End Game

by David Hagberg

  McGarvey dropped the bag. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. People around me tend to become targets.”

  “And I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  McGarvey was at a loss for words. The situation was surreal, and yet he’d been here, done that before. Too many times before.

  She laughed. It was strained. “How many interrogators do you know who’re also good shots?”

  It had been wrong for him to come up here, knowing what she was probably going to say to him. And he felt bad for her that she was pleading this way. And yet he wanted to take her into his arms and make love to her. And that was the problem. Once that happened between them, he would never take her into the field with him. Out there, he watched his own back. If he got shot, it was his fault, his problem, no one else’s. And he wanted to keep it that way. Clean and simple.

  On the other hand, if he did bring her with him, if he did allow her into his inner circle and they worked together on this thing, and something happened to her, he didn’t know how he would be able to live with himself.

  He didn’t know if he could handle such a loss again, because he felt very deep down, in some secret compartment, that he, too, was beginning to fall in love with her. He felt guilty for betraying Katy and yet … and yet …

  His cell phone chirped. It was Otto.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Pete’s apartment. What’s happened?”

  “Roy Schermerhorn made contact through the bulletin board. He wants to meet in the next twelve hours.”

  “Where?” McGarvey asked. He switched the phone to speaker mode so Pete could hear.

  “Anywhere except the campus.”

  “How about the Farm?”

  “No. Somewhere neutral. He wants an escape route, if from no one else than us.”

  “Union Station,” Pete said. “Below the Attic block on the main floor.”

  Otto heard her. “Good. Exactly where and when?”

  “Prometheus—the statue. Ten tonight.”

  “Stand by, he’s online,” Otto said.

  Pete looked at McGarvey. “It’s a break,” she said.

  “Eight in the morning,” Otto said. “And there’s a potential problem. His live-in was murdered—and he’s the main suspect.”

  “Where?” McGarvey asked.

  “Milwaukee.”

  “Can you confirm it?”

  “An APB for Dana Peterson,” Otto said. “I’ve aged the one photo of him we have—I’ll send it. But he could have altered his appearance as well as his name.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  McGarvey and Pete showed up at the south entrance of Union Station by seven in the morning, and they had a clear sight line on the huge statue of fire above the main floor. The place was chockablock with commuters, mostly those coming into the city, and just about everyone was in a hurry.

  Otto had sent them an old file photo of Schermerhorn that was useless except in a very general sort of way—mostly the man’s build and the shape of his head and face. But Otto had sent back decent photos of Mac and Pete.

  “Makes us sitting ducks,” she’d said last night.

  They’d agreed that once they’d made initial contact with the former Alpha Seven operator, they would move the meeting to her apartment. She’d not lived there very long, so it had only taken them a couple of hours to sanitize the place and move her things over to McGarvey’s apartment in Georgetown, a few blocks from the Renckes’.

  He’d taken the couch and had pretended to be asleep the two times she’d gone to the bedroom door to look at him. She been wearing only a sleep shirt that didn’t reach her knees, and she had looked wonderful to him.

  But he wasn’t ready. Especially not now in the middle of an op.

  In the morning he was up first, and after she got dressed, she came out and had coffee with him.

  “If the killer reads the same bulletin boards, he could show up at Union Station,” she’d suggested, and he’d agreed.

  “As long as we can get to Schermerhorn first, he should be able to ID Alex or their control officer.”

  Security was loose on the main concourse, only a few uniformed cops patrolling on foot, looking for needles in a very large haystack. They’d been trained to look for signs, even small signs, of developing trouble. Spot the face of the nervous man, or a woman wearing too many clothes for the weather. But someone reasonably well dressed walking up behind a person and firing one silenced shot into the small of their back and walking away, this would not be noticed until it was too late.

  “There,” Pete said. She was looking across the concourse at a man standing directly below the statue of Prometheus.

  “No,” Schermerhorn said behind them.

  Pete turned and reached into her shoulder bag for her pistol, but McGarvey stayed her hand.

  Schermerhorn appeared much older than in the photograph Otto had come up with, though his general build was the same, as was the shape of his face. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, untucked, the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. It was impossible to tell if he was armed.

  “I understand you’re wanted in Milwaukee for murder,” McGarvey said. “Might be a good idea if we got out of here and went somewhere more secure.”

  “It was my girlfriend, and I think whoever murdered her murdered the others—and in just about the same fashion,” Schermerhorn said. His voice held the very slight British accent of a Londoner, and he could have been discussing the weather. It was an act.

  “Whoever did it wanted you and has probably read the same bulletin board message and even hacked your contact with us. It’s possible they’re here.”

  “Rencke’s better than that,” Schermerhorn said. “But they managed to penetrate the campus. Not so hard—all of us did it at one time or another as an exercise. A lot of NOCs have. Where do you have in mind?”

  “I have an apartment not far from here,” Pete said.

  “And who the hell might you be?”

  “Could be one of your newest best friends.”

