Read The End Game for Free Online Page B

capable of doing this myself. His levels of paranoia weren’t too outrageous, though, considering the people we were up against, although time was tight, me being due to meet Nick at Federal Plaza at four for the Daland post-arrest briefing.
    I took a few steps toward the river and casually scanned through three-sixty. I was clean.
    Kurt told me that he’d read a stack of books on fieldcraft and practiced covert techniques within MMORPGs—the “massive” in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, he’d assured me jokingly, not a reference to his waist size. People overuse words a lot nowadays—everything is amazing, everyone’s a genius—although in his case, massive was an understatement. But as he emerged from the tree line to the south, it was still bizarre to see the new, thinner Kurt. He’d lost a ton of weight—OK, maybe not an actual ton. I thought I could take some credit for him dropping so much flab. Our regular meetings not only got him out of the house, but also appeared to have given him a sense of purpose where previously, he had none.
    Over the months he’d been helping me out, I’d got to know Kurt well. He’d opened up to me—probably more than he’d done with most people, I thought, given what he’d told me about his life. He hadn’t had it easy, not that I’d imagined otherwise.
    Throughout his school years, Kurt had been the butt of exceptionally cruel jokes—both verbal and practical—by a clique of particularly vicious girls. This systematic campaign had stemmed from his temerity in asking one of them to a dance at their fifth grade end-of-year party, a crime seemingly so heinous that he deserved to be punished for it till the end of his schooling.
    By middle school, this clique had shared their hatred of Kurt with their meathead boyfriends and his final two years of education had been off-the-charts intolerable. If it hadn’t been for his Sony PlayStation, his dial-up modem and the trailblazing Internet chat rooms he’d joined as soon as they launched, he would have put an end to his miserable existence long before he’d had a chance to think through the long-term consequences of such a decision.
    As with many other social outcasts, the Internet and the rapidly growing gamer culture it fed off ended up giving Kurt a reason to live. And like most hardcore gamers, he was a neophile at heart and wanted to see what would come next. He instinctively knew that games would become better, faster and more immersive and he wanted to be around as they did so. By the time he was twenty, he was as addicted to console games and the online world as he was to food, his treatment at the hands of the witches of East Brunswick having served to confirm his withdrawal from the world of women made of flesh and his dedication to those made of pixels.
    If I didn’t need Kurt myself, I’d probably have recommended him to our Cyber Division by now, but he and I had developed a routine and neither of us seemed to want to mess with it. Over the last few months, we’d worked together enough for me to mostly can my sarcastic instincts and accumulate no little respect for Kurt’s doggedness. I also knew enough about the way things were going with surveillance and data-trawling capabilities, drones, high-powered mikes and micro-cameras to understand that one day, real-world agents would be almost entirely redundant. I just hoped that day didn’t come until I had taken my pension.
    Kurt was grinning from ear to ear as he ambled toward me, his gait still that of someone carrying the hundred extra pounds he’d recently shed. Maybe it was because of the holiday season. Christmas turned guys like Kurt back into Fifth Graders—happy ones at that. If it wasn’t for keeping our meetings on the down-low, I fully suspect he would have been wearing a green knitted sweater that featured a reindeer.
    Glancing from side to side, he covered the final few yards to where I was standing and gave me a small