End Game

by David Hagberg

  “I’m waiting for a call from Mac, and then I’m getting out of here myself.”

  “It’ll only take a minute, honest injun’.”

  Otto had to laugh. He used the same expression himself, and he thought he was the only one. “Okay.”

  A couple of minutes later the door buzzed, and Otto glanced at one of his monitors. Marty’s number two was there, in jeans and a white shirt, an apologetic smile on his small round mouth.

  Otto pushed the unlock command, blanked his monitors, and got up and went into the outer office as Calder came in.

  As usual, the assistant deputy director of operations wore prescription eyeglasses that were darkly tinted. “I thought my eyes were bad, but yours are worse,” he said, taking off his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot, just like Otto’s. “The hours we keep to make sure our country stays safe.”

  It sounded pompous, like something Marty might say.

  Otto perched on the edge of a desk. “You promised to make it only one minute,” he said. Calder was okay, but he didn’t want to screw around with the guy right now. Once Mac called, he was going home.

  “Marty got a call from upstairs that he asked me to check out with you. The director apparently got a call from the State Department about one of its former employees who was hit by a car and killed. Her name was Jean Fegan. Thing is, the police said an unidentified man, possibly an employee of the CIA, may have provided the identification. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The description matched,” Calder said. “Anything to do with our goings-on?”

  “I don’t know. It’s one loose end in a basketful I’m trying to run down.”

  “You don’t think it was an accident?”

  “No.”

  “And your being there was no accident either. You met with her at the hotel. Care to share with me the substance of your meeting?”

  “No, because I don’t know what the hell to make of it, except that it could have something to do with the second Iraq war and the Alpha Seven people who were among the advance teams.”

  “WMDs?”

  “Could be,” Otto said. “What’s Marty’s take?”

  Calder stepped closer. “Don’t be coy with me, Otto, please. We’re all on the same team here. And we appreciate—Marty and I do—everything you and McGarvey are doing to run this to ground. But for goodness sake, all we ask is for a little cooperation. Tell us what you’ve come up with, and perhaps we can put our heads together. Everyone wants this to go away.”

  Organ music, very faint, came from Calder’s shirt pocket. It sounded to Otto like Bach.

  SIXTY-THREE

  Roper called back from the cockpit. “We’ve just cleared Israeli airspace, Mr. Director.”

  McGarvey looked out the window as the F-16 fighter that followed them on their port side peeled off, the one on the right doing the same. The Med was a featureless gray-blue that stretched one hundred and fifty miles south to the Egyptian coast.

  “I’m going to make a call now,” he said.

  Pete was sitting across from him, but Alex had stretched out in the back and had fallen asleep. She’d been exhausted after the ordeal she’d survived. The situation could have gone south at any moment. If she’d seriously hurt the Mossad agent who had accompanied her to the ladies’ room, or if she had fired a shot—just one even without hitting anyone—there would have been nothing McGarvey could have done. She would be in an Israeli military prison cell. Or, just as likely, she wouldn’t have let herself be taken, and there would have been more deaths—hers included.

  The problem was that they were no closer to solving the issue, except that the killer was probably still on campus at Langley.

  He phoned Otto’s rollover number, which would reach him wherever he might be. Otto answered on the first ring.

  “Where are you?”

  McGarvey put it on speakerphone so Pete could hear. “We’re headed up to Ramstein to refuel. Just cleared Israeli airspace. You?”

  “In my office. Tom Calder dropped over for an update. Hang on a sec.”

  McGarvey could hear the sounds of a printer in the background, and maybe some music but extremely faint, as if it were coming from another room. Otto’s voice was over it.

  “I’ll have something on your desk before noon, but besides what Mac found out in Israel, I’m in the middle of running down a couple of other leads I think might make some sense of what’s been happening.”

  “Any hint?” Calder asked. “Even just the tiniest?”

  “Well, we think we know who the killer isn’t.”

  “That’s progress of a sort,” Calder said. “I’ll just let myself out. Good luck, and good morning to you, Mr. Director.”

  The music faded to nothing, and McGarvey could hear the door from Otto’s outer office closing and gently latching.

  “He’s gone,” Otto said.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Someone at State called Walt, wanted to know what we knew about the death of one of their employees last night. She was hit by an SUV. Cops said an unidentified CIA employee witnessed the hit and run. It was me.”

  “Did Calder make the connection?”

  “Yeah, that’s why he came over to talk to me. Her name was Jean Fegan. She was on Bob Benning’s staff when he was an assistant ambassador to the UN. I met with her to see if she knew anything about the Alpha Seven team, and something they might have found in Iraq.”

  “Did she give you anything?” McGarvey asked.

  “Not much. She was frightened out of her mind. She admitted she knew what was buried out there, and left it to me to figure out. I read her Schermerhorn’s message on panel four, especially the last line: And there was peace. Said it was about what they were working for—a reason to take Saddam out so we could rebuild Iraq.”

  “How’d she leave it?” Pete asked.

  “Oh, hi, Pete. She said things didn’t work out that way, and now we were stuck with one hell of a big problem no one knows how to fix.”

  “And?” McGarvey prompted.

