End Game

Slowly, desperately slowly…

ONE

Walter Wager heaved himself off the floor, using the edge of his desk for leverage, blood running down the collar of his white shirt from a ragged wound in the side of his neck. He was an old man, even older than his fifty-four, because of the life he’d led as a deep-cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.

He was no longer an NOC, and he’d struggled for the last year, sitting behind a desk, in a tiny office buried on the third floor of the Original Headquarters Building, trying to lead a normal life, trying to fit in with the normal day-to-day routine without the nearly constant danger he’d faced for thirty-five years.

The beginning of the end for him had come eight years ago when his wife, Sandee, had been shot to death during a situation that had gone terribly bad in Caracas. They were meeting with a cryptanalyst from SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, who’d promised to hand over the latest data encryption algorithms his science directorate had devised. It was late at night in the warehouse district when the transfer of money for a disk had just taken place, and the headlights of a half dozen police vehicles came on, illuminating the three of them.

Sandee slammed her shoulder into the cryptanalyst’s chest, knocking him backward. “Run!” she shouted.

Wager reached for her arm, the same time the police opened fire, hitting her in the back and in her head, and she went down hard.

Something very hot plucked at Wager’s left elbow, and on instinct alone he jogged to the left, away from the headlights, and with bullets slamming into the pavement all around him and singing past his head, he managed to make it into one of the abandoned buildings.

Several cars started up, someone shouted something, and police came after him. But he was running for his life, the adrenaline high in his system. And somehow he managed to escape back into the city to the safe house he’d set up in the first days after his arrival. Sandee had called it: refuge.

“Let’s hope we never have to use it,” she’d said the first time he’d brought her there.

He’d never forgotten her words or the sight of her falling forward, bullets ripping into her body. And no day had gone by since then when her face, the feel of her body, her breath on his cheek, didn’t come to him in the middle of the night.

He was dying now, and of all things, what he would miss the most would be his dreams.

Calling for help would do no good. It was well past midnight, and all the offices on this floor were empty. No one would hear him. But security was just a phone call away. And even if they couldn’t get here in time to save his life, he would be able to tell them who his killer was.

Though not why.

“Don’t touch the phone, Walter,” warned the man behind him.

Wager’s heart pounded in his ears as he reached for the phone on his desk. He felt no real pain, only weakness from the terrible blood loss, and an absolute incredulity not at what was happening but how it was happening.

The face of his attacker was that of a stranger, but the voice was familiar. From years ago, maybe just before the second Iraq war. In the mountains outside of Kirkuk they were looking for WMDs that a lot of people in the Company knew didn’t exist. All that was required were a few photographs, something with a serial number or any sort of markings the analysts at Langley could use.

There’d been seven of them spread out over a twenty-five-mile line, and he remembered the guy they called the Cynic, who’d called himself a realist: the only sane man in a world gone completely batshit.

The man took Wager by the arm and gently turned him around so they were facing each other. The Cynic, if that was who he was, had a lot of blood around his mouth.

“It’s too late to call anyone.”

Wager was hearing music from somewhere, very low but very close. Church organ music, complicated.

“You never had culture, Walter. Too bad,” the man said. His voice was soft, with maybe a British accent. But high-class.

“Why?”

“Why what? Why am I here? Why have I decided to kill you? Why like this?” The Cynic turned away, his eyes half closed, a dreamy expression on his bloody face.

The music was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Wager couldn’t say why he’d dredged that up out of some distant memory, but he was sure of it, and it was coming from a small player in the breast pocket of the Cynic’s dark blue blazer.

“Yes, why?” Wager asked, his voice ragged and distant even in his own ears. He felt cold and weak, barely able to stay on his feet.

“Sandee was such a lovely girl. Was from the beginning, She never belonged with a bore like you.”

The Cynic had a round, perfectly normal face, small ears, thin sand-colored hair, a slight build. Everyman. Someone you would never pick out of a crowd, someone you would never remember. Perfect in the role of an NOC. The accent was a fake, of course, because if he was the man Wager was remembering, he was from somewhere in the Midwest. But how he knew Sandee — who was a big-city San Francisco girl — was beyond comprehension just at this moment.

“I knew her,” the Cynic said. “And I was fucking her before Caracas.”

A blind rage rose up, blotting out Wager’s weakness, and he lurched forward, but the Cynic merely pushed him back against the desk, grabbing his arm so he wouldn’t fall down.

“I wanted to get your attention, and I have it now. Maybe briefly, but I have it.”

Wager’s head was swimming.

“You illuminated the spot with an encrypted GPS marker. I need to know the password.”

He was the Cynic from Iraq, but Wager could not dredge up a name — though it would have been a work name, it would have been a start. “It’s gone.”

“The password or the stash?”

“Is this about money?”

The Cynic laughed softly, the sound from the back of his throat. “Come on, Walter. Is there anything more important?”

Wager could think of a lot of things more important than money in whatever forms it came.

“The password, probably both. The country has been overrun. Holes in the sand dug just about everywhere.”

“They didn’t find the bioweapons labs. What makes you think they found the cache?”

“Because the weapons never existed. Nor was there any heroin. And you didn’t fuck my wife.”

“Ah, but I did. She had a small mole on her left thigh, just below her pussy. Remember?”

Wager leaned back against the desk for support, and he tried to hide his effort to reach the phone, but the Cynic pulled him away, a broad smile on his bloody lips. Even his teeth were red, and Wager thought that a bit of flesh was hanging from the side of the man’s mouth.

“The password, please.”

“I don’t have it,” Wager said, and it came to him that the Cynic wasn’t lying: he had fucked Sandee. But then, in those days, everybody was fucking everybody else. Wives, girlfriends, sisters, even mothers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment. It was the game from the get-go, so the stories went. From the beginning of the Agency, and even before that in the WWII OSS. Fucking was not only the ultimate aphrodisiac; it was a powerful tool.

Wager thought that the happiest time of his entire life had been during training at the CIA’s base on Camp Peary in Virginia — south of DC. It was called the Farm because it grew agents. They were young and naive. Anxious for the future, but dedicated. “Truth, justice, and the American way,” a former DCI had supposedly once said. They were supermen and women. It was where he had first met Sandee, who was two years older than he was. But they’d been a natural pair from the beginning, though at first he’d thought she’d been working him, been given him as an assignment. But then he fell in love — and he’d always thought she had too — and nothing else mattered.

“Too bad for you,” the Cynic said. “But there are others.”

Wager started to shake his head, if for nothing else but to ward off what he knew was coming next. But it didn’t help.

Grinning like a madman, the Cynic took Wager into his arms and began to eat his face, starting at the nose, powerful teeth shredding flesh and cartilage.

TWO

Marty Bambridge, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, was awakened by his wife, who kept pushing at his shoulder. He was in a foul mood: too much red wine last night at dinner, from which nothing was left but a son-of-a-bitch headache and a crappy taste in his mouth. Along with that was the rumor floating around campus that the DCI Walt Page was on his way out, and there was talk of a clean sweep. All the old brass was going with him.

Which meant the heads of each directorate — intelligence, science and technology, management and services, and operations, formerly the directorate of national clandestine service.

Bambridge was a spy master, a job he knew he’d been meant for, when as a kid studying law and foreign relations at the University of Minnesota he’d read and reread every espionage novel he could get his hands on — especially the James Bond stories. But never in his dreams in those days did he believe he would actually get to run the CIA’s spies.

If it was actually coming to an end for him, he had no earthly idea what he would do with himself. He was helpless and frightened, which made him angry.

He growled at his wife. “What?”

“Phone,” she mumbled. She handed it to him, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

“Bambridge,” he said, sitting up.

“This is Bob Blankenship, campus security, sir. We have a problem.”

“Write me a memo, for Christ’s sake. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”

“No, sir. Mr. Page has been informed, and he specifically wants you involved. There’s been a murder here on the third floor of the OHB. One of your people. A former field officer.”

Bambridge was suddenly wide-awake. He turned on the nightstand light. It was after 1 A.M. “Who is it?”

“The security pass we found on the body identified him as Walter Wager. He worked as a mid-level operational planner on your staff.”

“I know him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You said murder? How?”

“I think it would be best if you came in and took a look yourself. Mr. Page did not want the authorities notified before you had a chance to get here. Nor are we moving the body.”

“Shit, shit,” Bambridge said under his breath. “Any witnesses?”

“He was alone on the floor.”

“Surveillance videos?”

“No, sir.”

“God damn it. One of the cameras in the corridor must have picked up something.”

“They were disabled.”

“Who the hell was monitoring?”

“A loop was inserted into the recording unit for the entire floor. Shows the same images over and over.”

Bambridge tried to think of some reason he wouldn’t have to go out. At forty-three, he had become soft. He’d never actually served as a field officer, though he did two five-year stints as assistant to the chief of station, one in Ottawa and the other in Canberra, neither them hot spots under any stretch of the imagination. He’d never humped his butt in Iraq or Afghanistan like many of the officers who’d worked for him had, so he’d never formed a bond — especially not with the NOCs who he’d always considered to be prima donnas. Just like Wager.

“Turn out the light,” his wife said.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he told the security officer. “Touch nothing.”

He got up and flipped on the lights in the bathroom and the closet. His wife buried her head deeper into the covers. If she had been a thoughtful woman, Marty mused, she would have gotten up and had the coffee on by now.

It was just one more brick in his wall of frustration and anger.

They had a nice two-story colonial on Davis Street NW near the Naval Observatory, and Bambridge had crossed the Key Bridge and was heading north on the GW Parkway to Langley before one thirty. Traffic was very light, the October morning cool, even crisp after a steamy summer, but he felt a heaviness in his chest he’d never felt before. And he was a little worried. His wife sometimes called him a hypochondriac, but over the past few months, and especially this morning, he’d seriously begun to get concerned he was developing heart troubles. It was the stress of the job, he told himself. Lately the stress of losing his job. And just now a murder inside the CIA’s campus. It was unbelievable, and the only other word he could think of was incompetence. Heads would roll, he would make sure of it.

The security officers at the main gate looked up as Bambridge’s BMW breezed through the employee lane; a bar code in the windshield along with a photograph of the driver’s face recognized the car and the DDO even before the rear bumper cleared.

Up at the OHB, which was the first of several buildings on campus, Bambridge’s bar code allowed him access to the underground VIP parking garage, and three minutes later he was getting off the elevator on the third floor — having passed his badge through the security reader in the basement and submitted to a retinal scan.

Bambridge was a narrow, slope-shouldered man whose acquaintances described him as almost always surprised, but whose friends described him as seriously intent. His features were dark; some French Canadian blood a couple of generations ago, according to his mother, who still lived in northern Minnesota. He harbored the more romantic notion that a Sicilian had gotten in there somewhere, which gave him a penchant for mysteriousness and a touch of violence.

Blankenship, a much taller, broader man in his early fifties, who wore a ridiculous military buzz cut, had been notified of the DDO’s arrival and was waiting for him.

“I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet, sir,” he said.

“No. Let’s get this over with so I can.”

At least a dozen security officers in short-sleeved shirts, khaki trousers, badges, and pistols in hip holsters filled the corridor around an open door just three down from the elevator.

“We’ve taken all the photographs we need, and I’ve had our techs dust for fingerprints and collect whatever DNA evidence they could find,” Blankenship said. “We’re also looking at the hard disk on Walt’s computer, along with his phone records for the past three months.”

“I want his entire contact sheet — computer, phone, and face-to-face — for as far back as you can dig it up,” Bambridge replied.

“Yes, sir,” the security officer said. “Can you think of any enemies Mr. Wager might have had?”

The guy had to be kidding. Bambridge gave him a look. “North Koreans, Cubans, Iraqis, Iranians, some Russians, Afghanis. Shall I go on?”

“Sorry, sir. I meant here on campus.”

“He’s only been back less than a year. I don’t think Walt even had enough time to make friends let alone enemies.”

Another security officer was leaning against the wall just before the open door. He looked a little green. When Bambridge and Blankenship approached, he straightened up.

Around the corner, just inside the tiny office, Bambridge pulled up short. The stench of fecal matter, and of something sweet, hit him all at once, at the same time he caught sight of the blood pooled on the floor. But then he came full face on with the ruined remains of what he could only vaguely describe as a human being. His stomach did a very sharp roll.

Wager, if that was who it was, had been destroyed from the neck up. Something had bitten or chewed out the entire side of his neck on the left side, blood all down the front and side of his white shirt. His face had been massively damaged as well, as if a pack of wild animals had had at him. His nose was mostly gone, his eyebrows shredded, his lips missing, his teeth obscenely white.

