End Game (11 page)

Crazy things had been done to the Kirkuk roustabouts, some of them not even Iraqis.

“We're here to send them a message,” George had told them from day one.

And such a message they had sent that, when they got back, even their debriefers handled them with respect—and maybe a little fear. Alpha Seven consisted of the most out-of-control operators in the entire national clandestine service.

Knight put the pistol back in the holster strapped to his chest under his coveralls, and headed out the door and down the gravel path to the driveway a quarter of a mile away.

The morning shift hadn't started coming in yet, and the sun was just peeking over the horizon, the day still cool, the sky perfectly clear. Saturday he and Stephanie were thinking about driving down to Williamsburg for the day and maybe a night.

She was from St. Paul. “F. Scott Fitzgerald's town,” as she liked to boast. As a kid, and still as a grown-up, she lived in her own literary fantasy world. It was one of the many reasons she and Knight had connected.

He'd chugged past the lower end of the parking lot and was turning onto the fringe beside the driveway when Foreman drove up in his Ford F-150, driver's window down, and pulled over.

“What the hell in sweet Jesus are you doing out here already?” he demanded. He was from Oklahoma, and at fifty-five had done his twenty and was retiring in a year or so. He liked Knight, but then again he liked everybody.

“Mowing the grass. What the hell does it look like I'm doing, you dumb Okie?”

Foreman tilted his head back and laughed from the bottom of his boots. “Dumb Okie—I gotta remember that one.”

Knight had been calling him a dumb Okie since shortly after Knight had come to work here ten years ago.

“We're supposed work in pairs,” Foreman said.

The order had come down two days ago after the murders.

“Whoever's doing it wants the spooks, not us,” Knight said. “But if you're so goddamned worried, get your ass in gear and come on down.”

Foreman laughed again. “Be down in a hog's fart,” he said, and took off up the hill.

Whatever the hell that meant.
Knight engaged the drive and started down the gently sloping hill, still a half hour or so before the early birds began showing up.

Barely one hundred yards down the hill, the engine began acting up, running rough, sputtering nearly to a stop, and then revving up as if the carburetor float were sticking.

Knight shut down the mowing blades, put the engine in neutral, locked the brakes, and dismounted, but before he could check the problem, the mower suddenly steadied out.

The equipment wasn't exactly new, but it was in good shape. Their two mechanics made sure of it.

All of a sudden the engine revved up to its maximum rpm, the mower blades suddenly engaged, and the machine lurched backward.

Knight tried to step away, but his left foot caught under the traction wheel and he was pulled off balance, falling backward.

The base of the machine climbed up over his lower legs and then knees, the pain impossible. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and keyed the push-to-talk switch. “Karl, you copy?” he shouted.

But then the edge of the mower blades bit into his feet, and he screamed.

He tried to push the heavy mower away, but the machine kept coming, the incredible, impossible pain climbing up his thighs.

When the three-feet-in-diameter blades reached his abdomen, he passed out, and when they reached his face, mangling it, he was already dead. Still the mower continued up the hill, blood and gore splashing down the slope and across the trunks of the trees.

 

EIGHTEEN

The NIS cleanup crew had come at once to remove the body and sanitize the boat. Searching for the shell casing would have to wait until first light, but it was obvious to McGarvey that Coffin had been shot with a high-power rifle and probably from a distance of a thousand yards or more. Something like the American-made .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle could have done the job from as far as a mile out.

He and Pete rode with Moshonas back into the city and to their hotel at two in the morning.

“If the killer was sloppy, which I don't think he was, he would have left a shell casing lying around,” McGarvey told the Greek intelligence officer.

“You're probably right, but it'll give our people something to do. Something to put in their report.”

“What about us?” Pete asked. She was shook up, but she held her feelings close.

“I don't know,” Moshonas said after a thoughtful hesitation. “What are we supposed to do with you? You'll have to at least come in for questioning.”

“Tell me about Joseph Carnes's death,” McGarvey said.

