“But I know how to use them, don’t I?”
“No complaints from me,” he’d said.
As he looked at her image on the screen, he was pulled in from the get-go; yet staring at it, he also wasn’t sure.
“Well?” Otto asked.
“She’s squinting.”
“It’s called smiling. Dotty does a lot of it.”
Alex almost never smiled in the old days. And when she did, it was as if she were laughing at you. Nothing about her rare smiles had any warmth in them. She measured people by what they were worth—to her personally.
But she’d also been an expert at disappearing right in front of your eyes. Usually she didn’t have to move; instead, somehow, she instantly became a stranger. Someone you’d never seen before.
The last time they had made love, he had rolled over onto his back, still inside her, and when he looked up into her face, he didn’t know who he was making love to. The woman above him was someone he’d never met. And the effect had been so extraordinary, instantly his mood had drained completely away and he couldn’t wait to get free.
She’d laughed. “What’s the matter, Kraut? The cat got your ardor?”
And an instant later she was the Alex he’d been making love to, but the cat or something had gotten his ardor.
It was in Iraq the week before she and George had started on their rampage, as they’d called it. “Teach ’em a little respect,” George had said, and Alex had agreed wholeheartedly.
Nothing was ever the same for any of them after that, though Alex and George were the one subject all of them avoided, at all costs. The two of them were taboo. They were afraid to even approach them, the same as if the two of them were dangerous IEDs ready to explode and kill them all at the slightest touch.
In fact, thinking about them now, Schermerhorn remembered that when they got to Ramstein and George wasn’t with them, they were relieved. No one wanted to bring up his name. Not even Alex had mentioned him.
They were debriefed individually, but so far as he knew, no one was asked about George. He became the forgotten man in everyone’s minds. Left behind somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
All that came back to him in a rush as he stared at the image of the DCI’s secretary.
“The DCI was in California, Thursday, two days before Coffin was killed,” Otto said. “His secretary took Friday off and wasn’t back at her desk until Monday morning when the director was back. Common practice.”
“As his secretary, she potentially had access to everything he knew,” McGarvey said.
“That included personnel records for everyone,” Otto said. “She is in a perfect position to know what the killer knew.”
Schermerhorn couldn’t tear his eyes from the image on the screen. “Did you know that when Alex was sixteen, she murdered her stepfather? She told Tom about it one night in Munich. The two of them were drunk, and he’d asked her something stupid, like, if it came to it, could she actually pull the trigger to kill someone? ‘In a heartbeat,’ she said. ‘Been there, done that already.’”
“It was in her initial interview,” Otto said. “But no charges were ever filed.”
“Of course not. Even at that age, she was too good to get caught. But she told Tom that when her stepfather tried to rape her, she stabbed him in the heart, then cut off his dick and peeled his face with a fish-filleting knife.”
“I pulled up the newspaper accounts,” Otto said. “The murder was never solved, though the wife was a prime suspect.”
“But that’s Alex Unroth,” McGarvey said. “What about the DCI’s secretary? Can you at least make a guess? You said you would recognize the eyes.”
“She’s squinting,” Schermerhorn said again, staring at the image. Yet his gut reactions were bouncing all over the place.
He turned to look at Rencke and McGarvey. He wanted to run and hide deep more urgently than he’d ever wanted to in his entire life. Larry Coffin and Joe Carnes had evidently tried without success in Athens. And Walt, Isty, and Tom had tried right there on campus, supposedly the safest place in the world for an NOC who’d come in out of the cold. And that hadn’t worked either.
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked again at the image, absolutely hating what he was going to say next. “I’ll have to see her in person.”
“I’ll find out if she’s still on campus,” Otto said, and started to leave, but Schermerhorn stopped him.
“We need to go in cold; otherwise, she’ll figure out what’s coming her way and run.”
“She knows by now,” McGarvey said. “If she’s not on campus, we’ll go to her house—wherever she lives.”
“You’d better bring the militia, and you better expect there’ll be some serious collateral damage.”
“She might kill again?’ Otto said.
Schermerhorn laughed. “Who’s left? Just me and George.”
THIRTY
McGarvey sat behind the wheel of his Porsche SUV, parked in a lot adjacent to a small apartment building in a pleasant neighborhood north of Washington in Chevy Chase—coincidentally not far from the house he and Katy had lived in before they moved to Florida. It felt odd to him, being back like this.
Pete rode shotgun next to him, and Schermerhorn sat in the backseat, nervously checking out the neighborhood. Traffic was light at this hour, but except for the streetlights, it was very dark under an overcast sky.
“We’ll go in first,” McGarvey told Pete. He phoned her, and when they were connected, he put his cell phone in the lapel pocket of his jacket without turning it off. Whatever happened, she would hear it.
Otto had checked with Agency security, who told him the DCI had left around six thirty, and his secretary fifteen minutes later. Neither of them were still on campus. He pulled up Dotty’s address from the file.
Schermerhorn had asked for a pistol before they left the house. “If it turns out to be Alex, I don’t want to go up against her unarmed. You can’t believe how fast she is.”
