End Game

by David Hagberg

  “You don’t think you’d have any trouble killing a human being?”

  “It would depend on who it was.”

  Dominick gave her a long, appraising look. “You’re staying at the Hay-Adams. Expensive hotel.”

  “I have a little money set aside,” she’d said.

  “An inheritance?”

  “No, I earned it the old-fashioned way.”

  Dominick closed her file and got up. “We’ll get back to you, Ms. Unroth.”

  “Don’t take too long. I was thinking about going to work for Microsoft.”

  “You know computers?”

  “I get by. But they’re going global, and they need someone who understands Russian and Chinese.”

  Dominick showed her out, and she took a cab back to the Hay-Adams, where, before she went inside for an early lunch, she stopped a moment to look across Lafayette Park toward the back of the White House. Troubling times were coming for the country, and she wanted to be part of it. Soon.

  Two weeks seemed to be the magic number for the CIA, because it wasn’t until then that they called her again, and in the same office she spent the better part of the day with a couple of clerks, filling out forms and questionnaires about her work preferences, her previously unreported skills, her work history, her next of kin—which was no one. Her mother had drunk herself to death last year.

  The next day she was driven in a panel van with three men about her age to Camp Peary where her third real education began.

  * * *

  Marty Bambridge came in, and Alex looked up and smiled. The nameplate on her desk said: DOROTHY GIVENS.

  “Good morning, sir. Go right in. The director is expecting you.”

  “How was your vacation?”

  “More like a long weekend,” Alex answered. “But it was good to get away from all the hullabaloo around here.”

  “Amen.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It was coming up on noon, and McGarvey had left the bulk of the interrogation to Pete, content to let her lead because she was damned good. Schermerhorn, even as cynical as he was—as most NOCs tended to be out of necessity—had warmed to her, and a couple of times in the past half hour he had actually anticipated a question and answered it before she could ask.

  “Would you like to stop for lunch?” she asked. “We can eat here, or there’s an Olive Garden not too far away.”

  “We’re almost done. When I walk out the door, I’m going deep and I won’t be back.”

  “We’re up to late oh two, just before the Second Iraq War, when you met Alex for the first time in Munich,” Pete said. “Tell us about it.”

  “I’d never met the others till then,” Schermerhorn said. “I hadn’t even heard of them. And actually, it was in Frankfurt, at what had been an old Nazi Kaserne.”

  This last bit came as a surprise to McGarvey. “The Drake Kaserne?” he asked.

  “Yes, you know it?”

  “I spent a couple of days there a while back. As a guest of the BND. If you were there, they knew about your op.”

  Schermerhorn glanced at Pete and grinned. “Actually, we were thumbing our noses at them.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It was Bertie Russell’s idea. He was our chief mission-training officer. Been with us from the beginning. He was sort of like a father figure, except to Alex, who didn’t trust him. And the feeling was mutual.

  “Our first task was to get to the Kaserne without being detected by the Germans, and simply knock on their door. We had passes that were worthless anyplace else. They scrambled, but they let us in. It was a fallback, you see, in case something went wrong in Munich. Bertie wanted us on record as being in country, so if it came to it, we wouldn’t get shot. And that was a possibility.”

  “What was your cover story in Frankfurt?”

  “Extrajudicial rendition. It was supposedly the real start to the hunt for bin Laden. The Germans were content to go along with us as long as we didn’t cause trouble for any German citizens. They were just happy we had let them in on what we were doing.”

  “Did they ever catch on?”

  “No. When we were done in Munich, we just packed up and left. In the mountains one day, and up at Ramstein on the big bird for Saudi Arabia the next.”

  “This Bertie Russell, would he confirm any of your story?” Pete wanted to know.

  “Ran over an IED in oh four, after all the bloody fighting was supposedly done and gone.”

  “Convenient,” McGarvey said.

  Schermerhorn flared. “Look, I came out of the woodwork to help you guys.”

  “Help save your own life.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. Walt, Isty, and Tom didn’t do so well on campus. What makes you think it’d be any different if I let you take me into protective custody? So just let’s get that shit out of the way. I’m here to help.”

  “With what?’ Pete asked, and the sharp question from her stung Roy.

  Schermerhorn took his time answering that one. He got up again and went to the window, this time with a lot more caution. “Who else knows I’m here?”

  “Otto Rencke.”

  “Who else?”

  “By now our deputy director of operations and the DCI,” McGarvey said. Otto had texted a query earlier, and McGarvey’s cell phone was on vibrate-only mode. He had excused himself and gone into the bathroom to answer.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “If you can’t trust people at that level, then what are you doing here with us?” Pete asked. She sounded as if she were gentling a skittish horse.

  “Preventing world war three,” Schermerhorn said, coming back to the couch. “It’s there, the warning on panel four.”

  “Save us the trouble and give us the message.”

  “It’s not going to be that easy. You, Otto, whoever, needs to come up with the decryption if you’re going to believe it. Kryptos is the Holy Grail in a lot of people’s minds. My telling you won’t wash. Especially not on the Hill or at the White House.”

  “You’re playing games with us now,” McGarvey said. “Your life is at stake here.”

