End Game

by David Hagberg

  McGarvey phoned Louise at two in the afternoon, after Schermerhorn had promised to at least give them until dark.

  “I want to bring our guy over to your place, just for the night,” he said.

  “We have the third bedroom upstairs. Anyway, Audie’s safe.”

  “I didn’t ask Otto yet, because he’d say yes no matter what.”

  “Will Pete be with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then if he gets out of line, there’ll be three of us to shoot him. See you in a half hour.”

  McGarvey had phoned from the bedroom of Pete’s apartment, and when he came back to the living room, Schermerhorn was again staring out the window at the parking lot and street that led up to Dupont Circle. He was looking for someone to show up, and he turned around with a start.

  “Who’d you call, some minders?” he asked. Minders were security officers. Like babysitters with guns.

  “A friend at another safe house. We’re moving you there immediately.”

  Schermerhorn was alarmed. “I said I’d give you until dark, but then I’m out of here. If you want to ask me some more questions, go ahead. But then that’s it.”

  “We’ve already told your story to the DCI and the director of clandestine services, plus the Company’s general counsel. They know about the fourth panel, and they know you’re here.”

  “Shit,” Schermerhorn said, and made for the door.

  Pete pulled out her gun and pointed it at him. “I will shoot you, Roy,” she said.

  Schermerhorn pulled up short and turned to her. “And then what?” he asked. Suddenly he didn’t seem so concerned.

  “There’ll be a good chance you’ll be dead before we can get an ambulance over here.”

  “I meant, I’m going with you to another safe house. But then what?”

  McGarvey motioned for Pete to put down her gun. “We’re getting out of here just in case the leak at Langley also knows where you are. Could be we’re saving your life.”

  “Noble of you.”

  “Just protecting our investment. And when we’re done, you’ll be free to walk.”

  “Providing I give you what you want.”

  “The killer.”

  * * *

  Schermerhorn had brought nothing with him. He’d stashed what he’d taken from Milwaukee somewhere safe nearby, and when it was time to leave, he’d get out of Washington clean.

  “To go where?” Pete asked on the way over to the Renckes’ safe house in Georgetown.

  “Someplace safe.”

  “That’s what Carnes and Coffin thought,” McGarvey said.

  Schermerhorn fell silent, but he glanced over his shoulder out the rear window every ten seconds or so.

  Pete was driving. “We haven’t picked up a tail,” she said.

  “What about the gray Caddy Escalade? Been with us since we crossed Rock Creek.”

  “It’s not one of ours,” Pete said. She turned left on Twenty-Seventh Street NW, and one block later right on O Street. The Escalade was no longer behind them. “Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Schermerhorn said.

  McGarvey called ahead, and Louise opened the iron gate to the parking area behind the brownstone. She was waiting at the door for them as the gate swung shut.

  “So who’s the mystery guest? One of the Alpha Seven crowd?”

  Schermerhorn introduced himself and held out his hand, but Louise just looked at him for a moment then stepped aside so they could come in.

  “Otto should be back any minute,” she said, leading them through the rear hall to the kitchen. “Said he’d finished with the meeting.”

  “How’d it go?” McGarvey asked.

  “Just about the way you said it would,” Louise said. “Anyone want a beer?”

  Schermerhorn shook his head.“You’re Otto Rencke’s wife,” he said.

  “So they tell me,” she said. “Someone killed your girlfriend.”

  Schermerhorn nodded.

  “Chewed her up just like the others.”

  “It was meant for me.”

  Louise got a couple of beers from the fridge for Pete and Mac, and one for herself. “Doesn’t seem as if you’re shook up about it.”

  “Should I be?”

  Louise gave McGarvey a look, as if to say, Scumbag, and Schermerhorn caught it.

  “It’s the nature of the job,” he said. “You folks trained me.”

  “Don’t get me started. I’ve known plenty of NOCs,” Louise said. She looked up at the monitor unit on the wall next to the back hall. “Otto’s home.”

