End Game

by David Hagberg

  “WW, William Webster?”

  “That’s the current thinking, but he’s never been willing to answer any questions about it. Like I said, I always thought the thing was nothing more than a toy.”

  He brought up the decryption for the third panel. “This one is a transposition cipher. A regular mathematical system that shifts the letters on the sculpture to the plaintext ones.”

  SLOWLY DESPERATELY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT-HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q

  “It’s Howard Carter talking when he opened King Tut’s tomb in 1922. And the question at the end was asked by Lord Carnarvon, who was standing right there. To which Carter supposedly said something like: ‘Yes, wonderful things.’”

  “The big problem is the dates,” Pete said. “The sculpture was dedicated in ninety, which means Sanborn must have been working on the thing in the late eighties. But Alpha Seven didn’t get to Iraq until the spring of oh three. So unless the guy could see into the future, the coded message has nothing to do with what’s hidden outside of Kirkuk.”

  “Coffin didn’t mention anything about them burying whatever was out there—just that they saw it,” McGarvey said. “Could have been buried before Kryptos was devised. Webster was the DCI from eighty-seven to ninety-one. Maybe it was buried then.”

  “Maybe he knew about it,” Pete said.

  “Or maybe it was buried five thousand years ago,” Otto said. “But I’m betting in the last five or ten years.”

  “Why?” McGarvey asked.

  Otto brought up the fourth panel. “This one hasn’t been solved yet, even though a lot of seriously bright cryptographers have been working on it since ninety. A few years ago Sanborn published a clue. He said letters sixty-four through sixty-nine—NYPVTT—en clair read BERLIN.”

  He turned the iPad so everyone could see the screen. It was split in two columns of fourteen lines each.

  NGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOS

  TMQSRSYUZMRYDKRYPTOS

  ABCDEFGHIJOHIJMNQUVWX

  ABCDEFGHIJDPYSHJQMLKUC

  “They’re different,” Pete said.

  “Yes,” Otto said dreamily. “The column on the left is the one that’s been published since 1990. The one that’s in all the books and on every Internet site. The one the code breakers have been working on since then.”

  “The one on the right?” Pete asked.

  Otto looked up at her and then Louise and finally McGarvey. “I took that picture this morning.”

  “Jesus,” McGarvey said. “Someone changed the panel.”

  “Probably not long ago. Otherwise, someone might have noticed it,” Otto said. He brought up a photograph of a husky-looking man with a broad Teutonic face and square jaw. “Until last year this guy worked for us as a maintenance man. Name was Ludwig Mann. Part of his job was cleaning the outsides of all the buildings on campus, including the New Headquarters Building.”

  “In the courtyard of which is Kryptos.”

  Otto brought up another photograph, this one of a man who could have been a very close relative of Mann. Hair a little thicker, a face bit thinner, but with the same jaw and eyes. “Roy Schermerhorn,” Otto said. “Alpha Seven.”

  “Let’s put something up on an encrypted site the CIA normally uses to contact its officers, that Carnes and Coffin were murdered in Athens,” McGarvey said. “We want the rest of Alpha Seven to contact us immediately because their lives are in danger.”

  “The killer will see it too,” Pete said.

  “Right. In the meantime, Otto can work on cracking the new code on four.”

  “My darlings are working on it right now.”

  “What about us?”

  “We’re going to see if we can find Mr. Schermerhorn. He somehow changed the message on four, which means he knows something and maybe has posted a warning.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “His social security number when he worked here. It’ll be a fake, of course, but it’ll list an address.”

  “And?” Pete said.

  “I’m betting that once the message goes up on the bulletin board, someone will be calling in,” McGarvey said.

  “Or one of the other team members will get themselves killed,” Louise said.

  “If they’re as good as they’re supposed to be, they’ll know that the killer has also seen the message and they’ll be on their guard. But for now Roy Schermerhorn is our best bet.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  On the way home from the Milwaukee Public Library, Roy Schermerhorn took a great deal of care with his tradecraft, switching buses twice, backtracking his way for several blocks downtown. Stopping to light a cigarette while he watched the reflections in a store window of people and cars. Watching the roof lines for snipers. Even a passing police cruiser gave him pause.

  He turned suddenly and walked into a tavern already busy mostly with people in suits and ties stopping in for a drink or two before going home. This was beer town USA; stopping in for a beer and a shot after work was the norm.

  Sitting at the end of the bar from where he could watch the front door and the short hall back to the restrooms, he ordered a Mich Ultra draught.

  Ever since he’d moved here, his normal weekday routine was to stop at the library after work to use one of its computers to cruise the Internet, especially the CIA bulletin boards, and the numerous Kryptos sites. Until this afternoon nothing concrete had been happening, though the campus apparently was conducting some sort of a lockdown drill. One day of which would have been understandable, but it had been going on for three days now.

  Then this afternoon he’d used an old password to get into one of the encrypted sites the Company used as a bulletin board, and the Alpha Seven message popped up.