Bambridge stepped back a pace, a sickness rising in his throat. “My God,” he whispered.

Wager’s body lay on its side in front of a small desk. The chair had been pushed to one side, up against a file cabinet. The back of his trousers was completely covered in fecal matter. He’d lost control of his bowels either at the time of his death or shortly before. If there had been any sign of horror or pain or surprise on his face, it was completely gone. His features had either been eaten away or were covered in blood and tissue — human meat.

It was the most awful thing Bambridge had ever seen or imagined.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I could not have described this to you,” Blankenship said.

“Could a guard dog have gotten in here?” Bambridge asked. It was the only thing he could think to ask.

“No, sir. They’re all accounted for. Anyway, none of our dogs would have done something like this.”

“A wild animal?”

“Maybe, but then someone with the proper badges to get into this building, onto this floor, and into this office would have had to let it in.”

“No one saw or heard a thing?”

“No, sir.”

A few splotches of blood had stained the desktop inches from the phone.

“Did he manage to call someone?”

“No.”

Bambridge tore his eyes away from the horrible thing on the floor, gagging as the smell, associated with what he was seeing, fully hit him. He walked out into the clean air of the corridor, where he leaned his back against the wall.

Blankenship joined him. “What’re your orders, sir?”

“Are your people finished?”

“Just about.”

“When they are, call the police. I want the body out of here and the mess cleaned up before the morning shift.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bambridge looked at him. “I’ll be back later, but right now I’m going home. I need a shower.”

“I understand.”

THREE

Istvan Fabry at fifty felt like an old man, though he would never admit it to Fanni, his American-born wife, or his sons, Richard and Mark, but Iraq, and later Afghanistan, had worn him to the bone.

He left the Bubble, which was the CIA’s auditorium, and drove his three-year-old Fusion over to the Scattergood-Thorne house just off the GW Parkway, but still on the CIA’s campus. It was very late, just a bit before 2 A.M., but he’d always been an extremely light sleeper. Eight hours a night meant a person would be, for all practical purposes, dead for one-third of his life. It wasn’t for Istvan.

The DCI was hosting a dozen influential congressmen plus a like number of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals from the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intel and LE agencies to discuss plans for the top-down reorganization of America’s approach to nontraditional warfare. Fabry was front man for the setup, and he wanted to be well ahead of the curve before the 0800 start.

The Bubble’s projection equipment was loaded with the proper PowerPoint and video programs, mostly of his own creation, and once the presentation was done, the VIPs would be bused over to the house for the actual conference.

Parking in front of the large colonial that sat partially concealed in the woods just off the GW Parkway, he got out of the car and stopped to listen to the nearly absolute silence. Only a light breeze in the treetops, mournful and a little lonely in a way, and a truck passing on the highway, heading into the city or perhaps to Dulles.

But it was safe here, something his wife, who’d been raised in a reasonably upscale environment as the only daughter of a corporate lawyer in Chicago, could never understand. By instinct, at times like this, alone with just his own thoughts, he would catch himself listening for other sounds. Some distant, some very close. The whine of a drone’s engine, or of a Russian Hind helicopter gunship. The clank of metal on metal as a troop of Taliban fighters or Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers approached up a mountain pass. The snick of an AK-47 slide being pulled back and released. Footfalls on loose gravel. Someone or something rising up behind him, carrying a knife or a wire garrote.

Suddenly spooked, he turned and looked down the gravel road toward the Bubble, and then did a careful scan of the woods surrounding the house that had been a private residence until the CIA had taken it over in 1987. But nothing moved. He was absolutely alone, and not in a place where harm was likely to come his way. Of any spot in the world, here was the safest place for him to be, and not a day went by that he didn’t bless his good fortune for surviving Hungary’s turbulence when he was a kid growing up in Rabahidveg, close to the Austrian border.

Two uncles had been shot to death by KGB border patrol pricks, and his father had been taken into custody for reasons they’d never been told. There he’d been tortured day and night for more than a week. Afterward he’d been a broken man, unable even to feed himself or use the toilet without help.

Then Hungary was free, in a large measure because of America’s diplomacy and the harsh realities of a Soviet system that simply could not support its own weight. Istvan had specialized in English in school, and when he was nineteen, he went to the U.S. and joined the army, where he was first made a translator — in addition to Hungarian and English, he was also fluent in Russian — and then into INSCOM, which was the army’s intelligence and security command, where he became a spy.

The transition to the CIA had been easy at first, until he’d been selected to become an NOC and had been sent first to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. Then the nightmares started, and they’d become so bad that, by the time he’d slipped home on a short leave, Fanni, who he’d known from college at Northwestern while he was in the army, almost left him.

They were sleeping together, and after his second morning back, she’d slipped out of bed to make them coffee. She brought the coffee and a plate of sweet rolls on a tray that she set on her side of the bed, then went around to him and bent down to brush a kiss onto his lips.

He suddenly reared up out of a deep sleep and smashed his fist into her face, breaking several of her teeth, dislocating her jaw, and sending her sprawling onto the floor.

They were both in shock.

After a trip to the emergency room, where her jaw was sent in place and she’d been given pain pills, they went back to the apartment. But she wasn’t fearful of him; instead she was puzzled and angry.

“You didn’t do it on purpose, Isty; you did it purely on instinct,” she told him. “For survival.”

They were sitting across from each other at the tiny kitchen table, and he had a hard time looking her in the eye. Her jaw was red and swollen, and she spoke with a lisp because of the missing teeth.

“For survival from what? Have you been on a battlefield somewhere?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t or you won’t?” she demanded, her voice rising.

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

“Orders—”

“Bullshit. I want the truth!”

“My life and yours could depend on your not knowing what I do.”

“Are you a spy, then? Is that what you’ve become? A traitor, spying for the Russians or maybe the Chinese?”

“I’m not a traitor, Fanni,” Istvan said. “You have to believe me.” His heart was aching.

She jumped to her feet, the chair falling over. “I won’t live with you. Not like this.”

“I’m not a traitor.”

“Of course you’re not. I know it. But if you were a spy, you would never be able to tell me where you were, what you were doing. I’d never know when you would come back to me—if you were coming back.”

“I’ll always come back.”

“I can’t be sure. Tell me how I can be sure!”

“Because I love you,” Istvan said.

In the end it had been enough for her, and they’d both somehow survived his long absences until he had come out of the field to work as an analyst and mission planner in the Directorate of Operations and he’d been able to tell her he had indeed been a spy. But all that was past. He was home for good.

He took a portable handcart from the trunk, and when he had it unfolded, he loaded four cartons of agendas, briefing books, copies of the presentation disks, and lined legal pads and pens, and took them inside, where he laid them out in the large conference room. The fit would be tight, but there was room for everyone. The main topic for review would be the threat the U.S. faced right now from cyberterrorism.

State-sponsored cyberterrorism.

It was something Istvan had become an expert in since he’d come home. He had a knack for it and had been a fast learner — his mentor at the end was Special Projects Director Otto Rencke, the smartest, and oddest, man he’d ever known. But a good man, with an equally odd-duck wife and a lovely child.

He’d come to his office in the OHB’s fourth-floor science and technology operations center, where some of the gadgets and ideas that had been created and already evaluated as useful were placed in planning cycles for manufacture and then distribution to stations around the world. After he’d loaded his car, he’d driven over to the Bubble and then here.

Time enough to go home for some breakfast, but he would have to rush to make it back before the guests began to arrive. Anyway, after the field rations he’d eaten over the years, even the cafeteria adjacent to the New Headquarters Building wasn’t half bad.

He went outside, where he refolded the handcart and loaded it into the trunk and then got behind the wheel.

Something smelled odd to him, slightly off. At that moment he heard a Bach organ piece and turned around in surprise as the figure of a man who he did not know rose up from the backseat, blood all over his face and lips.

Before Istvan could react, the Cynic yanked Istvan’s head backward, breaking his neck. Before he died, he realized that the side of his neck was literally being eaten.

FOUR

Bambridge had spent only a few minutes in his office, making sure everything for the cyberconference was in place for later this morning. He was giving a short presentation at the Bubble once the PowerPoint and video had been played, emphasizing the necessity for boots on the ground in the likely spots where such acts of terrorism might originate. Like Beijing. He knew the reaction he would get, but what he had to tell them needed saying. Even Page had agreed.

“You’ll be ruffling some feathers, Marty, but maybe someone from the Hill will sit up and take notice, toss us an extra few millions to fight the good fight.”

“More like billions,” Bambridge had replied glumly. His mood, like everyone else’s in the Company, was in the toilet. Change was coming, that much was for sure, but no one was looking forward to what it would bring.

He passed through the main gate, and at the bottom of the slight hill he turned right onto the Parkway, traffic even less at this hour than it had been when he’d come in. By rights he should have stayed till the conference — he still had plenty to do, including rereading the dossiers on all the conferees, to refresh his memory. But he’d told Blankenship the truth: he needed to go home and take a shower to get rid of the stench of death that hung around him like a dark cloud.

Never in his life had he seen or even imagined anything so gruesome as what had been done to Walter Wager. It was beyond his comprehension that one human being could do something like that to another.

Blankenship had called in every available security officer as Bambridge was heading toward town, and dozens of cars were converging on the main gate. If the killer were still on campus, he would not be getting out anytime soon.

Bambridge’s phone went off, and for just an instant he debated not answering it, but the caller ID read Blankenship.

“Something new?”

“There’s been another one,” the chief of security said. He sounded seriously pissed off.

Bambridge’s heart lurched. “Who?”

“Istvan Fabry. One of my people found his body — what was left of it — in his car, parked in front of the Scattergood-Thorne house.”

“What the hell was he doing there at this hour of the morning?” Bambridge shouted, but Fabry was the front man on the PowerPoint and video presentation, and would have gone over to the house to set up for the second part of the conference.

“We’re checking. But it was the same MO. Whoever it was waited in the backseat for Mr. Fabry to come out of the house and then attacked him.”

“Are the cops at the OHB?”

“They’ll be here all morning. The Bureau sent out a CSI unit, and they’ve taken control. Special Agent Morris Wilkinson is in charge.”

“Has he been told about the second… incident?”

“I wanted to talk to you first, sir.”

Bambridge came to a narrow gravel pass over through the median, and he took it. “I want our people to collect whatever evidence they can first.”

“We’re already on it.”

“Soon as you’re ready, turn it over to the Bureau. I want the campus locked down. No one in or out without personal recognition. Get two of your people on both gates to make sure it gets done.”

“What about the conference?”

“It’s canceled. In the meantime, I want a room-by-room search of every square inch of every building. That includes elevator shafts, air ducts, closets, maintenance spaces, all the subbasements. Every cabinet, under every desk, on top of the roofs, and when your people are finished, I want you to do it again. And again. And again.”

“We have a lot of acreage, lots of places to hide.”

“Make sure there are no loops or any other glitches with our fence-line video cameras and motion detectors. I want as many helicopters with infrared detectors in the air right now, and I want our K-9 people on it too. This guy has to be covered in blood. Give the dogs the scents of Wager and Fabry.”

“It has to be one of us,” Blankenship said. “I don’t see how anyone else could have gotten in here this morning. It means it has to be someone on the night schedule.”

“Plus people like you and me who are bound to show up at any hour of the day. Narrows field,” Bambridge said. “Pull the personnel records of everyone, including mine, see whose psych evals have come up shaky in the past six months. And find out who had connections with Wager and Fabry — not just either of them. I want a common denominator.”

“The shift change starts in a few hours. What do you want to do about it?”

Bambridge’s knee-jerk reaction was to keep everyone on campus and hold the new shift from coming to work until the buildings and grounds had been sanitized, but he thought better of it. “Let it go on as normal. If we get out of our routine, someone is going to sit up and take notice. Whatever happens, we need to keep the media out of this for as long as possible. We’re already in enough trouble as it is.”

Two years ago the scandal about the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans had bled over to the CIA. The Agency’s charter specifically forbade any operations on U.S. soil, but that hadn’t been the case since the Cold War days. The CIA went wherever its investigations led, including the continental U.S.

“We’ll be letting the suspect walk out the gate.”

“What suspect?” Bambridge demanded angrily.

“The killer.”

