End Game

by David Hagberg

  “Istvan Fabry. Looks like the same guy probably did it.”

  “Has the Bureau been contacted?”

  “They’re here along with one of their CSI units,” Bambridge said. “I’m going to text and e-mail everyone involved that we’re postponing the conference this morning.”

  “Don’t do that,” Page said. “There’ll be too many questions. And make sure the officers on perimeter duty—especially at the Parkway and Georgetown Pike gates—maintain a low key. We don’t want to tip off anyone—not the killer, and sure as hell not the media.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about everyone else out there at the moment?”

  “Sir?”

  “Assuming the killer hasn’t already left, someone else could be a target. Double up everyone—no one goes anywhere alone. Tell them it’s a drill; tell them anything you want to tell them: we’re beefing up security because of our VIP guests coming this morning.”

  “I’ll tell them the vice president might drop in unannounced.”

  “I’ll be in my office in one hour. I want you up there, along with Bob Blankenship, and see if you can get Rencke to come in.”

  “I don’t think including him is such a good idea, sir.”

  “Do it,” Page said. “I want answers.”

  FIVE

  Otto Rencke could not remember ever having slept for more than one or two hours at a stretch. Until he’d married Louise, most of his naps were in front of his computer, or listening to music on headphones in a secure spot somewhere. But from the beginning, her primary goals in life had been taking care of their child, now four, and straightening out her husband’s act, which included requiring him to come to bed with her every evening for at least six hours.

  He’d fought her on that one at first, until she’d told him that sometimes she got frightened in the middle of the night and she needed him to watch over her. And he’d agreed—spending his waking hours listening to classical music and operas in his head, and solving tensor calculus problems, matrices of partial differential equations of the type Einstein had used to develop relativity.

  In his early forties, Rencke was of medium height, slender with a head too large for his body, and long frizzy red hair held in place by a ponytail. He almost always wore jeans and sweatshirts—some from Disneyworld and some from the old KGB or CCCP, as a sort of joke inside the CIA campus—and at Louise’s prodding, decent boat shoes instead of raggedy sneakers that were always dirty, always unlaced.

  Marty wouldn’t explain why Page wanted to see him at this hour, but as Otto came up to the main gate, he saw four backed-up cars he had to get through, and while he waited, he pulled up the CIA’s mainframe to see what was going on to create a delay here.

  Nothing jumped out at him, but when he connected with his search programs in his office, he came up with a series of requests from security to pull the personnel records of everyone working the midnight-to-eight shift. Security’s search parameters included psych evals, time to retirement, Agency assignments, previous military experience, and connections with Walter Wager—and with Istvan Fabry, a name he knew.

  Fabry had come to him with help on a special cybercrimes project. The guy was bright but something of a milquetoast despite the fact that his rep as a fearless field operative—an NOC—was rock solid. The guy had struck Otto as being the happiest man in the world for finally being in from the cold.

  When his turn came, he was passed through security by one of the officers who mentioned something about a drill, which Otto knew was total bullshit, and he drove the rest of the way up to the OHB, where he took his parking spot in the basement.

  He went to his third-floor office to make sure nothing had been disturbed since he’d left late yesterday afternoon, then took the elevator to the seventh floor. McGarvey once told him that paranoia was an agent’s most powerful tool: Worry that someone or something might be coming up on your six, and it might save your life one day.

  A security officer was waiting at the DCI’s door, which he opened for Otto, who paused just long enough to glance down the long corridor. All doors on this floor were closed this morning. But by tradition over the past fifteen or twenty years, they had been left open. Directors liked to wander out of their offices to visit, especially with the people down the hall on the left in the long narrow room called the Watch. Five officers manned the place 24/7; there they could monitor everything happening in the world on a real-time basis. Connected by satellites and other electronic means, and by constantly updated human intelligence, they were able to keep tabs on developing operations, as well as come up with alerts on hot spots that had the potential to blow up.

  All the people working there loved their jobs, because as one of them once said: we get to know everything.

  “Good morning, sir,” the security man said to Otto. He looked a little nervous.

  “Too bad about Wager and Fabry.”

  “Yes, sir, hard to believe.”

  Page’s secretary wasn’t here yet, so Otto went straight through to the director’s big office. Page was seated in an easy chair across a coffee table from Bambridge and Blankenship, who were sitting on the blue Queen Anne couch. Bambridge looked perplexed, as usual. Blankenship looked angry. But Page seemed worried, which was unusual.

  “Thanks for coming at this hour,” Page said.

  Otto took the chair opposite Page. “Have the families been notified?”

  “Families?” Bambridge asked.

  “Yeah, Wager’s and Fabry’s. When officers lose their lives, their families are told straightaway.”

  Bambridge blustered. But Page held him off. “Not yet,” he said. “How did you find out?”

  “Lucky guess. So, what happened?”

  “We have a serial killer on campus,” Blankenship said.

  “The extra security won’t help.”

  “Why’s that?” the chief of security asked. He wasn’t angry, just earnest.

  “Whoever’s done it is one of us. He knows the system, and since he’s killed two people in one night, he thinks he’ll get away with it.”

