End Game

by David Hagberg

  Nor thinking about it did he wonder if he gave a damn about a group of NOCs taking some grudge out on one another. It happened once in a while. These people, living out in the cold very often for years at a time, developed deep-seated paranoid fantasies that sometimes tipped them over the edge into insanity. Sometimes they put a pistol into their mouth and pulled the trigger. More often they got divorces or went from one affair to another, looking for something they couldn’t even define.

  They were more likely than the average person to explode in road rage, or become drunks or drug addicts. Half of them walked around feeling superior to the rest of the world, while the other half slunk into dark alleys, their eyes downcast, convinced they were no better than pond scum.

  A few became thieves. And a few became murderers.

  Yet without them, we would lose the same war we had been fighting for two-plus centuries. No one was beating down the walls to immigrate to China. No one was crossing some ocean to illegally reach Angola or Vietnam or Yemen or Iran or Iraq. But they sure as hell were stowing away on ships, crossing rivers, even taking leaky old rust buckets from Cuba or Haiti to reach the U.S. And for the most part even the poor people getting out of Syria because of the conflict loved their home country, and wanted to go home as soon as it was safe to return.

  The real problem wasn’t illegal immigrants; it was the kind of people who were so seriously pissed off that everyone wanted to come here, they were willing to kill to stop it, knock it down, make the point that whatever ideology floated their boat was the only ideology—the U.S. was the land of the Satans that had to be destroyed.

  “A penny,” Pete said, coming out to the balcony. She wore only a bath towel, and her hair was still damp.

  “I have no idea what the hell they want, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  “Money?” she suggested. “I was thinking a stash of heroin, a cash cow on the open market. Or maybe someone grabbed a bunch of Saddam’s gold at the end and hid it up there until things settled down and they could go back for it.”

  McGarvey shrugged.

  “But it isn’t that easy, is it?”

  “Never is.”

  She took the beer from him, and drank some. “There’s nothing left here for us,” she said.

  “We’re going back to DC, but the flight doesn’t leave till after one.”

  “Good, I’m tired.”

  McGarvey’s cell phone rang on the bed, and he went inside to answer it. Otto was on the line, and he sounded breathless.

  “We’ve had another one, about two hours ago,” he said.

  He motioned for Pete. “I’m putting this on speakerphone. What happened?”

  “Marty’s sent a Gulfstream from Ramstein for you guys. The whole place is in an uproar. No one knows what the hell to do.”

  “Tell me,” McGarvey said, not at all surprised.

  “He was a goddamned groundskeeper, name of Bob Maddox. Worked for the subcontractors about ten years. Happened before seven this morning our time. Looked like an accident. He was run over by his own moving machine and ripped all to hell. I found out about it twenty minutes ago, and what struck me right off the bat was that his face had been destroyed. I told security to look for a remote-control device, which they found. FM band, line of sight. They screwed with the engine, and when he got off to check it out, the machine backed over him, the mower blades running. Makes three.”

  “Five,” McGarvey said, and he told Otto about Carnes and Coffin.

  “Two to go,” Otto said.

  “There was a control officer Coffin only knew as George. Maybe Brooklyn, a Jew.”

  “Only seven show on the op file.”

  “This guy along with the woman—Alex Unroth—supposedly were quite the pair. If anyone would know the control officer, it would be her.”

  NINETEEN

  Security at the CIA’s main gate was tighter than it had ever been, and Marty Bambridge himself had to drive down to personally vouch for McGarvey and Pete, even though they had been picked up at Andrews by a pair of CIA security officers in a Company Cadillac SUV. And even though Mac had once been the DCI.

  They followed the deputy director back up to the VIP parking garage in the OHB.

  “What about your bags, sir?” one of the security officers asked.

  “Have someone take them up to the impound area. They can pick them up on the way out,” Bambridge said. The impound area was actually a locker where items people weren’t allowed to bring past security in the lobby were kept while they were inside.

  McGarvey and Pete surrendered their weapons, which included a couple of extra magazines of ammunition and, in Mac’s case, a silencer.

  “Did you find Larry Coffin?” Bambridge asked in the elevator on the way up to the seventh floor.

  “Yeah, but someone shot him to death while Pete and I and an NIS officer were interviewing him,” McGarvey said.

  “Good Lord. Any notion who the shooter was?”

  “A couple of ideas, and no one will be happy about what we found out.”

  Bambridge scowled. “No one usually is when you get back from one of these things,” he said. “But it’s not over, is it?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  * * *

  Walt Page was waiting for them in his office, along with Carleton Patterson, the CIA’s general counsel. Otto breezed in right after them, a flushed look on his round face. It looked as if he hadn’t slept or changed clothes since Serifos.

  “I can’t lie to you and say we’re making much progress here, and that the campus isn’t in nearly complete shambles,” Page said. “So I hope you two have brought something useful back from Athens.”

  “How’d you know Maddox was one of the Alpha Seven operators? Larry Coffin told us none of their real fingerprints or DNA samples were on record.”

  “Otto gave us the heads-up when he told us to look for a remote-control device, which we found,” Bambridge said. “Soon as it was confirmed it wasn’t an accident, we went looking in the old files.”