“Give me a name. Everyone on the grounds at this moment is a suspect.”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“Besides anyone with connections to Wager and Fabry, I want the names of anyone who’s ever worked as an instructor at the Farm or served time in the field, either working for us or for the military — special forces. Both of those guys were NOCs, too highly trained to let someone come up on them so easily.”

“I’ve already started on that list. Anyone else?”

“Guys just about set to retire.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s about stress. A lot of guys are burned out after twenty — especially Watch officers. And we’ve made some pay cuts and we’ve reduced hours. Check those people.”

“We don’t have the personnel to do this very quickly,” Blankenship said. “Could take a month or more of cross-checking.”

“Then I suggest you get started right away,” Bambridge said, and hung up.

He came to the main gate and stopped directly across from the gatehouse until one of the security guards came out.

“Mr. Bambridge, is there a problem, sir?”

“Yes, why wasn’t I stopped for a positive ID?”

“Your tag came up, and you showed positive on the facial recognition program.”

“I could have been an imposter in disguise who killed the deputy director and stole his car. I want everyone coming through this gate to be checked.”

“Yes, sir,” the security officer said. “Is there a problem we should know about?”

“Just a drill. So keep on your toes. There’ll be an eval tomorrow.”

As he drove the rest of the way through the woods to the OHB, where he parked in his slot in the basement, he could not remember hearing or reading about anything like this ever happening. No business seemed to be immune from the disgruntled employee coming to work with a loaded weapon, or weapons, and opening fire. Or setting off a bomb. Movie theaters, schools, federal building — no place was safe. Except, until now, for the CIA.

Upstairs in his office, he powered up his computer to see what Blankenship was up to, but except for a personnel list with about one hundred names highlighted, there was nothing else. So far the chief of security had not come up with any connections between Wager and Fabry or anyone else except for the people in the sections where they had worked.

He phoned Page at home. “There’s been another murder,” he told the director.

“My God, who?”

“Istvan Fabry. Looks like the same guy probably did it.”

“Has the Bureau been contacted?”

“They’re here along with one of their CSI units,” Bambridge said. “I’m going to text and e-mail everyone involved that we’re postponing the conference this morning.”

“Don’t do that,” Page said. “There’ll be too many questions. And make sure the officers on perimeter duty — especially at the Parkway and Georgetown Pike gates — maintain a low key. We don’t want to tip off anyone — not the killer, and sure as hell not the media.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about everyone else out there at the moment?”

“Sir?”

“Assuming the killer hasn’t already left, someone else could be a target. Double up everyone — no one goes anywhere alone. Tell them it’s a drill; tell them anything you want to tell them: we’re beefing up security because of our VIP guests coming this morning.”

“I’ll tell them the vice president might drop in unannounced.”

“I’ll be in my office in one hour. I want you up there, along with Bob Blankenship, and see if you can get Rencke to come in.”

“I don’t think including him is such a good idea, sir.”

“Do it,” Page said. “I want answers.”

FIVE

Otto Rencke could not remember ever having slept for more than one or two hours at a stretch. Until he’d married Louise, most of his naps were in front of his computer, or listening to music on headphones in a secure spot somewhere. But from the beginning, her primary goals in life had been taking care of their child, now four, and straightening out her husband’s act, which included requiring him to come to bed with her every evening for at least six hours.

He’d fought her on that one at first, until she’d told him that sometimes she got frightened in the middle of the night and she needed him to watch over her. And he’d agreed — spending his waking hours listening to classical music and operas in his head, and solving tensor calculus problems, matrices of partial differential equations of the type Einstein had used to develop relativity.

In his early forties, Rencke was of medium height, slender with a head too large for his body, and long frizzy red hair held in place by a ponytail. He almost always wore jeans and sweatshirts — some from Disneyworld and some from the old KGB or CCCP, as a sort of joke inside the CIA campus — and at Louise’s prodding, decent boat shoes instead of raggedy sneakers that were always dirty, always unlaced.

Marty wouldn’t explain why Page wanted to see him at this hour, but as Otto came up to the main gate, he saw four backed-up cars he had to get through, and while he waited, he pulled up the CIA’s mainframe to see what was going on to create a delay here.

Nothing jumped out at him, but when he connected with his search programs in his office, he came up with a series of requests from security to pull the personnel records of everyone working the midnight-to-eight shift. Security’s search parameters included psych evals, time to retirement, Agency assignments, previous military experience, and connections with Walter Wager — and with Istvan Fabry, a name he knew.

Fabry had come to him with help on a special cybercrimes project. The guy was bright but something of a milquetoast despite the fact that his rep as a fearless field operative — an NOC — was rock solid. The guy had struck Otto as being the happiest man in the world for finally being in from the cold.

When his turn came, he was passed through security by one of the officers who mentioned something about a drill, which Otto knew was total bullshit, and he drove the rest of the way up to the OHB, where he took his parking spot in the basement.

He went to his third-floor office to make sure nothing had been disturbed since he’d left late yesterday afternoon, then took the elevator to the seventh floor. McGarvey once told him that paranoia was an agent’s most powerful tool: Worry that someone or something might be coming up on your six, and it might save your life one day.

A security officer was waiting at the DCI’s door, which he opened for Otto, who paused just long enough to glance down the long corridor. All doors on this floor were closed this morning. But by tradition over the past fifteen or twenty years, they had been left open. Directors liked to wander out of their offices to visit, especially with the people down the hall on the left in the long narrow room called the Watch. Five officers manned the place 24/7; there they could monitor everything happening in the world on a real-time basis. Connected by satellites and other electronic means, and by constantly updated human intelligence, they were able to keep tabs on developing operations, as well as come up with alerts on hot spots that had the potential to blow up.

All the people working there loved their jobs, because as one of them once said: we get to know everything.

“Good morning, sir,” the security man said to Otto. He looked a little nervous.

“Too bad about Wager and Fabry.”

“Yes, sir, hard to believe.”

Page’s secretary wasn’t here yet, so Otto went straight through to the director’s big office. Page was seated in an easy chair across a coffee table from Bambridge and Blankenship, who were sitting on the blue Queen Anne couch. Bambridge looked perplexed, as usual. Blankenship looked angry. But Page seemed worried, which was unusual.

“Thanks for coming at this hour,” Page said.

Otto took the chair opposite Page. “Have the families been notified?”

“Families?” Bambridge asked.

“Yeah, Wager’s and Fabry’s. When officers lose their lives, their families are told straightaway.”

Bambridge blustered. But Page held him off. “Not yet,” he said. “How did you find out?”

“Lucky guess. So, what happened?”

“We have a serial killer on campus,” Blankenship said.

“The extra security won’t help.”

“Why’s that?” the chief of security asked. He wasn’t angry, just earnest.

“Whoever’s done it is one of us. He knows the system, and since he’s killed two people in one night, he thinks he’ll get away with it.”

“The son of a bitch is nuts,” Bambridge said.

“Doesn’t mean he’s stupid,” Otto said. “Someone want to fill me in?”

Page nodded, and Blankenship brought Rencke up to speed with everything they’d learned tonight, everything Bambridge had suggested they do and the results so far.

Otto took out his highly modified iPad and connected with his search programs — his “darlings,” as he called them.

“Your machine won’t work on this floor,” Bambridge said, but Otto ignored him.

In twenty seconds he had the start of what he was looking for, and he was surprised. He looked up. “Besides Wager and Fabry, there are eighteen other NOCs working the night shift. A bigger number than I would have suspected.”

“We tend to keep them at the Farm or on this shift,” Page said. “Why an NOC?”

“Savagery.”

Page cocked a shoulder.

“These folks — three of them on this shift are women, by the way — have been trained to live by their wits in badland. The mission comes first, all other considerations off the table. A lot of them have been alone in places I wouldn’t send an armored column to. They’ve killed to save their own lives — didn’t matter who they killed — men or women or children if need be. A lot of the time they’ve had to improvise, like a lot of our guys in early Vietnam did. Kill to send a message. Kill like an animal, so that the opposition thinks twice about pursuit. No one wants to go into a lion’s den.”

“We’re checking possible connections,” Blankenship said.

“That’s a start, but there might not be any. This could be something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like Marty suggested, someone who’s a psycho. And not necessarily someone who works this shift.”

“We have the records of everyone coming through security,” Blankenship said.

“Yeah,” Otto said, nodding. “But you know, every now and then I forget to scan my badge when I walk out the door. The computer thinks I’m still in the building, or somewhere on campus. A flag doesn’t go up. Or, just maybe one day I’d scan my badge but then come through another entrance, maybe with someone else’s badge I’d lifted. The system isn’t perfect. You guys oughta know it. We need entry strictly by personal recognition.”

“Impossible,” Bambridge said.

“Of course it is, and what’s happened tonight — and may still be happening — is a result.”

“We’ve doubled up everyone,” Blankenship said. “Told them it was a security drill.”

“Come on, Bob. This isn’t a box of dummies you’re dealing with, ya know. We’ve got more PhDs per capita here than there are at Harvard. Pretty soon I suspect you’re going to have a panic on your hands.”

Blankenship’s cell phone buzzed, and he answered it. “No reason to hold them,” he said, and hung up. “That was the back gate. It’s already started. Just a handful so far.”

“One of whom could be the killer,” Bambridge said.

“I doubt it,” Otto said.

“He’s not going to break his routine. He’ll leave at the end of his shift. He thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us,” Blankenship said.

“But he isn’t,” Otto said.

“What do you suggest?”

“I’m going to talk to Mac. He knows more about the NOC mentality than anyone.”

“Christ,” Bambridge said. “Send a killer to find a killer.”

SIX

Over a thirty-plus-year career Kirk McGarvey had developed a sixth sense about his surroundings, and something possibly coming at him out of the blue. And the feeling had been niggling at the back of his head now for the past couple of days.

He was a man in his early fifties, husky, with a square but pleasant face, and gray-green eyes that saw things most other people missed. Running now along a path in the hills above the port city of Livadi on the Greek island of Serifos, he noticed an Aegean Airlines charters helicopter touching down in front of the Serifos Beach Hotel. It was an unscheduled flight from Athens and at the wrong end of the tourist season, so it caught his attention.

The distance was too great for him to make out anything except that only two passengers got out and walked up to the hotel. He couldn’t even tell if it was a man and a woman, yet something about them, about the timing, about everything, wasn’t right — or a real surprise, for that matter.

High overhead, the morning jet to Tel Aviv made a bright contrail in the perfectly clear blue sky, and McGarvey turned and headed back to walk the three miles to the decommissioned lighthouse he’d used as his refuge from time to time. He’d worked practically all his adult life first for air force intelligence, then the CIA had picked him up, trained him as a field officer, and he’d gone to work doing black ops for the national clandestine service. He’d become a killer for his country — an assassin, a soldier who didn’t march in a platoon but one who worked alone. His kills were face-to-face and very personal.

But then they’d promoted him to run the clandestine service, and by happenstance — the right president at the right time — he’d been appointed and confirmed by Congress as the director of the CIA. But that job hadn’t lasted long; he wasn’t an administrator. He’d respected most of the people, but he’d hated the job, so he had retired.

After that it seemed like every few months someone came to him to do something about a situation that the Company simply could not handle on its own. Something extrajudicial. Something strictly forbidden in the U.S. and almost everywhere else by international law. But something that needed to be done. In Russia, in Japan, in Israel and Mexico and Cuba, and even one job in North Korea, possibly the strangest of his career. He had stopped a missile attack on Israel’s nuclear weapons storage depot; had stopped an outright invasion of Texas and New Mexico by drug cartels; and even came face-to-face on two occasions with Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

Before each of those assignments, he had gotten the feeling as if a target had been painted on his back and someone was taking a bead on him.

He stopped on the crest of a hill that looked down at the lighthouse. No one was around. Sometimes tourists hiked up here, and he usually treated them nicely, though he’d always turned down their requests for a tour.

Someone from the Company had come to him twice before — last time it was Marty Bambridge, the deputy director of operations. And then as now he’d been emotionally banged up. He’d come here to recuperate, get his brain rewired, so that he could rejoin the civilized world without finding the need to constantly look over his shoulder.

This time he’d run here for two reasons. The first was his last assignment, in which he’d battled a team of terrorists from Germany hired to kill all the SEAL Team Six guys who had gone to Abbottabad to take out bin Laden. And the second was Pete Boylan, a former CIA interrogator who’d moved up to clandestine services, where she’d helped with two of his assignments.