  * * *

  They drove over to Pete’s apartment in McGarvey’s Porsche Cayenne. He circled the block a couple of times before parking around the corner. The morning was starting to cloud over, and already it was sticky.

  “You’ll be safe here,” Pete said.

  “Yeah, right,” Schermerhorn said, laughing.

  “Just until we can figure out what the hell to do with you,” McGarvey said.

  “You wanted to talk to one of us—well, here I am. And when we’re done—which won’t take long, I guarantee it—I’m gone. So don’t be handing me any crap about protective custody or safe houses.”

  “No, it didn’t work for you in Milwaukee. The question on my mind is if they wanted you, why didn’t they stick around after killing your girlfriend?”

  Schermerhorn looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they were sending you a message,” McGarvey said. “Not to talk to us.”

  “But here I am,” he repeated, “so let’s get on with it.”

  * * *

  McGarvey had made sure they hadn’t been followed; nevertheless, Pete went ahead to make sure the apartment was clean before she phoned the all clear. Upstairs, she was waiting at the end of the short corridor, her pistol in hand. The door to her apartment was open.

  “What about the other people in the building?” Schermerhorn asked.

  “This is a singles’ place; everyone is at work,” Pete said.

  “Did you check all the apartments in the building?”

  “No.”

  “Sloppiness like that might get you—maybe the both of you—killed one of these days. I suggest you tighten up your act. You have no idea who you’re up against this time.”

  “This time?” McGarvey asked, once they were inside.

  “I read your file, Mr. Director, or at least some of it—I suspect there’s more. You’ve been around, and you’ve survived. It’
s the only reason I’m here for now and not long gone. But if you don’t watch your step with these people, you’ll be dead.” He glanced at Pete. “Both of you will be.”

  He went to the window and looked down at the street and across to the apartment buildings.

  “Do you want a beer?” Pete asked.

  “No,” he said. He went to sit on the arm of the couch. “Not such a hot idea to drink when you’re on the run. Impairs the judgment.”

  “Who’s after you?” McGarvey asked. “Let’s start there.”

  “I don’t know. Could be Alex. She was capable of doing something like this. My girlfriend’s face was destroyed. Was it the same with the others?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it could be her, or George. They were the hot item at the end. I was—we all were at one point or the other. But it didn’t take very long for me to figure out that being with her was a guaranteed one-way street straight to hell.”

  “Do you have any idea where she is?”

  “In the States somewhere. Probably back here in Washington by now, if it was her in Milwaukee.”

  “Who else could have done this?” McGarvey asked.

  “George? It could have been him, too—or the both of them together. They were certifiable. George would do something a little outrageous, and Alex would jump in and top him. Then he would try to top her, and it just kept going. Crazy shit, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. But they’re the last two.”

  Schermerhorn laughed. “Don’t count on it. If it was the Israelis, then they have the entire Mossad or even Aman to draw from. And some of those people are seriously disturbed. Just like a lot of our people.”

  “Israeli military intelligence?” Pete said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? What are they protecting after all this time? Was it something they buried in Iraq? We were told there was a cache you guys discovered in the hills above Kirkuk.”

  “I don’t know for sure. Could have been them, could have been Saddam. Hell, it could even have been us or the Russians, or the North Koreans.”

  “But you do know,” McGarvey said. “It was you who changed the fourth panel on Kryptos.”

  “Insurance,” Schermerhorn said. “But you contacted me, and that means you haven’t decrypted it yet.”

  PART

  TWO

  The light x the confusion x the salvation …

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When Alex Unroth was sixteen and a freshman at Pine View School for the Gifted just outside Sarasota, Florida, she was a slender attractive girl, short with beautiful dark eyes and silken black hair. The girls didn’t like her because she looked like an athlete—all lean muscle—though she never went out for sports. And the boys didn’t care for her because her breasts were too small and she was smarter than just about everyone in school.

  Her stepfather, Leonard Unroth, was a drunk, and her mother laid around most days, reading movie magazines, eating candy and other sweets, and bitching about everything.

  She remembered one night in particular, the start of her real education, when her stepfather came into her bedroom around two in the morning, pulled down the covers, pulled down her pajama bottoms, and began fondling her. She was a virgin, though she had begun masturbating and reading books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover two years earlier, so she understood all about sex. Especially its uses for control.

  She touched his hand. “If Mom wakes up, she’ll hear us,” she whispered.

  Leonard stopped for just an instant. “Fuck her,” he said, his breath from booze, cigarettes, and bad teeth nearly unendurable.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday. You’ll take the fishing boat out, and I’ll come with you. I’ll tell Mom I’m going shopping with my friends.”

  In the dim light filtering in from outside, she could see the confusion on his face. And suspicion.

  “Some of the boys in school want to fuck me. But I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t want to make a fool of myself. You’ll teach me. But you’ll use a rubber.”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Go ahead. And when you’re done, I’ll call the cops and you’ll end up doing jail time. It’ll have been the most expensive piece of ass you’ve ever had.”

