End Game

by David Hagberg

  “Why not?” Alex demanded. She wanted to get there, look him the eye, and put a bullet into the middle of his forehead. What he had done to her in Iraq was far worse than anything the guy her mother had married had done to her.

  “In the first place, he’s a cripple. Took a round in the spine from a sniper about eight years ago. He’s been confined to a wheelchair ever since.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Alex shouted, a black rage rising inside her. She didn’t want to believe it, now that she was so close.

  “He’s retired Major General Chaim Yarviv, married thirty-seven years to Merriam, three children, two granddaughters. Before he got hurt, he was deputy director of Aman.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure he knew about the operation in Iraq before the second war, and he almost certainly knew George. Means he should have the answers we’re looking for.”

  “Not the ones I need!” Alex screamed. She’d wanted to say the ones they wanted, but it didn’t come out that way. “George told me to come. I sent him the message, and he got it.”

  “Leaves two possibilities. Either the general directed the killings, or someone else we don’t know about has done it.”

  “Christ.”

  “Listen, Alex. If the general is masterminding this operation—never mind the question of for what reason—he won’t hesitate to kill Mac and Pete if you barge in there, gun blazing. Think it out.”

  “I’ve had more than ten years to think it out.”

  “There’s no powder in the bullets. Just sand.”

  “Why? Why give me a weapon? Why lead me here?”

  “I needed to give them the time to make contact with George, or whoever it was who responded to your message,” Otto said. “Turn around and go back to the hotel. Once Mac and Pete are out of there, they’ll pick you up and take you to the airport. With any luck, all of you will get out of Israel in one piece.”

  It suddenly struck her that Otto was not sure. “You don’t know if it’s the general.”

  “I’m betting it’s someone else.”

  “Why?”

  “A hunch.”

  “We’ll see,” Alex said, and tossed the phone out of the car.

  * * *

  The dirt road was easy to spot; it was the only one at that distance leading up a hill through a grove of olive trees. Alex stopped a few meters up and, making sure no traffic was coming, pointed the pistol out the window and pulled off a shot.

  The Beretta bucked in her hand. Otto had been lying to her.

  She continued slowly up the hill until just before the top, where she pulled off to the side of the track, parked the Range Rover, and headed away on foot.

  Near the top of the hill, she checked over her shoulder for traffic on the highway, but at this distance, she would not be identifiable by anyone passing by.

  She got down on her hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way to the top, where she rose up just enough to see the sprawling stone house and the outbuildings to the west. Nothing moved. She had a clear sight line to the Mercedes van, but the driver who Otto said had been leaning up against it, smoking a cigarette, was gone, and other than a small flock of sheep well off into the distance—maybe a mile away—nothing moved.

  Backing away until she was well below the crest, she got to her feet. Her wrists and the palms of her hands were scraped from the rocky soil, but now that she was this close, she was mindless of the minor discomfort.

  She brushed the dirt off the knees of her jeans and headed in a trot to the west, figuring she would approach the house by keeping the outbuildings between her and the windows on that side.

  About seventy-five meters from the dirt road, she got on her hands and knees again and crawled to the crest. The house was to her left, the first of the four outbuildings directly below. Off in the distance the sheep had spread out over the hillside. There was no sign of their shepherds, or of any other person.

  Pulling out the pistol, she jumped up and sprinted down the hill toward the small stone building, reaching its safety in less than fifteen seconds. There, she held up.

  Peering around the corner, she could see the right side of the Mercedes van, but the driver had apparently gone inside.

  Something wasn’t right.

  She started to turn as the muzzle of a rifle touched her on the cheek.

  “Please drop your weapon to the ground,” a man said.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she got the impression he was one of the shepherds who’d taken the flock up the hill. He was dressed in old corduroy slacks and a bulky wool shirt. They’d been waiting for her.

  “No trouble, please. You came to talk to the general, and that’s exactly what will happen if you cooperate. Your friends are already inside.”

  “This pistol has a twitchy trigger. I’ll lay it on the ground,” Alex said.

  As she bent down, the man stepped back, which is exactly what she expected he’d do. She batted the rifle barrel away, rose up, and jammed the pistol into the man’s face, just above the bridge of his nose.

  “Assuming your Uzi doesn’t have a twitchy trigger, please drop it on the ground, and we’ll go talk to the general,” she said.

  “The general is not your George,” someone said from behind her.

  She looked over her shoulder.

  “Not worth dying when you’re being offered what you want,” he said. He was pointing a SIG Sauer at her.

  “Makes sense,” said the shepherd in front of her, still holding his Uzi.

  She lowered the Beretta to the ground.

  SIXTY-ONE

  McGarvey and the others looked up as Alex came down the front hall, one of the shepherds behind her. Her jeans were dirty, and a little blood was oozing from a cut on her left wrist. Otherwise, she looked unharmed, except for a fierce look of hatred and anticipation mixed with what might have been a little fear.

  “Here’s Ms. Unroth at last,” the general said.

  Alex stopped just inside the study door, her eyes locked on Yarviv’s.

