End Game

by David Hagberg

  “They do sorta taste artificial.”

  Louise put down her cup, suddenly stricken as if the worst news of her life had just come into her head. Otto got it immediately.

  Her cell phone was on the counter. He phoned the duty officer at the Farm. “How’s everything down there this morning?”

  “Mr. Rencke, just fine. Something I can do for you?”

  “Just got back home, and we were missing our daughter.”

  “She’ll probably sleep till nine or ten. Had a busy day out on the water. We were doing exfiltration drills, and Audie was on the observer boat. Time to bring her home?”

  “Soon,” Otto said.

  “She misses you guys like the devil, but we’re going to be sad to give her up.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  They were refueled and airborne west over France toward the Atlantic after a two-hour delay at Ramstein, Germany. Once they were at altitude, McGarvey went forward to the cockpit. He was dead tired, his eyes gritty, but he was pumped with adrenaline.

  “Thanks for getting us out of there so fast,” he told Roper and the first officer. “But I have an even bigger favor.”

  “No need to ask,” Roper said. “I got clearance at thirty-seven thousand, an Air France flight from Paris found a two-hundred-knot tail wind.”

  “Jet stream?”

  “No, just winds aloft. Don’t know how far it’ll last, but we’re in it right now. ETA Andrews at 0800 local.”

  “Good enough,” McGarvey said, patting Roper on the shoulder.

  He got a cognac from the galley before he went aft and took his seat. It was pitch-black outside, only the stars, no moon, and a cloud deck below them, obscuring the lights of Paris, but they were chasing the sun.

  Pete was in the head and Alex was still asleep, leaving him alone with his thoughts. From near the beginning, he’d thought that the killer had to be someone on campus. But everyone connected with Alpha Seven, except for Alex, was dead, so it wasn’t one of them.

  The weapon was almost certainly American made and had been buried in Iraq, so when it was found, it would prove our case that Saddam did indeed have WMDs. At least the one nuke.

  But Alex had told them the bomb had been meant to be detonated. Probably blamed as a last-ditch stand by the Iraqi military unit still hiding in the oil fields.

  Evidently, the Mossad had somehow found out about it, and had sent George to find it and perhaps neutralize the thing. But the Alpha Seven team had come up with a better plan. They had reburied it, where it apparently was still hidden. The only one left now who knew the location was Alex.

  Still, it left them with the final problem of the killer’s identity. Whoever it was had known about the plot—or had even been a part of it—and was now trying to cover up their tracks by killing just about everyone who had any knowledge of the incident. The Alpha Seven team members first, because they were loose cannons.

  Then Jean Fegan because she had talked to Otto—and Otto himself because someone knew if he knew enough to seek out the woman, it meant he had to be getting close.

  Pete came forward and sat down across from him. She took the glass from his hand and had a sip. “You need to get some sleep,” she said.

  “It’s hard to shut down now that we’re close.”

  “I know, but we have another five or six hours, and you won’t do anybody any good like this.”

  “You’re right, of course,” McGarvey said. “But I was wondering what’s the worst that could happen, and what could we do to prevent it?”

  Pete thought about it for a second. “You sent Otto home. And their place in McLean is like a fortress, so even if someone does go after him—maybe another hit man sent by the killer—it wouldn’t do much good. Louise would push the panic button, and the cops would be all over the place within minutes.”

  “He’s the target, but as long as he stays put, he’ll be okay.”

  “You’re a target. So am I and so is Alex. And in six hours we’ll be on the ground and outgun the bastard.”

  “We’ll find him,” McGarvey said. “But Alex said the device was meant to be exploded.”

  “Before we started the war, or shortly thereafter, to prove our case. That’s if you believe we put it there.”

  “I think it was us. A rogue operation. But what happens to us in the region if someone sets the damned thing off?”

  “No reason for it,” Pete said. “Who would gain?”