  “She got up and walked out. By the time I caught up with her, she was already outside and running across the street when the SUV knocked her into the path of a taxi.”

  “No tag number?”

  “The license plate light was out.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, I got a firm ID on the contract killer in Paris, but not who hired him to take out Alex. She’s with you on the plane? She got out okay?”

  “She’s here.”

  “He did work for his own government as well as the Germans and for Mossad. I was able to track down most of his money in a couple of offshore banks—nothing matched with Paris. But I came up with one thing that at first seemed really far-fetched. It’s possible he has an account at a credit union in Venice, just ten miles from your place on Casey Key.”

  McGarvey sat up. “At first?”

  “Yeah. A guy’s body was found in an apartment in Georgetown, not far from your place. The ID he was carrying didn’t match anything the cops had, but when they ran his fingerprints, they came up with the name Norman Bogen, a former Army Ranger. No known address, or criminal record. But, kemo sabe, he has an account at the same credit union in Venice. And that’s fringe. Not only that, but a bartender in a place on M Street about two blocks from the apartment said he saw the guy leaving with a slender, attractive woman. Same time Alex was on the loose.”

  “Don’t tell us his face was chewed off,” Pete said.

  “No, his neck was broken. But it’s my guess he was another contract killer targeting Alex. She just beat him to the punch.”

  “Whoever knew she would be in Georgetown on the loose had some damned good intel,” Mac said.

  “Narrows the field,” Otto said. “What about you guys? How’d it go?”

  “Alex’s George was a Mossad agent. He was a nut case. Died in prison years ago. When Alex’s message from Paris showed up, the general answered it.”

 
“There’s no longer any George, and Alex isn’t the serial killer. Leaves someone on campus,” Otto said. “What we figured all along.”

  “What’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk is a nuclear demolitions device,” McGarvey said. “In a duffel bag without the aluminum case.”

  “That’s also just about what we figured. The suitcase doesn’t matter. Did they give you a serial number?”

  “No, but I don’t think the Israelis buried it. I think they knew about it, which is why they sent George out to find it. Alex’s story that George showed them where it was buried was a lie.”

  “Alpha Seven buried it?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “But it’s only us and the Soviet Union that ever made the things.”

  “That doesn’t help much. About that time, maybe a little earlier, some Russian official admitted they may have lost a hundred of the things. Could be anybody who buried it.”

  “I hear a but in there, Otto,” McGarvey said.

  Otto took a moment to answer. “It almost has to be us,” he said. “I don’t think it was the president or his cabinet who authorized it—I don’t think I want to go that far. But I think we were so sure Saddam had WMDs we might never find, someone took it upon themselves to somehow get a device and somehow transport it to Iraq and somehow bury it in the hills. Alpha Seven would find it and blow the whistle—let the whole world know we were right.”

  “Lots of somehows in there.”

  Again Otto hesitated. “I checked, Mac. No demolition devices missing from our inventory. At least not in the records. So if it was one of ours, whoever got it had to be very high up on the food chain. Someone with lots of pull.”

  “Civilian or military?” Pete asked.

  “Could be either.”

  “Whoever it was, they’re willing to kill the entire Alpha Seven team,” she said.

  “But the way it’s been done?” McGarvey said. “Makes no sense.”

  “Only if you’re thinking through the lens of normalcy. They hired a lunatic to do the job. Afterward they could claim insanity. Conspiracy theory. That kind of shit.”

  “We’ll be home by nine or ten,” McGarvey said. “I want you to listen real carefully to me, my friend. I want you to go home now. Trust no one. Not Walt Page or Carleton Patterson or Marty or anyone else. Lock up tight. Don’t order a pizza or Chinese delivery. Don’t even ask Blankenship for help, or anyone from the Farm.”

  “I have a couple of things to look into—” Otto said, but McGarvey cut him off.

  “Do you have a pistol in your office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t bother shutting off your programs. No one can get to them anyway. Just take your gun and leave right now. Otto: I mean right this instant. Hang up, take the SIM card out of your phone so no one can track you, and go. You’re the next target.”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Otto’s pistol was a standard U.S. military–issue 9-mm Beretta 92F that McGarvey had taught him how to use years ago. He checked the magazine and then made sure a round was in the chamber.

  He left his darlings running but added a self-destruct code that would wipe everything out should anyone try to tamper. Rather than take the SIM card out of his phone, he left the phone on his desk. Somebody wanting to find him would think he was still in his office.

  He checked the monitors in the corridor outside his office to the elevator, the elevator itself, and finally the parking garage.

  No one was coming or going. Security was still extremely tight; Blankenship had placed the entire campus on all but a full-scale lockdown. Everyone’s comings or goings would be noticed and recorded.

  He hesitated at the door. The trouble was he’d never been a field officer. He was a certifiable geek whose best friend in all the world was a gun-toting operator, a man who figured out things and killed people. The thing in Otto’s mind was that Mac was a hell of a lot more than just a shooter; he was understanding.

  Stupid, actually, to define a friend with only one word. Mac was kind. He was gentle when he needed to be gentle—his wife and daughter had been just about his entire life, and when they had been assassinated, he’d grieved, but he hadn’t gone off the deep end, as so many men would have done.