  “Are you okay?” McGarvey asked.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Alex?” Mac prompted.

  She shook her head. “It’s not him. He’s not George.”

  “Of course not,” the general said. “Your George died years ago in prison. Cancer.”

  “Who answered my message?”

  “As SOP, we keep a continuous lookout for any pro phrase messages no matter how long they’ve been out-of-date. Every now and then one like yours turns up.”

  “Then who’s the killer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who was the shooter in Paris?”

  “Sûreté identified him as a British contract killer,” McGarvey said.

  The play of emotions on Alex’s face was amazing, almost heartbreaking to watch. Everything she had worked for, just about everything she had feared the most, had been laid bare for her. Suddenly there was no meaning.

  “Mossad did not hire him,” Sharon said.

  “Neither did Aman,” Smith said.

  “He’s still at Langley,” McGarvey said. He had almost all of it now. “Leaves us with finding out the why before we can identify him.”

  “No need to stop the bastard; he’s already taken out everyone except me,” Alex said. “I just have to go deep, providing they’ll let me out of Israel.”

  Sharon started to object, but Yarviv motioned him off. “My dear girl, you and Mr. McGarvey and Ms. Boylan are free to go at any time you wish. This moment, if that’s what you want.”

  “She hurt one of my people,” Sharon said.

  “She could have killed her, Lev.”

  “We still need the what,” Pete said. “I mean, what was all this about?”

  “Would you like to tell her, Ms. Unroth?” the general asked. “From what I understand, it was you and your people who moved the thing.”

  Alex sat down in one of the wingback chairs, her knees drawn up. McGarvey thought she looked like a little
girl at that moment. Not the trained killer she was.

  “Roy all but spelled it out for you on the fourth panel,” she said, her voice small.

  Everyone held their silence.

  “Everyone was rabid to find a WMD to justify the war when no justification was needed. Saddam was a monster. He’d used gas against his own people, just like the Syrians have done. We had plenty of provocation.”

  She looked at the general.

  “They sent us behind the lines to soften them up, which we did, but then George came, and it was a game changer. He showed us where you guys buried the thing—”

  “No,” Yarviv cut her off. “We didn’t bury it. Major Ya’alon—your George—got a message left at one of our letter drops in Damascus from a contact in Hussein’s Mukhabarat. Gave us the GPS coordinates of something interesting buried in the hills above Kirkuk. He volunteered to go out there to find out what it was. I think it unhinged him.”

  “Who put it there if not your people?” Alex shouted.

  “I don’t know. We never found out.”

  “You didn’t want to find out,” McGarvey said.

  “No.”

  “There were no markings on it, and I’m not enough of an engineer to tell anyone with certainty whose design it was, but the only two possibilities, I think, would be us or the Russians. And besides Israel, we had the most to gain.”

  Sharon had become agitated. “I’m sorry, General, but I don’t know if I want to hear this. Especially not if it’s what I think it is.”

  “There were rumors,” Smith said. “I agree with Lev. Maybe we should just let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “It was a small nuclear weapon,” Alex said. “A demolition device designed to take out dams, bit bridges, major installations, things of that nature that ordinary explosives or even nonnuclear air attacks couldn’t handle.”

  “A suitcase bomb,” Pete said.

  “But it wasn’t in an aluminum case; it was in a heavy canvas bag. I think the damned thing weighed seventy-five or eighty kilos. Took two of us to pull it out of the hole and move it.”

  “No markings?” McGarvey asked.

  “None I personally took the time to look for, if you mean serial numbers or writing in English or Russian.”

  “How do you know it was a bomb?” Sharon asked.

  Alex just looked at him. “Please,” she said. “Maybe the physics package was lead instead of plutonium or U-235—we didn’t have a Geiger counter to see if the thing was leaking—but there was no mistaking what it was, and the reason it had been out there. It was meant for our team to find it and blow the whistle. ‘Hey, look, world! The bastard did have a WMD after all!’”

  “Why didn’t you guys do just that?” McGarvey asked, and he thought he knew this answer too.

  “Our orders changed. Maybe someone got cold feet.”

  “Or came to their senses,” Pete said.

  “Or that,” Alex agreed. “Anyway, we had a little less than a month with George before he suddenly slipped away one evening, and the next day we got the burst transmission to move the damned thing.”

  “You radioed that you had found it?” Pete asked.

  “No, and that was the odd part. We’d agreed to keep the thing a secret. I think it was Larry’s idea to begin with. We had quite a discussion about it. I was all for letting the chips fall where they may. We were in the war because Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and he could be allowed to continue. God only knew what would happen in the region, especially if the nuclear genie got out of the bottle.

  “But Larry kept harping on the unintended consequences that the CIA seemed really good at engineering for itself. ‘Like the Bay of Pigs,’ he said. ‘Look where the hell that got us. We’re still dealing with that mess. Think what this would do.’

  “He insisted that we rebury the thing, and when it came time for our debriefing, we wouldn’t bring it up first.”

  “No one did,” Pete asked.

  “No. Not in Ramstein, and not later at the Farm.”

  “Who sent you the order to move it?” McGarvey asked. “Did you ever know?”

