The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  ALSO BY SEAN CHERCOVER

  The Trinity Game

  Trigger City

  Big City, Bad Blood

  Eight Lies (About the Truth): A Collection of Short Stories

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Sean Chercover

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477828663

  ISBN-10: 1477828664

  Hardcover ISBN-10: 1503944573

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781503944572

  Cover design by Marc Cohen

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014958622

  For Holly Chercover, friend, sister, co-traveler through the wild ride of childhood

  And Alexander “Sasha” Neyfakh (1959–2006), who fought deadly microscopic critters on behalf of the whole human race

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  “But what does . . .

  “On this earth . . .

  1: DON’T FEAR THE REAPER

  2: GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY

  3: WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

  4: I AM THAT I AM

  5: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL

  6: ARE YOU READY(FOR THE FUTURE)?

  7: SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

  8: RAT RACE

  9: LAST DANCE

  10: BIG SHOT

  11: THE DEVIL WENT DOWNTO GEORGIA

  12: ARMAGIDEON TIME

  13: MIND CONTROL

  14: FINGERPRINT FILE

  15: WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE

  16: EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK

  17: DOWNPRESSOR MAN

  18: IRON SHARPENING IRON

  19: GAMMA RAY

  20: FLYING NORTH

  21: RADIO SILENCE

  22: A MILLION VACATIONS

  23: RIDDLE ME

  24: NUE

  25: CINNAMON GIRL

  26: WHO BY FIRE

  27: SAFE AS HOUSES

  28: CANARY IN A COAL MINE

  29: RIGHT PLACE WRONG TIME

  30: THESE DREAMS OF YOU

  31: DISSOLVED GIRL

  32: LAWYERS GUNS AND MONEY

  33: SECRET AGENT MAN

  34: DEMOLITION CITY

  35: BABYLON SYSTEM

  36: PRAY FOR RAIN

  37: SPLITTING THE ATOM

  38: LITANY AGAINST FEAR

  39: STRANGERS

  40: DON’T SLOW DOWN

  41: THE RICHEST MAN IN BABYLON

  42: HIGHER THAN THE WORLD

  43: CHAIN OF COMMAND

  44: JACOB’S LADDER

  45: A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL

  46: ONE MAN ISLAND

  47: SILENCE

  48: TEARDROP

  49: LIAR’S CLUB

  50: CHAOS AND DISORDER

  51: BAD CARD

  52: SAFE FROM HARM

  53: BULL IN THE PEN

  54: EVERYTHING COMESDOWN TO THIS

  55: WE DO WHAT WE’RE TOLD

  56: HELL IS CHROME

  57: IT’S NO GAME

  58: CLAMPDOWN

  59: WHAT ABOUT NOW

  THANKS AND PRAISES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

  “But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”

  “On this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

  —Albert Camus, The Plague

  1: DON’T FEAR THE REAPER

  Red Ridge, West Virginia

  Today is a good day to die.

  Daniel Byrne handed the counterfeit identification card to the soldier behind the metal desk. To the left of the desk, another soldier stood blocking the solid-steel inner door. Mounted to the cinder-block wall beside the door was an electronic palm-print reader. A third soldier—the one cradling an assault rifle—stood behind Daniel, blocking the larger metal door through which he’d entered, and which he knew was the only exit. They wore plain green uniforms, no identifying patches or insignia.

  Today is a good day to die. But I’ve decided to stay alive until tomorrow.

  The soldier at the desk examined the forgery, which identified Daniel as Colonel Walter Pomerance of the Defense Intelligence Agency, then tapped on the computer keyboard and looked at the screen. His mouth twitched once and he became very still. The sentry stationed at the inner door moved his hand an inch closer to his holster.

  The soldier at the desk said, “Sir, there’s no record—”

  “Typical,” snapped Daniel. The persona he’d created for Colonel Walter Pomerance was that of an insufferable bastard—he would play the role all the way, whatever the outcome. “Is it too much to presume your computer is at least capable of providing you the phone number of the Pentagon?” He resisted the urge to adjust his uniform. Putting ice in his voice, he added, “Don’t waste my time . . . Sergeant.” Forcing that last word, having no way of knowing if the man was in fact a sergeant.

  During the pre-insertion briefing, Raoul had told him the one behind the desk would be a sergeant and said to address him by rank. Daniel had just bet his life on the accuracy of that intel—intel provided by a man he’d known less than three months.

  He raised his left wrist and pressed the button on the side of his watch—starting the chronograph—and shot the young man a look. From the soldier’s perspective, the move would scan as an ego-driven high-ranking officer tossing his clout around. But Daniel needed to track time. From the moment the soldier had entered Daniel’s cover name into the computer, he would have one hour. That is, if the Foundation computer geeks, tapping away furiously 538 miles away in New York City, were successful.

