End Game (26 page)

He was always the odd duck. And when he was a kid in Catholic school, his classmates teased him unmercifully. And sometimes, after school and on the weekends, a few of the class bullies who'd singled him out would beat him. One time they'd broken a couple of ribs, another his nose and even his arm, and one winter his left leg—which still ached on rainy days.

It was impossible for him to go to the nuns about it, because they didn't like him either. By the age of six or seven he was already smarter than they were in just about every subject—especially in math and science. But instead of treating him like a prodigy, they called him a liar. He was already solving college-level mathematical equations in his head, and they accused him of simply parroting the words and symbols he'd seen on paper. They'd never bothered to call someone who knew the math to check him out, because they were afraid of him. Instead of being proud of the genius they had in their classrooms, they were scared silly, mostly because he was already questioning the basic tenets of the faith, and they knew if he learned too much too soon, he would become an atheist and they would have failed as teachers.

It was just about the same for him in high school and even in college, because he'd developed the unfortunate habit—which he later managed to break—of laughing at people who couldn't just “get it.” He had the tendency to solve problems they were grappling with and telling anyone who'd listen how stupidly easy they were.

He'd finally dropped out in his third year, and he spent several years of intense reading—not studying because he could “get it” just by reading—supporting himself by cooking in restaurants and any number of other jobs where he didn't have to use his brain. But each time, he was fired because whatever he was doing, he did it better than the boss.

At one point he went to work for a Catholic diocese, running its books and doing some teaching, but by then he had discovered sex in a big way, and he was fired because he had not only seduced the dean's twenty-year-old daughter but the dean's nineteen-year-old son as well.

And then he came to the attention of the CIA.

Some letters and even scraps of words were beginning to emerge when his phone chimed softly. But it wasn't Mac. The call was internal, ID blocked. He answered anyway, though the interruption just now was irritating.

“What?”

“Good morning. Marty asked that I check in to see what progress you were making.” It was Tom Calder, the assistant director of the national clandestine service. Bambridge had no idea how to deal with Otto, so he had taken to sending Calder to talk to him.

“I'm slammed down here, Tom. Tell him I'm being a bastard.” In Otto's opinion, he was one of the smarter guys on campus.

Calder chuckled, his voice, like his manner, soft, even gentle, but refined. “I know, and I apologize, but I'd like come down for a chat. I'll make it brief; we don't want him going ballistic on us now.”

“Okay,” Otto said. He hung up and sat down at his desk, facing the big monitor.

Just about everyone in the CIA was ambitious. Everyone worked hard at their jobs; there was no doubt about it. But a lot of them worked just as hard at securing their career paths. Everyone wanted promotions, not only for the money, but for the prestige, for the increased power. The flavor of the intelligence business had always been the thrill of knowing something the general public hadn't an inkling of.

Calder was no different than most of them. He wanted to take over and run the directorate the way he thought it should be run. He was doing that by making the clandestine service look so good, Marty would be promoted. Calder would be the logical choice to fill the vacancy.

In that much, at least, Otto agreed. Although Calder was in his late fifties, and starting to get a little old to run a directorate—by now he should have been the assistant director of the entire CIA—he would have done a much better job running the spies overseas than Marty had ever dreamed of doing.

It meant Calder was a spy for Marty. Part of his job.

Otto's fingers flew over the keyboard, and the image on the screen changed, the train of characters slowed down, and the background went from a pale blue to a medium violet.

He didn't disturb the ongoing decryption program—just hid it—and instead brought up on the monitor a version of the search that was six hours old, just before the word
BERLIN
had popped up en clair.

The state of his search was no one's business except his and Mac's. Everyone else—and that was everyone with a capital
E
—was an outsider as far as he was concerned. When the decryption was a done deal and he had shared it with Mac and they had produced the results they were after, then it might be time to spread the wealth. Until then, nada.

