End Game (Will Robie 5)

He pointed the UMP at a forty-five-degree angle up and five clicks to the left. He pressed the trigger and fired half his mag. The ACP rounds blasted through the cheap drywall. Robie counted to three and watched as the shooter’s body rolled down the stairs and landed at the bottom and on top of the gent who’d had his throat slit by Robie.

Robie made sure the shooter was dead with an M11 round dotting the man’s forehead.

Thirteen down, three to go.

And those three were upstairs.

Now it became purely a tactical game. A chess match played with guns and battlefield strategy instead of molded pieces on a square board.

The enemy had the high ground and Robie the low. For him to attack, he would have to move through a funnel where they could concentrate their fire, and he couldn’t count on the liquid armor to see him through.

What Robie wanted was the high ground, and as he looked to his left, he saw a way to take it.

He popped open the window, climbed out, and found handholds in the uneven brick surface. On past missions he’d scaled what appeared to be sheer rock walls, so this wa

s not a stretch for him.

The window was just above. The floor plan of the house told him exactly where this opening would take him. He spent three seconds calculating, which was his allotted time to think at any interval during a mission such as this.

Holding on to the windowsill with one hand, he jimmied the window with his knife. He did a controlled tumble through the opening and rolled up to a defensive position.

Having seized the tactical advantage, Robie charged into the upstairs hall and saw one man peering cautiously down the stairs, unaware that his rear flank was fully exposed.

His life ended with a pair of M11 rounds in his back.

Fourteen down, two to go.

The next man came out of another bedroom holding the exact same type of weapon that Robie held.

It was UMP versus UMP.

But not really. It wasn’t just about the hardware. A gun was a gun. The same models worked pretty much the same.

What really mattered was the software.

And the shooter was always the software.

Robie threw himself through a doorway as the muzzle of the opposing UMP took aim at him.

He transferred his UMP fully to his right hand, making sure by touch that his selector was still on full auto. The only part of him exposed was his gun and his hand. He used the lower part of the doorjamb as his fulcrum because the recoil kick on an UMP was not always kind if the collapsible stock was not firmly against one’s shoulder. That might foul the shot and Robie didn’t have the time for that.

The UMPs fired at the same time.

The man’s UMP managed to take a chunk of polymer off Robie’s weapon.

Robie’s UMP managed to blow the head off the man.

Robie dropped the UMP, his ammo exhausted.

Fifteen down, one to go.

But what a one it would turn out to be.

The young woman stepped out of a room and into the upstairs hall.

In her hand was not a weapon, at least not a conventional one.

Clenched in her fingers was a dead man’s—or in this case a dead woman’s—trigger wired to the vest around her torso. Strapped there were six packs of connected Semtex. More than enough to collapse the house and kill her and Robie, and maybe crack the belly of the cobalt bomb in the basement and radiate the neighborhood until the twenty-second century.

He understood at once. She was the designated fail-safe.

She smiled at him.

He didn’t return it.

The bloodstained KM2000 flashed through the air.

It severed the wire from the trigger to the suicide vest before lodging in the wall.

The woman looked down at the useless trigger, then back up at Robie. She screamed at him even as her hand went to the vest.

Robie did not wait for her to blow them up another way.

He shot her in the head and she fell to the floor wrapped in her unexploded bombs.

Sixteen down.

None to go.

Time clock punched.

Sunrise coming.

Ninety-nine percent was apparently good enough.

Chapter

3

THE CLEANUP WAS quick and efficient.

To keep things as secret as possible, they made use of the same tunnel that Robie had. The house was going to be leveled in the next week and the debris buried forever. The tunnel was being permanently plugged. Any complaints about the sounds of explosions or gunfire that night would be referred to the appropriate agency with instructions to bury it as deeply as the remains of the house.

The concussed survivor was revived and would be interrogated until he gave up every secret he would ever have. Then he would disappear into the permanent shadows with no ability to harm anyone again.

The cobalt bomb was removed and disarmed, and it would be reverse-engineered to see how the terror cell had done it. Neither the Brits nor the Americans were under the illusion that a terrorist cell alone had had the wherewithal to pull this off. This operation smacked of a serious institutional backer. Whether it was the Russians or the Iranians or even the North Koreans, they would trace this op back to its source.

Then the diplomats would have their shot at de-escalating this sucker.

If the statesmen failed, it would be the generals’ turn.

And no one wanted that scenario.

When the British tactical team had entered the house, Robie had taken off his helmet and was calmly sitting on the couch in the living room.

The team took its time viewing all the carnage, including the suicide bomber, as Robie filled them in on how he had disarmed her. Bloody hells resonated from all corners of the house as the team saw firsthand the American’s handiwork.

One armored assaulter had sat down next to Robie and asked him if he needed anything, politely addressing Robie as “sir.”

Robie had shaken his head and said, “I’m good.”

“You’re far better than good. In fact, you’re the bloody best I’ve ever seen, mate.”

Robie appreciated the sentiment, but he had exited the house with no positive feelings, despite having defeated a maniacal attempt to throw the world off its axis.

He was now wheels up on a private ride back to the United States.

He rubbed his gut and then his thigh where the rounds and the knife had struck, respectively.

Either one would have disabled him. And then he would have been fresh meat to kill. Just another corpse on the floor.

And that made a person think.

Robie closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But while slumber had come easily on the flight over, it was not so easy on the way back. He had killed sixteen people the previous night. And nearly been killed himself about a half-dozen times.

It was all in a day’s work for him, on one level.

On another level, part of him couldn’t process it.

It wasn’t like an endorphin high after winning a Super Bowl or a World Series, chiefly because nobody died in those events. However, it was clearly a contest, of sorts. There were winners and losers in Robie’s world, only the losers left the field of battle in body bags.

He opened his eyes, and his thoughts reached back to Mississippi.

The reunion with his father. A reunion from hell. But the ending was what mattered. And it had ended better than it had begun.

And he and Jessica Reel had been together, battered but together.

Now nearly six months had passed and Robie hadn’t seen Reel in all that time. He had called, e-mailed, and texted. Nothing. She was still working for the Agency, that he knew, but he had no idea where. He had asked. And received not a single answer.

After returning from Robie’s hometown of Cantrell, Reel—then in a wheelchair because of injuries sustained during their time there—had told Robie that they would always have each other. That they might fall, but together they were unbeatable.