End Game

by David Hagberg

  Bambridge stepped back a pace, a sickness rising in his throat. “My God,” he whispered.

  Wager’s body lay on its side in front of a small desk. The chair had been pushed to one side, up against a file cabinet. The back of his trousers was completely covered in fecal matter. He’d lost control of his bowels either at the time of his death or shortly before. If there had been any sign of horror or pain or surprise on his face, it was completely gone. His features had either been eaten away or were covered in blood and tissue—human meat.

  It was the most awful thing Bambridge had ever seen or imagined.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I could not have described this to you,” Blankenship said.

  “Could a guard dog have gotten in here?” Bambridge asked. It was the only thing he could think to ask.

  “No, sir. They’re all accounted for. Anyway, none of our dogs would have done something like this.”

  “A wild animal?”

  “Maybe, but then someone with the proper badges to get into this building, onto this floor, and into this office would have had to let it in.”

  “No one saw or heard a thing?”

  “No, sir.”

  A few splotches of blood had stained the desktop inches from the phone.

  “Did he manage to call someone?”

  “No.”

  Bambridge tore his eyes away from the horrible thing on the floor, gagging as the smell, associated with what he was seeing, fully hit him. He walked out into the clean air of the corridor, where he leaned his back against the wall.

  Blankenship joined him. “What’re your orders, sir?”

  “Are your people finished?”

  “Just about.”

  “When they are, call the police. I want the body out of here and the mess cleaned up before the morning shift.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bambridge looked at him. “I’ll be back later, but right now I’m going home. I need a shower.”

  “I understand.”

  THREE

  Istvan Fabry at fifty felt like an old man, though he would never admit it to Fanni, his American-born wife, or his sons, Richard and Mark, but Iraq, and later Afghanistan, had worn him to the bone.

  He left the Bubble, which was the CIA’s auditorium, and drove his three-year-old Fusion over to the Scattergood-Thorne house just off the GW Parkway, but still on the CIA’s campus. It was very late, just a bit before 2 A.M., but he’d always been an extremely light sleeper. Eight hours a night meant a person would be, for all practical purposes, dead for one-third of his life. It wasn’t for Istvan.

  The DCI was hosting a dozen influential congressmen plus a like number of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals from the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intel and LE agencies to discuss plans for the top-down reorganization of America’s approach to nontraditional warfare. Fabry was front man for the setup, and he wanted to be well ahead of the curve before the 0800 start.

  The Bubble’s projection equipment was loaded with the proper PowerPoint and video programs, mostly of his own creation, and once the presentation was done, the VIPs would be bused over to the house for the actual conference.

  Parking in front of the large colonial that sat partially concealed in the woods just off the GW Parkway, he got out of the car and stopped to listen to the nearly absolute silence. Only a light breeze in the treetops, mournful and a little lonely in a way, and a truck passing on the highway, heading into the city or perhaps to Dulles.

  But it was safe here, something his wife, who’d been raised in a reasonably upscale environment as the only daughter of a corporate lawyer in Chicago, could never understand. By instinct, at times like this, alone with just his own thoughts, he would catch himself listening for other sounds. Some distant, some very close. The whine of a drone’s engine, or of a Russian Hind helicopter gunship. The clank of metal on metal as a troop of Taliban fighters or Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers approached up a mountain pass. The snick of an AK-47 slide being pulled back and released. Footfalls on loose gravel. Someone or something rising up behind him, carrying a knife or a wire garrote.

  Suddenly spooked, he turned and looked down the gravel road toward the Bubble, and then did a careful scan of the woods surrounding the house that had been a private residence until the CIA had taken it over in 1987. But nothing moved. He was absolutely alone, and not in a place where harm was likely to come his way. Of any spot in the world, here was the safest place for him to be, and not a day went by that he didn’t bless his good fortune for surviving Hungary’s turbulence when he was a kid growing up in Rabahidveg, close to the Austrian border.

  Two uncles had been shot to death by KGB border patrol pricks, and his father had been taken into custody for reasons they’d never been told. There he’d been tortured day and night for more than a week. Afterward he’d been a broken man, unable even to feed himself or use the toilet without help.

  Then Hungary was free, in a large measure because of America’s diplomacy and the harsh realities of a Soviet system that simply could not support its own weight. Istvan had specialized in English in school, and when he was nineteen, he went to the U.S. and joined the army, where he was first made a translator—in addition to Hungarian and English, he was also fluent in Russian—and then into INSCOM, which was the army’s intelligence and security command, where he became a spy.

  The transition to the CIA had been easy at first, until he’d been selected to become an NOC and had been sent first to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. Then the nightmares started, and they’d become so bad that, by the time he’d slipped home on a short leave, Fanni, who he’d known from college at Northwestern while he was in the army, almost left him.

  They were sleeping together, and after his second morning back, she’d slipped out of bed to make them coffee. She brought the coffee and a plate of sweet rolls on a tray that she set on her side of the bed, then went around to him and bent down to brush a kiss onto his lips.