Pete took a standard U.S. military–issue Beretta 92F out of the glove compartment and handed it back to him. “She won’t be much help to us if she’s dead.”
“Neither will I,” Schermerhorn said. He ejected the magazine to check its load, seated it home in the handle, and cycled a round into the firing chamber. He stuffed the pistol under his belt and beneath his shirt. “Let’s get it over with. I want to be long gone an hour from now.”
“We’ll see,” McGarvey said. He didn’t feel particularly comfortable, having a man such as Schermerhorn armed, but he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to shoot the man center mass if he became a threat. Or even looked like he was about to cause trouble. “You’re out here tonight just to make a positive ID.”
“You’d better be prepared for some serious shit to go down. Because if it is Alex, she’ll recognize me the minute we come face-to-face.”
It was exactly what McGarvey hoped would happen.
“I can have a SWAT team out here by chopper in fifteen minutes,” Pete said.
They’d discussed it before they’d left the safe house, and McGarvey had vetoed the idea. “There’ll be other people living in the building. I don’t want this to become a hostage situation.”
“Not her style,” Schermerhorn said. “If it’s Alex, she’ll have a plan for getting free no matter what the odds are against her. She might shoot someone, but she wouldn’t want to be slowed down with a hostage in tow.”
“Let’s go,” McGarvey said, and he and Schermerhorn got out of the car and headed across to the apartment building.
Pete got behind the wheel and turned the car around so it faced the street.
McGarvey’s main worry had always been collateral damage. Innocent people getting in the way of a gunfight. He’d been in the middle of such things far too many times in his career, and he didn’t want another repeat. He’d come to the opinion that he would rather let the bad guy walk away free than corner him—or her—where other people could get hurt.
; Voltaire had the same philosophy a couple of hundred years ago: he reasoned it would be better to let a guilty man go free than to convict one innocent man.
They approached the building from the front and buzzed apartment 301 at the front on the top floor. Dorothy Givens lived in 104, at the rear on the bottom floor.
A man answered the intercom. “Who is it?”
McGarvey held up his open wallet. “Metro police.”
“What’s this about?”
“Open the door, Mr. Reading,” McGarvey said, reading the name off the tag beside 301. “We’re not here for you, but we could be.”
The door lock buzzed and they went inside. Down a corridor was the elevator, to the right a row of built-in mailboxes, below which were two larger lockboxes for packages. The doors to the two front apartments were left and right of the main entrance, and the doors to the rear two down a corridor past the elevator.
McGarvey went first.
Schermerhorn hung back a little, drawing his pistol and concealing it behind his right leg.
“Don’t shoot unless there’s no other way out,” McGarvey warned.
“I want this to be over with as much as you do. I’m tired of always looking over my shoulder. And if anybody has some answers, it’ll be Alex.”
“And your message on Kryptos.”
“But they moved it, and none of us knew where. Only Alex and George.”
McGarvey’s anger spiked, and he turned. “Moved what?”
“The package.”
“You’ll fucking well tell me what it is right now. No bullshit about Alex or the message on four.”
“One thing at a time. I want Alex neutralized, and I’m going to want a whole shitload of assurances first.”
“We’ll decrypt the thing.”
“By then I’ll be long gone, and it’ll be your problem. The biggest problem you’ve ever faced.”
McGarvey had considered the possibility that Schermerhorn was the killer. But he knew that was wrong five minutes after the guy had shown up at Union Station. The former NOC was determined, but he wasn’t certifiable. The killer had some sort of deep-seated psychosis that required him—or her—to destroy the faces, and therefore the identities, of their victims.
If Alex had been telling them the truth in Iraq about killing her father and slicing off his face, she was the obvious fit to the profile.
The problem he was having was coming up with the reason. In his way of thinking, it had to be more than just insanity. Crazy people had purpose, though almost always their motivations were obscure and often senseless.
They came to 104. “You’re here to identify her, nothing else,” McGarvey said.
“And?”
“The next move will be hers.”
“Christ. You have no idea who you’re dealing with, do you?”
McGarvey knocked on the door. The building was quiet, and the corridor smelled faintly of cleaning fluid, even furniture polish on the shiny chair rails and oak wainscoting. Solid upper middle-class, no trouble here.
A shadow blocked the peephole.
“Who the hell are you?” a woman demanded.
“Ms. Givens? We’re from Mr. Page’s office.”
“Shit,” the woman said, and opened the door. She was tall, with a long thin neck and narrow features, high cheekbones, and blue eyes. Her hair was wet, and she was wrapped in a bath towel. “Has something happened to Dotty?”
“No,” Schermerhorn said.
“She’s fine so far as we know,” McGarvey said. “The director has been trying to contact her, but she doesn’t answer her cell phone. We were sent out to tell her there’s trouble with the White House meeting first thing in the morning.”
“I can’t help you guys. She’s not here.”
“This is really important.”
“She called about an hour ago, said she was spending the night with her boyfriend. She does that sometimes.”