Moshonas gave McGarvey an odd look. “I don't know. He was killed in a car crash.”

“His body crushed? Maybe burned in a fire?”

Moshonas shrugged. “What's your point?”

“How was the body identified? Was there a match with his passport photo?”

“As I recall, his face had been totally destroyed.”

They were sitting in the car in the hotel's driveway, one piece of the puzzle dropping into place for McGarvey. Carnes, Wager, Fabry, and now Coffin had all been killed by the same person, who had left them some bizarre message by wiping out their faces, erasing their identities.

Moshonas got the connection. “Whoever shot Coffin waited until he turned around so they could hit him in the back of his head, destroying his face.”

“It was the same with the two men killed at CIA headquarters,” McGarvey said.

“Two here in Athens and two in Washington. Leaves three on the original team plus the mysterious control officer. One of them is the killer?”

“It's possible.”

“Find them before someone else dies,” Moshonas said.

“That's why we came here.”

“Too late,” Moshonas said. “And now you're returning to Washington, or wherever the others are. Do you know where?”

“No,” McGarvey had to admit, but he had a bad feeling they were going to find out and very soon.

Moshonas nodded. “Then I wish you good hunting. No one will interfere with your leaving in the morning. But when it's over, I'd like to sit down with you two over a couple of beers and hear the whole story. Whatever is buried out there is important enough to kill for. I'd like to know what it is.”

“Any ideas?” Pete asked.

“Many of them. But none that make sense.”

*   *   *

When they got upstairs, Pete jumped into the shower, and McGarvey opened a Heineken and went out to the eighth-floor balcony. Syntagma Square was lit up as it always was, and a few people wandered around, despite the hour.

To him, the city had always smelled like what he thought olive oil and fresh fish should, clean with a sense of something good, something promising. But this morning the city smelled like death. Like old mothballs, an old lady's sachet, scents to cover something disagreeable.

The CIA's old acronym for why people spied was MICE: money, ideology, conscience, or ego. Except for Alpha Seven's control officer telling them that the solution to the puzzle would show that what was buried above Kirkuk was an empirical necessity, he would have bet anything that the motivation was either money or ego, or a combination of both. But he wasn't so sure now.

He called the CIA's travel agency in Paris and, using his coded phrase, booked first-class seats for him and Pete on the British Airways flight out of Athens leaving in the early afternoon and getting to Dulles at eight thirty in the evening. Otto had set up the account for him a few days ago, and though finance would bitch about first class versus economy or even business, he didn't give a damn.

Nor thinking about it did he wonder if he gave a damn about a group of NOCs taking some grudge out on one another. It happened once in a while. These people, living out in the cold very often for years at a time, developed deep-seated paranoid fantasies that sometimes tipped them over the edge into insanity. Sometimes they put a pistol into their mouth and pulled the trigger. More often they got divorces or went from one affair to another, looking for something they couldn't even define.

They were more likely than the average person to explode in road rage, or become drunks or drug addicts. Half of them walked around feeling superior to the rest of the world, while the other half slunk into dark alleys, their eyes downcast, convinced they were no better than pond scum.

A few became thieves. And a few became murderers.

Yet without them, we would lose the same war we had been fighting for two-plus centuries. No one was beating down the walls to immigrate to China. No one was crossing some ocean to illegally reach Angola or Vietnam or Yemen or Iran or Iraq. But they sure as hell were stowing away on ships, crossing rivers, even taking leaky old rust buckets from Cuba or Haiti to reach the U.S. And for the most part even the poor people getting out of Syria because of the conflict loved their home country, and wanted to go home as soon as it was safe to return.

The real problem wasn't illegal immigrants; it was the kind of people who were so seriously pissed off that everyone wanted to come here, they were willing to kill to stop it, knock it down, make the point that whatever ideology floated their boat was the
only
ideology—the U.S. was the land of the Satans that had to be destroyed.

