End Game Read Free Page A

treetops, mournful and a little lonely in a way, and a truck passing on the highway, heading into the city or perhaps to Dulles.
    But it was safe here, something his wife, who’d been raised in a reasonably upscale environment as the only daughter of a corporate lawyer in Chicago, could never understand. By instinct, at times like this, alone with just his own thoughts, he would catch himself listening for other sounds. Some distant, some very close. The whine of a drone’s engine, or of a Russian Hind helicopter gunship. The clank of metal on metal as a troop of Taliban fighters or Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers approached up a mountain pass. The snick of an AK-47 slide being pulled back and released. Footfalls on loose gravel. Someone or something rising up behind him, carrying a knife or a wire garrote.
    Suddenly spooked, he turned and looked down the gravel road toward the Bubble, and then did a careful scan of the woods surrounding the house that had been a private residence until the CIA had taken it over in 1987. But nothing moved. He was absolutely alone, and not in a place where harm was likely to come his way. Of any spot in the world, here was the safest place for him to be, and not a day went by that he didn’t bless his good fortune for surviving Hungary’s turbulence when he was a kid growing up in Rabahidveg, close to the Austrian border.
    Two uncles had been shot to death by KGB border patrol pricks, and his father had been taken into custody for reasons they’d never been told. There he’d been tortured day and night for more than a week. Afterward he’d been a broken man, unable even to feed himself or use the toilet without help.
    Then Hungary was free, in a large measure because of America’s diplomacy and the harsh realities of a Soviet system that simply could not support its own weight. Istvan had specialized in English in school, and when he was nineteen, he went to the U.S. and joined the army, where he was first made a translator—in addition to Hungarian and English, he was also fluent in Russian—and then into INSCOM, which was the army’s intelligence and security command, where he became a spy.
    The transition to the CIA had been easy at first, until he’d been selected to become an NOC and had been sent first to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. Then the nightmares started, and they’d become so bad that, by the time he’d slipped home on a short leave, Fanni, who he’d known from college at Northwestern while he was in the army, almost left him.
    They were sleeping together, and after his second morning back, she’d slipped out of bed to make them coffee. She brought the coffee and a plate of sweet rolls on a tray that she set on her side of the bed, then went around to him and bent down to brush a kiss onto his lips.
    He suddenly reared up out of a deep sleep and smashed his fist into her face, breaking several of her teeth, dislocating her jaw, and sending her sprawling onto the floor.
    They were both in shock.
    After a trip to the emergency room, where her jaw was sent in place and she’d been given pain pills, they went back to the apartment. But she wasn’t fearful of him; instead she was puzzled and angry.
    â€œYou didn’t do it on purpose, Isty; you did it purely on instinct,” she told him. “For survival.”
    They were sitting across from each other at the tiny kitchen table, and he had a hard time looking her in the eye. Her jaw was red and swollen, and she spoke with a lisp because of the missing teeth.
    â€œFor survival from what? Have you been on a battlefield somewhere?”
    â€œI can’t tell you.”
    â€œYou can’t or you won’t?” she demanded, her voice rising.
    â€œCan’t.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œOrders—”
    â€œBullshit. I want the truth!”
    â€œMy life and yours could depend on your not knowing what I do.”
    â€œAre you a