“How do we contact him?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s got a place somewhere in Georgetown, but I don’t have the address or phone number.”
“You’re Ms. Givens’s roommate?”
“No, just a friend from New York. We used to work together at the UN, and I come down here from time to time. She comes up to stay with me every now and then.”
“Do you at least have a name for her boyfriend?”
The woman shrugged. “No last name—just George.”
THIRTY-ONE
Alex had the cabby drop her off near the end of Dumbarton Avenue NW, just a block from the edge of Rock Creek Park, and less than two blocks from Otto Rencke’s safe house, which itself wasn’t far from Kirk McGarvey’s apartment.
The evening was dark and quiet, the only real traffic and activity in Georgetown at this hour was down in the tourist section along M Street, with its bars, restaurants, and chichi shops. After work, she’d driven to her second apartment in Tysons Corner, just across the Dulles Access Road and not far from the CIA’s back gate, where she’d packed a few overnight things in a bag.
She called her sometimes roommate, Phyllis Dawson, using an untraceable pay-as-you-go cell phone. “I’ll be with George tonight, maybe tomorrow. I think he might propose to me.”
“What trouble are you in now?”
“Nothing serious, but someone from the Company might pay you a visit.”
“What do you want me to tell them?”
“The truth.”
“Yeah, right,” Phyllis had said, and laughed.
They’d worked together at the UN, spying on delegates for an international lobbying firm that worked for a consortium of international businesses. But they’d been too effective, both of them posing as high-priced call girls. When the WikiLeaks were made public, a couple of Brazilian diplomats had been burned, and Alex and Phyllis, who’d worked under assumed names, were forced out. Their control officer and his boss were more than satisfied when the girls simply disappeared without a fuss, happy to sweep the entire incident under the rug.
Phyllis, working under a new identity, had landed a job gathering intel for another international lobbying firm, this one dealing in the secrets of big banks.
They kept in touch from time to time to share gossip, the only people in the world with whom they could be totally open. Or nearly so, in Alex’s case.
Around the corner, Alex used a universal electronic key to open the door of a Ford Fusion, started it, and drove the two blocks to the Renckes’ safe house, where she parked across the street and a few doors down from the electric gate.
A few lights were on in the house. While driving past, she had spotted two old cars parked in back—one a Mercedes, the other a Volvo station wagon. One belonged to Otto, the other to his wife, who still used her maiden name of Horn.
It actually meant nothing that both cars were there. Nor did it make much sense to her to stay here very long, in case the car was reported missing and the police sent out a stolen vehicle notice on the net.
She thought there might be some obvious sign that Schermerhorn was here, but then she knew she was being foolish to hope for such luck. After twenty minutes she turned around and returned the car to where it had been parked.
After wiping down the steering wheel and door handle, she walked a few blocks to M Street, where she had a drink at Clyde’s in the Shops at Georgetown Park, which backed up on the old C&O Canal. The place was busy with the late after-work crowd.
The problem was timing her disappearance. If she went back to work in the morning, and McGarvey brought Roy over to look at the thirty-six suspects, it was possible they would end up on the seventh floor. She had altered her appearance enough that she was pretty sure she would never be picked out of a police lineup. But she and Roy had been a thing in bed for a short while and had lived in close quarters in Germany and again in Iraq. He might pick up on something if he saw her. Escaping at that point would be problematic.
On the other hand, she wanted to know how close they were to solving
the mystery. The only way she could get that information was by sitting in her office and listening in on what was said in the director’s office via the direct wire link between her phone console and his.
She’d removed the light in the director’s console that showed when she was connected. Simple but effective.
The key was if someone had shown up at the Chevy Chase apartment, looking for her. But if they’d come that far, it meant they’d put her file back on the list despite Page’s removing it. It meant she was a suspect. But only Schermerhorn could possibly make that determination, and then only if he could meet her face-to-face.
Another possibility she’d considered, and the reason she’d packed an overnight bag, was her Tysons Corner apartment. There was a possibility, no matter how slight, that they had found the place. That in turn would mean they had discovered her Monica Wrigley persona. All her background preparations would unravel from that point.
But she couldn’t take the risk of phoning Phyllis again in case they’d requested an NSA look and listen. Nor could she avoid the risk of going to the office in the morning as normal to find out what was coming her way, if anything.
A reasonably well-put-together man in a business suit, tie loose, collar open, came over to her. He looked to be in his late thirties, maybe forty, and he had a wedding ring. He smiled.
“No line, but you’re an attractive woman,” he said. “My name is Jeff. May I buy you a drink?”
“Why not?” she said, and motioned for the bartender. “Your wife out of town?”
“She works for a senator who likes to go on junkets. They’re probably sleeping together.”
The bartender came and refilled her glass with a Pinot Grigio.
“Kids?”
“No time.”
“Never too late. Leave Washington, get a new life,” Alex said, her problem of staying away from her Tysons Corner apartment for the night solved. But she almost felt sorry for the guy, and she guessed she wanted to give him a chance. “Call her right now, wherever she is, tell her you love her, and ask her to come home.”
End Game Page 14