  “Does he know I’m here?” Schermerhorn asked.

  “He does now,” Louise said.

  Otto breezed in, gave his wife a kiss, and put his iPad on the counter. “Roy Schermerhorn, the Kraut,” he said.

  “Did you come in clean?”

  Otto laughed. “I don’t know. I never did check my rearview mirror,” he said. “You guys up for pizza tonight? We can order in.”

  “Did you narrow down the range of possibles?” McGarvey asked.

  “Thirty-seven of them, nine women, all of them about the right age, or close, though I wouldn’t trust the personnel files with my life. Nothing obvious jumped out at me, but these guys were professionals.”

  “I’m not going to be able to tell you anything from looking at a bunch of files,” Schermerhorn said. “You’re wasting my time.”

  Otto turned on his iPad and shoved it in front of Schermerhorn. The photograph of Walter Wager came up on the screen.

  “Jesus,” Schermerhorn said, sitting down. “It’s Walt.”

  “Mr. Ponderous,” Otto said. He brought up Fabry’s and then Knight’s photos from their personnel files. “They were hiding out in the open, hoping being inside they’d be safe.”

  “Isty and Tom,” Schermerhorn said softly. He looked up. “Could I have that beer after all?”

  Louise got him one.

  Otto brought up Coffin’s prison photo. “Do you recognize this one?”

  Schermerhorn stared at the image for a long time.

  “The eyes ring any bells?” McGarvey asked.

  “It’s Larry, all right. I’d recognize him anywhere. But he looks different. Worn-out, maybe sad. I don’t know. Not himself.”

  “He was running for his life, just like you are,” McGarvey said. “Only he wasn’t quick enough. Neither were Carnes or the others.”

  “Or your girlfriend,” Louise said into the sudden silence.

  “You can see it in his eyes,” Schermerhorn said.

  “He didn’t look like that the last time we saw him,” McGarvey said. “He took a sniper rifle round to the back of his head. Completely destroyed his face.”

  “That’s what Alex and George did to the rag heads in the end,” Schermerhorn said, his voice soft.

  “Are you ready to look at the rest of the pictures?” McGarvey said.

  Schermerhorn took a deep drink of his beer then nodded. “Sure,” he said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Alex sat at her desk, trying to keep her heart rate normal, the expression on her face pleasantly neutral, as staffers came and went into the DCI’s inner office. The Speaker of the House had called for an update on the goings-on across the river. The president’s chief of staff asked Page to come in at nine in the morning to help with Norman Hearney’s briefing—Hearney was the new director of national intelligence. And Stanford Swift, an old friend from IBM, had called for lunch tomorrow, but Page had declined. “Full plate just now, Stan.”

  The problem was trust, something Alex didn’t know if she could count on for much longer. In the four years since she’d started here first as a substitute for Page’s secretary, and then the full-time position when the woman was killed in a car accident, the DCI had come to trust her.

  The most immediate problem was the Kraut showing up here in DC. By all rights, after the Milwaukee incident with his live-in, Alex had expected Schermerhorn to run for the hills. One less operator to have to worry abou
t in the short term.

  But sometimes, like right now, she felt like a juggler with too many balls in the air while standing barefoot on a slippery slope that kept moving. The center was starting to fall apart; it wouldn’t hold for much longer, and then God only knew what would happen next. Except the fallout would be lethal.

  Her desk console chirped. It was the director.

  “Dotty, could you come in for a minute?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Alex said.

  She’d heard what Rencke had said inside. In the last three years she’d heard everything that had been said in Page’s office. Was privy to all his phone calls, all his e-mails, even his private ones, and especially the encrypted ones. She’d recorded everything against the day—which might never come—when she needed some insurance. Though what she knew of the recordings wouldn’t be of much help now.

