End Game (36 page)

But Otto's darlings had come with one fact that was as unexpected as it was intriguing. Bogen maintained an account with the Midcoast Employees Credit Union of Venice, Florida. The same bank Butterworth possibly had an account.

The date of Bogen's death matched the date Alex had been on the loose. And she more or less fit the bartender's description. But if she had killed Bogen, Otto could not see the connection—though he knew there had to be one.

And last was the murder of Jean Fegan in front of the Hotel George. It had been no accident, Otto was sure of that, and he had beaten himself up that he hadn't been able to come up with a tag number. But the cops had not been able to find an SUV with front-end damage. After the hit, it had been locked away in some private garage somewhere—either that, or ditched in the Potomac.

His phone buzzed. He thought it might be Mac, but the call was from on campus, though the ID was blocked.

“Yes.”

“I thought you might still be here, though I expect Louise might be cross with you.” It was Tom Calder, Marty Bambridge's assistant deputy director, the direct opposite of his boss and, therefore, universally liked by just about everyone on campus.

“You're here too. Marty must be keeping you on a short leash.”

“As a matter of fact, he just left, and I wanted to get the latest from you before I pulled the pin and went home. It's been a very long few days. May I come over?”

“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
somehow
s 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.