End Game

by David Hagberg

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” Coffin said.

  “It’s only been a couple of days since the murders in the CIA.”

  “I knew someone would be coming for us.”

  “Who?”

  “Either our control officer or Alex. They were a thing the moment he dropped into our camp. It’s like they’d known each other all their lives.”

  “His name?”

  Coffin smiled. “We came to think of him as the Avenging Angel. The first time he came down to the oil fields with us, he took out two roustabouts—I don’t even think they were Iraqis. It didn’t matter to him. The next time, Alex came with us—it was a first for her—and she was just as good and ruthless as he was. They made a hell of a pair.”

  “Avenging Angel—why that name?” Pete asked, coming back with the wine.

  “The war was close, he told us, so it didn’t matter how many bodies were stacked up in plain sight. He wanted the Mukhabarat to know someone was looking down on them and taking revenge for all their sins.”

  “They didn’t send someone up to search for your guys?”

  “They did for a couple of days, but when all hell began to break loose, they took off—some of them to the front but a lot of them across the border into the already big refugee camps in Turkey and Syria.”

  “You didn’t call this guy by name?”

  “George.”

  “American?” Pete asked.

  Coffin shrugged. “Brooklyn maybe. An East Coast Jew. At least that’s what I thought at the time.”

  “But you know better now,” McGarvey said, careful to keep his voice neutral. He’d heard stories from Otto and others inside the Company, especially when he’d served briefly as the DCI, about hidden caches of money or heroin—besides the WMDs—in Iraq. But they were rumors. Popular myths. Internet “truths” that the conspiracy nuts loved to hash out.

  “Damned right. It didn’t make sense to me then. But I saw it with my own eyes, and gradually began to realize what had happened and why. I just didn’t think they’d kill to keep it a secret. And especially not the way Walt and Istvan were done. But I understand now.”

  “We’re listening,” McGarvey said.

  “The thing is, I don’t think there’s a damned thing you can do about it. You get involved, and you’re a dead man walking.”

  “We’re already involved,” Pete said. “So tell us this big secret of yours.”

  “Shit,” Coffin said. He was in distress. It had come to him slowly during the interview, and now he had a crazy look in his eyes, almost as if he were a wild animal that had been cornered. But the odds were so overwhelming, he didn’t know how to fight back.

  “Quit the bullshit,” Moshonas said. “If you have something to say, get on with it, or I’ll take you in this minute. And I won’t give a damn if I have to shoot when you try to escape.”

  “You have to understand that it’s more than what’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk.”

  “An area where the inspectors never searched,” Pete said.

  Coffin nodded.

  “So it’s still there—whatever the it is.”

  Again Coffin nodded. “And it’ll never be found unless you have the coordinates.”

  “Which you have.”

  “All of us did.”

  “Now it’s only Knight, Schermerhorn, and the woman.”

  “Plus our control officer.”

  “What’d he say at your debriefing when you got back to the States?”

  “He never came back with us. He got as far as Ramstein, but when we boarded the plane to come home, he wasn’t aboard.”

  “Nobody ever mentioned him?” Pete asked.

  “No.”

  “Not you or the others?” McGarvey asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what he told us about Kryptos. The solution to number four, he told us, would lead to what he called the ‘empirical necessity.’”

  Everyone in the mess knew about the encrypted sculpture in the courtyard outside the New Headquarters Building. Every day employees eating in the cafeteria looked at it, though most never really saw it.

  “Only the first three panels have been decrypted so far,” Pete said. “They’re mostly nonsense.”

  “Except two talks about something buried in an unknown location,” McGarvey said. “Otto mentioned it to me once.”

  “Did he solve four?” Coffin asked.

  “Two has the latitude and longitude of the burial site, which, as I remember, was a couple of hundred feet or less southwest of the sculpture.”

  “That’s wrong,” Coffin said.

  “And three is just a paraphrase of what the archeologist Howard Carter supposedly said when he looked inside the tomb of King Tut for the first time.”

