The End Game by Raymond Khoury

he was and how he fitted into anything at all.

10
    Times Square, New York City
    One o’clock came and went, and no one turned up.
    When I say no one, I don’t mean it literally. People were there. Tons of them. It seemed like nothing short of a serious hurricane could keep the hordes away from the chaotic maelstrom that was Times Square, anytime of day or night. But of all the people there, no one approached or made contact with me.
    Which surprised me.
    My instincts had been pulling for the guy to be real, either way: whether he was a deep throat, or bait. Either one could help me find out more about my dad and Corrigan. I’d somehow reached the conclusion that it was going to happen, and I was leaning toward him being the real deal and genuinely having some critical information to share with me. And if that was the case, and he hadn’t shown up, it would mean two things: either he got spooked, or someone got to him first.
    I mean, I was there. I got there early, scoped the place out. It was packed, as always—in fact, more so. This close to Christmas, it gets even crazier than normal. The square, particularly that part of it, the pedestrianized area by the TKTS tickets booth, was like a condensed mini-Vegas, heaving with people, music, car horns, monster LED screens and neon lights, a relentless assault on the senses, which pretty much summed up most of Manhattan these days. I ended up standing there for over half an hour, scanning the area while my eyes and ears suffered its total onslaught. And in the midst of all that chaos, between the daze of wide-eyed tourists, harried locals, gawkers, hawkers, Elmos and Captain Americas and guitar-playing rhinestone cowboys, it was almost impossible to tell if anyone was watching me. Which was one of the reasons why Times Square was a favorite for unorthodox meetings like this. That, and the multiple routes through which to slip away.
    I was annoyed. I wanted him to be here. I needed to hear what he had to say about my dad. Up until his call, all I’d had were my suspicions, based on seeing his initials in that file Corrigan was mentioned in, along with ‘Azorian’ on his desk. The coincidence was too big to ignore, but on the other hand, it would have been great to discover there was actually no connection between my dad and my bête noire.
    The phone call had kind of nuked that possibility.
    By one thirty, it was time to move on. I checked my phone yet again. Nothing. And it was a thirteen-block walk down to Penn Station, where Tess and our Acela fast train to DC were waiting for me.
     
     
    Seated on the bleachers above the TKTS booth while feigning to surf through an iPad, Sandman observed the federal agent who was waiting for the meeting that wouldn’t happen.
    The iPad was a great prop for this kind of surveillance. Despite the cold and despite the swarm of activity all around him, everyone there, it seemed, was lost in some kind of handheld device, teleported to some alternate social realm—even those who weren’t sitting alone. This new norm was actually quite a boon when it came to shadowing targets. It gave operatives like Sandman something to do with their hands, which, he knew, was something aspiring actors always worried about. Many years and many deaths ago, he’d taken an acting course. Not that he ever wanted to be an actor. He just knew it would help him be more convincing while in character. He’d inhabited many personas in the course of his work and, despite all those kills, he was still a faceless ghost that hadn’t appeared on a single police report or sketch artist’s portrait.
    His attention focused on Reilly, he casually scrolled through the pages of The Huffington Post , his default site. It always gave him a perverse thrill to glance at the opinions of people who thought that what they expressed in blogs and comments had any impact on what actually happened. He knew the real power in the world was beyond the reach of these naïve souls. He