A couple of years ago his wife and daughter had been assassinated right in front of his eyes, and he’d never fully recovered from the trauma. He’d been rubbed totally raw, his emotions naked on the surface. And then Pete had come along — vivacious, talented, no nonsense whatsoever, and dedicated to the same ideals he’d been dedicated to all his life: defending the U.S. and, in fact, defending anyone or any idea from the bullies of the world. From the bin Ladens and the extremists of any stripe.

The fact was that he’d become emotionally attached to her. He’d begun to fall in love, so he had run here. Every woman in his life — including his wife — had lost their lives because of him. Because of what he did, who he was.

He didn’t want it to happen to Pete.

If the two who’d gotten off the chopper had come to see him, it would take them at least a half hour to get up here. Only a narrow dirt path rose up from the town, much too narrow and rocky for a jeep or just about anything else to make it up, unless it was a motorcycle. Most people who came up here made their way on foot.

At the lighthouse he went up to the second level that had been fitted out as a small bedroom suite, and took a shower, changing into a pair of jeans, a light T-shirt, and moccasins. He checked the load on his Walther PPK, in the 9-mm version, stuck it in the waistband of the slacks at the small of his back, and went downstairs.

He opened a bottle of ice-cold Retsina wine, then brought it and three glasses out to the patio. There he could watch the path from town. He settled down to wait.

A long time ago, when he was an air force second lieutenant in the OSI, a colonel told him he would burn out before he was thirty, because he was too angry. He had a chip on his shoulder. Years later, after the Cold War was pretty much over with, a DDO had called him an anachronism. His kind of dedication to what he’d called McGarvey’s Superman complex — truth, justice, and the American way — was sadly out-of-date.

“Fact of the matter is, McGarvey, there’s no room for you any longer. We don’t need you.”

But that was long before 9/11, and as it turned out, the DDO was the one who was no longer needed.

A figure appeared over the crest of the hill about two hundred yards away, stopped for a few moments, and then started down the path.

McGarvey shaded his eyes, but he could not make out who it was — even if it was a man or a woman — though from the way the person moved, he figured she was a woman. And even before she got close enough for him to recognize who it was, he knew it was Pete, and that the other person who’d gotten off the helicopter was probably Otto, and that something serious was going down, or about to happen.

Although he hadn’t brought a laptop or iPad with him, nor had he activated his cell phone, he did walk down to Livadi for lunch at least once a week, if for no other reason than to watch an hour or so of CNN. Over the past several weeks nothing much had been going on in the world he figured he should get involved with. The Euro troubles in Athens and Madrid had not filtered down here; the Snowden case was back in the news, linked with another NSA whistle-blower, and the CIA had come under congressional scrutiny for its domestic operations contrary to law. Egypt was still on fire, as were Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea, with the deaths of several top generals — supposedly at the hands of South Korean assassins. And Paris and Brussels.

Floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, a very active tornado season, and three strong earthquakes along the San Andreas fault dominated U.S. news. But none of it rose to the level of sending Pete and Otto all this way to talk to him.

He found that not only was he curious, but he was looking forward to seeing them. Except for a few people in town and the occasional tourist, he’d spoken to no one in three months.

Pete Boylan, in her late thirties, about five-five, wearing a light shirt with sleeves rolled up above her elbows, and baggy khaki trousers that did nothing much to hide her figure, stopped a few feet out. Her pretty, round face was dominated by her vivid blue eyes that were wide and expressive, framed by short dark hair cut almost boyishly, and rich lips that were formed into a dazzling smile.

“Hi, Kirk,” she said, smiling. Her voice was soft, her accent slightly Southern, though she was a California girl.

“Why didn’t Otto come up with you?”

“I asked him to give me twenty minutes before we got to business,” she said. “How are you?”

“Good. You?”

“Wanting to see you, but giving you space. No one likes to be crowded.”

McGarvey got up and she came to him, almost hesitantly at first, not sure of her reception until her took her into his arms and held her close for a long time.

“How are you really?” he asked.

“Lonely as hell, but we have a problem Otto hopes you can help with.”

SEVEN

Otto gave them less than ten minutes before he topped the rise and started down the other side to the lighthouse. “He’s got the bit in his teeth, and nothing’s going to stop him from talking to you,” Pete said.

They’d not had the chance to cover what had been happening over the past few months since McGarvey had left Washington, nor had she brought up the reason she and Otto had made the trip.

She’d been doing mostly office work, catching up on the reports dealing with the SEAL Team Six assignment. The only bright light had been a two-week stint at Camp Peary. She’d engaged in learning urban infiltration tactics, and had given a few lessons in hand-to-hand combat.

“Bruised a few tender male egos, I think,” she said. “Some of the kids took me for granted.”

McGarvey had to laugh, which was a first for him in a long time. It felt good to be with her, even like this, like now.

Otto took his time getting down to them, even though he was in good enough shape these days to have sprinted from town. “Hiya, Mac,” he said, sitting down.

McGarvey poured a glass of wine, which Otto downed in a couple of swallows. He held out his glass for more.

“How you doing out here? Getting bored yet?”

“I was thinking about coming back to Florida to open the house, maybe take a trip on the boat,” McGarvey said.

He had a place on Casey Key south of Tampa on the Gulf Coast, and a forty-two-foot Island Packet ketch, which he and Katy had used to sail to the Keys and twice out to the Bahamas. When he was in for the season, he taught Voltaire at the University of South Florida’s New College in Sarasota, but last semester the dean had suggested he might take a year or two sabbatical. There’d been some trouble connected to him, trouble in which a car had exploded in a campus parking lot, killing not only the driver but two innocent students who’d happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After that, teaching Voltaire had lost some of its charm for him.

“We have a problem,” Otto said. “Walt sent me out to fill you in, and Pete asked if she could tag along.”

“I had a feeling I was going to get involved,” she said. In her job as an interrogator, she’d been one of the CIA’s all-time best. Her good looks, slight build, and the fact that she was a female who also had a kind, understanding manner made her subjects want to talk to her. Sometimes she even brought them to the point where they begged to tell her their story. And she was never judgmental, which was even more effective.

“There’s been something in the news over the past couple of weeks that Walt could be stepping down. They’ve mentioned Daniel Voight to replace him. This have anything to do with why you’re here?”

Voight was the former Democratic senator from California who’d first made a name for himself as a defense attorney for a very large Washington law firm before he’d gone home to enter politics. A lion’s share of his career had been designing and pushing for reform in the intelligence community. He’d been dead set against creating the office of national intelligence, calling it little more than another layer of government bureaucracy. He was called the Architect at Langley and the other fourteen military and civilian intelligence agencies.

“Walt doesn’t want to leave on this kind of a note. It’s why he agreed to let me ask you for help.”

“Voight is a good choice.”

“Probably, but it’s better the devil you know than the one you don’t. Morale is a little low on campus. And it’s going to get lower once our problem gets out.”

“Marty sign on for you coming out there?”

“No. He wants to do this himself. Everyone thinks he’s angling for Fred Atwell’s job.”

Atwell was the deputy director of the CIA, and since it wasn’t likely he would take the top spot when Page left, it was assumed he would resign. He was a professional intelligence officer, and the biggest problem in the CIA for a very long time was that its directors were almost always politicians, not professionals, while the DCIs were. Bambridge, as much as McGarvey didn’t like him, would be the logical choice.

McGarvey sipped his wine. Otto and Pete were skirting the issue, which was highly unusual for both of them. Whatever it was had to be big.

“What is it?” he asked. “Why’s Walt asked for my help?”

“We have a serial killer on campus,” Otto said. “Two bodies so far, but there could be more. Everyone involved thinks it’s likely.”

“No one is allowed to go anywhere on campus alone,” Pete said. “Everyone’s in pairs. Marty’s taken the blame for it, telling everyone that part of the Agency’s new strategic plan is to expect a possible terrorist incursion and get ready for it.”

“That would take someone from the inside,” McGarvey said.

“Right. Everyone is a suspect, so no one works alone.”

“Even for bathroom breaks,” Pete said. “People have started calling the OHB Gestapo Headquarters.”

“That’s not the real issue,” Otto said. “It’s how they were killed that has Blankenship and his people freaked out. Me too, because it makes no sense unless the killer is a total psycho. But nothing like that shows up on anyone’s psych evals.”

“I’m listening,” McGarvey said, and glanced at Pete. She was a little pale.

“Both of them bled to death. Their carotid arteries were ripped out of their necks.”

“Ripped or cut?”

“The killer ripped them out with his teeth, like a wild animal. And then while they were bleeding out, he chewed off their noses and lips — even their eyebrows. We found saliva, and we’re running DNA matches as fast as the lab can get the work done. Be a couple more days.”

McGarvey had heard of things like this happening in the early days of the Vietnam War. And he said as much to them. “It was a tactic of the Degar. The French called them the Montagnard, the ‘mountain people,’ and they were fierce. We used them as guerrillas against the VC, who were frightened of them, and rightly so. These guys left their calling cards wherever they went. Go back to Hanoi and leave us alone, or no one will be safe. They cut off heads, genitals, put men headfirst in cages of starving rats. Shoved poisonous snakes down their throats. Made their prisoners swallow the shoots of live bamboo plants that would grow right through their stomachs and intestines, and then let them make it back to their own units.”

“This guy was a Vietnamese soldier?” Pete asked skeptically. “He’d have to be seventy.”

“No, but someone who studied the tactics, because they worked. If we’d given the Montagnards more support and then gotten out of their way, the VC just might have gone back to Hanoi and stayed out of it. He’ll be an NOC,” McGarvey said.

“Eighteen of them on the night shift,” Otto said. “Three of them women, and Wager and Fabry leave thirteen. Soon as we get the DNA results back, we’ll nail the bastard.”

“He’s already thought of that, which means it won’t matter to him what DNA he left behind. It won’t be in his records. He’ll have gotten around that. It’s the whole point: their asses are out in the field, and they sure as hell don’t want anything pointing to their connections with the CIA.”

“Then we’ll take cheek swabs of everyone on the shift,” Pete suggested.

“He may not have worked that shift. Getting on campus through security isn’t all that difficult to do.”

Otto sat back. “Are you in?”

“Of course,” McGarvey said. From the moment Pete had shown up, there’d been no doubt in his mind. “I’m going to need a list of any field assignments Wager and Fabry were ever on together.”

“We already have that,” Otto said. He opened a file on his iPad and passed it across. “Called Alpha Seven. April oh three, little over a month before we started the second Iraq war.”

Wager and Fabry were part of a ground team spread out in the mountains above Kirkuk. They were looking for WMDs. Of the five others, Joseph Carnes was dead, killed in a car crash in Athens last year, and none of the others were currently on the Company’s payroll.

“You have current addresses on three of them, but the fourth is off the grid,” McGarvey said. It was how he would have played it.

Pete was surprised, but Otto wasn’t. “Larry Coffin,” he said. “He and Carnes were pals. Could be our guy?”

“Probably not, but I’m betting he knows something we can use.”

“He could be anywhere,” Pete said. “And he’s certainly demonstrated he doesn’t want to be found.”

“I’ll find him,” McGarvey said.

“Where?”

“Athens.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No,” McGarvey said. “You’re going back with Otto to help set up a public funeral for Wager and Fabry. Their families are going to insist, and only a very brief mention of their participation in the war will be released to the media.”

“Marty will never go for it.”

“Let him think it was his idea. We just want to know if any of their Alpha Seven buddies show up.”

“Then what?”

“Let Marty figure it out, because I have a feeling none of those guys is the killer.”

“Then why the ruse?” Pete asked.

“To keep the killer distracted.”

EIGHT

Lawrence Thaddeus Coffin sat alone at a sidewalk café in the Plaka district of Athens, very near the Acropolis and on top of the ancient city. It was a historical district and almost always busy with tourists, which made it anonymous. It was one of his favorite people-watching spots in a city he’d come to love, because of its international flavor.

Greece from ancient times had been at the crossroads of trade not only in goods but in ideas, among them the arts, the sciences, and government itself.

He was a slender man, a bit under six feet, with thinning light brown hair and pale blue eyes that had always made him seem like a dreamer to those who didn’t know him. Someone whose thoughts and concerns were far away from the everyday.

The waiter brought him another ouzo and a demitasse of very strong coffee, his third for the late afternoon, along with his bill on a tiny slip of paper.

He’d had no idea anything had started to go bad until he’d read the brief squib in the International New York Times this morning about the funerals for two CIA officers who’d openly been identified as Wager and Fabry. It was a fact he found extraordinary. NOCs were never given public recognition. When they were killed in the line of duty, they were given a star on the granite wall in the lobby of the OHB. And that was that.