  “Which leaves four. Maybe you should have Mr. Rencke try his hand at translating it before someone else is killed.”

  “You’re saying whatever’s on panel four makes sense of what’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk.”

  “That’s what George told us in the end, when he swore us to secrecy. ‘The truth will come out sooner or later,’ he said. ‘When it does you’ll understand. The entire world will understand the empirical necessity.’”

  “So what’s buried up there?” Pete asked.

  Coffin got up and handed his empty glass to her. “Another one, please,” he said. He moved around the table to one of the open portholes.

  “Sit down,” McGarvey said.

  “I need some air,” Coffin said, looking back. “The rain smells good.”

  “Sit down, God damn it.”

  Coffin was suddenly flung forward off his feet, a small red hole in the back of his head and his entire face exploding in a spray of blood, bones, and brain matter.

  SEVENTEEN

  Thomas Knight arrived at the CIA’s ground-maintenance building just after six thirty in the morning. He was short, something under five ten, with a stocky build that had turned a little soft over the years. His eyes were wide and deep blue—his best feature, his wife, Stephanie, told him. The worst, the back of his head, where a bald spot was growing bigger every year.

  This was his favorite time of the day, just before dawn, when everything was cool and peaceful. The campus always looked the prettiest to him at this hour. The lights of the OHB in the distance—American’s bastion against the real world—safe and secure, reassuring.

  He parked around the side, unlocked the service door, and powered up the three garage doors, behind which were the riding mowers, tree-trimmer buckets, and other grounds equipment.

  He lit a cigarette and then brought the Starbucks he’d picked up on the way in from Garrett Park, across the river, to the open door, where he breathed deeply of the woodland scents.

  He was wearing his usual white coveralls, the CIA’s logo on the breast pocket, totally spotless. How his wife got the grass and mud stains out was the big mystery to the crew.

  “She’s a magician,” one of the guys had said.

  Knight had to smile, thinking about it. No, that had been Joseph, but he was dead now, like Walt and Istvan. And maybe the others, because none of them had stayed in contact once the op was finished and they’d been debriefed.

  Larry Coffin had suggested they go deep and never make contact with one another.

  They’d met at a McDonald’s in Williamsburg just a few miles from the front gate at Camp Peary—the Farm. Even Alex had shown up, and she’d told them she’d never eaten at a McDonald’s in her life.

  “Yeah, right,” Fabry said. “Even in Paris, on the Champs-Élysées, there is a McDonald’s where you may have le hamburger and a glass of wine. And you have been to Paris.”

  “Oui, but lunch at Le Jules Verne,” she’d said. It was the restaurant on the first level of the Eiffel Tower.

  They’d all laughed, but the tension had run high that day, because once they left the restaurant, they would be on the run. And there was no telling h
ow long it would be, if ever, before they could resurface.

  “Hide the thimble,” Carnes had said. It was the children’s game in which a thimble used for sewing something by hand was placed out in the open when all the contestants were out of the room. When they came in, they were supposed to find it. But it was a frustrating game, because even though the tiny thimble—it was small enough to fit over the tip of someone’s thumb—was in plain sight, almost everyone had a hard time seeing it.

  Carnes was going to hide somewhere in plain sight, under the theory that if George were looking for them, he’d look deep, not on the surface.

  But that hadn’t worked.

  Someone was coming, as he’d known they would ever since they’d gotten back from Iraq and George wasn’t with them. The fact that no one ever mentioned the man’s name or his absence had been the clincher.

  “Let sleeping dogs lie,” the Magician had cautioned. “But go deep, at least for the time being.”

  The others had disappeared, except for Walter and Istvan, who, like him, had come back to the CIA, but under new identities. Nothing whatsoever connected them to their careers as NOCs, and especially not to Alpha Seven. Even their fingerprints, blood types, and DNA on record with the Company were false.