  “Here, yes, it is. Once I walk away and as long as I stay on my own and on the move, I’ll be fine while you do your job.”

  “Okay, Roy,” Pete said. “Tell us how you did it. Changed the carvings on four. To this point we’ve stayed totally away from it. We didn’t want to call any attention to the thing. Everyone knows what’s carved into the copper plate, so no one really looks at it.”

  “I suggested that the sculpture looked like shit, weathered and green. My supervisor didn’t agree, said copper out in the weather was supposed to look like that. It was the effect Sanborn was looking for. I couldn’t push it, of course, so I bided my time, until I pointed out that all the steel and burnished aluminum on the outside of the New Headquarters Building looked shiny and new. Kryptos didn’t match. It’d be my job to take off the crud and make it look new. And maintain it that way. If someone complained, we could also let it go back to natural.”

  “And they went along with it?”

  “Lots of really smart people work on campus. Lots of PhD’s, but if you ever look real close at them, you’ll find out just how naive and gullible they are outside their own narrow little specialties. They were easy.”

  “You polished the sculpture. Then what?”

  “Actually, it was a big job, because I not only had to do the plates themselves, but I had to polish the insides of each carving by hand, one by one. When I got to four, instead of polish, I used liquid metal to which I had added a copper tint.”

  McGarvey saw the possible flaw. “In order to make something like that work, you couldn’t have changed, let’s say an A to an I, or vice versa. You would have needed to work out whatever message you wanted to put on panel four, and then figure out the code that would work as an overlay on the original letters.”

  Schermerhorn shrugged. “I had a little help with my laptop, but my specialty was cryp
tography, and I just needed to come up with a modified one-time cipher. It’s completely random like the original, which is why no one was able to break the thing in the first place.”

  “But you did.”

  “You have to learn to think in random.”

  “What’s on panel four?” Pete asked. “What did you try to tell us?”

  “Something you wouldn’t believe if I just sat here and mapped it out for you. Plus, I don’t have all the answers—none of us ever did—except for maybe George. Listen, I’m just one guy on the run, a liar, con man, thief, killer by trade. And there’s only me and Alex left from Alpha Seven.”

  “Plus George.”

  “Yeah, but my guess is he’s never been on campus. Most NOCs never go near the place.”

  “Except for Wager, Fabry, and Knight.”

  “But someone on the inside, someone with access to real-time intelligence information has to be,” Schermerhorn. “Surely, you guys have figured that out by now.”

  “Security has turned the entire campus upside down,” Pete said. She was clearly frustrated.

  “Tell Otto what I said about four, and he’ll decrypt it in no time at all if he’s as smart as everyone says he is.”

  “The only one left from your team is Alex Unroth,” McGarvey said.

  “The Working Girl.”

  “So you’re saying it’s she who killed the three on campus? What about Carnes and Coffin in Athens?”

  “She moved around a lot. One day here, the next day somewhere else. Did it during our training at the Farm—sometimes she’d bug out for a day or two, and no one could get anything out of her. She did it in Germany, and of course in Iraq with George. We should have called her the Ghost, because she was damned good at disappearing right while you were looking directly at her.”

  “She’s on campus in plain sight?” Pete said.

  “Ever play Hide the Thimble?” Schermerhorn asked. “She’s there.”

  “And you’re going to help us find her,” McGarvey said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Otto showed up at Page’s office twenty minutes behind Bambridge, and fifteen minutes behind Carleton Patterson. He was distracted and didn’t wait for the DCI’s secretary to announce him; instead he just barged in.

  “You’re late,” Bambridge said.

  Page was behind his desk, Marty and Carleton seated across from him. The office was large, bookcases on the west wall, big—surveillance-proof—windows looking out over the Virginia countryside on the south, and a couple of good Wyeth paintings on the east.

  Otto went to Page’s desk and wrote a note on a memo pad: When’s the last time this office has been security scanned?

  Five days ago, Page wrote.

  Otto motioned him to silence, and he used his cell phone to call a friend of his in the directorate of science and technology’s office of electronics. “Come up here now, would you?”

  He hung up and again motioned for Page and the others to remain silent as he went to the director’s desk, picked up the phone console, and turned it over to look for any obvious signs of tampering.

  “I just talked to Mac, and he and Pete are at a dead end,” he said. He got on his hands and knees and followed the phone cord to the jack in the floor.

  “I didn’t think this was going to be all that easy,” Carleton said, picking up on Otto’s ruse.

  “This kinda stuff never is,” Otto said, getting to his feet. “Toni Borman is on her way up with the old tapes of the preliminary interviews we did with Wager, Fabry, and Knight. Might be something we missed. Mac suggested it.”

  He removed the battery and SIM card from his cell phone and laid them on Page’s desk, and then motioned for the others to give him their phones, which he dismantled as he talked.

  “Thing is, we think whoever whacked our guys is long gone. I don’t know how the hell they got off campus, but there’s no way in hell they’re still here. Not with all the extra security we’ve put in place in the last thirty-six hours.”

