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“You tried, Mike,” Kat said, gritting her own teeth against the pain.

“We both tried as hard as we could.”

“Did we? Well, it wasn’t good enough.” I felt tears welling up in my throat, hot and painful. “Kat, I don’t know if we’re going to convince any of them.”

“I need you to tie this,” she said again, her voice shaking. I turned and looked at her. She was pale and scared.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re going to have police on us any minute now. We probably woke up everyone in this whole hotel.”

I put my gun back in my waistband and took the ends of the towel in my hands. “How is it?” I asked, as I tied it into a makeshift bandage. “It’s the back of my arm,” she said. “So no arteries or anything like that. But it went down to the bone. I need stitches.”

I tightened it and then reached down to pick up her fallen gun. She took it with her left hand.

“There’s a back stairway,” she said.

“Okay.”

She took a robe from the closet and pulled it on, putting the Beretta into a pocket. As we got outside into the hall, we saw a dozen other guests, most of them in pajamas or bathrobes; they all looked tired and bewildered, wondering where the noise had come from. Rumors of whatever was going on in the Olympic apartments had to be passing around. Kat and I played it cool, trying to take on the same look that the others had.

An employee of the hotel made an announcement in German that I didn’t understand, but Kat did.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“The back?” I asked.

“No, the lobby.”

At the front desk Kat asked the clerk a question in German, and he nodded.

He opened a drawer, neatly organized with all kinds of toiletries: toothbrushes, shower caps, fingernail clippers. He pulled out a little packet and a book of matches and handed them to Kat.

“Danke,” she said.

“Bitte.”

We slipped out the front door and crossed the street to a park. It was still dark out, but the eastern sky was beginning to lighten.

“What’s that?” I asked, as she led me to a picnic table.

“A sewing kit,” she said, sitting down and opening the small packet, revealing thread, needles, and a couple of buttons. “You’re going to stitch me up.”

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e9dc8b49-255b-565f-b32b-adccc1b3d880)

We had a first aid kit in the backpack and she opened it and took two painkillers. I opened an alcohol swab and wiped the vicious gouge. The Turkish blade had cut cleanly—a straight cut through the sweatshirt, skin, muscle, down to the bone. I lit a match to sterilize the needle and then tried to follow Kat’s instructions to stitch the wound up cleanly. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it—I was timid at first, knowing how much pain she had to be in—but I soon figured it out. It was going to be an awful-looking scar, but she said it had to be done.

While I worked, she got on the walkie-talkie and called to report in. She had the earphone in, so I couldn’t follow most of the conversation. “We had to kill her,” Kat said. “Yes … No, there was no other choice … No. No. At least I don’t think so … Yes. Mike is stitching me up, but I’m not going to be able to use my right hand. It severed the muscle and tendons I think. I need a hospital … We’re in a park across from the hotel … Okay. We’ll see you.”

There was a long pause, and she looked down at the slash. She was far more comfortable with blood and being stitched up than I was. I didn’t know what kind of pain pills she’d taken, but they must have been strong. She’d been the one to make the first aid kits, and I’d have been willing to bet that she’d taken the pills from the clinic where she worked—these weren’t over-the-counter medications.

“How are we going to explain this to a hospital?” I asked. “People don’t normally stitch themselves up.”

“You’d be surprised what people do,” she said. “Lots of patients self-medicate, and do crazy things like try to remove teeth with pliers or try to close a wound with superglue. That one’s not so crazy. It works pretty well for small stuff. Medics use it in Vietnam. I don’t know if it’s been studied for toxicity, though.”

“You’re not going to be able to use your hand?”

“No, since you’re not suturing the tendons. That’s going to need a hospital.”

“Then what good is stitching?”

She smiled through her pain. “It stops the bleeding.”

“What did John have to say?” I asked, gesturing to the walkie-talkie.

“Mary and Tyson had to kill their Player too. The Koori. Tyson took a bullet, and they’re in the hospital. Walter is off meeting with the Cahokian. He thinks he’ll be able to reason with him, since they know each other.”

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.”