End Game

by David Hagberg

  The NIS safe house was aboard a passenger ferry that had blown its engine three months ago and was on chocks on dry land, waiting for a replacement. From the outside, the 110-foot boat was a rusting wreck; on the inside, it wasn’t a lot better, though everything aboard worked, including the galley. No crew was assigned at the moment, so it was just Moshonas, Pete, and Coffin who came aboard.

  McGarvey was waiting for them in what had been the crew’s mess belowdecks, just forward of the engine room. Both portholes were open, but still the room was stuffy and smelled of diesel oil.

  Eight people could sit around the table, and when Coffin came in, he pulled up short when he spotted the Walther PPK in front of where Mac was sitting.

  “I’m glad you could join us without trouble,” McGarvey said. “Give your weapon to Ms. Boylan, please.”

  Coffin stepped back a pace, but Pete and Moshonas were right there. Pete reached inside Coffin’s jacket and took the SIG.

  “Just so there’re no mistakes,” McGarvey said. “Sit down.”

  Coffin did as he was told. Pete sat cross-legged on a chair across the room, her arms draped over the back of it, while Moshonas leaned up against the door.

  The mess was functional, but little more than that.

  Pete had no idea what was coming next, except that Coffin seemed to be in an agreeable mood. But she couldn’t tell if he was for real, or if he was simply working the situation like any good NOC was trained to do. And by all accounts he was one of the best.

  FOURTEEN

  “The Alpha Seven operation was a long time ago,” McGarvey said. “Where’s the bridge to Wager’s and Fabry’s deaths and you running to ground?”

  “It’s been a long day, and I would like something to drink,” Coffin said. He sat back and crossed his legs. “A glass of wine?”

  “I’ll get it,” Pete said, and started to get up, but McGarvey waved her back.

  “Maybe later, but for now I want Mr. Coffin to take us through the scenario. I want to know what the hell is happening.”

  “How were they killed?” Coffin asked.

  “Their carotid arteries were severed, and they bled to death.”

  “Any DNA evidence at the crime scenes?”

  “None that match any CIA employee,” McGarvey said.

  “I thought not,” Coffin said. “What weapon did the killer use? A knife? A gunshot to the side of the neck? A piece of broken glass?”

  “Teeth.”

  “Animal or human?”

  “Human.”

  Coffin looked away for a moment. “Were their faces destroyed? Lips chewed off, noses, eyebrows?”

  “You know who it is?” McGarvey asked.

  “I think so. But you’ll need to hear the entire story, or you wouldn’t understand the motive.”

  “I want his name.”

  “I don’t know it. None of us ever did. In addition to the seven of us on the team in Iraq, our control officer showed up out of the blue, and I mean, literally out of the blue. He parachuted down on our position above Kirkuk in the middle of the night. None of us heard the aircraft that brought him across the border either from Turkey or maybe Syria, which means he had to have made a HALO jump—high altitude, above twenty-five thousand feet, and free-falling down to a thousand feet or so to make the low opening.”

  The team had been assembled in Saudi Arabia for their initial briefing before being staged at Frankfurt and then moved to their training site in the mountains above Munich. That was in the winter of 1999, and when the mission had been fully explained, they’d all gotten a laugh out of the logic—send a team to be trained in midwinter for a mission that might not develop until the summer in a hostile country where temperatures could soar to well above 110.

  But the point of learning the op in Germany was to do so in complete secrecy, right under the noses of the BND—Germany’s intelligence service, whose headquarters at the time were still at Pullach, just outside of Munich.

  “If you get caught up here, if even a hint of our presence becomes known, the mission is a wash,” their chief instructor had told them.

  Which was the entire point. They were hidden in the Bavarian Alps, with orders to spy on the BND’s headquarters. They were to slip into town at night, carry out their surveillance operations, and then disappear back into the mountains before daybreak.

  “Thing is, they picked the seven of us because no one spoke even a smattering of German,” Coffin said.

  “You needed to complete an op without being able to talk yourself out of a difficult spot?” Pete asked.

  Coffin looked at her. “Being able to blend in was why we were hired in the first place. I was a chameleon. Give me a few days with a couple of textbooks or instruction manuals, and I could play the part of just about anybody. Airline pilot, surgeon, plumber.”

  “But you had to be able to speak the language,” Pete said. “The mission was Iraq. Why didn’t the Company send someone who spoke Arabic or Kurdish?”

  “Not many of them around in those days,” Coffin said.

  “The German mission evidently was a success.”

  “Yes. The BND never knew we were there. Some of us even used to go into town for a couple of beers and some wurst. Played the part of tourists.”

  “Your instructors didn’t jump you over it?”

  Coffin laughed. “They were sending us to Iraq. If we were expected to get past the BND guys, which we did, and then the Mukhabarat operators, slipping past our own people was easy.”

  “Anyway, it was fun,” Pete suggested.

  “None of it was ever fun—interesting and all that, but not fun. We were going into badland, and there’re never any guarantees.”

  “You think the killer was your control officer?” McGarvey asked.

  “I never said that. The killer could be anyone of the team still alive.”

  “Including you?”