  “I found photographs of all of them,” Otto said. “Knight’s was the closest match. He was one of two cryptographers on the team, and one of the guys he works with on the maintenance crew said he was always messing around with puzzles, like Sudoku, the Rubik’s Cube, stuff like that.”

  “You weren’t authorized to conduct interviews,” Bambridge snapped. “Stick to your computers.” He was totally on edge.

  “Just a phone call. I needed to make sure of the match. At this point it looks as if Wager and Fabry were hiding in the open, but Knight was here under a work name.”

  “He was the most frightened,” Pete suggested.

  “Of what, my dear girl?” Patterson asked. He was an old man, nearly eighty, and long past his retirement age. But he loved the business and, he’d confided to McGarvey a few years back, most of the people.

  “Me excluded?” McGarvey had pulled his leg, one of their rare lighter moments.

  “You especially. Because you’re just about the last of a dying breed I most admire. A true conservative without any left-wing biases or right-wing allegiances.”

  The insiders, the few people in the Agency who had known McGarvey almost from the beginning, had slapped the moniker of Superman on him—behind his back, of course—when he served as DCI. Superman’s motto from the beginning had been: “Truth, justice, and the American way.” Those few words pretty well summed up who and what he was.

  “Afraid of exactly what happened to him,” she replied.

  “And why,” McGarvey added.

  Everyone looked at him, the moment frozen in glass. Bambridge especially wanted to know; he was clearly the most agitated.

  “What happened in Athens?” Page asked, breaking the silence. “What did you two find?”

  “We found Larry Coffin, the fourth member of Alpha Seven, serving time in Korydallos prison for art theft.”

  “He’s okay,” Bambridge said.

  “He was shot to death while we w
ere interviewing him in an NIS safe house. A high-power rifle, possibly a Barrett. They took a shot through an open porthole to the back of his head.”

  “Destroying his face,” Bambridge said softly. “A pattern. Someone is targeting the Alpha Seven operators. But why, for heaven’s sake? That war’s been over for a long time; it’s not like Iran or Syria. And why the mutilations?”

  “We don’t know yet, but it means something to the killer or killers, and there’s more.”

  “There always is,” Bambridge said.

  McGarvey took his time going over everything he and Pete had done and learned, including their connection with Spiros Moshonas, the NIS officer, and the manner in which Carnes had died, his face completely destroyed.

  “That is a great deal to take in,” Patterson said, making the understatement. “But aside from whatever supposedly has been hidden in some mountain cache in Iraq, Alpha Seven wasn’t the only team looking for weapons of mass destruction over there. All of them consistently reported that they’d found nothing. Only the one team was sending glowing reports.”

  Bambridge shot him a look, and Patterson smiled.

  “I have access to operational records. I can read and draw conclusions,” Patterson said. He turned back to McGarvey. “But there were none, of course, and you’re saying the team sent false reports to steer the inspectors away from the cache—whatever it contained.”

  “And suddenly, after all these years, someone is running around killing all the Alpha Seven people, to keep the secret, maybe because someone is getting too close to finding it or knowing about it? What?”

  “The manner in which they were murdered has significance,” Page said. “We’re being sent a message.”

  “Or it’s simply the work of someone truly deranged,” Bambridge said. “Which is something I think is more likely. Even if there is this something—whatever—buried in the hills, it’d be damned near impossible to go back, dig it up, and get it out without some al-Qaeda nut case or some trigger-happy Taliban hill people finding out.”

  “A brilliant someone,” McGarvey said. “Among perhaps two or three people—the two left from the old Alpha Seven team and their control officer, whose identity we don’t have yet.”

  “Whoever it is, they’re still out there, and they have money and intelligence resources,” Otto said. “Mac gave me the bank account number and password for the guy Larry Coffin was using as a substitute prisoner in Korydallos. He wanted to confirm that Coffin was the paymaster. Well, he might not have been. I’ve found most of his money in Athens and a few other places, but the money to pay the substitute came from Bank Yahav, a password account, of course, and a pretty sophisticated one. Has to be more than eight characters. One of my darlings has been working the problem for six hours and hasn’t come up with the solution yet. But it’ll happen.”

  “Israel?” Pete asked.

  “Yeah, Jerusalem,” Otto said. “But you guys won’t like the next part. The full name translated from Hebrew, is ‘Bank Yahav for Government Employees Limited.’”

  All the air left the room.

  Page sat back, a stunned look on his face, his mouth set. “I don’t know if I very much want to go in that direction,” he said.

  “It’s not a government bank,” Otto said. “Just a government employees’ bank. Like one of our government employees’ credit unions.”

  “Does it mean Coffin was working for the Israelis?” Bambridge asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “Either that, or someone knew about Coffin’s situation and paid the substitute fee,” McGarvey said.

  “Why?” Page asked.

  A dozen threads were running through McGarvey’s head, the first of which was panel four of the Kryptos sculpture. “I don’t know,” he said absently. “But I’m going to ask them just that.”