  He was stopped, directly over her.

  “Either that, or we have a deal. Wait until tomorrow, and we’ll anchor someplace and you’ll teach me. It’ll be a deal we can both walk away from happy.”

  Leonard backed off. “You’re a fucking whore,” he said.

  “Not yet,” she’d replied.

  * * *

  The day was blazing hot and humid. Leonard found a relatively isolated spot to tuck in just north of the Holiday Inn near the airport. The boat was a battered old twenty-four-foot Chris Craft cabin cruiser, and belowdecks, with the hatch closed, the interior was like an oven.

  Alex took off her clothes and lay down on the settee, spreading her legs for him.

  It was only ten in the morning, but he was drunk on beer already. He pulled off his shorts and underwear, and spread her legs farther, pawing her with his calloused fingers.

  She pulled a razor-sharp skinning knife from where she’d hidden it in the crack of the cushions and buried it to the hilt in his chest, directly into his heart. He gasped once and fell back on the cabin sole, dead almost immediately.

  She checked the ports, but no one was around. For the next fifteen minutes she mutilated his body. Starting by cutting off his penis, she worked her way up to his neck, which she sliced from ear to ear, and then his face, which she skinned—cutting off his nose, his lips, his eyebrows, and his ears, leaving them lying in the incredible mess where she’d dropped them.

  She drew water from the sink and washed her body, checking the long mirror on the back of the door into the tiny head to make sure she hadn’t cut herself. At that time she didn’t know all the details of forensic police work, but she didn’t want to leave any of her own blood behind in case she could be identified.

  She’d brought a bikini, which she put on, and stuffed her clothes into a watertight plastic bag. Before she went out on deck and jumped overboard to swim ashore, she checked the portholes on both sides of the boat again to make sure no one was nearby to see her leave.

  Onshore, she made her way across the rear property of the Holiday Inn, where behind a Dumpster she changed into a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. Then, stuffing the plastic bag into her purse, she walked around the long end of the hotel’s parking lot, unnoticed, and out onto Tamiami Trail and to the first bus stop.

  Her mother didn’t report her husband missing until the next morning, and it wasn’t until late that afternoon that his body was found. His time of death couldn’t be fixed to anything closer than a six-hour window, and when Alex’s mother had been questioned, she had no alibi. It was Alex who produced the time-and-date–stamped receipts from a couple of department stores that fell within the six hours, and she told police she had come home immediately after shopping, and then she and her mother had watched television together.

  The brutal murder of Leonard Unroth was never solved and eventually went into the cold-case files. But for a time the people of Sarasota had been traumatized that a seriously disturbed nut-case killer was running around loose among them.

  * * *

  Alex graduated at the top of her high school class and then did three years at Northwestern, earning her degree with honors in foreign affairs with a double minor in Russian and Chinese. She had only a handful of boyfriends, but in Sarasota she sometimes worked the North Trail as a prostitute, and the kinkier the sex, the better she liked it.

  At college, during the short breaks between the spring semester and summer semester, and then until the fall semester started, she went out to Las Vegas, where she worked first as an ordinary prostitute. Then one night a high roller picked her up—because he liked young stuff—and her second real education began.

  She got a taste for the seriously bizarre, including role-playing,
S&M, and a few other tricks, including orgasm at the moment of suffocation. Timing was everything in that game. At exactly the right instant during sex, her on top and her John on the verge, she would place a plastic bag over his head. At the instant he was about to pass out, he would come.

  A certain type of man and a few women she had sex with liked it that way, and were willing to pay top dollar. Until the one night it went too far. Her John, paying her one thousand dollars, begged her to put the bag over his head, but he was too early. He had a heart problem, and he died while she was astraddle him.

  She was honest with the hotel security people, who she’d always tipped very well, and they let her go.

  “You just can’t come back here, sweetheart,” the chief of security told her with regret. He liked the money, but he also liked his sex with her straight.

  Two weeks later she was in Washington, applying for a job with the CIA. And two weeks after that, her initial background check completed, she was called to an office in a federal building on the Beltway for her second interview with a case officer who wasn’t much older than she was and who sported an actual military-style crew cut. He said his name was Dominick.

  “Northwestern’s a good school, and you picked the right studies,” Dominick told her. He looked up from her file. “What do you want to do for the CIA?”

  She had smiled. The office was plain, only a table and two chairs, with a lousy view of the parking lot four stories down. The walls were bare, the floor a bland off-white tile, and there was nothing else.

  “Truth, justice, and the American way—isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?”

  Dominick showed no reaction.

  “Seriously, I want to be a field officer. An NOC.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I want to kill bad guys. I think this country has some serious shit coming its way. I want to be one of the guys on the front line, but I definitely don’t want to join the Marines.”

  “Says you were questioned in the murder of your father when you were sixteen. Did you kill him?”

  “Stepfather,” she said automatically. “No, but I should have. The son of a bitch tried to rape me. Someone else just beat me to it.”