James Frey - Reap

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.”

“But they can’t connect us to anything,” I said. “Right?”

“What about the gun store robbery? The bank robbery? Both our prints were at the bank.”

“There’d be no reason why a shooting at the Olympics in Munich would ever be connected to a bank robbery in California. No one would make the connection. No one would compare the prints.”

She pulled the robe closer around herself, as if she was cold. “Except that there’s some kind of terrorist attack going on at the same time we’re killing people in their hotel rooms. And how many witnesses saw us come out of that door?”

“We can’t just go back there,” I said. “There’s no way we can get them back. We’re screwed, Kat.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “We need to talk to John and Walter. They’re all coming here, after Mary gets done with Tyson.”

“Why here?”

“It’s kind of a central location. We’re all going to meet up and try some new tactics.”

I nodded. “Good. Because Raakel was totally unswayed by our arguments.”

Kat stood, but she was a little unsteady on her feet. “You okay?” I asked. Kat was stronger than most people I knew, but everyone had a limit. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t reached mine yet.

“Let’s get to a more concealed part of the park.”

“Right. And you need to get out of that bathrobe.”

“Everyone else is in robes,” she said, gesturing to the hotel guests who had filled the street after the alarms went off. “You wear it.”

“But we don’t want to look like we came out of that place.”

Kat set her face in a grimace. “You need to get in there, fast,” Kat said, with a slight slur. “Go now, while everyone is outside and the police haven’t arrived yet. I’d go with you, but I think I’m not fit for service right now.”

I helped her down on a park bench, farther from the street now that it was getting light.

“Stay here,” I said.

I took another look at the slice in her arm and my poor, uneven stitching. She was definitely going to have a scar—but hopefully she’d regain the use of her fingers. At least the bleeding had stopped.

She took a pouch of something out of the first aid kid—some kind of antibacterial something—and squirted it all along the cut.

“Can you help me with the bandage?” she said, pulling two-inch squares of gauze from the first aid kit.

She held the cotton down with her left hand, and I taped it on. I was no surgeon—I wrapped a strip of tape all the way around her arm twice.

I took the robe from her and put it on myself. I left her gun with her, in the backpack. The robe was snug, but no one else looked particularly well dressed. They’d been awakened by a fire alarm early in the morning. The fact that my robe had blood on it seemed to go unnoticed by anyone in the crowd. There was a lot, but it mostly stained the inside of the fluffy material, not soaking through.

Despite the fire alarm and the noise of bullets, there were only two fire trucks—no police at all yet.

“Absurd,” a man next to me said in a proper English accent. “To be awakened at this hour is absurd. They don’t even know what they’re looking for. I don’t see any smoke. Do you?”

“No,” I said. “And I have to get inside. If there is a fire, I have documents in there that can’t be destroyed.”

“Good luck. The concierge is turning everyone away at the door.”

I hadn’t had a good look at the entrance, so I bade good morning to the man, and walked around a fire truck, the word FEUERWEHR emblazoned on the front. There was a single man at the top of the stairs—a balding man in a suit and tie, who was giving his assurances in English and German to the guests that everything would be fine.

He said it was likely a false alarm.

“Wait to go in,” a voice behind me said.

I startled and looked back. It was John.

“How did you get here so fast?”

“I was only down the street at the Staatlich hotel. Say good-bye to the La Tène.”

“I thought that Agatha was going after the La Tène?”

“Agatha talked to the La Tène last night. But he wouldn’t get on board.

Agatha left him for us—he wouldn’t agree to stop Playing, and she said she wasn’t going to kill anyone.”

“You had to kill?”

He nodded, his lips forming a thin line. “I think we’re going to have to kill more today.”

I sighed and shook my head. “The Minoan got Kat pretty good,” I said.

“I had to kill her—” I laughed tiredly. “Kill the Minoan, not Kat.”

“I knew what you meant. Where is she?”

“In the park. I stitched her up, but she won’t be using her right hand anytime soon.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. And I left evidence in the room. I’ve got to get in there.”

“What did you leave?”

“The Brotherhood of the Snake papers.”

“Some good they did, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, annoyed by how casual John was. He was always like this. Walter was the one who barked orders. John just talked like a normal person. He talked like a peacenik half the time, and I’d rarely seen someone get a rise out of him.

“Who says you need to go back inside and get them?”

“Our fingerprints are all over them.”

“It’s a risk we have to take. You can’t go back in there.”

“But they’re what’s supposed to convince them to join us,” I said, my panic rising. “We only have so many copies.”