should have all the data downloaded in another hour, two tops. They won’t know what hit them. They’ll be scrambling for days trying to track us, and we’ll be long gone, with everything we need in place.”

“Good. Good. Well done, Andy.” He turned to Vanessa. “Go shower and start packing. We leave as soon as Andy has the information downloaded.”

She gave him an emotionless look and went down the narrow hallway, fear scoring deep at Andy’s a

She nearly ran into Ian as he came out of the bedroom, his hair still wet from his shower. He gave her a loud smacking kiss on each cheek, hugged her tight.

“We did it, Van, we did it.” His Irish accent was thick tonight, but then he frowned. “But all those men, dead. I didn’t like that at all. I mean, they weren’t those wanking Muslim gits taking over Belfast.”

“No, they weren’t,” she said. “They burned to death; i

“It wasn’t your doing, Van, or mine, so don’t feel guilty. It was that maniac Darius, he’s the one who pushed Matthew into using one of his new coin bombs at Bayway. At least we now know what a tiny part of one of Matthew’s coins can do. Still, it was too close. I nearly didn’t make it out in time since that arse Darius put the bomb too near the room I was in. Nearly burned to death—now, what a thought that is. And I heard the screams.” He shook himself. “Hey, come help Andy and Matthew load the cases in the van.”

Say something, say something. “I’m very glad you made it, Ian. I’ll be out in a minute to help.”

“Listen, Van, we’ll make it to Tahoe, and maybe things will go back to the way they were before, since Darius is gone now. We’ll lay low and plan our next attack, the right kind of attack.”

Matthew came into the hallway, heard Ian, and nodded. “Yes, we need to leave, but we’re not going back to Tahoe, we’re heading south. It’s time to take this to the next level.”

Ian eyed him. “You mean you still want to do Yorktown?”

“Oh, yes.”

Ian shook his head. “I don’t know, Matthew, I don’t know. Tonight was—bad.”

“I promise you and Vanessa, no major bombing like tonight at Bayway.” Matthew pumped his fist in the air. “Life’s an adventure, Ian, our adventure. Don’t turn coward on me now.”

The power plant at Yorktown? Vanessa hadn’t known. Neither Ian nor Matthew had told her. Did Andy know?

Matthew was still pumped, thrilled with himself. “Andy is breaking down his computers, then you can help him get everything into the van. You know what he did, right, Ian?”

“I know all I need to know—he crippled the buggers. Hey, even if you explained it all to me, I wouldn’t understand it.” He gri

12

PAWN TAKES C4

Vanessa turned away from him, said over her shoulder, “I’m going to shower and pack. Five minutes.”

“We need to talk.”

“Later, Matthew. We have plenty of time to talk on the road south. To Yorktown.”

She left him, already writing her text message in her head as she went into the bedroom to get clothes and her special phone she’d stashed in a tampon box, the safest place in the universe when surrounded by men. She was scared, excited, knew at last things were coming together. Yorktown? Was that where Darius had gone? But why split apart from the group?