After Carnes and now these two, it left only him and three others who he expected would eventually make their way here to him. But it was all for nothing, especially after Snowden and the others had taken the fall. Nothing was left, except for Kryptos, which was the key if anyone took the time to understand the message — the entire message, which was scattered all over the campus.

A game, actually, he told himself. Deadly, but a game nevertheless.

When he was finished, he paid his bill, then got up and made his way down the block and across the street, traffic horrible at this hour. He was safe from retaliation to this point because of the measures he’d put into place more than a year ago. Necessary, he’d thought then, and still did. With Wager’s and Fabry’s deaths, the issue would soon be coming to a head. He could finally make his move.

A half dozen blocks from the taverna, he stopped across the narrow cobblestone lane to light a cigarette while he studied the two-story house he’d paid nearly a million euros for three years ago. The front was stuccoed in a pale pink, two iron balconies on the second floor — one for the sitting room and the other for the master bedroom, which jutted out over the street.

On March 25—that was the Greek independence holiday from Ottoman rule — each of those three years, he’d hung the Greek flag and bunting on the balconies as most of his neighbors did and went out into the streets for the festival and dancing.

He’d fit in very well, because that was what he was trained to do by the CIA. Blend in with the surroundings, mingle with the people as one of them. And the entire key to success, he’d learned very early on, was lying to yourself and believing it to such an extent that even under torture you would never reveal anything except your legend, the lies.

In the field, he’d played the part of an oil exploration engineer — studying enough textbooks and technical manuals to convince even another oil engineer. A UN aid worker, even issuing aid checks, and helping drill freshwater wells while spying on a military installation. Working as an independent arms dealer, a financier from London, a chef from San Francisco in Saudi Arabia to understand Arab cooking, and to introduce California fusion dishes to royalty while spying on them.

But his latest role, that of an independently wealthy dealer in rare books, artwork, and pieces of antiquity, had come about when all but the last panel on the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters had been decrypted, and the talk on the Internet hinted that the fourth was soon to fall.

He’d allowed himself to be caught red-handed with three tiny Greek sculptures: one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, desire, and pleasure; Hera, the queen of the heavens and goddess of marriage, women, childbirth, heirs, kings, and empires; and of Athena herself, the goddess of intelligence, skill, warfare, battle strategy, handicrafts, and wisdom.

After a brief hearing before a judge five months ago, during which he’d pleaded guilty, he’d been fined one hundred thousand euros or one year in prison. He refused to pay the fine.

The house was quiet, the same blinds in two of the upstairs windows half drawn, as he’d left them. No suspicious car with its left wheels up on the sidewalk, no telltale glitter from the lenses of binoculars, no radio antenna, no small satellite dish of the kind often used as a television receiver but could also be used for burst transmissions to and from a satellite — the same sort he and the others on Alpha Seven had used.

A taxi rattled past. Tossing his cigarette aside, he crossed the street and let himself inside using the code on the keypad. He was dressed in tight jeans and a plain red muscle T-shirt rather than the sport coats or suits he’d worn as an arts dealer.

In the past he’d hinted he was gay, and his neighbors — most of them married couples — left him alone. Coming here like this, as he had for the past four months, raised no suspicions. It was just one of his gay friends stopping by from time to time to check on things. He sometimes stayed for several hours, but he always left before eight in the evening.

The downstairs hall was deathly silent. He took the SIG Sauer pistol from the hall table, held his breath, and cocked an ear to listen for a sound. Any sound that would indicate someone was here.

No out-of-place scents were on the air; the slight layer of dust on the table and on the cap of the newel post and the stair rail had not been disturbed since the last time he’d been here. Nevertheless, he methodically checked the hall closet, reception area, guest bathroom, dining room, kitchen, and pantry, as well as the breakfast nook, which looked out over a pretty courtyard with a small fountain at the rear of the house.

Upstairs he checked the three bedrooms and attached bathrooms and closets before he went into the sitting room he had used as his office. Before he’d left for prison, he’d destroyed anything that tied him in any way to the CIA, but left everything else. Since the police raid and investigation, nothing else had been disturbed.

He checked the street from a window, but no one had shown up since he’d come inside, and he breathed a small sigh of relief.

Downstairs, he opened a good bottle of Valpolicella and took it out to the small iron table in the courtyard, where he sat listening not only to the sounds of the neighborhood but to his inner voices — the ones he’d very often had trouble understanding.

He’d been a man alone for most of his life. Growing up as a child in Detroit, mostly on the streets and later at the community college in Lansing, where he’d studied psychology, running out of money six months before graduation. Afterward he’d learned to count cards, and he went to Atlantic City, where he made twenty thousand before he had to run to avoid getting arrested or, at the very least, beaten up.

For the next years, he’d taught himself disguises — simple hair dyes, glasses, fake mustaches, clothing — and most of all: attitudes, mostly meek to blend in, or sometimes as an expert on some subject. He’d supported himself primarily by gambling, and a few con games involving illegal guns or drugs. And he’d never been caught, because he was good.

For two years he studied psychiatry, learning enough to understand even more about the manifestations of personalities, which made his job of blending in easier. And finally he’d applied to the CIA, using a fake degree in psychology and a line of bullshit that went right over the heads of interviewers and didn’t come to light until his deep background investigation.

They’d actually admired him. Told him he was perfect for what they had in mind. After all, they’d explained, the best man for the job as an NOC was a con artist.

“You talked your way through the door without any help; you’ll go a long way with ours,” the final recruiter told him.

All that time from the streets of Detroit, to Lansing and to casinos around the country, he’d been alone. But in the CIA he’d finally found a place where he could be respected and even liked for who and what he was.

A few minutes before eight, Coffin went back into the house, rinsed out and dried his wineglass, and, checking out the window, let himself out of the house. At the corner he took a bus to the metro station. From there he boarded a train for Piraeus — Athens’s port town twelve kilometers to the southwest.

He was due back in his cell at the Korydallos Prison Complex no later than ten. He was scheduled to interview a female prisoner first thing in the morning at the psych ward where he worked. She had delusions she was someone else, though she couldn’t say exactly who it was. It was a condition he knew very well.

NINE

McGarvey packed a few things, then flew up to Athens with Otto and Pete in the Aegean Airlines charters helicopter. The noise over the eighty-mile flight was too great to talk out loud without shouting, and he didn’t want to use the intercom and headphones. What he had to say wasn’t for the pilot’s ears. In any event, Otto had brought up the dossiers on all seven of the Alpha team, and he’d read them.

Nor was it for the ears of their taxi driver on the way to the Athens Hilton near the U.S. embassy. And it wasn’t until they’d checked in, three separate suites on the eighth floor that looked down across the city toward Syntagma Square, and agreed to meet at the Galaxy, the hotel’s rooftop bar, that he shared his plan.

“I’m betting Larry Coffin has a setup here in Athens. If we can find him and prove he went to the U.S. in the past few days or week, then he’ll become a likely suspect.”

“We need a motive,” Pete said, but Otto held her off.

“What if he’s here and never left?”

“The connection between Wager, Fabry, Carnes, and Coffin was Alpha Seven. And I’m guessing something happened in the mountains above Kirkuk that not only bound those guys together but is the reason three of them were killed.”

“You’re saying Carnes didn’t die in a traffic accident?” Pete asked.

“He died, but it probably wasn’t an accident. The question in my mind is why now? Why go through the trouble and risk of penetrating campus security to kill two of the team?”

“Doesn’t have to be a reason that’d make sense to us,” Pete said. “The killer is obviously a psychopath.”

“That’s too easy,” McGarvey said. “We need a trigger. Something recent.”

“What’s going on in the region that has a bearing?” Pete asked. “Iran’s nuclear program for one. Their ballistic missile tests for another ISIS.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that pat. I mean, I don’t think we’re looking for a threat to the U.S. It has to be something that benefited the team.”

“Not another treasure hunt.”

“No.”

“What then?” Pete asked. “You’re not making any sense, Mac. Anyway, we’re back to a motive, because if we can’t come up with that, then the killings, and the way they happened, make no sense.”

“First we need to find Larry Coffin,” McGarvey said.

“Maybe not so easy,” Otto said. “If this guy was as good an NOC as his reputation had him, he won’t be found if he doesn’t want to be found.”

“He’s either the killer or if he isn’t, he’s heard about the funerals, and he’ll want to know what’s happening.”

“You’re betting the latter.”

“Because it’s going to be the easiest,” McGarvey said.

“If you’re right, he’ll have to guess someone has made the Alpha Seven connection and will be coming after him,” Pete said. “Either the killer or someone from the Company.”

On the way up from Serifos, McGarvey had thought about the easiest, most direct approach. Something to dig the guy out of hiding. Coffin had been an NOC, which meant in order to survive as long as he had, not only in the field but in hiding from his own people, he had to maintain at least minimal contact with the Company. It didn’t have to be a personal contact. Someone on the inside but maybe an electronic contact.

“The CIA retirees’ newsletter is online these days, right?”

Otto nodded. He was grinning. “Why sneak in the back way when you can ring the front doorbell?” he said. “How do you want it to read?”

“Alpha Seven reunion. Give him your e-mail address.”

Pete got it. “He’d be a fool to answer.”

“Either that, or he thinks he’s smarter than we are,” Otto said.

“Or desperate,” Pete said.

“Smarter,” McGarvey said. “But curious.”

Otto posted the announcement online and took the CIA’s Gulfstream home. But Pete had refused to go with him. “At the very least, Coffin is a psycho himself — a very smart and successful psycho. I’m going to stick around to watch your back.”

“You’d better move in here with me so I can watch yours,” McGarvey said reluctantly. He didn’t want any sort of entanglement, especially not just now. Whoever this guy was who’d killed Wager and Fabry and then had chewed off their faces was crazy, but he was also a professional field officer, which made him doubly dangerous.

Pete moved her things over, then went downstairs and checked out of her room and into his. She was back for just a minute when someone knocked at the door, and McGarvey went to answer it.

An older man with a very thick shock of white hair who was dressed in a ratty old sports coat and slacks that hadn’t seen an iron in a month held out his Athens metro police badge. “Spiros Moshonas,” he said. “Mr. McGarvey, I presume?”

McGarvey let him in. “What can I do for you?”

Pete came to the bedroom door, and the detective smiled and nodded. “I followed you up,” he apologized. “The hotel won’t reveal anything about their guests, not even to the police.”

They had checked in under their real names — no reason at this point for them to have used work names and false papers.

“Actually, the NIS asked my department to send someone over to have a little chat,” Moshonas said. The NIS was the Greek intelligence service headquartered here in Athens.

“Good,” McGarvey said. “Maybe you can help us.” He got the tablet Otto had left with them and pulled up Coffin’s dossier, which included a half dozen photos, and showed them to the cop.

“You’re looking for this man?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask why?” Moshonas smiled. “What I mean to say is that it’s highly unusual for a former director of the CIA to come here so openly, and then apparently in pursuit of someone. Is this business for you?”

“We want to have a little chat with him,” McGarvey said.

“May I know what you wish to discuss with him?”

“He used to work for us, and something has come up we’d like to ask him about.”

“The service would want a more detailed answer.”

Pete came the rest of the way into the sitting room. “Do you know where this man is?”

“Of course. I was the one responsible for putting him there,” Moshonas said. “If you’ll give me something I can report, any little thing, I’ll take you to him.”

“He’s wanted for questioning in the murders of two CIA employees a few days ago.”

“That would be impossible,” Moshonas said. “Mr. Cooke was convicted of trafficking in stolen artifacts last year. At the moment he’s serving time at Korydallos prison in Piraeus.”

For just a moment McGarvey allowed himself to be surprised, until he realized what was wrong. Coffin would never have allowed himself to be caught doing something so simple. “Did he plead guilty?”

Moshonas’s eyes narrowed. “In fact, he did.”

“Was he offered a plea bargain, maybe if he named his sources?”

“He turned it down.”

“Maybe a fine instead of a prison sentence?”

“He turned that down as well, though he was living in a very expensive home, without a mortgage. He wanted to go to prison, which none of us understood.”

“Let’s go talk to him, and I’ll tell you what I can on the way down.”

“Would you like to see his house?”

“No,” McGarvey said. “There’d be nothing there of any interest to us.”

Moshonas nodded. “I’ll bring you to him, but I want to sit in on the interview, and there are a few questions I’ll have to ask you afterward.”