  Bambridge was frustrated, but Page had gotten it, and he motioned for his DDO to stand down. “So, what’s Mac suggesting?”

  “If we can find something linking the three of them to someone else, a fourth party, it’d be our best lead. But it’s a long shot.”

  “Nothing else we can do at this point, I suppose,” Patterson said.

  Toni Borman, lanky, pleasant smile, and almost as tall as Louise was announced by Alex, and she went to work following Otto’s lead.

  “Did you bring the interview tapes with you?” he asked.

  “Actually, a thumb drive, encrypted of course,” Borman said. She took an electronic device about the size of a smartphone out of her pocket and methodically started on the room. High across the ceiling first.

  “Did you listen to the interviews?” Otto asked.

  “Some,” Borman said. “Mostly boring.” She worked her way across the walls, top to bottom, especially the light fixtures and electrical sockets, and the wall-mounted flat-screen television.

  “Anything stand out in your mind?”

  Borman shrugged and Otto shook his head.

  “No, not really,” she said. She lingered at Page’s desk and his computer, and when she was done, she looked up. “You have the thumb drive—you listen. Maybe you’ll hear something I didn’t. But I didn’t pick up anything.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Otto said, and went with her to the door.

  “The director asks, we’re not to be disturbed for just a bit,” he told Page’s secretary.

  “Of course,” Alex said.

  Otto closed the door and sat down with the others.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Bambridge fumed. “Security sweeps every key office on the entire campus every week.”

  “On a schedule I know and we think someone else probably knows. We need to randomize the sweeps and notify no one of the time or office. The security people will just show up, and everyone will have to accommodate them.”

  “Obviously, you believe there’s leak somewhere that whoever the killer is has access to,” Page said.

  “Mac thinks there might be two of them, one still on campus and another free to travel around. Whoever the second one is was in Athens last year to do Joe Carnes, then again a few days ago to kill Coffin, and yesterday in Milwaukee to try for Schermerhorn. But they missed and killed his girlfriend instead.”

  “Has he surfaced yet?” Bambridge asked.

  “He showed up this morning, and he’s with Mac and Pete, plus with something else we’d already guessed. Or at least partially guessed.”

  “How do we know he’s not the second killer?” Patterson said. “He kills his girlfriend, and his informant here on campus tells him we’re closing in on them, so he comes to us to ask for what? Protection?”

  “He said he came to help find the killers. He doesn’t want to be next.”

  “Does he know who they are?”

  “Could be Alex Unroth, who’s the only other Alpha Seven operator still alive, or their supposed control officer, who they only ever knew as George. Trouble is, the team’s actual control officer was Bertie Russell—I checked—but he was killed in Iraq in oh four. There’s no record anywhere of a control officer with the work name of George who joined them on their mission three months before the war started.”

  “What about when they came home?” Bambridge asked. “They must have been debriefed.”

  “He didn’t come back with them, and apparently, the man was never missed.”

  “None of them said anything? They didn’t ask their debriefers what happened to George?”

  “No.”

  “Why?” Patterson asked.

  “Because of what George showed them was buried in the foothills above Kirkuk,” Otto said, and hesitated just as Kirk had told him to do.

  “Well, come on, dear boy. Don’t keep us in suspense,” Patterson prompted. “What was buried?”

  “He refuses to say.”

  “Thi
s is bullshit, Walt,” Bambridge said. “Let’s get the guy in here right now. We have people who’ll find out whether he’s lying.”

  “He’s already given us the answer,” Otto said. “He worked here for a couple of years as a maintenance man, and one of his jobs was to take care of the grounds, especially the statues and sculptures.”

  “Including Kryptos,” Page said. “He has the solution to panel four.”

  “Yes, but it’s not the original cipher, and he won’t give us the solution to the new one. But my darlings are already chewing on it, and I suspect it’ll only be a matter of a few days before they come up with the solution.”

  “And?” Page asked.

  “He changed the cipher on four,” Otto said, and before Bambridge could object again, he told them how Schermerhorn said he had done it. “I took a photo of panel four yesterday and compared it with the original. They’re different, all right.”

  “Then he knows the answer,” Page said.

  “Yes, he does. But Mac says he won’t tell us, because no one on the Hill or in the White House would believe him. They’ll have to see it with their own eyes when four has been decrypted.”

  “This has gone from stupid to ridiculous,” Bambridge appealed to Page. “I say we bring him in immediately and end this right now.”

  “They are bringing him in,” Otto said. “As soon as I finish my homework. It’s either Alex or George. I have their general descriptions, from which we can probably eliminate ninety percent of the personnel on campus. My darlings are working on that, too.”

  “That’s something,” Patterson said. “But explain to me why he came to us either for our help, or to help us, and yet he refuses to tell Mac the message he put on the panel for everyone to see. What does he want? What’s his game?”

  “He says he wants to help prevent world war three.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Schermerhorn had told his story, and he was agitating to leave. No way in hell was he sticking around to see how things turned out, and he sure in hell wasn’t going out to Langley to look at faces.

  “I don’t care what Alex or George did to change their identities; it’s the eyes. I never forget the shape, and especially not the expression,” he’d told them.