“A penny,” Pete said, coming out to the balcony. She wore only a bath towel, and her hair was still damp.

“I have no idea what the hell they want, and it's driving me crazy.”

“Money?” she suggested. “I was thinking a stash of heroin, a cash cow on the open market. Or maybe someone grabbed a bunch of Saddam's gold at the end and hid it up there until things settled down and they could go back for it.”

McGarvey shrugged.

“But it isn't that easy, is it?”

“Never is.”

She took the beer from him, and drank some. “There's nothing left here for us,” she said.

“We're going back to DC, but the flight doesn't leave till after one.”

“Good, I'm tired.”

McGarvey's cell phone rang on the bed, and he went inside to answer it. Otto was on the line, and he sounded breathless.

“We've had another one, about two hours ago,” he said.

He motioned for Pete. “I'm putting this on speakerphone. What happened?”

“Marty's sent a Gulfstream from Ramstein for you guys. The whole place is in an uproar. No one knows what the hell to do.”

“Tell me,” McGarvey said, not at all surprised.

“He was a goddamned groundskeeper, name of Bob Maddox. Worked for the subcontractors about ten years. Happened before seven this morning our time. Looked like an accident. He was run over by his own moving machine and ripped all to hell. I found out about it twenty minutes ago, and what struck me right off the bat was that his face had been destroyed. I told security to look for a remote-control device, which they found. FM band, line of sight. They screwed with the engine, and when he got off to check it out, the machine backed over him, the mower blades running. Makes three.”

“Five,” McGarvey said, and he told Otto about Carnes and Coffin.

“Two to go,” Otto said.

“There was a control officer Coffin only knew as George. Maybe Brooklyn, a Jew.”

“Only seven show on the op file.”

“This guy along with the woman—Alex Unroth—supposedly were quite the pair. If anyone would know the control officer, it would be her.”

 

NINETEEN

Security at the CIA's main gate was tighter than it had ever been, and Marty Bambridge himself had to drive down to personally vouch for McGarvey and Pete, even though they had been picked up at Andrews by a pair of CIA security officers in a Company Cadillac SUV. And even though Mac had once been the DCI.

They followed the deputy director back up to the VIP parking garage in the OHB.

“What about your bags, sir?” one of the security officers asked.

“Have someone take them up to the impound area. They can pick them up on the way out,” Bambridge said. The impound area was actually a locker where items people weren't allowed to bring past security in the lobby were kept while they were inside.

McGarvey and Pete surrendered their weapons, which included a couple of extra magazines of ammunition and, in Mac's case, a silencer.

“Did you find Larry Coffin?” Bambridge asked in the elevator on the way up to the seventh floor.

“Yeah, but someone shot him to death while Pete and I and an NIS officer were interviewing him,” McGarvey said.

“Good Lord. Any notion who the shooter was?”

“A couple of ideas, and no one will be happy about what we found out.”

Bambridge scowled. “No one usually is when you get back from one of these things,” he said. “But it's not over, is it?”

“Not by a long shot.”

*   *   *

Walt Page was waiting for them in his office, along with Carleton Patterson, the CIA's general counsel. Otto breezed in right after them, a flushed look on his round face. It looked as if he hadn't slept or changed clothes since Serifos.

“I can't lie to you and say we're making much progress here, and that the campus isn't in nearly complete shambles,” Page said. “So I hope you two have brought something useful back from Athens.”

“How'd you know Maddox was one of the Alpha Seven operators? Larry Coffin told us none of their real fingerprints or DNA samples were on record.”

“Otto gave us the heads-up when he told us to look for a remote-control device, which we found,” Bambridge said. “Soon as it was confirmed it wasn't an accident, we went looking in the old files.”

“I found photographs of all of them,” Otto said. “Knight's was the closest match. He was one of two cryptographers on the team, and one of the guys he works with on the maintenance crew said he was always messing around with puzzles, like Sudoku, the Rubik's Cube, stuff like that.”