TEN

Coffin, wearing gray scrubs of the sort used by doctors in hospitals, walked down the corridor of the maximum-security section for men, his eyes lowered, a slight scowl on his face. No guard accompanied him; he was treated more or less as a special guest because of his generous contributions to the warden’s pension fund, and funds for the families of guards who were out of work because of injuries or illness. He was well liked here and practically had the run of the place.

He’d been convicted and sentenced as an antiquities thief, but he’d presented himself, complete with diplomas, as a clinical psychiatrist specializing in the mental disorders of habitual offenders — especially females, of which there were still a few in Korydallos.

The prison, which was infamous with Amnesty International for its horrible conditions, maintained a vastly out-of-date and underequipped hospital and mental clinic. Always short of money and personnel, the medical director was initially overjoyed to have Coffin’s help. And no one ever bothered to question his credentials, even though some of the staff had their suspicions.

At the end of the long corridor, he was admitted through a steel door into the medical section that divided the women’s cellblock from the rest of the complex.

“Good morning, Doc,” the guard said in Greek, a language Coffin had managed to become reasonably proficient in over the past couple of years.

“How is your child?”

“It was very close. Without your help, his appendix would have burst and he would have died.”

“Is he out of hospital?”

“Two days ago, and he’ll start back to school on Monday.”

“Glad to hear it,” Coffin said, patting the man on the arm.

Dr. Vasilis Lampros, the prison’s medical director, was waiting at Coffin’s office door when he came into the clinic. He was a stern, rough-looking old man who’d worked in Greek prisons all his medical career. He looked more like a rock cutter in a marble quarry than a doctor, and he trusted no one.

“Good afternoon, Doctor,” Coffin said pleasantly. He’d been expecting bad news for the past several days, but he wasn’t going to let his mood show here and now. The old bastard would jump on it and suspect the worst — whatever that might be in his mind.

“Your examination with Ms. Pappas will not be necessary,” Lampros said.

“Is she being transferred?”

“She hung herself last night. Told everyone at dinner you tried to rape her at your most recent session.”

Coffin laughed. “That’s ridiculous, and you know it. The woman was delusional, lived in a fantasy world her entire adult life. It’s a fact that in the three months I treated her, she was completely unable to distinguish truth from lies.”

“It’s a common condition here, as you well know.”

Something in the tone of the man’s voice was bothersome. “Is there a problem, Doctor?”

“You’re a prisoner.”

“Indeed I am. And you’re understaffed. Perhaps I could underwrite the salaries of a couple of nurses. They would help lighten your load.”

“Go back to your cell, Cooke,” Lampros said. “You’re no longer needed here.”

“As you wish,” Coffin said. He shrugged indifferently and turned to walk away.

“No one at Harvard has heard of you. There are no records.”

Coffin turned back. “That’s not surprising. May we go into your office so I can explain?”

“Nothing I want to hear.”

“But I think you will want to hear this,” Coffin said, smiling.

No one else was in the clinic evaluation room at the moment. Coffin took the doctor’s arm, and they went into the office and closed the door.

“You’re a fraud,” Lampros said.

“Of course I am,” Coffin said. He shoved the doctor back against the desk and clamped his fingers around the older man’s neck with enough pressure to the carotid artery to cut off blood flow to the man’s brain but not enough to cause a bruise.

Lampros tried to pull away, but Coffin was much stronger and trained in hand-to-hand combat. In a surprisingly short time, Lampros went unconscious and slumped to the floor.

Coffin followed him down, keeping pressure on the man’s neck until the heartbeat became thready and finally stopped.

He threw open the door. “Someone get me the crash cart!” he shouted. He went back to the doctor’s body, ripped open Lampros’s shirt, and pulled up his T-shirt. “Let’s go, let’s go!” he shouted, and started CPR.

One of the nurses came in with the defibrillator at the same time Coffin felt a very slight pulse, and he stopped the chest compressions until the machine came to full power.

One of the orderlies came in as Coffin applied the paddles to the doctor’s chest. “Clear!” he shouted. But nothing happened. The machine was broken and had been for some months.

He listened at the doctor’s chest and then felt the artery in the man’s neck. But the pulse had stopped. He sat back on his heels and shook his head. “It’s no use. Dr. Lampros is dead.”

One of the nurses said something Coffin didn’t catch.

He looked up.

“Dr. Lampros turned down a request for a new defibrillator,” the other nurse said. “He didn’t think the prisoners were worth it.”

Coffin got up. “Perhaps it’s best if I went back to my cell. But call the warden and let him know you tried to save his life, but his heart gave out.”

“Yes, sir,” the one nurse said.

Coffin walked out, though what he wanted was to kick everyone out of the office and look at the good doctor’s computer to erase whatever e-mails he’d received from Harvard. But he’d already come to the conclusion several days ago, especially since learning about the deaths of Wager and Fabry, that he would have to go very deep and very soon.

The wolves were gathering, and it was time to remove the scent from the pack.

Back in his cell, he powered up his tablet and launched a search program he’d designed with the CIA’s clandestine services as a major target. It was the program that had picked up the two deaths. This time a starred story keyed on the CIA retirees’ newsletter. A reunion of the Alpha Seven operators from Iraq was announced. But there were only five others, including him, plus one now.

He sat back in his chair. A call to arms, since two of their own had been murdered? A call to safety? Or a dragnet for the suspected killer?

Shutting down, he stuffed the tablet into his shoulder bag and phoned his substitute.

“I need you again for this evening.”

“I can be there by eight,” the American expat he’d paid more than one hundred thousand euros over the past several months promised.

“I need you now. How soon can you be here?”

“As it turns out, I’m in Piraeus. I can get to you in fifteen minutes. Another overnight?”

“Might be several days.”

“That place is a shit hole. It’ll cost extra.”

“Twenty-five thousand.”

“Thirty?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Coffin said, and he hung up. In addition to what he’d paid the warden, he’d also paid more than one hundred thousand euros to the prison’s administrator of the guard force, depositing the money into a personal bank account Coffin had arranged.

He changed into a pair of khaki slacks, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, loafers, a baseball cap, and sunglasses, and, shouldering his small bag, looked around his cell for the last time.

This place had been a safe house for him. The last place anyone would think to look for him. But as was almost always the case, good things came to an end. He was on the run now until he figured out who was coming after him and how serious the threat was.

If the last piece of the Kryptos puzzle — the one sculpture still unknown — had been solved, he would have to fight back if for no other reason than to save his life.

ELEVEN

A slightly built man in khaki slacks and white shirt was getting into a cab in front of the prison’s main gate, another similarly built man getting out, when McGarvey, riding shotgun, and Pete, sitting in the backseat, arrived in Detective Moshonas’s battered old Volvo station wagon.

They were met at the gate by a man introducing himself as Hristos Apostoulos, who was a representative of Nikos Hondros, the chief of prison security, who apologized that neither his boss nor Warden Kostas could have met them in person.

“We’ve had something of a tragic afternoon,” Apostoulos said. “Our chief medical officer had a heart attack in his office less than an hour ago, and his wife and sons are here already. Tragic.”

“In English please,” Moshonas said. “We’re here to interview one of your prisoners.”

“Yes, Livermore Cooke, a British citizen. We’ve set up a room where lawyers usually meet their clients.”

They headed on foot through the gate and then across to the main administration building, where they were searched, and Moshonas had to give up his weapon. McGarvey and Pete had left theirs at the hotel.

“It’s doubly difficult for us,” the aide said on the way down a long corridor.

“How’s that?” Moshonas asked.

“With Dr. Lampros gone, it leaves us very shorthanded. Except for Dr. Cooke, who’s been a real help, we’d have to send our serious cases up to Athens.”

“I didn’t know he was a medical doctor,” McGarvey said.

The aide gave him a sharp look. “A psychiatrist, but he’s had medical training. A great man. We’ll miss him when he’s served his time.”

“Because of his medical help?”

“Yes, and he’s a generous man.”

The prison was noisy, someone was shouting in one of the cellblocks, and the place stank badly of human waste and of diesel fumes. But they encountered no one. Except for the noise and odors, the prison could have been deserted.

Moshonas asked about it.

“We’re in temporary lockdown.”

“Because of your doctor?”

“No, one of our inmates hung herself last night, but there may be some evidence that she was murdered.” They came to the interview room, and the aide gave them a hard look. “This is a placed filled with very bad people. And until now, Dr. Cooke’s presence has had an almost calming effect. Don’t ask me how, but the past five months have been easy for us.”

He opened the door for them. The room was small and contained only a table and two chairs.

“Unless you need my presence, I have other duties to attend to. I’ll have Dr. Cooke sent over.”

“Dr. Cooke and a guard?” Moshonas asked.

The aide smiled slightly. “He has respect here. There’s no need for him to walk through the prison with protection.”

Moshonas started to say something, but McGarvey interrupted.

“That’s good to know. Thanks.”

The aide turned to leave.

“Who was with your medical director when he had his heart attack?”

“Dr. Cooke. In fact, he performed CPR, but it was too late.”

“They were friends?”

“Of course. As I said, Dr. Cooke is very well respected.”

“What was that all about?” Pete asked when the aide was gone.

“We’re going to find out when Coffin, or whoever is here serving time for him, walks through the door,” McGarvey told them. He’d had a feeling when Moshonas explained about Coffin’s sentencing that the man would never have let himself be sent to a place like this unless he needed to disappear for some reason. Nor could a man of Coffin’s training be kept under lock and key.

“You think he has escaped?” Moshonas asked.

“I have a feeling he comes and goes anywhere he pleases, including out the front door.”

“Then why hasn’t he just disappeared?”

“I don’t think he’s needed to do it until just now.”

“He killed the medical director,” Pete said.

“I think it’s a good bet,” McGarvey said. “Probably because they found out he wasn’t a psychiatrist.”

“Who is this guy?” Moshonas asked.

“He was a deep-cover spy for the CIA. Part of a team in Iraq several years ago. Seven operators, two of whom were murdered recently. I have a feeling he knew it was going to happen, and maybe even who would do it, so he committed a crime and got himself sent here, where he figured he’d be safe for at least a year.”

“But his story started to unravel,” Pete said.

“If his real identity got out, this place wouldn’t be safe for him. It’d be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

“You think he’s gone?” Moshonas asked. “Then what are we doing here?”

“I want to see who comes through that door.”

“The security officer to admit that Cooke has somehow escaped?”

“Maybe not,” McGarvey said.

“You’re not making sense.”

“I think Cooke walked out the door from time to time to test the waters, or maybe just to have a nice dinner and a couple of drinks somewhere. I don’t know if I could stay here very long without a break.”

“He would have been reported missing.”

“Not if he hired a substitute.”

“Mother of God,” Moshonas said. “The guards would have to be in on it.”

“Apostoulos said Cooke was generous.”

A slender man dressed in gray scrubs came to the door. “You wanted to speak to me?”

“Dr. Cooke?” McGarvey asked.

The substitute nodded. “Yes?”

“Come in and sit down. I’d like to ask you a couple of things.”

The substitute did as he was told, but Pete took the chair across from him.

She smiled. “Are you being treated well here?”

“As well as can be expected in a place like this.”

“How did he first contact you?” she asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you do. Your name is not Cooke, but then neither is it the real name of the man who paid you to stand in for him from time to time. But none of that is of any real interest to me. I merely want to know how he first contracted you? How much he paid? What were the arrangements? And how was it that the guards allowed this to go on?”

The substitute said nothing.

“Detective, since this guy is a stand-in, could he be charged as an accessory to the murder of the medical director here?”

“Yes,” Moshonas said.

She smiled again. “In that case, you would come here for real, and most likely for a very long time.”

“Wait a minute,” the substitute blurted. “I don’t know anything about a murder. You can’t pin something like that on me.”

“The man who hired you probably killed the medical director this afternoon, and is gone, leaving you holding the bag. He won’t be coming back. And now we need your help to find him. It’s the only fair deal you’re going to get today.”

“Shit.”

“Help us find him, and you’ll walk out of here a free man. And even get to keep the money he’s already paid you.”

“I have something to say about that,” Moshonas said.

“No,” McGarvey told him. “Trust me: if we can get to Coffin, you’ll have your murderer.”

“You’re an American?” the substitute asked.

“We’re CIA, and so was the man who hired you,” Pete said. “Help us, and we’ll help you.”

The substitute had no way out, and it was obvious he knew it.