One of his monitors chimed. “Excuse me, dear, but Mr. Calder is at the door.” The computer voice was Louise's.

“Let him in, sweetheart.”

The door lock popped, and Calder walked into the outer of the two rooms that were Otto's domains. The first meant for a secretary or assistant he used for generally unclassified searches: the weather at some specific place and time, tides, moon phases (most operators liked to go out in the field during a dark night), airline, train and ship schedules, social security, passport, and driver's license information—the easy stuff.

“In here, Tom,” Otto called.

Calder came into the inner sanctum and looked up at the main monitor. He was a slender man, thinning hair—a prematurely old man's malady, one of many, he liked to say—and a shuffling gait. His expressions were always pleasant, and his eyes, pale blue, were kind and intelligent. Otto thought that he was a pleasant man, someone people immediately thought could be a friend.

BERLIN
came up on the monitor.

“Ah, progress,” Calder said.

Otto glanced up at the monitor. “Just a key word. It's come up several times.”

“What's your best guess? Twenty-four hours maybe?”

“Twenty-four hours, twenty-four days, twenty-four years. Maybe never.”

Calder laughed softly. “I might believe that coming from anybody but you,” he said. “Marty's keen on this, you know.”

Otto shrugged. “I'll let you guys know soon as.”

Calder held his gaze for a beat then nodded. “Do that, please. We'd like to get this mess behind us.”

“Sure.”

Calder started to leave. “Have you heard from Mac or Ms. Boylan? Bob Blankenship wants to know what's going on. Quite an embarrassment with his guy being taken and all.”

“He got back in one piece?”

“Thankfully.”

“They're off campus, is all I know at the moment,” Otto said.

“Right,” Calder said, and left.

“Lou, is he gone?” Otto asked.

“Down the hall to the elevators,” his computer replied. “You have an interesting development on your
Kryptos
search engine.”

Otto brought up the decryption program in real time. After the briefest of pauses, he sat back and laughed, suddenly knowing with certainty what was buried in the hills above Kirkuk, and the why, but not who had buried it, though he had his strong suspicions.

AND GOD SAID, LWET TRHER BE LIGHT: AND THERE WAS LIGHT X AND THE LIGHT WAS VISIBLE FROM HORIZONQ TO HORIZON X BERLIN X AND ALL WAS CHANGED X ALL WAS NEVER THE SDAME X AND GOD SAID LET THERE BE PROGRESS X AND THERE WAS X PEACEF

 

FORTY-FIVE

Once McGarvey and then Pete Boylan had left, the entire atmosphere of the house had changed. It was late afternoon, and Schermerhorn stood at the head of the stairs, nervously listening to the clomping around on the ground floor.

Pete Boylan was an unknown, Mac had been the Rock of Gibraltar, but Bob Blankenship's guys downstairs were amateurs. They were pretty good at what they did, providing muscle for security details. But so far as he'd ever been able to determine, they'd never make it in the field. Even the odd lot NOC would chew them up for breakfast without raising a sweat.

And right now he wasn't feeling a lot of comfort.

He went back to his bedroom, which was at the front of the house, and looked out the window. Two Caddy SUVs were parked in the driveway, and he spotted at least three guys in dark nylon Windbreakers down there; one was behind a tree at the end of the driveway, another was off to the left at the edge of the woods to the west, and the third was leaning against the fender of one of the vehicles. He was actually smoking a fucking cigarette.

McGarvey had apparently suspected that Alex was going to slip away, and the fact that she had believed George was no longer on campus. He and Pete were following her; at least he figured that was their plan, though following Alex wouldn't be so easy. She was damned good at spotting a tail and then evading it. Even double or triple teams were no match for her.

But it left two major concerns in Schermerhorn's mind: Alex only suspected George was gone, and even if he had left, maybe he would double back to finish the job.

They'd all fallen in love with him almost from the moment he'd dropped in on them, with his urbane self-assurance, his ready smile, and his intellect and talent. All of them were smart, and well trained by some of the best instructors in any secret intelligence or military special forces organization in the world. But George outclassed them all from every angle.

