They’d not had the chance to cover what had been happening over the past few months since McGarvey had left Washington, nor had she brought up the reason she and Otto had made the trip.
She’d been doing mostly office work, catching up on the reports dealing with the SEAL Team Six assignment. The only bright light had been a two-week stint at Camp Peary. She’d engaged in learning urban infiltration tactics, and had given a few lessons in hand-to-hand combat.
“Bruised a few tender male egos, I think,” she said. “Some of the kids took me for granted.”
McGarvey had to laugh, which was a first for him in a long time. It felt good to be with her, even like this, like now.
Otto took his time getting down to them, even though he was in good enough shape these days to have sprinted from town. “Hiya, Mac,” he said, sitting down.
McGarvey poured a glass of wine, which Otto downed in a couple of swallows. He held out his glass for more.
“How you doing out here? Getting bored yet?”
“I was thinking about coming back to Florida to open the house, maybe take a trip on the boat,” McGarvey said.
He had a place on Casey Key south of Tampa on the Gulf Coast, and a forty-two-foot Island Packet ketch, which he and Katy had used to sail to the Keys and twice out to the Bahamas. When he was in for the season, he taught Voltaire at the University of South Florida’s New College in Sarasota, but last semester the dean had suggested he might take a year or two sabbatical. There’d been some trouble connected to him, trouble in which a car had exploded in a campus parking lot, killing not only the driver but two innocent students who’d happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After that, teaching Voltaire had lost some of its charm for him.
“We have a problem,” Otto said. “Walt sent me out to fill you in, and Pete asked if she could tag along.”
“I had a feeling I was going to get involved,” she said. In her job as an interrogator, she’d been one of the CIA’s all-time best. Her good looks, slight build, and the fact that she was a female who also had a kind, understanding manner made her subjects want to talk to her. Sometimes she even brought them to the point where they begged to tell her their story. And she was never judgmental, which was even more effective.
“There’s been something in the news over the past couple of weeks that Walt could be stepping down. They’ve mentioned Daniel Voight to replace him. This have anything to do with why you’re here?”
Voight was the former Democratic senator from California who’d first made a name for himself as a defense attorney for a very large Washington law firm before he’d gone home to enter politics. A lion’s share of his career had been designing and pushing for reform in the intelligence community. He’d been dead set against creating the office of national intelligence, calling it little more than another layer of government bureaucracy. He was called the Architect at Langley and the other fourteen military and civilian intelligence agencies.
“Walt doesn’t want to leave on this kind of a note. It’s why he agreed to let me ask you for help.”
“Voight is a good choice.”
“Probably, but it’s better the devil you know than the one you don’t. Morale is a little low on campus. And it’s going to get lower once our problem gets out.”
“Marty sign on for you coming out there?”
“No. He wants to do this himself. Everyone thinks he’s angling for Fred Atwell’s job.”
Atwell was the deputy director of the CIA, and since it wasn’t likely he would take the top spot when Page left, it was assumed he would resign. He was a professional intelligence officer, and the biggest problem in the CIA for a very long time was that its directors were almost always politicians, not professionals, while the DCIs were. Bambridge, as much as McGarvey didn’t like him, would be the logical choice.
McGarvey sipped his wine. Otto and Pete were skirting the issue, which was highly unusual for both of them. Whatever it was had to be big.
“What is it?” he asked. “Why’s Walt asked for my help?”
“We have a serial killer on campus,” Otto said. “Two bodies so far, but there could be more. Everyone involved thinks it’s likely.”
“No one is allowed to go anywhere on campus alone,” Pete said. “Everyone’s in pairs. Marty’s taken the blame for it, telling everyone that part of the Agency’s new strategic plan is to expect a possible terrorist incursion and get ready for it.”
“That would take someone from the inside,” McGarvey said.
“Right. Everyone is a suspect, so no one works alone.”
“Even for bathroom breaks,” Pete said. “People have started calling the OHB Gestapo Headquarters.”
“That’s not the real issue,” Otto said. “It’s how they were killed that has Blankenship and his people freaked out. Me too, because it makes no sense unless the killer is a total psycho. But nothing like that shows up on anyone’s psych evals.”
“I’m listening,” McGarvey said, and glanced at Pete. She was a little pale.
“Both of them bled to death. Their carotid arteries were ripped out of their necks.”
“Ripped or cut?”
“The killer ripped them out with his teeth, like a wild animal. And then while they were bleeding out, he chewed off their noses and lips—even their eyebrows. We found saliva, and we’re running DNA matches as fast as the lab can get the work done. Be a couple more days.”
McGarvey had heard of things like this happening in the early days of the Vietnam War. And he said as much to them. “It was a tactic of the Degar. The French called them the Montagnard, the ‘mountain people,’ and they were fierce. We used them as guerrillas against the VC, who were frightened of them, and rightly so. These guys left their calling cards wherever they went. Go back to Hanoi and leave us alone, or no one will be safe. They cut off heads, genitals, put men headfirst in cages of starving rats. Shoved poisonous snakes down their throats. Made their prisoners swallow the shoots of live bamboo plants that would grow right through their stomachs and intestines, and then let them make it back to their own units.”