Pete took a notebook and pen out of her purse and laid them on the table. “Dates and places you met. Money he’s already paid you, and the bank and account number it was paid into, unless it was cash.”

“In an account he set up for me.”

“We’re not interested in the money — only the account number. We have someone who can trace it back to him.”

“Christ, he said he’d kill me if something went wrong.”

“We’ll see that it doesn’t,” Pete said. “The bank?”

“Piraeus Bank.”

“Do you live in Piraeus?”

The substitute nodded. “I think it’s why he picked me, because I was so close to the prison.”

“The account number,” Pete said, “and then we’ll see about getting you out of here.”

“It’s electronic,” the substitute said. He told her the bank’s e-mail address, then his online account name and password. “I don’t want to spend another night here,” he said.

“You’re coming with us,” McGarvey said. “But if you’ve lied to us, we’ll turn you over to the Greek cops, and you’ll end up back here” He turned to Moshonas. “Can you get him out of here?”

“Guaranteed.”

TWELVE

Coffin sat in the rooftop garden of the Alkistis Hotel in Athens’s market section, nursing a beer and considering his options, which had narrowed considerably. It was early evening, and this section of the city, bustling during the day, was all but deserted now. The hotel was one of the cheapest in the entire metro and reasonably safe for the moment. It was off-season, and no one else was on the roof with him. Nor had he seen anyone except for the clerk in the lobby when he’d checked in.

It had been Kirk McGarvey at the prison. He’d caught a glimpse of the bastard as the taxi was pulling away, and it was one of the biggest shocks of his life. He’d been with some old guy and a broad, but the point was, he’d been looking at the taxi. The son of a bitch knew where to show up, as impossible as it seemed.

Coffin had actually met the man once, a number of years ago in Afghanistan, when a meeting had been arranged with bin Laden. It was impossible for McGarvey to have remembered him, because he was just one of a group in the middle of a deployment into the Kandahar region, and they didn’t speak.

Yet McGarvey was here.

He’d had the cabby drop him off a few blocks from his house, and went the rest of the way on foot, very careful with his tradecraft. McGarvey knew about the prison; he almost certainly knew about the house.

But no one had been there. No cars, no one lingering at the corner, no one on the roofs across the street or in any of the windows. At least nothing he could see was out of the ordinary. But there could have been a drone circling overhead, quiet and completely out of sight. Or perhaps McGarvey had contacted the NIS and they had set up an electronic surveillance operation.

McGarvey himself wasn’t a threat to his life, but by coming this far, the former DCI could very well have led the only man Coffin feared to him. And the woman with him was a mystery, as was the older man. McGarvey’s rep was as a loner.

Coffin had gone around the back and gotten into his house through a rear door. He wasn’t armed, but that really didn’t matter. If it came to a fight, he could take care of himself with his bare hands. Everyone in Alpha Seven, plus their control man who’d shown up only at the last moment with surprising new orders, had the background and training to do so. It was one of the mission’s requirements.

No one had been there, and he was in and out in less than ten minutes with a small bag, a few items of clothing and toiletries, and a 9-mm SIG, a suppressor, two magazines, and a box of twenty-five bullets he had hung in a satchel on a hook in the basement wine cellar. The cops hadn’t been very thorough in their search. He’d been an art thief not a killer, and they had the evidence he’d led them to. Show them what they wanted to see, and hide everything else right under their noses.

He’d walked a few blocks away before he’d taken a cab out to the airport, and from there, twenty minutes later, a cab into the city, and a third to this hotel.

The question now was what to do with the situation that had landed in his lap. Run, or stay and fight back? He didn’t want to go up against McGarvey, but he had to consider it as one of his options. The other would be going to him for help.

For the first time in his professional life, Coffin didn’t know what to do. He had plenty of money stashed under different names in a half dozen banks around the world, so he could run and live in reasonable comfort just about anywhere. Plastic surgery, new papers. The trouble was, he’d eventually be tracked down. Either by McGarvey or the other one. A man whose real name none of them had ever known.

Assuming Wager and Fabry had been murdered, the others would probably be next, and the only reason he could think why was because one of them had cracked the last puzzle. It was the one thing he’d feared from the beginning. The main reason he had run.

He finished his beer, got his iPad from his room, and walked up toward the Acropolis. The Parthenon, the museum, and all the grounds were closed at this hour, the gates locked, guards and closed-circuit television cameras everywhere. But tourists still flocked to the place, because even from outside the fence, they could get great photographs.

A table at a sidewalk café was open, and he sat down and ordered an espresso. When it came, he powered up his tablet and went online. For just a moment he hesitated, but then went to the Alpha Seven reunion address in the newsletter and logged on with one of his old Internet names: G. Washington.

His only real option, he decided, was finesse.

When the site came up he wrote: When? Where? Why?

It took nearly two minutes for the reply to come. You’re a difficult man to find, Mr. C.

Who wants to find me?

The man getting out of the taxi behind you this afternoon.

I’m a fugitive. Is that why he came?

You were a suspect until this afternoon.

Then what does he want?

Answers.

Coffin looked up as a police car cruised slowly past. The cop behind the wheel glanced over indifferently for just an instant, but he didn’t linger.

What’s the question?

Why the murders? Why the two from Alpha Seven?

This is a hackable connection, Coffin wrote back, and he was about to power down and get away when the reply came.

No, it’s not.

Still Coffin hesitated, his finger on the power off button.

Backscatter encryption in both directions.

Who are you?

Otto Rencke. I’m in my third-floor office at the OHB. You may have heard of me, Mr. Coffin; we’ve heard of you. We know you are probably still in Athens, and we know that for the past five months, you have been in hiding. We would like to know why.

The same police car cruised past, and Coffin was about to get up and find the back door, but the cop never looked over.

Will the police be looking for me?

Do you think the killer will come after you?

It’s possible, but it depends on a set of circumstances.

What circumstances?

The translation of the last Kryptos tablet, Coffin wrote.

Could be something new. It needs to be found and recognized for what it is. Evidently, it hasn’t been yet.

Someone must think so.

Yes.

An attractive woman came around the corner and stopped at his table. “May I join you, Mr. Coffin?” she said.

Her name is Pete Boylan, the message appeared on his screen. She is a CIA case officer and came with Kirk McGarvey to find you. Help us, and we’ll help you.

Coffin’s iPad powered down by itself, and he managed a smile. Like McGarvey, Otto Rencke was a legend in the CIA. A wizard. “Would you like a coffee?”

She sat down. “Actually, Mr. McGarvey would like to talk to you.”

“Where?”

“We have a safe house not far from here.”

“An NIS safe house?”

“Yes, they’re cooperating.”

“I’m armed.”

“Yes, we know this.”

“Am I wanted by the police?”

Pete laughed softly. “On a number of counts, the least of which is escaping from prison.”

“The doctor had a heart attack. I was trying to save his life. Let’s just get that off the table before I agree to anything.”

“Most likely you killed him, but the police aren’t all that concerned. Dr. Lampros was not a doctor; in fact, he himself was a murderer. Killed a female prisoner last night and made it look like she hung herself. Apparently, she wasn’t his first.”

THIRTEEN

Coffin followed Pete around the corner, where the same old man who’d been with her and McGarvey outside the prison this afternoon was waiting by a battered Volvo station wagon that was painted green.

“You took a pistol from your house, and when we searched your hotel room a few minutes ago, it wasn’t there,” Moshonas said. “Give it to me, Mr. Coffin.”

“I think he’ll feel safer for the moment with it, Detective,” Pete said.

“Actually, it’s Special Agent Moshonas. I work for the NIS.”

“Yes, we know. But I don’t think Mr. Coffin will shoot us.”

“He murdered Dr. Lampros.”

“Almost certainly, but we’ve come here to save Mr. Coffin’s life. And I think he understands that in order for us to do our job, he needs to do his. One hand washes the other.”

Moshonas muttered something but then got in behind the wheel, Pete in front and Coffin in the back, and they headed away from the Acropolis and southwest for the short drive out of the city to the commercial waterfront at Piraeus.

McGarvey had sent Pete to soften the blow, and Moshonas for his authority, rather than approach Coffin himself. “He’ll be on a hair trigger. If I show up, he might want to shoot first and listen later.”

And it had worked, along with allowing him to keep his weapon. But Pete realized she resented Mac’s attitude just a little, even though he was right. If Coffin had pulled his weapon, she was sure she would have been able to handle herself.

She turned and looked back at him. “You could have shot me and simply walked away. Why not?”

“Wouldn’t have been very sporting. In any event, I’m sure you would have responded in kind, and both of us would be on our way to the hospital or the morgue.”

“So, what’s the point? Why’d you set yourself up for the fall? Who’d you think was coming after you? Not us. Your record was clean when you walked away from the Company.”

“It’s more complicated than that, as Walt and Istvan found out.”

Pete understood. “Almost everything usually is.”

“What about the other Alpha Seven operators? Are they okay? Have you managed to make contact?”

“You were our first. We’re still working on the others.”

“Rencke is?”

“Yes. Wager and Fabry were the only ones left still working for us.”

“They’re dead now. So might the others be.”

“We found you,” Pete said, and faced forward as the lights around the harbor came into view. Her skin crawled, having an armed man — especially one of Coffin’s character — sitting behind her.

She’d only ever met a few NOCs in her career, and all of them had been singularly egotistical liars, cheats, and con men — she’d not met a woman NOC field officer. But those traits were the prime requirements for the job of going into badland to spy and not get caught. They had to screw over people on a regular basis in order to fulfill their assignments.

Mac had told her about the one couple who’d moved in next door to an Egyptian major who worked in logistics and supply for the air force. The man was married and had four children, and as a major he was barely making ends meet.

The U.S. wanted to know what aircraft spare parts were most in demand, so Boeing and Northrop and other U.S. suppliers would not only have a leg up in their business dealings with the Egyptians, but so Washington would have a better handle on the actual workload the air force was under.

It started easy. The NOC and his wife, who had two children of their own, invited the major and his family over for an old-fashioned American backyard barbecue, complete with beer and tapes of a couple of Packers football games.

A couple of weeks later the NOC’s oldest son, who was ten, taught the major’s son, who was eight years old, how to ride his bike. The lessons went on for a week, until the major’s son demanded a bike like their neighbor’s boy had.

It was an impossible demand on a major’s pay, so the NOC bought a bike from the BX at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, had it shipped to Cairo. And within two days the major’s son was riding around the neighborhood.

The major had been unable to resist the pressure from his son and his wife to allow the boy to keep the bike, and that had been the beginning of his conversion to a spy for the U.S. against his own government.

The NOC had targeted the major, figured out his weakness, and had homed in on it. Mission accomplished. Two years later, after the NOC and his family transferred out, the major came under suspicion so he killed his wife and children and then put the pistol into his own mouth and pulled the trigger. It was an easier way out for him than military prison.

“Thing is,” McGarvey had told Pete, “we never really needed the information. The parts were all made in the U.S. and the suppliers had all those records.”

The NIS safe house was aboard a passenger ferry that had blown its engine three months ago and was on chocks on dry land, waiting for a replacement. From the outside, the 110-foot boat was a rusting wreck; on the inside, it wasn’t a lot better, though everything aboard worked, including the galley. No crew was assigned at the moment, so it was just Moshonas, Pete, and Coffin who came aboard.

McGarvey was waiting for them in what had been the crew’s mess belowdecks, just forward of the engine room. Both portholes were open, but still the room was stuffy and smelled of diesel oil.

Eight people could sit around the table, and when Coffin came in, he pulled up short when he spotted the Walther PPK in front of where Mac was sitting.

“I’m glad you could join us without trouble,” McGarvey said. “Give your weapon to Ms. Boylan, please.”

Coffin stepped back a pace, but Pete and Moshonas were right there. Pete reached inside Coffin’s jacket and took the SIG.

“Just so there’re no mistakes,” McGarvey said. “Sit down.”

Coffin did as he was told. Pete sat cross-legged on a chair across the room, her arms draped over the back of it, while Moshonas leaned up against the door.

The mess was functional, but little more than that.

Pete had no idea what was coming next, except that Coffin seemed to be in an agreeable mood. But she couldn’t tell if he was for real, or if he was simply working the situation like any good NOC was trained to do. And by all accounts he was one of the best.

FOURTEEN

“The Alpha Seven operation was a long time ago,” McGarvey said. “Where’s the bridge to Wager’s and Fabry’s deaths and you running to ground?”

“It’s been a long day, and I would like something to drink,” Coffin said. He sat back and crossed his legs. “A glass of wine?”