  “Of course. It was our original control officer, Bertie Russell.”

  “I thought he was killed in Iraq.”

  “That was a year later,” Alex said. “But when we got to Ramstein, he was there, and the thing was, he never brought up George’s name, nor did he even hint at his order to move the device.”

  “So you kept your mouths shut, and afterward you split up and tried to go deep,” McGarvey said. “Why was that?”

  “Come on. You know what we were facing. If the device had been found, it would have been traced back to someone—probably us—and the political fallout would have been devastating.”

  “I thought the thing was supposed to be found,” Pete said. “Wasn’t that the whole idea?”

  “It was meant to be detonated.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  At Langley, Otto was seated at his desk, his eyes gritty, his energy all but gone. Time to go home and get some sleep. It seemed to him he had been working around the clock since this business had begun.

  Louise had called a couple of hours ago to ask how he was doing and when he’d be home.

  “Soon as I hear from Mac. He said he’d call after they cleared Israeli airspace.”

  “You have the bone in your teeth—I can hear it,” Louise said. “Are we any closer to making this a done deal?”

  “Depends on what they managed to find out, and whether or not Alex is in jail or has been shot to death. And right now that’s too close to call.”

  “She’s not the killer? For sure?”

  “For sure,” Otto said. “At least not the one we’ve been looking for.”

  “Somehow that’s not very comforting.”

  “I’ll be home soon as I can. Maybe we can get this thing settled in the next twenty-four hours and take a vacation somewhere.”

  Louise chuckled. “I’ll believe that when it actually happens. Take care of yourself, sweetheart.”

  “Will do,” Otto said, and hung up.

  Earlier he’d driven off campus to a convenience store a few miles down the Parkway, where he’d bought a half dozen packages of Twinkies, finally back on the market, and several pints of half and half, the closest to whipping cream he could find. He sat now, eating the things and guzzling the cream—his comfort food—for which Louise would skin him alive if she found out.

  All the elements were laid out in neat order on one of his big-screen monitors, all of it pointing toward their serial killer still being on campus. He had to be well connected enough to know the movements of just about everyone working for the CIA—which narrowed the list of possibilities.

  One of the analysts from the Watch, someone on Walt Page’s staff—which was why Alex had turned up high on the list—someone on the deputy director of the CIA’s staff, or on Marty Bambridge’s staff in operations.

  But all their personnel files were squeaky clean—some of them like Alex’s: almost too perfect.

  There were also several disconnected pieces. The contract killer who’d tried to take Alex out in Paris was a former officer in the British Special Air Service by the name of Tony Butterworth. So far nothing had turned up for that hit, though in the past he’d done work for the German BND, his own government’s SIS, and once for the Mossad, though that had been a number of years ago.

  Otto had managed to find two of his offshore accounts, one in the Channel Islands and the other in the Caribbean, and matched several of the payments to the dates of the hits. But nothing he’d found matched the dates of the killings here on campus or the two in Athens.

  At this point Butterworth was a dead end, except that Otto’s darlings were chewing on at least three other places where the contractor may have hidden his payments—intriguingly enough, one of them with a small credit union in Venice, Florida, less than ten miles from Mac’s house on Casey Key.

  The next odd bit that had turned up was the murder of a guy in
a small apartment in Georgetown, just a couple of blocks up from the tourist shops and bars along M Street, and coincidentally only a half dozen blocks from Mac’s apartment.

  One of the bartenders told police he vaguely remembered seeing the guy leaving with a slender, good-looking woman two nights before his body had been discovered by the landlord, who’d come over to check on a bad smell the neighbors were complaining about.

  The name on the lease, and on the driver’s license and other documents on his body, did not match his fingerprints, but matched a former Army Ranger’s by the name of Norman Bogen. But the cops had come up with nothing else—not where he worked, not where he lived, nothing about any family, except that he had no criminal record.

  But Otto’s darlings had come with one fact that was as unexpected as it was intriguing. Bogen maintained an account with the Midcoast Employees Credit Union of Venice, Florida. The same bank Butterworth possibly had an account.

  The date of Bogen’s death matched the date Alex had been on the loose. And she more or less fit the bartender’s description. But if she had killed Bogen, Otto could not see the connection—though he knew there had to be one.

  And last was the murder of Jean Fegan in front of the Hotel George. It had been no accident, Otto was sure of that, and he had beaten himself up that he hadn’t been able to come up with a tag number. But the cops had not been able to find an SUV with front-end damage. After the hit, it had been locked away in some private garage somewhere—either that, or ditched in the Potomac.

  His phone buzzed. He thought it might be Mac, but the call was from on campus, though the ID was blocked.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you might still be here, though I expect Louise might be cross with you.” It was Tom Calder, Marty Bambridge’s assistant deputy director, the direct opposite of his boss and, therefore, universally liked by just about everyone on campus.

  “You’re here too. Marty must be keeping you on a short leash.”

  “As a matter of fact, he just left, and I wanted to get the latest from you before I pulled the pin and went home. It’s been a very long few days. May I come over?”