Game Over by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online Page B

open at the throat. He didn’t look at all like the sort of man who would kill you, but in fact he would kill you without hesitation and never think much about it afterward. He had murdered people with guns, knives, garrotes, and other assorted tools too gruesome to mention. He’d even shot a guy with an arrow once. He was not a freelancer. This was his steady job. The Axis Assembly kept him on retainer, and he was always ready to go to work. When someone became a problem for the Assembly, it was Hepplewhite’s job to make him stop being a problem—in other words, to make him dead.
    Now it was Kurodar who had become a problem for the Assembly and Hepplewhite’s assignment was to deal with him—which was to say, kill him.
    Hepplewhite reached inside his jacket. His hand brushed the butt of the pistol in the holster under his arm. It was a custom-made .22 with a built-in sound suppressor. It fired almost silently, and its small bullets were hollow and contained a poison that would kill a man almost instantly if the bullet itself didn’t do the job. But Hepplewhite did not draw the weapon. Instead he reached for the smart phone in his shirt pocket. He drew it out. Pressed one button. Spoke two words: “I’m here.” And slipped the phone back into his shirt.
    Then he put his hands in the pockets of his slacks and began to stroll slowly across the compound toward the white building. He glanced around casually as he walked, but there was nothing to worry about that he could see. There were no gunmen, no guards. They had all run away the moment they heard the Assembly was abandoning the MindWar Project. They all knew what that meant. They all knew what would come next: Harold Hepplewhite. And Death.
    With no one to stop him or question him, Hepplewhite reached the door of the building, pulled it open, and went inside.
    It was downright eerie in here. An enormous lobby like the lobby on the ground floor of a New York Cityoffice tower. But no one around. No one at all. No noise. No motion. An empty chair behind the reception desk. No lights on. The security terminals all dark.
    Hepplewhite’s footsteps echoed on the tiled floor, ghostly, as he passed through.
    The elevator wasn’t working, but the door to the stairwell was ajar. As he stood at the top of the stairwell, Hepplewhite could hear the footsteps of the woman with the food descending to the bottom. Still moving slowly and casually, he followed her down.
    At the foot of the stairs, he came into a long corridor with fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Some of the lights were off, some were on, some were blinking fitfully, blue glare and shadows alternating on the floor below. Hands in his pants pockets, Hepplewhite passed beneath them. He passed several guard stations, but there were no guards. He went through several heavy iron doors, but they were all unlocked and standing open. Whenever he paused and listened, he could hear the woman’s footsteps echoing up ahead of him.
    At last, he turned a corner and caught sight of her again. She was entering the final room, Kurodar’s room, the Control Room, the place where the Realm was made.
    The woman had just gone through the door. Hepplewhite went after her. He reached the threshold. He stepped over.
    And he nearly gagged at what he saw.
    The brilliant physicist Ivan Doshenko—the terrorist now known as Kurodar—had always been an ugly littleman. Stoop-shouldered and small, he had always had a face like a skull crossed with a toad. But now . . . now, the man was an atrocity. A slimy purple barely human thing strapped to a chair, wires and tubes going in and out of him blending seamlessly with sinews and nerves and veins. His body and the banks of computers all around him were so completely linked that Hepplewhite found it difficult to distinguish the man from the machine.
    Disgusting , Hepplewhite thought. Killing him will just put him out of his misery. Not that he