  “You can’t believe how easy it was to walk out of Korydallos. Greece is in financial meltdown. A few euros here and there do wonders.”

  “Then why did you walk for good today?”

  “Dr. Lampros found out I wasn’t a real shrink. I’m next on the list, and whoever is killing Alpha Seven had me in their sights.”

  Pete picked up on it. “Their sights?” she asked.

  “One of Alpha Seven was a woman, if you want to call her that.”

  McGarvey brought up the list on his iPad. Otto had come up with it from some old paper file buried in archives. Almost nothing had been written down except names, DOBs, and what evidently were faked medical data, including blood types.

  “No woman on the list.”

  “Alex Unroth, from Philly or someplace out east. None of us were ever sure about one another. She was a good-looking girl, five years younger than the rest of us. She’d obviously been picked for the team because of her looks, though she turned out to be seriously tough. The rag heads totally lose their cool when a Western woman bats her eyelashes at them. She was one of our secret weapons.”

  “What else?” McGarvey asked.

  Coffin hesitated. “I think she was the daughter of someone important. The way she acted, as if she were privileged, as if she were owed something. The way she talked. What she expected from us. She wasn’t our control officer, but half the time she moved as if she were. And even our actual control officer deferred to her as if she were some VIP.”

  “Was she sleeping with him?”

  Coffin laughed. “No, but she was having sex with him. All of us did at one point or another.”

  “Could she be the killer?” Pete asked. “Is she capable of something like that? Wager and Fabry were trained field officers. They couldn’t have been all that easy to take down.”

  “She could have taken them down on one of their good days.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know where Walt and Istvan had gotten themselves to until I read about their deaths. All I did know was someone would be coming for
me sooner or later.”

  “Why?” McGarvey asked. He wanted not to believe Coffin, and yet the man’s story had the ring of desperation—which was often one of truth.

  “The cache in the mountains.”

  “Containing what?” McGarvey asked.

  Coffin took a long time to say nothing, and McGarvey got the distinct impression that the man was truly afraid. Not of some killer coming for him, but of something else. Something even more important than a threat to his life.

  FIFTEEN

  “The Second Gulf War started on the twentieth of March oh three,” Coffin said. “By then we’d been inside Iraq for three months, looking for WMDs, which we never really found. At least not the ones we’d been told to look for.”

  “What did you find?” McGarvey asked.

  “Not what we were supposed to find.”

  Moshonas pushed away from the wall. “That’s enough. This piece of shit will tell you only what he thinks you want to hear. He murdered a man in prison, and combined with his art theft conviction, he’s going back.”

  “This is a matter for the CIA,” Pete said. “We have the murders of two innocent men we have to figure out.”

  “The CIA has no jurisdiction in Greece.”

  “Take care, Special Agent,” Coffin said, his voice quiet, but with conviction. “The NIS might not want to get involved.”

  Moshonas started to object, but McGarvey held him off. “What did you people find in the mountains? What was in the cache?”

  “I need to tell you the circumstances about the other operators, because you’re going to need that information if you’re going to do something about the situation.”

  “That still exists after ten plus years?” Moshonas asked.

  “Yes,” Coffin said, and the way in which he said it, quietly, confidently, struck McGarvey as ominous.

  “Let’s start with Joseph Carnes right here in Athens,” McGarvey suggested. “He was the first to die.”

  A light came into Coffin’s eyes. “You think I killed him. It’s why you came here. That’s the connection you were looking for. Well, you’re wrong. I never even knew he was here until I saw the squib in the paper about him being killed. They even had his real name, which meant he wasn’t undercover.”

  “Was there a reason for you—and not him—to be hiding under an assumed identity?”

  “You’re damn right I was after Iraq. Check the Company’s records. Every one of Alpha Seven quit the Company.”

  “Except for Wager and Fabry,” Pete said.

  “Yeah, and even hiding out in a place they figured was secure didn’t help them in the end.”

  “Nor did it help you hiding in Korydallos,” McGarvey said. “Are you sure it was Carnes? Did you go to the morgue and identify the body?”

  “Are you kidding? Soon as he was killed, I came up with my little bit of fiction. I figured if I dropped out of circulation for a year, whoever it was might try somewhere else. Which they did. Joseph just made a dumb mistake, staying out in the open like that. He must have figured the threat was over and done with. But he was wrong.”

  “But now you’re out. Maybe we should just cut you loose and see what happens.”

  “Carnes was the weakest link, and the oldest. We celebrated his thirtieth birthday in Munich a few days before we shipped out to our staging spot in Turkey, a place called Van, which was a hundred and fifty klicks from the Iraqi border. There was an airport there. Anyway, we all had too much to drink at the party, Joseph the most. He passed out, and we had to carry him back to our position. The instructors were pissed, but by that time it would have been impossible to replace anyone. We’d become a pretty good team.”

  “Letting off some steam isn’t such a terrible thing before going into badland,” Pete said. “Was there more?”

  “He got drunk just about every night. We never found out where he got the stuff, but he was a damned good operator. One minute he was standing right next to you, and if you happened to turn away for just a second, he was gone. Never gave an explanation. Alex started calling him the Magician, and it stuck.”