  They’d learned to blend in—or at least they’d learned to enhance the skills of something they’d been doing most of their lives. The one thing they had in common was the ability to lie so convincingly that most of the time they believed it themselves.

  Knight was a kid from Des Moines who’d been a dreamer all his life. He lived in books, and at times he played the roles of his heroes. Don Quixote had been his hands-down all-time favorite, for reasons even he couldn’t say. But one of the guys—or maybe it was Alex, on one of their soul-searching evenings after they’d had sex—had found out about his near obsession and then came up with his operational handle. He’d never objected.

  When he finished his cigarette, he went inside and started the wide-swath riding mower he was to use for this morning’s assignment. He was working the fringe on both sides of the driveway up from the main gate to the OHB, and after lunch he and Karl Foreman would be working the slope from the rear of the OHB down to the woods, past and around the dome.

  Mindless work, but satisfying for all of that, because until two days ago he’d begun to relax, begun to actually take a deep breath from time to time.

  Before he got up on the seat, he pulled out his 9-mm Beretta 92F pistol and checked the load. No crazy son of a bitch—whether it was George, their control officer, or Alex, who Coffin never trusted—was going to get the better of him. Rumor was that Walt and Istvan had not only been murdered, but their bodies had been mutilated.

  Crazy things had been done to the Kirkuk roustabouts, some of them not even Iraqis.

  “We’re here to send them a message,” George had told them from day one.

  And such a message they had sent that, when they got back, even their debriefers handled them with respect—and maybe a little fear. Alpha Seven consisted of the most out-of-control operators in the entire national clandestine service.

  Knight put the pistol back in the holster strapped to his chest under his coveralls, and headed out the door and down the gravel path to the driveway a quarter of a mile away.

  The morning shift hadn’t started coming in yet, and the sun was just peeking over the horizon, the day still cool, the sky perfectly clear. Saturday he and Stephanie were thinking about driving down to Williamsburg for the day and maybe a night.

  She was from St. Paul. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s town,” as she liked to boast. As a kid, and still as a grown-up, she lived in her own literary fantasy world. It was one of the many reasons she and Knight had connected.

  He’d chugged past the lower end of the parking lot and was turning onto the fringe beside the driveway when Foreman drove up in his Ford F-150, driver’s window down, and pulled over.

  “What the hell in sweet Jesus are you doing out here already?” he demanded. He was from Oklahoma, and at fifty-five had done his twenty and was retiring in a year or so. He liked Knight, but then again he liked everybody.

  “Mowing the grass. What the hell does it look like I’m doing, you dumb Okie?”

  Foreman tilted his head back and laughed from the bottom of his boots. “Dumb Okie—I gotta remember that one.”

  Knight had been calling him a dumb Okie since shortly after Knight had come to work here ten years ago.

  “We’re supposed work in pairs,” Foreman said.

  The order had come down two days ago after the murders.

  “Whoever’s doing it wants the spooks, not us,” Knight said. “But if you’re so goddamned worried, get your ass in gear and come on down.”

  Foreman laughed again. “Be down in a hog’s fart,” he said, and took off up the hill.

  Whatever the hell that meant. Knight engaged the drive and started down the gently sloping hill, still a half hour or so before the early birds began showing up.

  Barely one hundred yards down the hill, the engine began acting up, running rough, sputtering nearly to a stop, and then revving up as if the carburetor float were sticking.

  Knight shut down the mowing blades, put the engine in neutral, locked the brakes, and dismounted, but before he could check the problem, the mower suddenly steadied out.

  The equipment wasn’t exactly new, but it was in good shape. Their two mechanics made sure of it.

  All of a sudden the engine revved up to its maximum rpm, the mower blades suddenly engaged, and the machine lurched backward.

  Knight tried to step away, but his left foot caught under the traction wheel and he was pulled off balance, falling backward.

  The base of the machine climbed up over his lower legs and then knees, the pain impossible. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and keyed the push-to-talk switch. “Karl, you copy?” he shouted.