  If they were successful, the phone call would be intercepted by the Foundation, who would also take control of the local computer network and upload the military file for Daniel’s legend—not a complete file, because much of the fictional Colonel Pomerance’s file would be classified even above the level of this place, but a file even more impressive for what was redacted than for what it contained. Colonel Walter Pomerance was a very powerful DIA spook.

  Not a man whose time you wanted to waste.

  Daniel watched a half-dozen seconds tick by—he loved the smooth micro-ticks of his new watch’s automatic movement—and when none of the three soldiers put a bullet in his head, he figured the guy was really a sergeant. He dropped his wrist to waist level.

  The room was a perfect square, twenty feet wall-to-wall. No furniture beyond the steel desk and single chair, nothing on the desktop but the computer and a telephone. LED light fixtures set into the ceiling, protected by thick sheets of clear bulletproof Plexiglas. Nothing on the walls. No military shields or symbols, no flags, no official portrait of the commander in chief. Of course, there wouldn’t be. Officially, thi
s facility, which ran twelve stories down into the earth, did not exist. Black ops, according to the case file Daniel had spent two days studying. It had once been a coal mine, and hundreds of West Virginia men and boys had died here in the early 1900s. How many men died here now, and what they died of, was not in the case file.

  The sergeant at the desk picked up the telephone receiver and pressed a speed-dial button. He offered a verbal passphrase, paused for confirmation, and began to explain the problem. There was nothing Daniel could do now but act inconvenienced and wait for it to play out.

  And breathe.

  He took his mind back to the zazen meditation that had started his day. Sitting seiza—kneeling, sitting on his feet with his back straight and his hands cupped together in his lap—on the impossibly plush royal-blue carpet of the Greenbrier Hotel’s Congressional Suite. Counting breaths, mentally tuning out the riotous floral print that assaulted him from the draperies, headboard, duvet cover . . . the smell of coffee beckoning from his room-service breakfast table . . . the sound of a distant woodpecker working to find its own breakfast. Tuning out thoughts, worries, fears about the day ahead. Tuning in to counting breaths. Then moving past counting, tuning in to breathing itself.

  Tuning in to the now.

  In the previous three months, Daniel had become an exceedingly proficient meditator. Any decent Buddhist will tell you that meditating is not about grasping for proficiency, but Daniel was not a Buddhist, decent or otherwise, and the daily practice was not religious in nature. It was part of his job.

  Having spent ten years in his previous job as a Roman Catholic priest, he was familiar with meditation, knew much about the Zen sect of Buddhism, but he’d never practiced zazen meditation until after he’d quit the priesthood. He’d learned it as part of his training at the Fleur-de-Lis Foundation.

  For the Foundation, it was simply about brain chemistry and best practices, nothing more. Operatives who meditate solve problems faster, shoot straighter, stay more focused under stress, and recover faster from injury. So they were trained to meditate and were expected to continue their practice in the field.

  And they were trained to end each morning’s session with this intentional thought:

  Today is a good day to die. But I’ve decided to stay alive until tomorrow.

  An elegant phrase. An acceptance of death, followed by the simple decision to see the day through, with all that such a decision implies. Daniel liked to think of it as a set of instructions to his subconscious.

  The sergeant pinned the telephone receiver between his shoulder and ear, reached for the mouse, and spoke into the mouthpiece. “I’m reloading the screen now, sir.” A small wave of relief rolled over Daniel. They’d successfully hijacked the phone call, but that was just the first link in a chain of events that needed to be perfectly calibrated. The computer system had exponentially stronger firewalls. If the Foundation hackers were successful, Daniel’s military personnel file and palm print were now being fed into the local network.

  If they weren’t successful, today would have to be a good day to die after all.

  What a rush, thought Daniel as he waited to find out which.

  2: GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  It started with the running.

  The month following Tim Trinity’s death was a blur. Trinity’s finances were all kinds of illegal, and he’d named Daniel executor of his will, so Daniel hired a team of absurdly expensive, white-shoe New Orleans lawyers to take care of business while he focused on the business of grieving.

  Daniel’s lawyers managed to win a battle royal against the IRS, helped no doubt by the fact that millions of Americans now believed Tim Trinity had been a prophet sent by God, or even the messiah returned.

  Others believed Trinity had been the antichrist, but they were outnumbered by the optimists.

  Tim Trinity’s estate paid the federal government twenty million dollars in back taxes. Another forty million was allocated to pay for property damages and to cover the cost of police and EMS overtime stemming from the chaos Trinity’s followers had caused in Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans—that account was to be administered by FEMA.

  The lawyers then established the Tim Trinity Charitable Trust to distribute the remaining 120-odd million to New Orleans and the towns across the Southland where Trinity had worked his preacher grift for so many years. For the general welfare, Trinity had said in his handwritten will.