  TWENTY

  Otto’s safe house in Georgetown was a three-story brownstone with a parking area and a garden in the rear. From the outside, it looked ordinary, like just about every other brownstone in the neighborhood. But inside it was comfortable and completely impervious to mechanical or electronic surveillance of any sort.

  He and Louise had another safe house, off the grid so far as the CIA was concerned, in McLean—a traditional colonial where they lived when their daughter, Audrey, was in residence. But whenever there was trouble, like now, Audie, who was going on four, was sent to Camp Peary, and he and Louise came here.

  Otto called ahead, and when he got home with McGarvey and Pete in tow, Louise had cold beers laid out, baked potatoes keeping warm in the oven, and steaks on the barbie.

  She and Pete hugged. “How about putting together a salad? Everything’s in the fridge.”

  “Glad to,” Pete agreed.

  Louise and McGarvey hugged. “So, Otto tells me you’ve got another bone in your teeth. This one not so nice or tidy as some of the others.” She was a tall woman, well over six feet and slender. She was almost as bright as her husband, and for a long time worked as chief photo analyst for the National Security Agency. Now she was Otto’s partner in every meaning of the term.

  “Five people are dead already, and it’s likely at least one more will be murdered soon,” McGarvey said.

  She sat him down at the kitchen counter and gave him a Dos Equis with a lime in the neck of the bottle, but no glass. She gave Otto a bottle of lemon-flavored carbonated water.

  “I need to tend to the steaks,” she said, and went out to the rear patio.

  Otto set up his tablet, which had once been an iPad until he and a couple of friends in the science and technology directorate had modified it, and brought up the Kryptos file, with detailed photographs of the main sculpture itself, along with the translations of the first three panels.

  “Coffin said it was an empirical necessity,” Otto said.

  Pete was across from them, pulling the salad fixings out of the fridge. “Not logical, but empirical,” she said. “What do you make of it? Was their control officer just blowing smoke rings?”

  “Logical wouldn’t work—nothing mathematical about something buried in the hills, except for the fact itself. A latitude and longitude. There’d be no consequences. But an empirical necessity? Whatever’s up there could change things their control officer thought should be necessary.”

  “Coffin guessed him to be from Brooklyn, maybe a Jew. And the bank you came up with is for Israeli government employees.”

  “Mossad?” Pete suggested.

  Otto looked up from his tablet. “It’s a thought. Iraq’s certainly in the neighborhood, a possible staging point for an attack through Syria’s back door. Maybe a staging point for an attack against Iran. Or at least it was when we had serious boots on the ground there.”

  “Something the Israelis knew couldn’t last,” McGarvey said. “We were going to leave sooner or later.”

  “Doesn’t explain why they want the Alpha Seven operators dead,” Pete said.

  “They know what’s in the cache, and for some reason the Israelis want them to keep quiet about it,” Otto said.

  “Okay, but despite the timing, why the brutality? The way those guys were murdered is not the methodology of an intelligence service. It’s more like that of total insanity.”

  “Pete’s right,” Louise said, coming in with a platter of steaks. “Who fits that sort of a profile?”

  “And what’s their agenda? What do they want?”

  Otto brought up the translations of the first three panels. “Okay, here it goes. You know that the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, worked with Ed Scheidt, who headed up our Cryptographic Center, to come up with the codes. And Jim said there was a riddle within a riddle that could only be solved after all four panels were decrypted. So far only the first three have been cracked.”

  “Why haven’t you played around with it?” Pete asked. “It’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a toy, and I’ve always been busy with real shit, ya know? Bill Webster, when he was DCI, is supposedly the only one Sa
nborn gave the plaintext to, but wasn’t much after that when Sanborn reneged and said he’d not given the entire decryption. Show business.”

  “But not now,” Pete said.

  “Panel one,” he said, bringing up a printout of the letters chiseled into the copper plate. “It’s a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using ten alphabets, and was actually quite simple. I checked it, and the decryption seems valid. They used the old Vigenère tableau, just about the same one they used on two. Anyway, the key words were Kryptos—Greek for “hidden”—and Palimpsest—also Greek, for a manuscript page on which the writing has been erased so some new text can be set down.”

  He brought up the decrypted text and turned the iPad around so everyone could read it.

  BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION.

  “Doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Louise said. “And there’s a misspelling.”

  “Sanborn supposedly put the q in to keep the code breakers on their toes,” Otto said. He brought up the much longer decryption for panel two. “Same substitution cipher, except this time he used only eight alphabets, and the key words were Kryptos and Abcissa—which is a high-school math term for the ‘horizontal position on a two-dimensional graph.’”

  IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE. HOW’S THAT POSSIBLE? THEY USED THE EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGROUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS? THEY SHOULD IT’S BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY-EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY-SEVEN MINUTES SIX-POINT-FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY-SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY-FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

  “It mentions something buried,” Louise said. “But that latitude and longitude isn’t in Iraq; it’s right here.”

  “Actually, about one hundred fifty feet southeast of the sculpture,” Otto said. “So far as I know, nothing’s been found there. But that could have been a ruse to throw everyone off. Maybe the key was ‘it’s buried out there somewhere.’”