  His beer came, and he forced himself to raise the glass with a steady hand, though he was truly more frightened than he’d ever been since ’03, after they’d gotten out and George had disappeared.

  Carnes had left first, and a couple of months later Coffin had come over to where Schermerhorn had been living at the time, in Chevy Chase, and said he was going to disappear for a while.

  “Just to be on the safe side,” he said. “You know how it’s probably going to work out.”

  “No, I don’t,” Schermerhorn had told him, though he did know what he expected everyone else had figured out. But he had wanted to hear it from Coffin’s mouth.

  “Alex has disappeared.”

  “Probably went with George.”

  “That’s right, and you know damned well where that is. And why she left.”

  “I know where. Why don’t you tell me why?”

  “Don’t be so goddamned dense, you dumb Kraut. The shit’s probably about to hit the fan. My guess is that someone has either found the cache, or is about to, and all of us are going to be in the crosshairs.”

  “You think one of us will be blamed for blowing the whistle?”

  “Of course I do. I’m going deep, and I suggest you do too. Right now. And I do mean right now.”

  They’d been sitting on the balcony of Schermerhorn’s third-floor apartment. He lived alone, except for Henry, his cat, and after his brief but superintense fling with Alex, he preferred things that way. “Where are you going?

  Coffin got to his feet. “Take care of yourself,” he’d said, and walked out the door.

  Schermerhorn had thought about going away too, but he could not leave things just like that, or else the Georges and Alexes of the world would win. He spent the next two weeks altering his appearance, thinning his hair, aging his face, and building himself a new legend, complete with social security number, driver’s license, military records, and even photos of a family he didn’t have. Bulletproof enough that w
hen he applied for a job as a maintenance man at the CIA, he would pass the background investigation.

  It took nearly six weeks before he was hired and had started on the job, and nearly another year before he got into the position he’d wanted. When he was finished, he walked away, changed his appearance and legend again, and disappeared to Milwaukee, where he got a job managing a Hess station and convenience store.

  Mindless work, not satisfying but bearable because of Janet, his live-in girlfriend. They wouldn’t last for the long haul, of course, nor would Milwaukee. All of it here was designed to be disposable, like just about every previous day of his life had been.

  And it had worked until now.

  Someone in a sports coat and tan slacks, his tie loose, came in, and Schermerhorn stiffened, until the bartender pulled out a Bud and set it on the bar for the man. He was a regular, and he didn’t look like George.

  Schermerhorn finished his beer, paid for it, and left the bar. Two blocks later he caught a cab and gave the driver an address a couple of blocks away from the small house he and Janet rented. She worked as a nurse at Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital on North Lake Drive and would be getting home about now.

  He called her cell phone, but she didn’t answer, and the call flipped over to voice mail. A little thrill niggled at the nape of his neck. She always answered her phone when she was on break or away from the hospital. She had a lot of friends she texted on what seemed like an around-the-clock schedule.

  “What do you guys talk about?” he’d asked once.

  She’d just smiled at him. “Stuff.”

  He didn’t normally carry a weapon with him, though his 9-mm Beretta was stashed behind some paint cans in the one-car garage. But since the bulletin board announcement and Janet’s not answering her phone, he wished he had it now.

  The tree-lined street where the cabby dropped him off was a typical Milwaukee neighborhood—mostly small houses, some of them bungalows, many with brick fronts and almost all with fireplace chimneys. For now it was very neat and orderly, but once the leaves turned and started to drop, the place would be a mess. As fast as you raked them up and bundled them in big lawn and leaf bags, the more would fall.

  Used to be you could burn them, and fall in the upper Midwest had always smelled of smoke. Pleasant.

  He phoned her again, but she didn’t answer. He shut the phone off and then removed the back and pulled the battery. He tossed the pieces behind some bushes spread over a full block.

  At the corner half a block from their house, he didn’t slow down, but almost instantly he cataloged everything going on. No strange cars or trucks or vans. The Wilson boys shooting hoops across the street two doors down from his house. Douglas driving up in his old Saturn SUV. He waved when he got out, and Schermerhorn waved back.

  No cops, no sirens, no fire trucks or ambulances.

  Their car was in the driveway. Janet usually put it in the garage.

  Everything else was normal, but Schermerhorn’s instincts were screaming in high gear. He remembered an instructor from the Farm telling them one of the Murphy’s laws the SEAL Team Six operators swore by: if everything is going good, you’re probably running into an ambush.

  It felt like that now.

  He crossed the street in front of his house and let himself into the garage by the side door, got his Beretta, checked the load and the action, and stepped across the paved path to the kitchen door.

  Janet was on her back in the doorway to the dining room. One leg was crossed over the other. She was still wearing her sneakers, but she usually took them off as soon as she came in the house. The shirt of her blue scrubs was completely drenched with blood. The left side of her neck had been ripped away, and most of her face had been destroyed.

  He only knew it was her because of her clothes, her size, and the fact that this was their house. She belonged here.

