Free The End Game by Raymond Khoury

after another from her wardrobe and parading them for my opinion.
    “What about this one?” she said as she gleefully presented me with a long, shimmering bronze dress that flared out at the bottom. “You said you liked it when I wore it to that gala at the Institute.” Her expression then clouded with thought just as fast as it had brightened up. “Then again—do you think the guest list at the White House might have anyone else who was also at that gala besides us?”
    I raised my eyebrows and nodded positively, though evidently not with a lot of enthusiasm. I mean, by dress number three, I was fresh out. I went with the failsafe response: “They’re all great. Besides, whichever one you choose, you know you’re going to be the hottest girl in that room.”
    OK, I knew that wasn’t going to cut it, and it didn’t. Tess just gave me that deadpan look that signaled a lot of hard work ahead for me to make up for it and said, in her best ironic French accent, “You have such a silky tongue, Monsieur Reilly. No wonder women swoon over your ever utterance.”
    “It’s my cross to bear,” I replied before heading out to the kitchen. “You want a beer?”
    “Monsieur, you spoil me with your exquisite taste.”
    “I’m assuming that means you want foreign?”
    “Moi?”
    I smiled. “One Bud, coming up.”
    I hit the fridge, took a long chug, then sat down at the kitchen table and mapped out tomorrow in my mind.
    I had to be at Times Square at one. I didn’t think it would be a long meet, and that’s assuming Darth showed up at all. The guy sounded so jittery it felt like anything would spook him.
    On the other hand, he could show up and turn out to be the real deal. If so, I might try to convince him to come into custody, which, if he did, would obviously wipe out our little DC excursion. I could already picture how cheerfully Tess would take that.
    She was all excited about our mini-break. She’d arranged for her mom, who lived up in Westport, to come down and look after Kim and Alex while we were out of town. It would be just the two of us, shacked up in a nice hotel room in the capital. Which would be great. Having to miss it would be bad. Then again, my covert meeting could go all wrong and morph into something nasty and intense, which was a different worry altogether.
    I needed to be at Penn Station at two for our Acela Express down to DC I was already going to be on thin ice with Tess once I told her I’d be ditching her at Union Station and meeting up with her at the hotel later. That would be tight too—I’d be jumping in the rental car that was waiting there for me and driving out to have my chat with my favorite philandering CIA agent before joining her in time for the star-studded Christmas dinner.
    That wasn’t a conversation I was hugely looking forward to. I hadn’t felt great about blackmailing Stan Kirby the first time, even though he was a cheating scumbag. It hadn’t exactly endeared me to him either. He’d probably blow a gasket at having me show up again, and at his house for that matter, but I didn’t have any other choice. A phone call wasn’t going to have the full effect, not if I wanted to convince him to look into what the CIA’s servers had on record about my dad. I couldn’t show up at his office. And Kurt had called to tell me that his snoop into Kirby’s digital footprint showed that his Thursday evening trysts with his sister-in-law seemed to have ended, and that he drove home from Langley straight after work pretty much every day. Maybe my little intervention had actually put him back on the straight and narrow. Or maybe his mistress had just got bored with his sorry ass. Who knows. Still, I couldn’t afford not to go out and see him. The dinner invitation to the White House was timely, a great opportunity to slip away and have my little chat with him without raising too many flags.
    I decided it wasn’t hugely productive to keep mulling over it any more. I just