  “You were the Chameleon, and Carnes was the Magician. What about the others? How about the woman?”

  “We called her the Working Lady.”

  “She didn’t mind?”

  “None of us did. Walter was MP—Mister Ponderous. Istvan was the Refugee. Roy Schermerhorn was the Kraut, of course, and Tom Knight was the last to get his handle.”

  “Which was?”

  “Don Quixote, because the day after we settled down in country, he wanted to go work, blowing up shit. There were big oil fields nearby, and he figured we could go down there and raise some hell.”

  “You were supposed to be looking for WMDs.”

  “Everybody knew they weren’t there, just like everybody knew the war was coming. Tom wanted to pave the way. Saddam’s military wouldn’t be very effective if they ran out of gas.”

  “But you didn’t let him go.”

  “Of course not. Alex said he was just trying to tilt at windmills, which was how we came up with his handle. And he liked his more than the rest of us liked ours.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Tracked the movements of military convoys, mostly. There was a lot of activity around Kirkuk.”

  “We were putting up Keyhole satellites as early as seventy-six,” Pete said. “I expect they could have done a better job monitoring the military’s goings-on up there.”

  “The Iraqis were smarter than that. They hid their shit right out in the open—up next to where waste gas was burning day and night. Infrared equipment was useless from overhead, but from ground level we didn’t have that problem.”

  “So you did go down to the oil fields.”

  “Yes, but not to blow up anything, just to look,” Coffin said.

  “They must have had security patrols,” McGarvey said.

  “They were mostly easy to avoid.”

  “Mostly?”

  “There were a couple of close calls.”

  “What’d you do with the bodies?”

  “Buried them in the foothills,” Coffin said. “Anyway, we were just going through the motions out there. Like I said, there were no WMDs, and everyone with half a brain at Langley knew it.”

  McGarvey suddenly got it, or at least part of what Coffin was leading up to. “You had to report by radio every day?”

  “Every twenty-four-hour period on a rotating schedule. Never the same time of day or night. Encrypted burst transmissions to one of our spy birds in geosync orbit about thirty degrees above the horizon.”

  “Alpha Seven never found anything, but you didn’t report it that way.”

  “Of course not,” Coffin said. “When the war wound down, where do you think the coalition force inspectors went looking?”

  “The caches Alpha Seven found and marked,” McGarvey said. “All of it fiction.”

  Coffin looked over his shoulder at Pete, almost as if he were appealing to her for an understanding he wasn’t getting from McGarvey. “Pretty much,” he said. “May I have that glass of wine now?”

  Pete went to the galley in the adjacent compartment and came back a minute later with a glass of red wine for Coffin, who sipped at it delicately and then smiled. “We should have stopped at my place first. I have a decent cellar.”

  “Pretty much…?” McGarvey prompted.

  “We got out shortly after the shooting began, but they wanted to hold us, possibly for our testimony on camera on the Hill. We got out the same way we came in: airlifted across the border into Turkey and from there Incirlik, then Ramstein and home, straight to Camp Peary, where we were debriefed.”

  “No weapons of mass destruction were ever found,” Pete said.

  “We were just another mission that had gotten things wrong.”

  “Not all your reports to headquarters were fiction. You said pretty much. Take me back to Iraq before the war began,” McGarvey said.

  SIXTEEN

>   It had begun to rain. They could hear the heavy drops hitting the decks, and the light from the partially open hatches had darkened, casting a pall over the mess. Pete got up to switch on a light, but McGarvey gestured her off. The gloom fit his mood just now, because he expected a line of bullshit from the former NOC, who was, after all, probably fighting for his life in the only way he knew how—the big lie, the big scam, the legerdemain, misdirection.

  “The one and only report we transmitted that was an actual fact, they ignored,” Coffin said. “Worse than that, I learned later they’d buried it. And all things considered, I suppose it was the right thing to do at the time.”

  “How’d you find out?” McGarvey asked. “I thought you and the others walked away?”

  “We did, except for Walt and Istvan. Walt told me about it, and Istvan confirmed it. They were worried out of their wits. It was the last lifeline they were going to throw me. From that point I was on my own. Just like the others.”

  “Lifeline?” Pete asked.

  “A bit of solid information I could use if the need ever arose. But only if it was important.”

  “Important enough to die for?” McGarvey asked. “Like now?”

  Coffin nodded.

  “Did the others also know this dark secret had been buried?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is it why Wager and Fabry were murdered? And why you went deep?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “Did you ever get the feeling someone was coming after you?”

  “Not until a couple of days ago,” Coffin said. “Could I get a little more wine?”

  Pete got up and took his glass. “What I don’t get is why didn’t you go public.”

  “You have to be kidding. My life was on the line as it was—still is—and if I’d blown the whistle, someone from the Company would have come after me.”

  “We don’t assassinate our own people,” Pete said, a very hard edge to her voice.

  “Not unless there’s a valid reason for it.”

  She looked at him for a moment then went to fetch more wine.

  “Do you think your control officer—the guy who parachuted in—is the killer?” McGarvey asked.