  Her blood was already well coagulated, so what happened here had happened an hour or more ago. Someone had to have called her at the hospital and told her there was an emergency and she needed to come home immediately.

  Holding the pistol in the two-handed shooter’s grip, he checked the house, but the killer was long gone. They’d left a message: Not only aren’t you safe, but anyone close to you is a valid target.

  Back in the kitchen, he looked at Janet’s body for a long ten seconds, not able to keep himself from imagining what it had been like for her.

  But then he stuffed the pistol into his belt, got her keys from the counter, went back out to the garage—where from an old paint can he retrieved a plastic baggie that held an ID kit including a passport that identified him as Howard Tucker—then got in the car and drove away.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Pete shared a cab into the city with McGarvey. She had an apartment just off Dupont Circle, and the afternoon work traffic was terrible, as it usually was on a workday, so it took forever to get from Langley, the fare almost sixty dollars.

  They didn’t say much to each other on the way in, McGarvey’s thoughts drifting between the new message on panel four, the Alpha Seven mission in Iraq in ’03, and the nature in which the operators were being killed one by one. Only two were left now—Schermerhorn and Alex Unroth—plus the control officer, which narrowed the list of possible killers. But the real clue, Otto had told them, was the murderer’s intel sources.

  He or she knew not only the security procedures and routines inside the campus, which allowed them to make the three strikes, but they’d also known how to find Carnes and somehow manage to kill him and track down Coffin to the NIS safe house.

  Only someone very well connected could have possibly known all of that. And in such a timely fashion.

  “Come up for a minute. We need to talk,” Pete said, breaking him out of his thoughts.

  The cabby had pulled up to the curb, and Pete was paying with a credit card.

  “It’ll be a while before Otto comes up with anything, and I need to take a shower and get some sleep.”

  “Five minutes, God damn it,” she said, her tone brittle.

  “Do you want me to wait?” the driver asked.

  “No,” McGarvey said. He got his bag out of the trunk and followed Pete up to her second-floor apartment. He had a fair idea what she wanted to say to him, and he didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t ready, and they were in the middle of something he couldn’t quite grasp. It was just at the edges, but he wasn’t there yet.

  “May I fix you a drink?” Pete asked. “Something to eat? You must be starved.”

  They hadn’t eaten since the flight from Greece.

  “I’m cutting you loose,” McGarvey said.

  “Loose? What are you talking about?”

  “This is getting too dangerous. It could have been you in Piraeus instead of Coffin. I’m taking this the rest of the way alone.”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t forget it was me and Otto who came to you in Serifos in the first place.”

  “You’ll be safer staying here.”

  “Yeah, like Wager and Fabry and Knight. The story has gotten out, and it’s only a matter of time before the media gets ahold of it, and when that happens, just about anyone on campus will be out of the loop. Everyone will become a suspect. Just getting in and out will mean running the gauntlet. And if there’re any shooters out there, we’ll all be sitting ducks.”

  “It can’t be helped.”

  Pete was stricken. “Can you at least tell me where the hell you’re going?”

  “That depends on Schermerhorn and Alex Unroth, whoever contacts us first. But I suspect I’ll end up in Jerusalem at the government employees bank and then Tel Aviv.”

  “You think the Mossad is somehow involved?”

  “I think their control officer is or was a Mossad operative.”

  “You’ll need someone to cover your back. It’s something I’ve done before.”

  “I’m not going to risk it,” McGarvey said. “You’re staying here.”

  “What?” Pe
te shrieked. She put a hand to her mouth and turned away for a moment. “I’m not going to do this, God damn it.” She turned back. “I’m not your dead wife, Kirk. She wasn’t a professional, and from what I read in the case file, she wasn’t even the target—you were.”

  All that horrible time came blasting back at him in one ugly piece. He’d been in the car behind the limo in which Katy and their daughter were riding from the funeral of their daughter’s husband when the limo drove over an IED. Right in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery. They’d been killed instantly, with absolutely zero chance for survival. Nothing of their bodies had been identifiable, except by their DNA.

  Every woman he’d ever allowed to get close to him had died, had been murdered because of him. It was a never-ending nightmare from which he couldn’t escape, not even hiding on Serifos.

  “The Company has trained me well. I can take care of myself and you know it, so whatever reason you’re cutting me loose has nothing to do with protecting a helpless female. If I were a man, it would be different.”

  “It’s not that,” McGarvey said, knowing damn well what was coming.

  “What about Otto, then? He’s still on campus. Don’t you think it’s possible someone will come after him? Or what about Louise, at their safe house? How about her life?”

  “They were never Alpha Seven.”

  “Neither was I.”

  McGarvey picked up his bag from where he had dropped it by the door. “Take care of yourself,” he said.

  “I’ve fallen in love with you,” Pete said.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Do you think I need this, or want it?”

  “I work alone.”

  “Don’t make me beg, Kirk,” Pete cried. “I will, if I have to. I don’t have a shred of self-respect left when it comes to you. I’ll do anything you say. Just don’t tell me to turn my back and let you walk away.”