Page 132 of Until the End

Castle thought back to three months ago, replaying everything and connecting the scattered dots. “Willow found out about the sale of smallpox-M in an auction on the black market. Do you mean to tell me that you were the seller?”

“Yes,” Sanborn said, flatly.

The answer was a blow so crushing it sucked the air from Castle’s lungs. “Selling bioweapons spits on every righteous idea you’ve ever espoused. It makes you a hypocrite.”

“I controlled the game,” Sanborn said. “I picked the players. Figured out how to put the Gray Box on the field. We were always meant to win.”

The terrible truth was an unbearable weight that Castle wished he’d never known. “That’s why you picked Maddox for the assignment? Because you learned Cole was alive and connected to his arms dealer brother. You were banking on him still caring about Maddox and that if you got him into enough trouble with the Russians, offered to take care of his problems, that he would help her. Help the Gray Box.”

Sanborn nodded.

And it had worked.

Something inside Castle withered at the knowledge of how far Sanborn had gone, how low he had sunk.

Sanborn took a step toward him, reducing the gap, renewing that cherished sense of affinity between them. But Castle wasn’t so foolish as not to also see it as Sanborn moving further away from the gun. Something Castle could exploit.

“The middleman,” Sanborn said, “the broker who conducted the auction was a confidential informant for the government. We owned him already. I meant for the arms dealers who were invited to the auction to be arrested in the operation, the bioweapon to be recovered and—”

“And rack up a big win for the Gray Box.” Castle hung his head, thinking back to what Ashley had told him about the water treatment facility. The enemy stacked the game and torched the rules and didn’t care if the world burned as a result. Not them. Not ever. Not Sanborn. “But you didn’t factor in Aleksander Novak.” Novak had been an assassin with a vendetta. He’d crashed the auction, stolen the smallpox-M weapon and made their lives hell. “Novak almost killed twenty thousand people because you tried to play God.”

“It all worked out.” Sanborn extended his hands, palms up, and took another step closer. “The team recovered the weapon.”

By the skin of our teeth! Had he truly gone mad?

“And Novak was captured,” Sanborn said triumphantly.

And Maddox and Cole had both almost died stopping him.

“I’m the one who makes the hard decisions, without doubts,” Sanborn said, “and I live with them. I don’t crack. I don’t wallow in regret. We’re the same.”

Most of what Sanborn had said was true. At their cores, there were striking similarities, but there were fundamental differences between them too. “We’re not the same. You started out with convictions and principles and ended up here. Corrupted. Telling yourself and me whatever you have to in order to justify the terrible things you’ve done. The things that you’re still doing.”

Sanborn had gone off the rails, full-blown dark side.

“You can stand there and lecture me on morality.” Sanborn’s voice softened as he edged forward. “Or you can acknowledge that sometimes we have to do things that keep us awake at night so that the rest of the country can sleep safely and soundly.”

Castle would swallow his tongue before he admitted that Sanborn’s point was valid. If he voiced any credence, no matter how slight, it’d only feed into this manipulation technique to get Castle to believe and obey, to impair his ability to discriminate between what Castle thought was right and what Sanborn thought was necessary.

“The five million dollars that you walked away with, what did you do with it?” Castle asked. “Buy an island in the Caribbean for yourself?”

Sanborn gave a scathing laugh devoid of any humor. “You think so little of me? Do you really see me as a selfish, greedy opportunist?”

No, Castle didn’t. But he hadn’t seen Sanborn as Darth Vader before today either. What else was he supposed to think?

“We’ve suffered tremendous financial cutbacks,” Sanborn said. “Lee Pomeroy and Ed Boswell have been siphoning money from the Gray Box to fund biological weapons. They continue to tie our hands, limit our resources, make us do more with less. They were risking the lives of my operatives to fund their dirty program.”

Being short-staffed, they never had enough downtime to fully recuperate from one mission before heading out on the next. Limited resources meant shortcuts had to be taken. And shortcuts eventually led to the loss of lives.

They already gave so much in this thankless job. Government officials stealing money from the Gray Box was unforgivable. At the top of the list, right beneath launching a bioweapons program.

It was hard for Castle to disagree that he and Sanborn did indeed share a common enemy and a worthwhile fight, but this was bigger than the two of them.

“What did you do with the money?” Castle demanded.

“Part of the five million has gone into the Gray Box, enabling me to pay Tanaka Enterprises the outstanding debt I owed for the state-of-the-art gear you all have. Another portion was to pay my under-the-table operatives. I have several with families. They need to cover health insurance payments, put their kids through college, afford to retire from this ugly business one day. And the rest funded this operation. To destroy the enemies of the republic. Lee Pomeroy. Boswell.”

The more Sanborn confessed, the more Castle’s paradigm warped and the less he knew what to think.