  Getting up, she considered taking her subcompact Glock 29 from its hiding place in her desk, but decided against it. If she had to kill the DCI, she would do it only if she had a decent chance of escaping. She took her iPad and stylus instead. Sometimes he liked to dictate letters or notes the old-fashioned way.

  Page was staring out the window, his back to the door when Alex walked in.

  “Have a seat, please,” he said, his back still to her.

  She sat down across the desk from him.

  “Hell of a way to go out,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  Page turned around. “I’m going to resign. I’m sure you’ve already guessed. A lot of people have. Means you’ll be handed your walking papers. New DCIs seldom keep their predecessor’s private secretaries.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Director. I’ve been thinking about retiring myself.”

  “But you’re too young.”

  “Thanks for that, sir, but so are you.”

  Page let that hang on the air for several beats. He smiled. “I have a problem. This agency has a problem, and I don’t know what the hell to do about it, except I don’t want to leave without some sort of a solution.”

  For once, Alex didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t mean to put any burden on you, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve read your personnel file.”

  Alex stiffened. “Sir?”

  “Harvard. International law. Impressive then and impressive now, according to your résumé.”

  Alex had built a top-shelf résumé for herself mostly out of whole cloth, in which under various identities she had worked in a number of highly sensitive government positions—all of them as a private secretary to men who were dead. She’d fabricated pay records and all the paperwork to support her work history. And everyone vaguely remembered her, though no one could exactly remember what she looked like.

  Again Alex held her silence, not knowing where he was going.

  “Fact is, I need your advice. Not to be a sexist pig, but I need a woman’s point of view.”

  Alex couldn’t help but laugh. “Not to be a sexist pig myself, sir, but sometimes a man does need a woman’s point of view.”

  George had called her a man’s woman. It was something she’d resented at first, but operating side by side with him in the field, and in the evenings in bed, she’d come to respect him and had come to understand what he’d meant. Most men were total idiots, but George had been special. And Walt Page, in his old-fashioned gentlemanly way, was special as well.

  “You’re aware of the terrible business of the past few days. Three of our people murdered. What you’re not aware of is two other murders, both of them in Athens. Both of them were NOCs, on the same surveillance team in Iraq before the second war.”

  “Alpha Seven.”

  “Yes. All that’s left of them now is a man and a woman, plus some mysterious man who supposedly was their control officer. But he doesn’t show up in any of our records.”

  “Do you think one of them is the killer?”

  “We thought so, but one of the operators who was living in Milwaukee showed up, and Mr. McGarvey has him at a safe house.”

  “Maybe he’s the killer.”

  “Mac doesn’t think so. Leaves the control officer, who for all we know might work right here on campus. It would explain how he could have gotten to Wager and the others.”

  “And the woman,” Alex said, fighting to keep her voice and manner perfectly normal.

  “Otto’s come up with a list of people who fit the general descriptions and who are about the right age. They’re showing the man photographs from personnel records. Thirty-seven people, nine of them women, you included.”

  Alex forced a smile. “Me?”

  Page nodded. “I had Otto pull your picture from his list. It would have been a waste of time.”

  The photo in her personnel file was four years old, and she didn’t look anything like she had before the war. She had put on about thirty pounds, mostly around her hips and ass—which wasn’t all that terrible. During the war she had been mostly skin and bones. Too skinny, George had told her a couple of times. Her hair then had been thick and dark, but she had thinned it with chemicals, lightened it and highlighted it with blond streaks. Her face was fuller, and she even dyed her eyebrows and lightened her skin tone. The biggest change, and the one she liked most, was the Botox injections into her lips. And she smiled now, something she’d hardly ever done before. These days almost everyone warmed up to her the first time they met.

  But the Kraut knew her just about as well as anyone else on the team, except for George, who she thought had truly loved her.

  “Wasn’t a very flattering picture, as I remember.”

  “I saw it, and everyone else who did wondered why you were smiling. Most of the personnel pictures look like mug shots, but not yours.”