The first was how he had come to them, with absolutely no fuss or bother. One day they were on mission, and the next he was in their midst and the mission had changed.

“You and I know no WMDs have ever been found here,” he'd told them.

“Not yet,” someone—it could have been Alex—had shot back.

George had laughed, that soft upper-crust British chuckle that said so much about his sophistication versus theirs and exactly what he thought about the difference. “No, not yet.”

“So what are you doing here?” Schermerhorn had asked.

“To put the fear of God into the rag heads down there,” George had said, waving an arm in the general direction of the oil fields a few thousand feet below.

He hadn't meant the ordinary roustabouts, the drillers, the guys who worked the rigs; he'd meant the Iraqi military clumped around the waste gas fires, in hiding from infrared spy satellites.

At the time none of them knew exactly how he was going to accomplish the new mission, and if they had known, Schermerhorn wasn't so sure they wouldn't have gone along with him.

Isty had suggested they use their satellite burst transmitter to get a clarification of their orders. He had meant to keep his conversation private with a few of them, but George had been right there, in the darkness, like an apparition, and had heard everything.

“Excellent idea, Mr. Refugee,” he'd said.

And it hadn't dawned on any of them until later that George had known their handles along with their nicknames—like Isty instead of Istvan.

“But you might want to consider a couple of things before you actually phone home. Not everyone has approved the new mission orders, so you're likely to get some foot-dragging until a decision is made. In the meantime, the clock ticks, and when the troops come pouring across the border, a lot of the enthusiasm for battle we would have drained from the Iraqis will be in full strength. A lot more troops will lose their lives.”

As he thought about it now, it struck Schermerhorn that George had never once said
our
troops. He'd used the term
the
troops. But none of them had caught it at the time.

“What else?” someone had asked.

“We're not going to fight a conventional war. I want you to understand that from the beginning. What I propose has nothing to do with the Geneva Conventions, because we will be taking no prisoners. No quarter for the wounded. What I do propose is terrorism, raw, up close, and bloody. I'm here to ram it home to the bastards, with or without your help.”

They'd gone along with him at first, but when a few of them had balked because of the savagery of their attacks—Schermerhorn among them—George had taken them to the cache, which was a couple of miles away and a thousand feet lower.

Schermerhorn had remembered his exact feeling the moment he'd understood what was buried there. It was slick. The entire thing was uptown. And he and Alex and maybe Larry had started to laugh, until it dawned on all of them that from that moment, their lives were all but forfeit unless the thing stayed where it was buried for all time, or unless it was found in just the right way, by just the right people. Any other circumstances would have been a disaster.

Still could be a disaster for them.

And it was exactly that, only in a way none of them had foreseen.

A bright flash followed by a small explosion went off somewhere a hundred yards or so into the woods. It was a flash bang grenade.

A diversion. It came into Schermerhorn's head at the same moment: someone was right there behind him, and before he could move or even call out, a terrible pain ripped at his neck, and blood poured into his trachea, drowning him even as he began to bleed to death.

George had come back, or had never left in the first place. That thought crystallized in his head as he managed to half turn so he could face his attacker.

“I'm not who you expected, Roy?” the man asked.

His voice was vaguely familiar, but Schermerhorn wasn't sure who it was, though in the back of his dying brain, he thought he should know.

“It was clever of Alex to get out while she could. But then she always was the cleverest of the lot.”

He sounded a lot like the Cynic to Schermerhorn's ear.

Schermerhorn reared back and tried to put his shoulder through the window to alert the security guys outside, but the pane was Lexan, not glass, and he was rapidly losing his strength as he fought to clear his throat so he could take a breath of air.

“It's too late for that,” the Cynic said. “Anyway, they're all running after the first of the flash bangs I planted. They'll be kept busy for a bit. Long enough.”