The End Game

The End Game Read Free

Book: The End Game Read Free
Author: Catherine Coulter
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didn’t know. She grinned. Either way, he was right, it was their turn, and if Hodges was for real, it was possible they’d have a chance for a home run.
    Nicholas looked back at his laptop. “Mr. Hodges appears solid, an accountant for a local Bayonne engineering firm. His wife died three years ago, breast cancer.”
    She took a left into an older residential neighborhood, thick with trees and small, well-manicured lawns. Mr. Richard Hodges’s house was on a quiet dead-end cul-de-sac that backed up to the Hudson River. To Nicholas, the block looked like any other older development in a small eastern American town—thirty-year-old single-story house, comfortably settled in with their neighbors. Amazinghow quiet it was, considering its proximity to Manhattan. He supposed the lapping water dampened the sound.
    They saw the curtains twitch.
    Nicholas closed his laptop. “I see we’re expected.”
    Mike turned off the engine. “Okay, I’m thinking positively. I’m up at bat and Mr. Hodges is going to give me a perfect pitch.”
    The door opened before they had a chance to ring the bell. A man dressed in jeans and a white polo shirt waved them in and closed the door quietly behind them, as if he didn’t want to wake someone. A habit from when his wife was ill?
    The interior of Mr. Hodges’s house was neat, looked clean, but it smelled musty, somehow sterile, and Mike doubted there’d been another woman living here since his wife’s death. She didn’t see any photos or knickknacks on any surface, only piles of newspapers and newsmagazines. The house, she realized, was now only a place where a lonely man lived off his memories.
    â€œMr. Hodges? I’m Agent Caine, and this is Agent Drummond. We were told you have some information about the terrorist group known as Celebrants of Earth, or COE, and a possible bombing.”
    Hodges was a smallish man with a bald spot and a heavy five-o’clock shadow. He looked solid, calm, no indication that he was an alarmist or a wild-hair. Maybe they had finally caught their break. She smelled bacon and toast, a single man’s dinner. She felt a punch of pain for him.
    â€œIt’s nice to meet you,” he said. “Thank you for coming. Shall we sit? Can I get you coffee? I have some already brewed.”
    â€œWe wouldn’t say no to a cup, sir. Thank you.”
    He gestured toward the kitchen.
    Mike and Nicholas took a seat at an ancient table with one leg shorter than the others, held steady with a pile of magazines.Moments later, they both had mugs of coffee and a plate of chocolate-mint Girl Scout Cookies. Nicholas took one to be polite; they’d been floating around the office for the past few weeks and tasted like wax to him.
    Nicholas sipped his coffee, then set the cup on the table. “So, Mr. Hodges, tell us what you know.”
    Hodges blinked at him. “You’re British? I didn’t know people from England could be in the FBI. Are you some sort of special case?”
    Mike nodded, grinning. “Yes, sir, he is indeed a special case.”
    Nicholas sat forward. “My mother was American. The story, sir, please.”
    Mr. Hodges nodded. “I was at the Dominion Bar tonight, having a drink after work. There was a man there—I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him around before. He’s works at the Bayway Refinery—doing what, exactly, I don’t know. He’d obviously been drinking a while, looked pretty drunk to me, and I wondered why the bartender, that’s the owner, May Anne, hadn’t cut him off. He was shooting his mouth off, you know the kind of person, they get loud when they’ve had too much to drink and, well, lose all sense. I heard him tell his friend he was celebrating. He’d gotten a big payoff, a lot of money, and more to come, and he was going to retire and move to an island somewhere and have women in bikinis wait on

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