  But as the first month bled into the second, things got harder for Daniel. Most of the administrative work had been handed off, leaving him with time on his hands just as he passed his thirty-fourth birthday. Which raised the question:

  What the hell do I do with the rest of my life?

  So he started running. Years earlier, when he competed in Golden Gloves, they hadn’t called it running. Daniel’s trainer, Father Henri, simply called it “roadwork.” Daniel liked the term and still thought of it as roadwork. His boxing days were long behind him—he’d won the trophy at eighteen and retired from the ring—but during his years in the priesthood he kept in shape skipping rope and working with a heavy bag set up in his Rome apartment, and he tried to get in some sparring with the Jesuits at the Vatican boxing club whenever he was in town long enough.

  Around the time he left the priesthood, those fighting skills had been called for once again, this time outside the ring. And now in the middle of a New Orleans summer, he returned to roadwork.

  Running. And wondering what to do with the rest of his life.

  Prevailing opinion said that in the middle of a New Orleans summer, sane people did their running on treadmills inside air-conditioned fitness clubs. But Daniel pounded it out on the heat-buckled pavement with the po’ folk and the moneyed lunatics, sweaty street by sweaty street, reconnecting with the city of his childhood.

  He’d lived his early years mostly on the road, traveling the Bible Belt with his uncle and legal guardian, the Reverend Tim Trinity, grifter at large. Trinity worked the tent revival circuit hard, about 275 days a year, homeschooling Daniel in that rusty Winnebago, but home base was always New Orleans, where they kept a house in Uptown. After leaving Trinity at the age of thirteen, Daniel lived in the Crescent City full-time, the archdiocese his legal guardian.

  Daniel left New Orleans behind after graduating the seminary at twenty-three. For the next ten years he kept an apartment in Rome but lived mostly out of a suitcase. His world expanded to Africa, South America, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, each city, country, continent bleeding into the next.

  Now he was back to home base. Hurricane Katrina had tried its damnedest to kill this town and idiot politicians almost finished the job, but neither succeeded. There was no killing New Orleans. Even with crooks holding sway in government like nothing had happened. Even with corporate America trying to turn the place into Las Vegas. All you had to do was get away from the tourist traps and into the neighborhoods.

  The soul of New Orleans was intact.

  By now, every existing video of the late Reverend Tim Trinity speaking in tongues had been analyzed and decoded and dissected by the media. It had been thoroughly established that Trinity had been speaking English backwards and that he had predicted future events with 100 percent accuracy. That was beyond dispute.

  But nobody knew how he’d done it.

  The autopsy revealed a brain tumor, which might (or might not) conceivably explain speaking backwards, but there was still no explanation for how he’d successfully predicted the future. Religious people said it was the work of God or Satan or the Cosmic Consciousness, while non-believers waded into the baffling math and unsettling metaphysical implications of quantum physics.

  The Trinity Phenomenon remained a mystery, and Daniel figured the rest of the world could solve it without his help. Until that muggy Monday morning, this time running along Magazine Street. It had rained buckets all thr
ough the night until just before dawn, when the nuclear furnace in the sky took over, turning New Orleans into a steam bath, air both hot and laden, so thick you could feel the weight of water in your lungs and you were reminded that lungs are our gills and we were once fish.

  One of many ways New Orleans connects us to the primal, to the truth about what we are.

  It would be a slow run today, but that was fine. This run, on this morning, was finally the run to the bank. Daniel had held down the urge long enough.

  Time to see what was on that damn laptop computer.

  The laptop had arrived by FedEx a week after Trinity’s death. Sent by Carter Ames, managing director of the Fleur-de-Lis Foundation.

  Daniel ran to the edge of the Quarter, stopping to buy a padded backpack at a luggage shop on Canal Street. Then over to IberiaBank on Poydras, where he kept the laptop in a safety deposit box. He forced himself to complete the last three sweat-drenched miles of roadwork with the computer on his back, rather than going straight home with it.

  Felt like a marathon.

  Showered and shaved and cooled down, with a fresh aromatic pot of Community coffee at hand, Daniel powered up the laptop. The note Ames sent with it said: Your uncle was not the only one.

  The Vatican had sent Daniel to debunk his uncle, but they weren’t alone in trying to silence Trinity. There were others, some willing to go way beyond discrediting the man, and behind the scenes, with their fingers in every pie, were two powerful organizations Daniel had never heard of before. The Fleur-de-Lis Foundation had tried to help Daniel protect his uncle. As Carter Ames told it, the Foundation was doing battle with an outfit called the Council for World Peace.

  Don’t be fooled by the name, Ames had warned, the only peace offered by the Council is peaceful slavery. Adding, with an attempt at dry humor, Mind you, they did get the first word right. When did any group calling itself a “council” accomplish anything good?