  “The son of a bitch is nuts,” Bambridge said.

  “Doesn’t mean he’s stupid,” Otto said. “Someone want to fill me in?”

  Page nodded, and Blankenship brought Rencke up to speed with everything they’d learned tonight, everything Bambridge had suggested they do and the results so far.

  Otto took out his highly modified iPad and connected with his search programs—his “darlings,” as he called them.

  “Your machine won’t work on this floor,” Bambridge said, but Otto ignored him.

  In twenty seconds he had the start of what he was looking for, and he was surprised. He looked up. “Besides Wager and Fabry, there are eighteen other NOCs working the night shift. A bigger number than I would have suspected.”

  “We tend to keep them at the Farm or on this shift,” Page said. “Why an NOC?”

  “Savagery.”

  Page cocked a shoulder.

  “These folks—three of them on this shift are women, by the way—have been trained to live by their wits in badland. The mission comes first, all other considerations off the table. A lot of them have been alone in places I wouldn’t send an armored column to. They’ve killed to save their own lives—didn’t matter who they killed—men or women or children if need be. A lot of the time they’ve had to improvise, like a lot of our guys in early Vietnam did. Kill to send a message. Kill like an animal, so that the opposition thinks twice about pursuit. No one wants to go into a lion’s den.”

  “We’re checking possible connections,” Blankenship said.

  “That’s a start, but there might not be any. This could be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Marty suggested, someone who’s a psycho. And not necessarily someone who works this shift.”

  “We have the records of everyone coming through security,” Blankenship said.

  “Yeah,” Otto said,
nodding. “But you know, every now and then I forget to scan my badge when I walk out the door. The computer thinks I’m still in the building, or somewhere on campus. A flag doesn’t go up. Or, just maybe one day I’d scan my badge but then come through another entrance, maybe with someone else’s badge I’d lifted. The system isn’t perfect. You guys oughta know it. We need entry strictly by personal recognition.”

  “Impossible,” Bambridge said.

  “Of course it is, and what’s happened tonight—and may still be happening—is a result.”

  “We’ve doubled up everyone,” Blankenship said. “Told them it was a security drill.”

  “Come on, Bob. This isn’t a box of dummies you’re dealing with, ya know. We’ve got more PhDs per capita here than there are at Harvard. Pretty soon I suspect you’re going to have a panic on your hands.”

  Blankenship’s cell phone buzzed, and he answered it. “No reason to hold them,” he said, and hung up. “That was the back gate. It’s already started. Just a handful so far.”

  “One of whom could be the killer,” Bambridge said.

  “I doubt it,” Otto said.

  “He’s not going to break his routine. He’ll leave at the end of his shift. He thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us,” Blankenship said.

  “But he isn’t,” Otto said.

  “What do you suggest?”

  “I’m going to talk to Mac. He knows more about the NOC mentality than anyone.”

  “Christ,” Bambridge said. “Send a killer to find a killer.”

  SIX

  Over a thirty-plus-year career Kirk McGarvey had developed a sixth sense about his surroundings, and something possibly coming at him out of the blue. And the feeling had been niggling at the back of his head now for the past couple of days.

  He was a man in his early fifties, husky, with a square but pleasant face, and gray-green eyes that saw things most other people missed. Running now along a path in the hills above the port city of Livadi on the Greek island of Serifos, he noticed an Aegean Airlines charters helicopter touching down in front of the Serifos Beach Hotel. It was an unscheduled flight from Athens and at the wrong end of the tourist season, so it caught his attention.

  The distance was too great for him to make out anything except that only two passengers got out and walked up to the hotel. He couldn’t even tell if it was a man and a woman, yet something about them, about the timing, about everything, wasn’t right—or a real surprise, for that matter.

  High overhead, the morning jet to Tel Aviv made a bright contrail in the perfectly clear blue sky, and McGarvey turned and headed back to walk the three miles to the decommissioned lighthouse he’d used as his refuge from time to time. He’d worked practically all his adult life first for air force intelligence, then the CIA had picked him up, trained him as a field officer, and he’d gone to work doing black ops for the national clandestine service. He’d become a killer for his country—an assassin, a soldier who didn’t march in a platoon but one who worked alone. His kills were face-to-face and very personal.

  But then they’d promoted him to run the clandestine service, and by happenstance—the right president at the right time—he’d been appointed and confirmed by Congress as the director of the CIA. But that job hadn’t lasted long; he wasn’t an administrator. He’d respected most of the people, but he’d hated the job, so he had retired.

  After that it seemed like every few months someone came to him to do something about a situation that the Company simply could not handle on its own. Something extrajudicial. Something strictly forbidden in the U.S. and almost everywhere else by international law. But something that needed to be done. In Russia, in Japan, in Israel and Mexico and Cuba, and even one job in North Korea, possibly the strangest of his career. He had stopped a missile attack on Israel’s nuclear weapons storage depot; had stopped an outright invasion of Texas and New Mexico by drug cartels; and even came face-to-face on two occasions with Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

  Before each of those assignments, he had gotten the feeling as if a target had been painted on his back and someone was taking a bead on him.