  “I guess I’m just a happy person,” Alex said.

  Page nodded. “You don’t fit the profile of a killer, and Otto agreed.”

  Alex laughed. “That’s a relief to know. But you said you need my advice.”

  “I want this mess cleared away before I step down, and the president agrees. It’s where you come in. I want to lean on your woman’s intuition. If one of those eight women on Otto’s list is the killer, I think you could spot her before any of us could.”

  “You want me to interview them?”

  “Not until tomorrow. I’ll give you the list of names, and I’d like you to spend a couple of hours this afternoon going through their personnel files, see if anything jumps out at you. Look at their photographs, study their eyes. Toby Berenson thinks sometimes whatever’s going wrong shows itself in the eyes.”

  Berenson was the Agency’s psychologist. The suicide rate among CIA field officers was much higher than the general population. And so were the rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide. He claimed to be able to detect the early signs by looking into the officer’s eyes.

  “I’ll give it a try, Mr. Director,” Alex said. Her eyes were the same as they’d always been: neutral. But she was happy Page had pulled her file from Rencke’s list.

  “Let me know by morning.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  It was past eight when Schermerhorn got up from where he’d been seated in front of Otto’s computer in an upstairs bedroom and went to the window to look outside. A car passed, but the streets in this part of Georgetown were almost always quiet, according to Otto.

  “Makes it easier to spot someone trying to sneak up on you,” he’d said.

  “But not impossible for the right man,” Schermerhorn had replied.

  None of the photos Otto had brought back on his iPad rang any bells, nor did they even when displayed on the much larger screen upstairs. After dinner, Otto had retrieved the Agency’s complete dossiers on each of the thirty-seven possibles, and Schermerhorn had spent a couple of hours going over them.

  “Nothing?” McGarvey asked at the door.

  “No. It’s quiet out there.”

  “I meant in the files. Did you recognize any of them?”

  “There w
ere two or three guys who looked possible. But unless their files were faked, none of them ever had the field experience the rest of us had.”

  “How about the eyes?”

  “No. But there’s a problem with the files.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There were supposed to be nine women, but I only count eight. One’s missing.”

  Otto appeared on the monitor. “She’s Dorothy Givens, Walt Page’s secretary,” he said. He was seated at the kitchen counter, eating a piece of leftover pizza.

  “That’d be just like Alex. She could be anyone anywhere.”

  “I’ll be right up,” Otto said.

  “It’d explain how your killer got their intel. If it is Alex, she would have bugged the director’s office.”

  “It’s clean,” Otto said, pushing past McGarvey. “We checked.”

  “Physically checked?” Schermerhorn asked. He’d heard this sort of crap before. It was part of one of their training evolutions. Look for the unexpected. Think out of the box.

  “Old-fashioned,” one instructor had told them. “Like opening someone’s mail—paper mail. Peeping through keyholes, looking through bedroom windows.”

  “His office was swept.”

  “Maybe she put a water glass to her ear and listened through the wall,” Schermerhorn said. He was frustrated. Otto was supposed to be the best—but that was electronically. And now his worry that he wasn’t safe even here spiked.

  Otto grinned. “You’re right, but she checks out. You can’t believe the hoops someone wanting that job has to jump through. She came out clean.”

  “You picked her in the first place. Where’s her file?”

  “Page vouched for her.”

  “Her file, or don’t you guys give a shit?”

  McGarvey nodded, and Otto shrugged and went to the computer. With a few keystrokes, he pulled up the secretary’s file. Schermerhorn got the feeling he’d been had.

  The photograph of a woman with a broad smile filled the screen, and Schermerhorn’s first instinct was to step back. But he didn’t know why. The face was more or less the same shape, a little heavier than Alex had been. And the lips were filled out. In Germany and later in Iraq when they’d made love—more accurately when they’d had sex—she had complained that her worst features were her small boobs and skinny lips.