End Game (15 page)

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Go ahead. And when you're done, I'll call the cops and you'll end up doing jail time. It'll have been the most expensive piece of ass you've ever had.”

He was stopped, directly over her.

“Either that, or we have a deal. Wait until tomorrow, and we'll anchor someplace and you'll teach me. It'll be a deal we can both walk away from happy.”

Leonard backed off. “You're a fucking whore,” he said.

“Not yet,” she'd replied.

*   *   *

The day was blazing hot and humid. Leonard found a relatively isolated spot to tuck in just north of the Holiday Inn near the airport. The boat was a battered old twenty-four-foot Chris Craft cabin cruiser, and belowdecks, with the hatch closed, the interior was like an oven.

Alex took off her clothes and lay down on the settee, spreading her legs for him.

It was only ten in the morning, but he was drunk on beer already. He pulled off his shorts and underwear, and spread her legs farther, pawing her with his calloused fingers.

She pulled a razor-sharp skinning knife from where she'd hidden it in the crack of the cushions and buried it to the hilt in his chest, directly into his heart. He gasped once and fell back on the cabin sole, dead almost immediately.

She checked the ports, but no one was around. For the next fifteen minutes she mutilated his body. Starting by cutting off his penis, she worked her way up to his neck, which she sliced from ear to ear, and then his face, which she skinned—cutting off his nose, his lips, his eyebrows, and his ears, leaving them lying in the incredible mess where she'd dropped them.

She drew water from the sink and washed her body, checking the long mirror on the back of the door into the tiny head to make sure she hadn't cut herself. At that time she didn't know all the details of forensic police work, but she didn't want to leave any of her own blood behind in case she could be identified.

She'd brought a bikini, which she put on, and stuffed her clothes into a watertight plastic bag. Before she went out on deck and jumped overboard to swim ashore, she checked the portholes on both sides of the boat again to make sure no one was nearby to see her leave.

Onshore, she made her way across the rear property of the Holiday Inn, where behind a Dumpster she changed into a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. Then, stuffing the plastic bag into her purse, she walked around the long end of the hotel's parking lot, unnoticed, and out onto Tamiami Trail and to the first bus stop.

Her mother didn't report her husband missing until the next morning, and it wasn't until late that afternoon that his body was found. His time of death couldn't be fixed to anything closer than a six-hour window, and when Alex's mother had been questioned, she had no alibi. It was Alex who produced the time-and-date–stamped receipts from a couple of department stores that fell within the six hours, and she told police she had come home immediately after shopping, and then she and her mother had watched television together.

The brutal murder of Leonard Unroth was never solved and eventually went into the cold-case files. But for a time the people of Sarasota had been traumatized that a seriously disturbed nut-case killer was running around loose among them.

*   *   *

Alex graduated at the top of her high school class and then did three years at Northwestern, earning her degree with honors in foreign affairs with a double minor in Russian and Chinese. She had only a handful of boyfriends, but in Sarasota she sometimes worked the North Trail as a prostitute, and the kinkier the sex, the better she liked it.

At college, during the short breaks between the spring semester and summer semester, and then until the fall semester started, she went out to Las Vegas, where she worked first as an ordinary prostitute. Then one night a high roller picked her up—because he liked young stuff—and her second real education began.

She got a taste for the seriously bizarre, including role-playing, S&M, and a few other tricks, including orgasm at the moment of suffocation. Timing was everything in that game. At exactly the right instant during sex, her on top and her John on the verge, she would place a plastic bag over his head. At the instant he was about to pass out, he would come.

A certain type of man and a few women she had sex with liked it that way, and were willing to pay top dollar. Until the one night it went too far. Her John, paying her one thousand dollars, begged her to put the bag over his head, but he was too early. He had a heart problem, and he died while she was astraddle him.

She was honest with the hotel security people, who she'd always tipped very well, and they let her go.

“You just can't come back here, sweetheart,” the chief of security told her with regret. He liked the money, but he also liked his sex with her straight.

Two weeks later she was in Washington, applying for a job with the CIA. And two weeks after that, her initial background check completed, she was called to an office in a federal building on the Beltway for her second interview with a case officer who wasn't much older than she was and who sported an actual military-style crew cut. He said his name was Dominick.

“Northwestern's a good school, and you picked the right studies,” Dominick told her. He looked up from her file. “What do you want to do for the CIA?”

She had smiled. The office was plain, only a table and two chairs, with a lousy view of the parking lot four stories down. The walls were bare, the floor a bland off-white tile, and there was nothing else.

“Truth, justice, and the American way—isn't that what I'm supposed to say?”

Dominick showed no reaction.

“Seriously, I want to be a field officer. An NOC.”

“Why's that?”

“I want to kill bad guys. I think this country has some serious shit coming its way. I want to be one of the guys on the front line, but I definitely don't want to join the Marines.”

“Says you were questioned in the murder of your father when you were sixteen. Did you kill him?”

“Stepfather,” she said automatically. “No, but I should have. The son of a bitch tried to rape me. Someone else just beat me to it.”

“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.”