  He suddenly reared up out of a deep sleep and smashed his fist into her face, breaking several of her teeth, dislocating her jaw, and sending her sprawling onto the floor.

  They were both in shock.

  After a trip to the emergency room, where her jaw was sent in place and she’d been given pain pills, they went back to the apartment. But she wasn’t fearful of him; instead she was puzzled and angry.

  “You didn’t do it on purpose, Isty; you did it purely on instinct,” she told him. “For survival.”

  They were sitting across from each other at the tiny kitchen table, and he had a hard time looking her in the eye. Her jaw was red and swollen, and she spoke with a lisp because of the missing teeth.

  “For survival from what? Have you been on a battlefield somewhere?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?” she demanded, her voice rising.

  “Can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Orders—”

  “Bullshit. I want the truth!”

  “My life and yours could depend on your not knowing what I do.”

  “Are you a spy, then? Is that what you’ve become? A traitor, spying for the Russians or maybe the Chinese?”

  “I’m not a traitor, Fanni,” Istvan said. “You have to believe me.” His heart was aching.

  She jumped to her feet, the chair falling over. “I won’t live with you. Not like this.”

  “I’m not a traitor.”

  “Of course you’re not. I know it. But if you were a spy, you would never be able to tell me where you were, what you were doing. I’d never know when you would come back to me—if you were coming back.”

  “I’ll always come back.”

  “I can’t be sure. Tell me how I can be sure!”

  “Because I love you,” Istvan said.

  In the end it had been enough for her, and they’d both somehow survived his long absences until he had come out of the field to work as an analyst and mission p
lanner in the Directorate of Operations and he’d been able to tell her he had indeed been a spy. But all that was past. He was home for good.

  He took a portable handcart from the trunk, and when he had it unfolded, he loaded four cartons of agendas, briefing books, copies of the presentation disks, and lined legal pads and pens, and took them inside, where he laid them out in the large conference room. The fit would be tight, but there was room for everyone. The main topic for review would be the threat the U.S. faced right now from cyberterrorism.

  State-sponsored cyberterrorism.

  It was something Istvan had become an expert in since he’d come home. He had a knack for it and had been a fast learner—his mentor at the end was Special Projects Director Otto Rencke, the smartest, and oddest, man he’d ever known. But a good man, with an equally odd-duck wife and a lovely child.

  He’d come to his office in the OHB’s fourth-floor science and technology operations center, where some of the gadgets and ideas that had been created and already evaluated as useful were placed in planning cycles for manufacture and then distribution to stations around the world. After he’d loaded his car, he’d driven over to the Bubble and then here.

  Time enough to go home for some breakfast, but he would have to rush to make it back before the guests began to arrive. Anyway, after the field rations he’d eaten over the years, even the cafeteria adjacent to the New Headquarters Building wasn’t half bad.

  He went outside, where he refolded the handcart and loaded it into the trunk and then got behind the wheel.

  Something smelled odd to him, slightly off. At that moment he heard a Bach organ piece and turned around in surprise as the figure of a man who he did not know rose up from the backseat, blood all over his face and lips.

  Before Istvan could react, the Cynic yanked Istvan’s head backward, breaking his neck. Before he died, he realized that the side of his neck was literally being eaten.

  FOUR

  Bambridge had spent only a few minutes in his office, making sure everything for the cyberconference was in place for later this morning. He was giving a short presentation at the Bubble once the PowerPoint and video had been played, emphasizing the necessity for boots on the ground in the likely spots where such acts of terrorism might originate. Like Beijing. He knew the reaction he would get, but what he had to tell them needed saying. Even Page had agreed.

  “You’ll be ruffling some feathers, Marty, but maybe someone from the Hill will sit up and take notice, toss us an extra few millions to fight the good fight.”

  “More like billions,” Bambridge had replied glumly. His mood, like everyone else’s in the Company, was in the toilet. Change was coming, that much was for sure, but no one was looking forward to what it would bring.

  He passed through the main gate, and at the bottom of the slight hill he turned right onto the Parkway, traffic even less at this hour than it had been when he’d come in. By rights he should have stayed till the conference—he still had plenty to do, including rereading the dossiers on all the conferees, to refresh his memory. But he’d told Blankenship the truth: he needed to go home and take a shower to get rid of the stench of death that hung around him like a dark cloud.

  Never in his life had he seen or even imagined anything so gruesome as what had been done to Walter Wager. It was beyond his comprehension that one human being could do something like that to another.

  Blankenship had called in every available security officer as Bambridge was heading toward town, and dozens of cars were converging on the main gate. If the killer were still on campus, he would not be getting out anytime soon.

  Bambridge’s phone went off, and for just an instant he debated not answering it, but the caller ID read Blankenship.

  “Something new?”

  “There’s been another one,” the chief of security said. He sounded seriously pissed off.

