End Game (Will Robie #5)(107)

They had traveled what seemed to Robie to be about a quarter mile when they came to yet another door.

“Shit,” muttered Robie.

There was no doorknob, only an electronic pad.

“It’s a biometric reader,” he observed. “Like the one that Lambert uses to access his silo.”

Reel drew closer and looked at it as Bender took a step back so he was behind the both of them.

“Our magnesium brew won’t work on that,” noted Reel.

“No, it won’t.” Robie felt the door. “Solid metal. I’m guessing three or four inches thick, steel hinges set right into the rock. We’d need an RPG round to make a dent.”

“We’ve got one back in the truck,” said Reel.

She looked back at Bender, who was staring at her, his gun pointed in front of him.

“No!” screamed Reel, when she saw the red dot flicking around him. She launched herself but it was too late.

The round slammed into the back of Bender’s head and stayed there.

He stood there teetering in his boots for a second before toppling forward face-first, his pistol dropping from his dead hand.

The door they were going to break into swung open, and ten guns were pointed at them along with blinding lights.

Dolph emerged from behind the armed men.

He smoothed down his uniform jacket and said, “I think this is where you lay your weapons down. Or we’d be perfectly fine with shooting you right here.”

Robie and Reel laid their weapons on the ground.

From down the tunnel they heard footsteps approaching.

Out of the darkness a silhouette appeared.

And then it emerged into a fuller, more solid form.

Yet it was only when the person used a flashlight to illuminate her features that she became recognizable. The rifle with the laser scope and heated barrel from the just-fired round was held in her other hand. It had been the red dot from the scope that Reel had seen.

Reel gasped, “You just killed your brother.”

Patti Bender looked down at the body and said, “Actually, my half brother. So it really doesn’t count, does it?”





CHAPTER





65


The air was stale and warm, with a chemical odor permeating throughout.

Robie and Reel sat in a small concrete block room behind a barred door. They had been stripped down to their underclothes, searched, and shackled. Their phones and weapons had been confiscated.

“I’m sorry, Robie.”

Robie glanced at her. “For what?”

“I didn’t secure our rear flank.”

“Well, considering we had about a dozen guns on our forward flank, I don’t think it mattered. If it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine. I did a bull run and screwed us.”

“You didn’t have much choice.”

“People always have choices. I made the wrong one. And now Bender is dead.”

“I didn’t see Patti being in on this.”

“Neither did I. But maybe it’s starting to make sense.”

“How so?”

Before he could answer, someone appeared at the doorway. It was Dolph.

Robie looked up at him.

Dolph said, “Well, there is justice after all, even for people like me. I had you as prisoners before and I do again. This time the result will be very different. There will be no Apostles to aid you.”

Reel said, “So what’s the game, Dolph? Hiding out in an abandoned missile silo? Afraid to come to the surface and fight it out mano a mano? Going for the angle of the cowardly Nazi?”

Dolph pursed his lips. “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the enormity of what’s going on here.”

“So enlighten us,” interjected Robie.

“I’ll be right back,” said Dolph. “Don’t go anywhere,” he added with a smirk.

A few minutes later someone approached the cell door once more. It was a man neither of them recognized. He was in his thirties and skinny with thick bushy hair.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded Reel.

“My real name is Arthur Fitzsimmons.” When he next spoke his voice was one that they both instantly recognized. “But you might also know me as Dolph.”

Both Robie and Reel gaped.

“God, that feels so good,” Fitzsimmons said, running a hand through his hair. “That latex head mask is a real bitch to wear. And the fat suit! Well, even in the cool weather it’s a bitch. Now I can understand what actors feel like.”

“Why the alter ego?” asked Reel.

Fitzsimmons used a sanitary wipe pulled from his pocket to clean some sticky gum from his face. “Well, I didn’t want anyone to know who I really was, of course. If things went to hell the police would be looking for a pudgy guy named Dolph who was in his fifties. I actually have a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech. And I’m not a Nazi, in any sense of the word. My great-grandmother was an Orthodox Jew, which means my mother was Jewish, and thus so am I. Though my mother never practiced her religion after her marriage. My father never converted. I was raised as a Catholic.”

Reel said, “So the commandment about ‘Thou shalt not kill’ never really sunk in with you, did it?”

“So why the neo-Nazi subterfuge, then?” asked Robie.