  “The Chinese, for one. If they could prove it was our bomb—and that’s fairly easy to do from the signature radiation after a detonation—they could make a case for kicking us out of the entire region. They’d take over, and that would include oil.”

  “Not to mention the Iranians, who’d love to thumb their noses at us,” Alex said, coming forward. She perched on the arm of the leather chair across the aisle from them. “We’ve been holier-than-thou over their nuclear program. It would make us look like the biggest hypocrites on the block.”

  Maggie came back. “Would any of you like something?”

  Pete finished Mac’s drink and handed her the glass. “Another one of these, please.”

  “Water,” Alex said.

  “Syria, Egypt, especially North Korea, because we’ve tried to keep a lid on their nuclear weapons,” McGarvey said. “We need to find the weapon and get it out of there.”

  “That’s the problem,” Alex said. “Someone moved it again after we did. The guy who took out Walt and Isty and the others has been wasting his time. None of us knew where it had been reburied. It’s the part that’s been driving me crazy.”

  “We have to find the killer, and Mac thinks he’s still on campus,” Pete said. “But if he doesn’t know where the device is buried, we’re on the edge of an even steeper cliff.”

  Maggie brought their drinks back. “Will anyone be wanting anything to eat before we land?”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “But if we do, we can manage. Why’d don’t you get a few hours’ sleep?”

  She smiled. “Thanks, Mr. Director. I think I’ll do just that.”

  “We have to find him first,” Alex said, and something occurred to her. “You say Otto went home?”

  “Yeah. He’s next on the list.”

  “Did you talk to him just now? I was half awake, and I thought I heard voices.”

  “A half hour ago.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Tom Calder was with him. Walt Page took a call from State about one of its employees who’d been hit by a car and killed. Otto was there when it happened.”

  “Did you record the call?”

  “No reason to,” McGarvey said.

  “How about Otto? Would he have recorded it?” Alex pressed.

  “Probably.”

  Alex was excited. “Call him. Tell him to play it back for us.”

  “His calls could be monitored. I had him take the SIM card out of the sat phone he usually uses.”

  “God damn it, call him at home,” Alex insisted. “Do it right now.”

  “You need to give us a reason,” Pete said.

  Alex was practically jumping out of her skin. “I think I might have heard something. Maybe I was dreaming, I don’t know. Christ, McGarvey, just do it!”

  McGarvey brought up Otto’s home phone. The call went through, and Louise answered on the first ring.

  “It’s Kirk. Is everything okay there?”

  “Otto and I are eating Twinkies, if that gives you any indication.”

  “I need to talk to him for just a minute.”

  Otto came on. “What’s up?”

  “Did you record our phone call when Calder was with you?”

  “I record everything.”

  “Send it to me. Alex thinks she might have heard something that could be significant.”

  “Let me get my tablet powered up.”

  McGarvey’s phone was on speaker mode. Alex seemed as if she wanted to snatch it from where it was lying on the table between the seats, and Pete looked as
if she were on the verge of slapping her down.

  Otto came back. “Okay, here it is.”

  They heard the door lock buzz and then Calder’s voice: I thought my eyes were bad, but yours are worse. The hours we keep to make sure our country stays safe.

  You promised to make it only one minute.

  Alex leaned in and cocked an ear.

  Marty got a call from upstairs that he asked me to check out with you.

  “Wait,” Alex said. “Go back.”

  I thought my eyes were bad, but yours are worse.

  “Go back again,” Alex ordered. “But take out the voices and enhance the background.”

  A second later the recording started again, only this time Calder’s voice was gone, leaving something that sounded like church music faintly in the background.

  “Do you hear that?” Alex said.

  “I think it was coming from something in his pocket,” Otto said. “Maybe an MP3 player.”

  “Can you raise the volume?”

  Otto did, and the music, though distorted, was recognizable.

  “Son of a bitch,” Alex said softly. “Son of a bitch!” she practically shouted. “That’s Bach’s Toccata and Fugue!”