  But then the edge of the mower blades bit into his feet, and he screamed.

  He tried to push the heavy mower away, but the machine kept coming, the incredible, impossible pain climbing up his thighs.

  When the three-feet-in-diameter blades reached his abdomen, he passed out, and when they reached his face, mangling it, he was already dead. Still the mower continued up the hill, blood and gore splashing down the slope and across the trunks of the trees.

  EIGHTEEN

  The NIS cleanup crew had come at once to remove the body and sanitize the boat. Searching for the shell casing would have to wait until first light, but it was obvious to McGarvey that Coffin had been shot with a high-power rifle and probably from a distance of a thousand yards or more. Something like the American-made .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle could have done the job from as far as a mile out.

  He and Pete rode with Moshonas back into the city and to their hotel at two in the morning.

  “If the killer was sloppy, which I don’t think he was, he would have left a shell casing lying around,” McGarvey told the Greek intelligence officer.

  “You’re probably right, but it’ll give our people something to do. Something to put in their report.”

  “What about us?” Pete asked. She was shook up, but she held her feelings close.

  “I don’t know,” Moshonas said after a thoughtful hesitation. “What are we supposed to do with you? You’ll have to at least come in for questioning.”

  “Tell me about Joseph Carnes’s death,” McGarvey said.

  Moshonas gave McGarvey an odd look. “I don’t know. He was killed in a car crash.”

  “His body crushed? Maybe burned in a fire?”

  Moshonas shrugged. “What’s your point?”

  “How was the body identified? Was there a match with his passport photo?”

  “As I recall, his face had been totally destroyed.”

  They were sitting in the car in the hotel’s driveway, one piece of the puzzle dropping into place for McGarvey. Carnes, Wager, Fabry, and now Coffin had all been killed by the same person, who had le
ft them some bizarre message by wiping out their faces, erasing their identities.

  Moshonas got the connection. “Whoever shot Coffin waited until he turned around so they could hit him in the back of his head, destroying his face.”

  “It was the same with the two men killed at CIA headquarters,” McGarvey said.

  “Two here in Athens and two in Washington. Leaves three on the original team plus the mysterious control officer. One of them is the killer?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Find them before someone else dies,” Moshonas said.

  “That’s why we came here.”

  “Too late,” Moshonas said. “And now you’re returning to Washington, or wherever the others are. Do you know where?”

  “No,” McGarvey had to admit, but he had a bad feeling they were going to find out and very soon.

  Moshonas nodded. “Then I wish you good hunting. No one will interfere with your leaving in the morning. But when it’s over, I’d like to sit down with you two over a couple of beers and hear the whole story. Whatever is buried out there is important enough to kill for. I’d like to know what it is.”

  “Any ideas?” Pete asked.

  “Many of them. But none that make sense.”

  * * *

  When they got upstairs, Pete jumped into the shower, and McGarvey opened a Heineken and went out to the eighth-floor balcony. Syntagma Square was lit up as it always was, and a few people wandered around, despite the hour.

  To him, the city had always smelled like what he thought olive oil and fresh fish should, clean with a sense of something good, something promising. But this morning the city smelled like death. Like old mothballs, an old lady’s sachet, scents to cover something disagreeable.

  The CIA’s old acronym for why people spied was MICE: money, ideology, conscience, or ego. Except for Alpha Seven’s control officer telling them that the solution to the puzzle would show that what was buried above Kirkuk was an empirical necessity, he would have bet anything that the motivation was either money or ego, or a combination of both. But he wasn’t so sure now.

  He called the CIA’s travel agency in Paris and, using his coded phrase, booked first-class seats for him and Pete on the British Airways flight out of Athens leaving in the early afternoon and getting to Dulles at eight thirty in the evening. Otto had set up the account for him a few days ago, and though finance would bitch about first class versus economy or even business, he didn’t give a damn.