  Bambridge’s heart lurched. “Who?”

  “Istvan Fabry. One of my people found his body—what was left of it—in his car, parked in front of the Scattergood-Thorne house.”

  “What the hell was he doing there at this hour of the morning?” Bambridge shouted, but Fabry was the front man on the PowerPoint and video presentation, and would have gone over to the house to set up for the second part of the conference.

  “We’re checking. But it was the same MO. Whoever it was waited in the backseat for Mr. Fabry to come out of the house and then attacked him.”

  “Are the cops at the OHB?”

  “They’ll be here all morning. The Bureau sent out a CSI unit, and they’ve taken control. Special Agent Morris Wilkinson is in charge.”

  “Has he been told about the second … incident?”

  “I wanted to talk to you first, sir.”

  Bambridge came to a narrow gravel pass over through the median, and he took it. “I want our people to collect whatever evidence they can first.”

  “We’re already on it.”

  “Soon as you’re ready, turn it over to the Bureau. I want the campus locked down. No one in or out without personal recognition. Get two of your people on both gates to make sure it gets done.”

  “What about the conference?”

  “It’s canceled. In the meantime, I want a room-by-room search of every square inch of every building. That includes elevator shafts, air ducts, closets, maintenance spaces, all the subbasements. Every cabinet, under every desk, on top of the roofs, and when your people are finished, I want you to do it again. And again. And again.”

  “We have a lot of acreage, lots of places to hide.”

  “Make sure there are no loops or any other glitches with our fence-line video cameras and motion detectors. I want as many helicopters with infrared detectors in the air right now, and I want our K-9 people on it too. This guy has to be covered in blood. Give the dogs the scents of Wager and Fabry.”

  “It has to be one of us,” Blankenship said. “I don’t see how anyone else could have gotten in here this morning. It means it has to be someone on the night schedule.”

  “Plus people like you and me who are bound to show up at any hour of the day. Narrows field,” Bambridge said. “Pull the personnel records of everyone, including mine, see whose psych evals have come up shaky in the past six months. And find out who had connections with Wager and Fabry—not just either of them. I want a common denominator.”

  “The shift change starts in a few hours. What do you want to do about it?”

  Bambridge’s knee-jerk reaction was to keep everyone on campus and hold the new shift from coming to work until the buildings and grounds had been sanitized, but he thought better of it. “Let it go on as normal. If we get out of our routine, someone is going to sit up and take notice. Whatever happens, we need to keep the media out of this for as long as possible. We’re already in enough trouble as it is.”

  Two years ago the scandal about the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans had bled over to the CIA. The Agency’s charter specifically forbade any operations on U.S. soil, but that hadn’t been the case since the Cold War days. The CIA went wherever its investigations led, including the continental U.S.

  “We’ll be letting the suspect walk out the gate.”

  “What suspect?” Bambridge demanded angrily.

  “The killer.”

  “Give me a name. Everyone on the grounds at this moment is a suspect.”

  “That’s a lot of people.”

  “Besides anyone with connections to Wager and Fabry, I want the names of anyone who’s ever worked as an instructor at the Farm or served time in the field, either working for us or for the military—special forces. Both of those guys were NOCs, too highly trained to let someone come up on them so easily.”

  “I’ve already started on that list. Anyone else?”

  “Guys just about set to retire.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “It’s about stress. A lot of guys are burned out after twenty—especially Watch officers. And we’ve made
some pay cuts and we’ve reduced hours. Check those people.”

  “We don’t have the personnel to do this very quickly,” Blankenship said. “Could take a month or more of cross-checking.”

  “Then I suggest you get started right away,” Bambridge said, and hung up.

  He came to the main gate and stopped directly across from the gatehouse until one of the security guards came out.

  “Mr. Bambridge, is there a problem, sir?”

  “Yes, why wasn’t I stopped for a positive ID?”

  “Your tag came up, and you showed positive on the facial recognition program.”

  “I could have been an imposter in disguise who killed the deputy director and stole his car. I want everyone coming through this gate to be checked.”

  “Yes, sir,” the security officer said. “Is there a problem we should know about?”

  “Just a drill. So keep on your toes. There’ll be an eval tomorrow.”

  As he drove the rest of the way through the woods to the OHB, where he parked in his slot in the basement, he could not remember hearing or reading about anything like this ever happening. No business seemed to be immune from the disgruntled employee coming to work with a loaded weapon, or weapons, and opening fire. Or setting off a bomb. Movie theaters, schools, federal building—no place was safe. Except, until now, for the CIA.

  Upstairs in his office, he powered up his computer to see what Blankenship was up to, but except for a personnel list with about one hundred names highlighted, there was nothing else. So far the chief of security had not come up with any connections between Wager and Fabry or anyone else except for the people in the sections where they had worked.

  He phoned Page at home. “There’s been another murder,” he told the director.

  “My God, who?”