  “He’s a classical music buff. So am I,” Otto said.

  “That’s our control officer’s music.”

  “George is dead,” Pete said.

  “I mean the guy who trained us. Tom Calder is Bertie Russell. He’s the serial killer. And I know why.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  The man who had been Bertie Russell until he faked his own death in Iraq more than ten years ago stopped at an all-night Hess station in McLean and filled the tank of his dark-blue Ford Taurus. He’d bought the car new after he’d changed his identity and come back to the States. Now it was old but serviceable. Best of all, it was anonymous.

  Otto had just finished talking to McGarvey and Alex, who were in the air over France, coming west. They would be touching down in less than six hours, which didn’t give him much time to finish what he’d started, and to make his exit.

  He’d be expected to end the thing the way it had originally been intended to end. But the imperative was all but gone. Yet from the beginning he’d enjoyed symmetry in all things.

  And the second but, perhaps the biggest of all, was the way he had changed since Iraq.

  After finishing at the pump, he parked in front of the convenience store and went inside, where he bought a cup of Starbucks regular black. Back outside, he had his iPad powered up, monitoring not only the phone at Rencke’s house a few blocks away, but the security channels at the CIA.

  As he expected would happen, McGarvey had called Blankenship, who’d begun issuing orders even before he got to the campus from his home down in Jefferson. Not only was the campus in total lockdown, Blankenship had ordered his people to find the assistant deputy director of operations.

  Bob evidently couldn’t quite bring himself to believe everything McGarvey had told him, so he had stopped short of ordering his men to make an arrest, or even to mention that Calder was just a work name.

  They were going at the search in a slow and very deliberate manner, for whatever reason, so they assumed he was still on campus, and no one had thought to check with the main gate. But that lapse wouldn’t last much longer.

  He drove over to the street where Otto’s safe house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, its backyard abutting a strip of woods, and parked around the corner at the end of the block.

  Rencke held the key to the castle, so far as Bertie was concerned. They’d already figured out what had been buried over there, and even much of the why it had been buried. McGarvey had been to see the general and knew about Ya’alon—George. And Alex had almost certainly told them that Alpha Seven had moved the bomb on its own initiative.

  But Rencke was a computer whiz, a genius in his own right, who would sooner or later realize Bertie Russell had gone into Iraq from Syria in the first place to hide the bomb—and this was while Saddam was still in power—no mean feat in itself.

  McGarvey had mentioned it was a rogue operation, which indeed it had been, conceived by an old friend of his at the Pentagon, an Army four-star general Adam Benjamin, who was convinced we would get bogged down in Iraq and lose the will to continue unless something was done to “sweeten the pot,” as he’d said over lunch in town.

  “And I’m just the guy to do it,” Bertie had said.

  “Once the device has been planted, you can put together a team and send them in, so that if things do go south despite our best efforts, they can take the blame.”

  “Them and the Israelis,” Bertie had agreed, warming to the idea.

  “The Joint Chiefs will be kept in the dark.”

  “And so will the president.”

  “Especially the president,” Benjamin said. “Will you do it? Can your country depend on you?”

  The question was so rah-rah, flag-waving, and over-the-top, Bertie remembered he’d almost choked on his steak. But he had nodded. “You can count on me.”

  But Benjamin had been deployed to Iraq, where his helicopter had been shot down and he was killed less than one week after he’d arrived in country. And then Bertie was on his own. A one-man show.

  Lights were on at the Renckes’. But the place would be an electronic fortress, impossible to storm without detection.

  They knew Bertie Russell’s death had been faked and he had managed to get back into the CIA with bulletproof credentials and a curriculum vitae that was backed up by computer records and phone numbers of former employers—some of whom had moved on or had died—and others who were directed straight to him so he could play the role of the employer who was sorry to see Tom Calder leave.