“This guy was a Vietnamese soldier?” Pete asked skeptically. “He’d have to be seventy.”
“No, but someone who studied the tactics, because they worked. If we’d given the Montagnards more support and then gotten out of their way, the VC just might have gone back to Hanoi and stayed out of it. He’ll be an NOC,” McGarvey said.
“Eighteen of them on the night shift,” Otto said. “Three of them women, and Wager and Fabry leave thirteen. Soon as we get the DNA results back, we’ll nail the bastard.”
“He’s already thought of that, which means it won’t matter to him what DNA he left behind. It won’t be in his records. He’ll have gotten around that. It’s the whole point: their asses are out in the field, and they sure as hell don’t want anything pointing to their connections with the CIA.”
“Then we’ll take cheek swabs of everyone on the shift,” Pete suggested.
“He may not have worked that shift. Getting on campus through security isn’t all that difficult to do.”
Otto sat back. “Are you in?”
“Of course,” McGarvey said. From the moment Pete had shown up, there’d been no doubt in his mind. “I’m going to need a list of any field assignments Wager and Fabry were ever on together.”
“We already have that,” Otto said. He opened a file on his iPad and passed it across. “Called Alpha Seven. April oh three, little over a month before we started the second Iraq war.”
Wager and Fabry were part of a ground team spread out in the mountains above Kirkuk. They were looking for WMDs. Of the five others, Joseph Carnes was dead, killed in a car crash in Athens last year, and none of the others were currently on the Company’s payroll.
“You have current addresses on three of them, but the fourth is off the grid,” McGarvey said. It was how he would have played it.
Pete was surprised, but Otto wasn’t. “Larry Coffin
,” he said. “He and Carnes were pals. Could be our guy?”
“Probably not, but I’m betting he knows something we can use.”
“He could be anywhere,” Pete said. “And he’s certainly demonstrated he doesn’t want to be found.”
“I’ll find him,” McGarvey said.
“Where?”
“Athens.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No,” McGarvey said. “You’re going back with Otto to help set up a public funeral for Wager and Fabry. Their families are going to insist, and only a very brief mention of their participation in the war will be released to the media.”
“Marty will never go for it.”
“Let him think it was his idea. We just want to know if any of their Alpha Seven buddies show up.”
“Then what?”
“Let Marty figure it out, because I have a feeling none of those guys is the killer.”
“Then why the ruse?” Pete asked.
“To keep the killer distracted.”
EIGHT
Lawrence Thaddeus Coffin sat alone at a sidewalk café in the Plaka district of Athens, very near the Acropolis and on top of the ancient city. It was a historical district and almost always busy with tourists, which made it anonymous. It was one of his favorite people-watching spots in a city he’d come to love, because of its international flavor.
Greece from ancient times had been at the crossroads of trade not only in goods but in ideas, among them the arts, the sciences, and government itself.
He was a slender man, a bit under six feet, with thinning light brown hair and pale blue eyes that had always made him seem like a dreamer to those who didn’t know him. Someone whose thoughts and concerns were far away from the everyday.
The waiter brought him another ouzo and a demitasse of very strong coffee, his third for the late afternoon, along with his bill on a tiny slip of paper.
He’d had no idea anything had started to go bad until he’d read the brief squib in the International New York Times this morning about the funerals for two CIA officers who’d openly been identified as Wager and Fabry. It was a fact he found extraordinary. NOCs were never given public recognition. When they were killed in the line of duty, they were given a star on the granite wall in the lobby of the OHB. And that was that.
After Carnes and now these two, it left only him and three others who he expected would eventually make their way here to him. But it was all for nothing, especially after Snowden and the others had taken the fall. Nothing was left, except for Kryptos, which was the key if anyone took the time to understand the message—the entire message, which was scattered all over the campus.
A game, actually, he told himself. Deadly, but a game nevertheless.
When he was finished, he paid his bill, then got up and made his way down the block and across the street, traffic horrible at this hour. He was safe from retaliation to this point because of the measures he’d put into place more than a year ago. Necessary, he’d thought then, and still did. With Wager’s and Fabry’s deaths, the issue would soon be coming to a head. He could finally make his move.
A half dozen blocks from the taverna, he stopped across the narrow cobblestone lane to light a cigarette while he studied the two-story house he’d paid nearly a million euros for three years ago. The front was stuccoed in a pale pink, two iron balconies on the second floor—one for the sitting room and the other for the master bedroom, which jutted out over the street.
On March 25—that was the Greek independence holiday from Ottoman rule—each of those three years, he’d hung the Greek flag and bunting on the balconies as most of his neighbors did and went out into the streets for the festival and dancing.
He’d fit in very well, because that was what he was trained to do by the CIA. Blend in with the surroundings, mingle with the people as one of them. And the entire key to success, he’d learned very early on, was lying to yourself and believing it to such an extent that even under torture you would never reveal anything except your legend, the lies.
