The End Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

hit a certain sweet spot inside my skull and I realized that this was code for something else entirely.
    Jeez, I love this woman.
    I titled my head, mock-studying her. “I did, but I know how much the holiday season means to you and the last thing I’d want is to disappoint you.”
    She flashed me a grin. “Hang on to that thought, cowboy.”
    I did have plans. I’d arranged to meet Kurt Jaegers in Jersey. Kurt was a white-hat hacker, a tech wizard who was helping me out privately, totally off the books. He’d asked for a meet, which could mean he had news for me, good news. I wasn’t holding my breath, but I also had some new ideas on how he could help me with the white whales I was hunting.
    Right now, all that could wait.
    I needed to live a little first.
     
     
    So, about those white whales I mentioned earlier, the ones preoccupying me during the stake-out at Daland’s house. The ones Nick and the Bureau couldn’t know about.
    Not one, but two things eating away at me, chewing me up from the inside.
    Come to think of it, I’m not sure whale is the best metaphor here. Something like the alien from, well, Alien , the one that burst out of John Hurt’s chest in the first movie, is probably a better fit.
    It all had to do with my son Alex, and my dad.
    For starters, I was still trying to track down the elusive “Reed Corrigan.” Corrigan—real name, unknown—is the ex-CIA spook who had orchestrated the brainwashing of Alex earlier this year. A son I never knew I had, up until then. His mom, Michelle, an ex-DEA agent I’d dated while on assignment in Mexico, before I met Tess, had never told me she got pregnant. While living out in California, Michelle and Alex had got caught up in a sick plan to flush out a psycho Mexican drug baron nicknamed “El Brujo”—the sorcerer. The plan involved brainwashing Alex and using him as bait. Corrigan had worked on the CIA’s mind control programs and had arranged to have some pretty disturbing things dumped into Alex’s brain. The plan had gone seriously wrong and I’d got sucked into it. It had ended up causing Michelle’s death and left me and Tess to pick up the pieces with Alex while Corrigan, whoever he was, was still out there somewhere.
    I wasn’t going to stop until I found the bastard.
    Alex was now doing better, thanks to a shrink we’d been taking him to see every week. His nightmares had subsided, but they were still there, off and on. Moreover, the nasty things they’d planted in his mind about me were, I felt—maybe more out of hope than out of anything concrete—starting to subside. I didn’t get the feeling that he was looking at me as apprehensively and fearfully as he often used to. We were tiptoeing our way into doing some normal father-and-son stuff, like me taking him to Teeball practice on Saturday mornings, but we still had a long ways to go.
    To find Corrigan, I’d recruited Kurt to help me get into the CIA’s files. When that didn’t work, I’d resorted to blackmailing a CIA analyst Kurt had identified for me, a sleazeball called Stan Kirby who’d been having an affair with his wife’s sister. That exercise had mixed results. On the one hand, and totally unexpectedly, it turned out to be key in saving the president’s life—hence our forthcoming dinner at the White House with the Yorkes themselves in a couple of days’ time. On the other hand, it hadn’t been much use in helping me get my hands on Reed Corrigan.
    Kirby had dug up three case files that mentioned Corrigan, but they were all highly redacted and weren’t much use.
    One of them, though, kicked up the second whale, or alien, or whatever metaphor you feel works best here. That file, which concerned an operation called “Cold Burn” that Corrigan and Fullerton had been part of, also mentioned something called “Project Azorian.” Not particularly ominous in itself, except that it then mentioned someone with the initials CR.
    I knew the name Azorian. As a