  Rencke would figure that out sooner or later. Unravel everything, and there was little doubt in his mind that Rencke would also find the device, which by now, buried as long as it had been, would be leaking radiation detectable within a short distance—maybe ten or fifteen meters. A search party would find it in no time at all, based on the assumption that its last location wasn’t far from the first two. Which it wasn’t.

  McGarvey was by all accounts a very bright man, but he was primarily a shooter. While Rencke, though a genius, was no ops officer.

  The two of them, though, made a formidable team. The problem would be to eliminate one of them as soon as possible. As in this morning. As in Otto Rencke.

  Using an iPad program, he scanned the neighborhood. As expected, Rencke’s house and the entire area within a sixty-or seventy-meter radius was alive in a lot of frequencies, including VHF and UHF.

  It was no good for him here.

  He made a U-turn and headed to the Dulles Access Road, the new plan he had in mind simple, so long as Blankenship’s net was for the most part kept on campus.

  He had worked with Ya’alon for eight days outside Tel Aviv, during a joint war-planning exercise one year before the invasion of Iraq. In fact, they had become reasonably close, both of them intelligence officers, and they had developed a respect for the other’s abilities.

  “You think out of the box,” Bertie had told him. “And that’s a good thing.”

  Ya’alon had laughed. They were drinking Russian vodka that had been liberated in Afghanistan several years earlier. “And you’re the craziest, most out-of-control son of a bitch I’ve ever known. And trust me, Mossad is filled with them.”

  “The face is the gateway to a man’s soul,” was Bertie’s argument. “Take away the lips, and they can reveal no secrets. Take away the nose, and they can’t smell what’s foul. Take away the ears, and they can’t hear the warnings. And especially take away the eyes so they can’t see what they’re not supposed to see.”

  “Vietnam. The Montagnards,” Ya’alon said.

  “Exactly.”

  The timing would be tight, but with any luck, he’d get to the airport, where he could park the Taurus out in the open in the short-term lot, and rent a car. From there he would make his way down to Cam
p Peary—another two and a half hours tops, giving him plenty of time to make a couple of phone calls and put things in place for the end game.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  A half hour from landing at Andrews, McGarvey got a phone call from an agitated Otto. “Where are you?”

  “Just about ready to touch down.”

  “It’s Calder, all right. The main gate logged him out at two thirty-five. And about forty-five minutes later, my surveillance gear showed a slight dip in energy returns. Someone was sampling the spectrum.”

  “Calder?”

  “It would be a hell of a coincidence if it weren’t him,” Otto said. “Blankenship wanted this to remain an internal matter, but I think Tom’s too smart for him. I gave the DC metro cops and Virginia state police the heads-up with Tom’s description and the car he’s driving—or least the one he left the gate with.”

  “He knows we’re on to him, so he’s not going to stick around,” Alex said. “Have you checked Dulles, Reagan, and BWI?”

  “Yes, but there’s nothing under Calder’s name.”

  “Bertie always kept several sets of decent working papers within easy reach. Maybe something to change his appearance—a wig, different glasses. It’s not difficult.”

  “I’ll call Blankenship and have him send people to all three airports,” McGarvey said. “We might get lucky. In the meantime, have the airport cops search the long-term lots for his car.”

  “If I were Bertie, I’d have a spare set of plates,” Alex said. “Out of state, maybe even out of country, and not so easy to quickly trace.”

  “It would help if we knew where he was going,” Pete suggested.

  They were all strapped in because of some turbulence on their descent, and Alex looked out the window. “I have a wild-assed idea where he might be headed, but it’d be pretty tough, even for someone like him.”

  “Where?” McGarvey asked.

  She looked at him. “Kirkuk.”

  “Why?” Pete asked, but then she got it just after McGarvey did.

  “You said the idea was to explode the thing,” he said. “Make it look as if the Iraqis were trying some last-ditch stand. But that was more than ten years ago. No reason for something like that now.”