In the field, he’d played the part of an oil exploration engineer—studying enough textbooks and technical manuals to convince even another oil engineer. A UN aid worker, even issuing aid checks, and helping drill freshwater wells while spying on a military installation. Working as an independent arms dealer, a financier from London, a chef from San Francisco in Saudi Arabia to understand Arab cooking, and to introduce California fusion dishes to royalty while spying on them.
But his latest role, that of an independently wealthy dealer in rare books, artwork, and pieces of antiquity, had come about when all but the last panel on the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters had been decrypted, and the talk on the Internet hinted that the fourth was soon to fall.
He’d allowed himself to be caught red-handed with three tiny Greek sculptures: one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, desire, and pleasure; Hera, the queen of the heavens and goddess of marriage, women, childbirth, heirs, kings, and empires; and of Athena herself, the goddess of intelligence, skill, warfare, battle strategy, handicrafts, and wisdom.
After a brief hearing before a judge five months ago, during which he’d pleaded guilty, he’d been fined one hundred thousand euros or one year in prison. He refused to pay the fine.
The house was quiet, the same blinds in two of the upstairs windows half drawn, as he’d left them. No suspicious car with its left wheels up on the sidewalk, no telltale glitter from the lenses of binoculars, no radio antenna, no small satellite dish of the kind often used as a television receiver but could also be used for burst transmissions to and from a satellite—the same sort he and the others on Alpha Seven had used.
A taxi rattled past. Tossing his cigarette aside, he crossed the street and let himself inside using the code on the keypad. He was dressed in tight jeans and a plain red muscle T-shirt rather than the sport coats or suits he’d worn as an arts dealer.
In the past he’d hinted he was gay, and his neighbors—most of them married couples—left him alone. Coming here like this, as he had for the past four months, raised no suspicions. It was just one of his gay friends stopping by from time to time to check on things. He sometimes stayed for several hours, but he always left before eight in the evening.
The downstairs hall was deathly silent. He took the SIG Sauer pistol from the hall table, held his breath, and cocked an ear to listen for a sound. Any sound that would indicate someone was here.
No out-of-place scents were on the air; the slight layer of dust on the table and on the cap of the newel post and the stair rail had not been disturbed since the last time he’d been here. Nevertheless, he methodically checked the hall closet, reception area, guest bathroom, dining room, kitchen, and pantry, as well as the breakfast nook, which looked out over a pretty courtyard with a small fountain at the rear of the house.
Upstairs he checked the three bedrooms and attached bathrooms and closets before he went into the sitting room he had used as his office. Before he’d left for prison, he’d destroyed anything that tied him in any way to the CIA, but left everything else. Since the police raid and investigation, nothing else had been disturbed.
He checked the street from a window, but no one had shown up since he’d come inside, and he breathed a small sigh of relief.
Downstairs, he opened a good bottle of Valpolicella and took it out to the small iron table in the courtyard, where he sat listening not only to the sounds of the neighborhood but to his inner voices—the ones he’d very often had trouble understanding.
He’d been a man alone for most of his life. Growing up as a child in Detroit, mostly on the streets and later at the community college in Lansing, where he’d studied psychology, running out of money six months before graduation. Afterward he’d learned to count cards, and he went to Atlantic City, where he made twenty thousand before he had to run to avoid getting arrested or, at the very least, beaten up.
For the next years, he’d taught himself disguises—simple hair
dyes, glasses, fake mustaches, clothing—and most of all: attitudes, mostly meek to blend in, or sometimes as an expert on some subject. He’d supported himself primarily by gambling, and a few con games involving illegal guns or drugs. And he’d never been caught, because he was good.
For two years he studied psychiatry, learning enough to understand even more about the manifestations of personalities, which made his job of blending in easier. And finally he’d applied to the CIA, using a fake degree in psychology and a line of bullshit that went right over the heads of interviewers and didn’t come to light until his deep background investigation.
They’d actually admired him. Told him he was perfect for what they had in mind. After all, they’d explained, the best man for the job as an NOC was a con artist.
“You talked your way through the door without any help; you’ll go a long way with ours,” the final recruiter told him.
All that time from the streets of Detroit, to Lansing and to casinos around the country, he’d been alone. But in the CIA he’d finally found a place where he could be respected and even liked for who and what he was.
A few minutes before eight, Coffin went back into the house, rinsed out and dried his wineglass, and, checking out the window, let himself out of the house. At the corner he took a bus to the metro station. From there he boarded a train for Piraeus—Athens’s port town twelve kilometers to the southwest.
He was due back in his cell at the Korydallos Prison Complex no later than ten. He was scheduled to interview a female prisoner first thing in the morning at the psych ward where he worked. She had delusions she was someone else, though she couldn’t say exactly who it was. It was a condition he knew very well.
NINE
McGarvey packed a few things, then flew up to Athens with Otto and Pete in the Aegean Airlines charters helicopter. The noise over the eighty-mile flight was too great to talk out loud without shouting, and he didn’t want to use the intercom and headphones. What he had to say wasn’t for the pilot’s ears. In any event, Otto had brought up the dossiers on all seven of the Alpha team, and he’d read them.
End Game Page 4