  He lifted people up, he helped those needing help, he told the truth no matter whose toes he stepped on doing it, and Otto had never known anyone who’d had more love for country than Mac.

  People good or bad, countries good or bad—he understood and helped where it was needed. Like now.

  Keeping the pistol at his side, the muzzle pointed away from his leg like Mac had taught him, he slipped out into the empty corridor and hurried down to the elevator. The car was on the basement level, and it took a seeming eternity for it to come up to three.

  Otto stepped aside, out of the line of possible fire—again something Mac had taught him—as the door opened. But the car was empty.

  His hand was shaking a little as he hit the P1 button.

  It seemed to take another eternity for the door to close and the car to start down, and another eternity before it reached the executive parking level 1.

  He flattened himself against the wall of the car and raised the pistol.

  His Mercedes was parked three rows to the left, nose out from the wall.

  The garage was mostly empty of cars. Nothing moved. There were no sounds.

  Ducking out of the elevator, Otto swung the pistol left to right as he sprinted to his car. He switched gun hands so he could dig his car keys out of his pocket and jump in behind the wheel.

  Mac had told him something else about situations like these. Something important, but his heart was beginning to race and he could think of nothing except getting the hell out and into the open air. The underground parking ramp had become claustrophobic.

  As he reached the exit, the security scanner read the bar code on his windshield and raised the gate at the same moment he realized not only about how Mac’s wife and daughter had been assassinated with a car bomb but how Fabry had been killed by someone hiding in the backseat of his car.

  He skidded to a halt, snatched the pistol from the passenger seat, jumped out of the car, and stepped back.

  But if it had been a car bomb, it would have exploded the instant he’d switched on the ignition. And so far as he could tell, no one was in the backseat.

  He moved back to the car and, holding his pistol at the ready, yanked open the rear door. For just an instant he didn’t know what he was seeing except for shadows cast by the streetlamp, until he realized it was his own shadow cast into the rear of the car, and he lowered the pistol at the same moment he released a pent-up breath.

  The couple of times he’d been in a firefight, Mac had been at his side. And at home he would have the electronic security of the place, as well as Louise at his side. He only thanked his lucky stars they had sent Audie down to the Farm, where she would be safe.

  * * *

  Otto breezed through the checkpoint at the main gate, and on the long drive back to McLean, where he and Louise had moved a few days ago, he kept looking in his rearview mirror. There was other traffic on the road, none of it apparently following him. Nevertheless, he passed his normal exit off the Parkway and got off instead at Kirby Road, then took Old Dominion the back way to their main safe house.

  He drove through town almost to where the road reached the Beltway, before he turned around and went home, reasonably sure no one had followed him.

  Louise was at the kitchen door when Otto came into the garage. As soon as he got out of the car and she could see his face, she hit the button to close the service door. She was holding a compact Glock pistol.

  “No one followed me,” he told her.

  “How would you know?” she asked sharply.

  “Mac taught me what to do.”

  As soon as the door was closed, she pulled him inside the house with her free hand and threw her arms around his neck. “Christ, I was worried sick about you.”

  �
�I know,” Otto said. After a moment he reached back, took the pistol out of her hand, and laid it on the kitchen counter. “I’d rather not get shot by my own wife.”

  “Oh,” she said, flustered. “I tried to call you, but your phone just rang. So I called Mac, and he said he told you to get the hell out of there. Did you take a gun?”

  “It’s on the passenger seat.”

  “No trouble getting out?” she asked, searching his eyes.

  “It was spooky, but no,” Otto said. “We have to button up this place right now.”

  “I took care of it as soon as I talked to Mac. When I picked you up on the east camera, I opened the center front portal to let you in. It’s closed again. We’re good here.”

  “For now,” Otto said. He went back to the car and got the Beretta.

  Louise had made coffee, and she poured him a cup and got a package of Twinkies from the cabinet. “I couldn’t bring myself to buy whipping cream, but I thought you might need a lift.”

  “Shit,” he said, and sat down at the counter. “I already had some at work.”

  “About what I figured, but none here,” Louise said. “Mac didn’t tell me everything that’s going on, except that the killer wasn’t George but he was probably still on campus. He wants us to stay put until he and Pete get here.”

  “And Alex,” Otto said. “He’s going to use her, and me, as bait.”

  “Peachy,” Louise said without humor. It was an expression she’d picked up from Mac’s wife, Katy. “So, who’s the killer? What’s your best guess?”

  “Could be anyone from Walt Page or Fred Atwell all the way down to Marty Bambridge or someone on his staff, or Len Lawrence and his staff.” Lawrence was the deputy director of intelligence.

  “You’re not serious?”

  “I am,” Otto said. Louise had poured a cup of coffee for herself, and Otto handed her one of the Twinkies, which she tried.

  “Jesus, this shit tastes like fuel oil.”

  He laughed. “And all the time you thought I liked them.”

  Her pent-up tension suddenly released, and she laughed so hard, tears streamed from her eyes. She drank some coffee. “I bought another package.”