  He stopped on the crest of a hill that looked down at the lighthouse. No one was around. Sometimes tourists hiked up here, and he usually treated them nicely, though he’d always turned down their requests for a tour.

  Someone from the Company had come to him twice before—last time it was Marty Bambridge, the deputy director of operations. And then as now he’d been emotionally banged up. He’d come here to recuperate, get his brain rewired, so that he could rejoin the civilized world without finding the need to constantly look over his shoulder.

  This time he’d run here for two reasons. The first was his last assignment, in which he’d battled a team of terrorists from Germany hired to kill all the SEAL Team Six guys who had gone to Abbottabad to take out bin Laden. And the second was Pete Boylan, a former CIA interrogator who’d moved up to clandestine services, where she’d helped with two of his assignments.

  A couple of years ago his wife and daughter had been assassinated right in front of his eyes, and he’d never fully recovered from the trauma. He’d been rubbed totally raw, his emotions naked on the surface. And then Pete had come along—vivacious, talented, no nonsense whatsoever, and dedicated to the same ideals he’d been dedicated to all his life: defending the U.S. and, in fact, defending anyone or any idea from the bullies of the world. From the bin Ladens and the extremists of any stripe.

  The fact was that he’d become emotionally attached to her. He’d begun to fall in love, so he had run here. Every woman in his life—including his wife—had lost their lives because of him. Because of what he did, who he was.

  He didn’t want it to happen to Pete.

  If the two who’d gotten off the chopper had come to see him, it would take them at least a half hour to get up here. Only a narrow dirt path rose up from the town, much too narrow and rocky for a jeep or just about anything else to make it up, unless it was a motorcycle. Most people who came up here made their way on foot.

  At the lighthouse he went up to the second level that had been fitted out as a small bedroom suite, and took a shower, changing into a pair of jeans, a light T-shirt, and moccasins. He checked the load on his Walther PPK, in the 9-mm version, stuck it in the waistband of the slacks at the small of his back, and went downstairs.

  He opened a bottle of ice-cold Retsina wine, then brought it and three glasses out to the patio. There he could watch the path from town. He settled down to wait.

  A long time ago, when he was an air force second lieutenant in the OSI, a colonel told him he would burn out before he was thirty, because he was too angry. He had a chip on his shoulder. Years later, after the Cold War was pretty much over with, a DDO had called him an anachronism. His kind of dedication to what he’d called McGarvey’s Superman complex—truth, justice, and the American way—was sadly out-of-date.

  “Fact of the matter is, McGarvey, there’s no room for you any longer. We don’t need you.”

  But that was long before 9/11, and as it turned out, the DDO was the one who was no longer needed.

  A figure appeared over the crest of the hill about two hundred yards away, stopped for a few moments, and then started down the path.

  McGarvey shaded his eyes, but he could not make out who it was—even if it was a man or a woman—though from the way the person moved, he figured she was a woman. And even before she got close enough for him to recognize who it was, he knew it was Pete, and that the other person who’d gotten off the helicopter was probably Otto, and that something serious was going down, or about to happen.

  Although he hadn’t brought a laptop or iPad with him, nor had he activated his cell phone, he did walk down to Livadi for lunch at least once a week, if for no other reason than to watch an hour or so of CNN. Over the past several weeks nothing much had been going on in the world he figured he should get involved with. The Euro troubles in Athens and Madrid had not filtered down here; th
e Snowden case was back in the news, linked with another NSA whistle-blower, and the CIA had come under congressional scrutiny for its domestic operations contrary to law. Egypt was still on fire, as were Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea, with the deaths of several top generals—supposedly at the hands of South Korean assassins. And Paris and Brussels.

  Floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, a very active tornado season, and three strong earthquakes along the San Andreas fault dominated U.S. news. But none of it rose to the level of sending Pete and Otto all this way to talk to him.

  He found that not only was he curious, but he was looking forward to seeing them. Except for a few people in town and the occasional tourist, he’d spoken to no one in three months.

  * * *

  Pete Boylan, in her late thirties, about five-five, wearing a light shirt with sleeves rolled up above her elbows, and baggy khaki trousers that did nothing much to hide her figure, stopped a few feet out. Her pretty, round face was dominated by her vivid blue eyes that were wide and expressive, framed by short dark hair cut almost boyishly, and rich lips that were formed into a dazzling smile.

  “Hi, Kirk,” she said, smiling. Her voice was soft, her accent slightly Southern, though she was a California girl.

  “Why didn’t Otto come up with you?”

  “I asked him to give me twenty minutes before we got to business,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Wanting to see you, but giving you space. No one likes to be crowded.”

  McGarvey got up and she came to him, almost hesitantly at first, not sure of her reception until her took her into his arms and held her close for a long time.

  “How are you really?” he asked.

  “Lonely as hell, but we have a problem Otto hopes you can help with.”

  SEVEN

  Otto gave them less than ten minutes before he topped the rise and started down the other side to the lighthouse. “He’s got the bit in his teeth, and nothing’s going to stop him from talking to you,” Pete said.