Endgame

“All right, boys and girls, better get a move on, because Bruce Lee is right,” said Moreau. “I’ve picked him up near the foundry.”

“Damn it, the traffic’s backed up,” said Noboru, slamming on his brakes and looking for a spot where he could rumble onto the embankment and skirt around the other cars.

Just then, the traffic moved, and they rolled closer to the foundry’s main driveway and shifted into the turning lane to cut across the road.

The size and decay of the building unnerved Noboru. If Fisher wanted to lure them into a gauntlet of horrors and systematically dispose of them, the abandoned foundry presented the perfect opportunity.

23

STEEL FOUNDRY NEAR RUSSANGE, FRANCE

Hansen barked his orders, but Valentina barely listened and deliberately partnered up with Noboru, the one man on the team who regarded her as an equal. She led him toward a vertical slit where it seemed the sheet-metal wall had been pried back enough to permit a person to enter.

She slipped inside and flicked on her light to reveal a cavernous warehouse of sweeping concrete ceilings with shattered skylights, as though bombs had been dropped through them to explode inside and tear apart the brick walls and rusting ladders and catwalks. A latticework of iron girders and concrete lintels was spanned by thick cobwebs, and dust motes trickled through her flashlight’s beam.

Valentina wondered if the dust in her light had been created by their entrance or by someone else’s movements. She worked the light a moment more and could almost hear the ghosts of steel workers bustling about while fires spat, water hissed, and more men shouted to get the next load ready. It was the early 1900s, and the place thrived.

Noboru suddenly cursed in Japanese behind her, and Valentina heard a splintering of wood.

She whirled and saw that one of his legs had dropped through the floor up to his knee. “Hold on, hold on… ”

He began falling onto his side and caught himself, groaning as his leg twisted. She wrenched her arms under his, swore, then hauled him up…

Only to have both her legs plunge through the same rotting floorboards. She released him and broke her fall at midknee with a hard slap of the palms and a gasp. She hung there for a moment, legs kicking in midair, coughing as the dust billowed into her face. Yes, they’d just learned the hard way that the foundry had a basement. Noboru managed to pull his leg free, then crawled around and got behind her.

“Don’t put too much weight,” she whispered as he lifted, and within a few seconds, she was sitting back on the wood and inspecting her legs for cuts.

They took a quick breather, and she directed her light back toward the floor, as did Noboru. More ash, dust, and something else, silt or loam, maybe, lay across a dark avenue of broad wooden planks, and within that dust were footprints, dozens of them, some larger than others. Kids, adults, all sorts of people had ventured into the foundry to play or explore over the years. She tried to find any that looked fresher than the others. It took a moment before she finally noticed a fresh break in the floor, a place where wood and soil had given way. She crossed to it, directed her light into the hole to reveal intersecting pipes and the reflective sheen of water far below. She shifted the light to pick out a canal far below. And now, from this new angle, she looked up again.

And there they were: a fresher set of footprints leading off to a staircase. She tipped her head to Noboru, and they rose.

Valentina’s foot clanged loudly on the steps, and she grimaced. Her light showed footprints clearly evident on the third step but no others. Odd.

Noboru shone his light above the staircase.

“What?” she asked; then she understood.

Fisher had gone vertical.

And now they were easy prey. She imagined him descending, inverted, like a spider, only to sink the fangs of a tranquilizer or something worse into her neck. She held her breath, and for a few seconds thought she would be sick.

* * *

Gillespie found herself paired up with the little runt Ames, and as she followed him along the foundry’s east- side exterior wall, she twice plotted his murder.

The first scenario involved a knife. The second had her putting a bullet in the back of his head. But then she realized those methods were too merciful and too quick. She considered slower ways that had her getting creative with water and insects and, lest we forget… fire.

She wondered if the others knew about his past. They were all spies, and you had to assume they had thoroughly investigated one another, both professionally and personally. Gillespie had many friends in military intelligence who could get her whatever she wanted. She’d read the news stories about Ames’s family dying in the fire. The world was unfair, and Ames railed against it with much more than words. His entire personality had been shaped by two facts: the loss of his family and his height. He probably asked himself: Why did my family have to die? Why can’t I be taller? Gillespie thought she had him all figured out, and there were times when she saw through his remarks and found the frightened little boy behind them. She wanted to sympathize with him, feel his pain, tell him he’d be all right, and say that if he’d just drop all the defenses, there were people who could help.

But he was such an ass that he made helping impossible.

“Slow down,” she told him. “You’re not going in there alone.”

“You worried about me, sweetie?”

“Well, if something happens to you, I want to make sure it’s permanent.”

“Great. I got your back, too.”

“And remember, we’re taking him alive.”

“So you can have your little reunion?”

“Sure. You want to watch?”

He snorted. “Look, there’s the door.” He yanked open the bent metal, and they entered a stairwell. Her flashlight’s beam raced up toward the distant ceiling.

* * *

Hansen had opted for a classic Sam Fisher entrance by coming in from the roof. He felt a bit wistful about that. Here he was emulating a man who should have been his mentor but was his target. The assumption was that you had to think like Fisher to capture him, but, then again, he knew you’d be doing that, so perhaps he’d be engaged in some very un-Fisher-like maneuvers…

Maybe that was thinking too hard and second-guessing himself, Hansen thought — which was, of course, thinking. Again. Mr. MIT Education needed to turn off the big brain.

Hansen startled a group of sleeping pigeons, which nearly knocked him off his feet as he reached the top of an exterior staircase running along the foundry’s west side. He waved them off, then slipped quietly toward a rooftop doorway. The door itself was long since gone, lying near the opposite wall, and Hansen eased himself down the metal stairs, one hand clutching the rail. He reached the top floor, the floorboards of which had been torn up here and there, perhaps by looters, and carefully worked his way toward the center of the vast room.

“We think he’s gone up to the second floor,” said Valentina.

“Roger that,” said Hansen. “I’m above.” Hansen glanced down through a rectangular opening in the floor, lost his balance, and reached toward the wall, but his hand came up empty. He slipped down onto the floor, landing across a piece of broken pipe and breaking off several chunks of concrete that went tumbling down through the hole. He bit back a curse, stood, and then carefully chose his next path, across sturdier-looking boards, and searched for a way down to the second level.

He spotted a wrought-iron spiral staircase off to his left and stepped toward it.

Even as his foot came down, he realized the floor plank would not hold him. Yes, he was a fine judge of sturdy-looking wood, all right. The plank suddenly split…