“I’ll get it,” Pete said, and started to get up, but McGarvey waved her back.

“Maybe later, but for now I want Mr. Coffin to take us through the scenario. I want to know what the hell is happening.”

“How were they killed?” Coffin asked.

“Their carotid arteries were severed, and they bled to death.”

“Any DNA evidence at the crime scenes?”

“None that match any CIA employee,” McGarvey said.

“I thought not,” Coffin said. “What weapon did the killer use? A knife? A gunshot to the side of the neck? A piece of broken glass?”

“Teeth.”

“Animal or human?”

“Human.”

Coffin looked away for a moment. “Were their faces destroyed? Lips chewed off, noses, eyebrows?”

“You know who it is?” McGarvey asked.

“I think so. But you’ll need to hear the entire story, or you wouldn’t understand the motive.”

“I want his name.”

“I don’t know it. None of us ever did. In addition to the seven of us on the team in Iraq, our control officer showed up out of the blue, and I mean, literally out of the blue. He parachuted down on our position above Kirkuk in the middle of the night. None of us heard the aircraft that brought him across the border either from Turkey or maybe Syria, which means he had to have made a HALO jump — high altitude, above twenty-five thousand feet, and free-falling down to a thousand feet or so to make the low opening.”

The team had been assembled in Saudi Arabia for their initial briefing before being staged at Frankfurt and then moved to their training site in the mountains above Munich. That was in the winter of 1999, and when the mission had been fully explained, they’d all gotten a laugh out of the logic — send a team to be trained in midwinter for a mission that might not develop until the summer in a hostile country where temperatures could soar to well above 110.

But the point of learning the op in Germany was to do so in complete secrecy, right under the noses of the BND — Germany’s intelligence service, whose headquarters at the time were still at Pullach, just outside of Munich.

“If you get caught up here, if even a hint of our presence becomes known, the mission is a wash,” their chief instructor had told them.

Which was the entire point. They were hidden in the Bavarian Alps, with orders to spy on the BND’s headquarters. They were to slip into town at night, carry out their surveillance operations, and then disappear back into the mountains before daybreak.

“Thing is, they picked the seven of us because no one spoke even a smattering of German,” Coffin said.

“You needed to complete an op without being able to talk yourself out of a difficult spot?” Pete asked.

Coffin looked at her. “Being able to blend in was why we were hired in the first place. I was a chameleon. Give me a few days with a couple of textbooks or instruction manuals, and I could play the part of just about anybody. Airline pilot, surgeon, plumber.”

“But you had to be able to speak the language,” Pete said. “The mission was Iraq. Why didn’t the Company send someone who spoke Arabic or Kurdish?”

“Not many of them around in those days,” Coffin said.

“The German mission evidently was a success.”

“Yes. The BND never knew we were there. Some of us even used to go into town for a couple of beers and some wurst. Played the part of tourists.”

“Your instructors didn’t jump you over it?”

Coffin laughed. “They were sending us to Iraq. If we were expected to get past the BND guys, which we did, and then the Mukhabarat operators, slipping past our own people was easy.”

“Anyway, it was fun,” Pete suggested.

“None of it was ever fun — interesting and all that, but not fun. We were going into badland, and there’re never any guarantees.”

“You think the killer was your control officer?” McGarvey asked.

“I never said that. The killer could be anyone of the team still alive.”

“Including you?”

“You can’t believe how easy it was to walk out of Korydallos. Greece is in financial meltdown. A few euros here and there do wonders.”

“Then why did you walk for good today?”

“Dr. Lampros found out I wasn’t a real shrink. I’m next on the list, and whoever is killing Alpha Seven had me in their sights.”

Pete picked up on it. “Their sights?” she asked.

“One of Alpha Seven was a woman, if you want to call her that.”

McGarvey brought up the list on his iPad. Otto had come up with it from some old paper file buried in archives. Almost nothing had been written down except names, DOBs, and what evidently were faked medical data, including blood types.

“No woman on the list.”

“Alex Unroth, from Philly or someplace out east. None of us were ever sure about one another. She was a good-looking girl, five years younger than the rest of us. She’d obviously been picked for the team because of her looks, though she turned out to be seriously tough. The rag heads totally lose their cool when a Western woman bats her eyelashes at them. She was one of our secret weapons.”

“What else?” McGarvey asked.

Coffin hesitated. “I think she was the daughter of someone important. The way she acted, as if she were privileged, as if she were owed something. The way she talked. What she expected from us. She wasn’t our control officer, but half the time she moved as if she were. And even our actual control officer deferred to her as if she were some VIP.”

“Was she sleeping with him?”

Coffin laughed. “No, but she was having sex with him. All of us did at one point or another.”

“Could she be the killer?” Pete asked. “Is she capable of something like that? Wager and Fabry were trained field officers. They couldn’t have been all that easy to take down.”

“She could have taken them down on one of their good days.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know where Walt and Istvan had gotten themselves to until I read about their deaths. All I did know was someone would be coming for me sooner or later.”

“Why?” McGarvey asked. He wanted not to believe Coffin, and yet the man’s story had the ring of desperation — which was often one of truth.

“The cache in the mountains.”

“Containing what?” McGarvey asked.

Coffin took a long time to say nothing, and McGarvey got the distinct impression that the man was truly afraid. Not of some killer coming for him, but of something else. Something even more important than a threat to his life.

FIFTEEN

“The Second Gulf War started on the twentieth of March oh three,” Coffin said. “By then we’d been inside Iraq for three months, looking for WMDs, which we never really found. At least not the ones we’d been told to look for.”

“What did you find?” McGarvey asked.

“Not what we were supposed to find.”

Moshonas pushed away from the wall. “That’s enough. This piece of shit will tell you only what he thinks you want to hear. He murdered a man in prison, and combined with his art theft conviction, he’s going back.”

“This is a matter for the CIA,” Pete said. “We have the murders of two innocent men we have to figure out.”

“The CIA has no jurisdiction in Greece.”

“Take care, Special Agent,” Coffin said, his voice quiet, but with conviction. “The NIS might not want to get involved.”

Moshonas started to object, but McGarvey held him off. “What did you people find in the mountains? What was in the cache?”

“I need to tell you the circumstances about the other operators, because you’re going to need that information if you’re going to do something about the situation.”

“That still exists after ten plus years?” Moshonas asked.

“Yes,” Coffin said, and the way in which he said it, quietly, confidently, struck McGarvey as ominous.

“Let’s start with Joseph Carnes right here in Athens,” McGarvey suggested. “He was the first to die.”

A light came into Coffin’s eyes. “You think I killed him. It’s why you came here. That’s the connection you were looking for. Well, you’re wrong. I never even knew he was here until I saw the squib in the paper about him being killed. They even had his real name, which meant he wasn’t undercover.”

“Was there a reason for you — and not him — to be hiding under an assumed identity?”

“You’re damn right I was after Iraq. Check the Company’s records. Every one of Alpha Seven quit the Company.”

“Except for Wager and Fabry,” Pete said.

“Yeah, and even hiding out in a place they figured was secure didn’t help them in the end.”

“Nor did it help you hiding in Korydallos,” McGarvey said. “Are you sure it was Carnes? Did you go to the morgue and identify the body?”

“Are you kidding? Soon as he was killed, I came up with my little bit of fiction. I figured if I dropped out of circulation for a year, whoever it was might try somewhere else. Which they did. Joseph just made a dumb mistake, staying out in the open like that. He must have figured the threat was over and done with. But he was wrong.”

“But now you’re out. Maybe we should just cut you loose and see what happens.”

“Carnes was the weakest link, and the oldest. We celebrated his thirtieth birthday in Munich a few days before we shipped out to our staging spot in Turkey, a place called Van, which was a hundred and fifty klicks from the Iraqi border. There was an airport there. Anyway, we all had too much to drink at the party, Joseph the most. He passed out, and we had to carry him back to our position. The instructors were pissed, but by that time it would have been impossible to replace anyone. We’d become a pretty good team.”

“Letting off some steam isn’t such a terrible thing before going into badland,” Pete said. “Was there more?”

“He got drunk just about every night. We never found out where he got the stuff, but he was a damned good operator. One minute he was standing right next to you, and if you happened to turn away for just a second, he was gone. Never gave an explanation. Alex started calling him the Magician, and it stuck.”

“You were the Chameleon, and Carnes was the Magician. What about the others? How about the woman?”

“We called her the Working Lady.”

“She didn’t mind?”

“None of us did. Walter was MP — Mister Ponderous. Istvan was the Refugee. Roy Schermerhorn was the Kraut, of course, and Tom Knight was the last to get his handle.”

“Which was?”

“Don Quixote, because the day after we settled down in country, he wanted to go work, blowing up shit. There were big oil fields nearby, and he figured we could go down there and raise some hell.”

“You were supposed to be looking for WMDs.”

“Everybody knew they weren’t there, just like everybody knew the war was coming. Tom wanted to pave the way. Saddam’s military wouldn’t be very effective if they ran out of gas.”

“But you didn’t let him go.”

“Of course not. Alex said he was just trying to tilt at windmills, which was how we came up with his handle. And he liked his more than the rest of us liked ours.”

“What did you do?”

“Tracked the movements of military convoys, mostly. There was a lot of activity around Kirkuk.”

“We were putting up Keyhole satellites as early as seventy-six,” Pete said. “I expect they could have done a better job monitoring the military’s goings-on up there.”

“The Iraqis were smarter than that. They hid their shit right out in the open — up next to where waste gas was burning day and night. Infrared equipment was useless from overhead, but from ground level we didn’t have that problem.”

“So you did go down to the oil fields.”

“Yes, but not to blow up anything, just to look,” Coffin said.

“They must have had security patrols,” McGarvey said.

“They were mostly easy to avoid.”

“Mostly?”

“There were a couple of close calls.”

“What’d you do with the bodies?”

“Buried them in the foothills,” Coffin said. “Anyway, we were just going through the motions out there. Like I said, there were no WMDs, and everyone with half a brain at Langley knew it.”

McGarvey suddenly got it, or at least part of what Coffin was leading up to. “You had to report by radio every day?”

“Every twenty-four-hour period on a rotating schedule. Never the same time of day or night. Encrypted burst transmissions to one of our spy birds in geosync orbit about thirty degrees above the horizon.”

“Alpha Seven never found anything, but you didn’t report it that way.”

“Of course not,” Coffin said. “When the war wound down, where do you think the coalition force inspectors went looking?”

“The caches Alpha Seven found and marked,” McGarvey said. “All of it fiction.”

Coffin looked over his shoulder at Pete, almost as if he were appealing to her for an understanding he wasn’t getting from McGarvey. “Pretty much,” he said. “May I have that glass of wine now?”

Pete went to the galley in the adjacent compartment and came back a minute later with a glass of red wine for Coffin, who sipped at it delicately and then smiled. “We should have stopped at my place first. I have a decent cellar.”

“Pretty much…?” McGarvey prompted.

“We got out shortly after the shooting began, but they wanted to hold us, possibly for our testimony on camera on the Hill. We got out the same way we came in: airlifted across the border into Turkey and from there Incirlik, then Ramstein and home, straight to Camp Peary, where we were debriefed.”

“No weapons of mass destruction were ever found,” Pete said.

“We were just another mission that had gotten things wrong.”

“Not all your reports to headquarters were fiction. You said pretty much. Take me back to Iraq before the war began,” McGarvey said.

SIXTEEN

It had begun to rain. They could hear the heavy drops hitting the decks, and the light from the partially open hatches had darkened, casting a pall over the mess. Pete got up to switch on a light, but McGarvey gestured her off. The gloom fit his mood just now, because he expected a line of bullshit from the former NOC, who was, after all, probably fighting for his life in the only way he knew how — the big lie, the big scam, the legerdemain, misdirection.

“The one and only report we transmitted that was an actual fact, they ignored,” Coffin said. “Worse than that, I learned later they’d buried it. And all things considered, I suppose it was the right thing to do at the time.”

“How’d you find out?” McGarvey asked. “I thought you and the others walked away?”

“We did, except for Walt and Istvan. Walt told me about it, and Istvan confirmed it. They were worried out of their wits. It was the last lifeline they were going to throw me. From that point I was on my own. Just like the others.”

“Lifeline?” Pete asked.

“A bit of solid information I could use if the need ever arose. But only if it was important.”

“Important enough to die for?” McGarvey asked. “Like now?”

Coffin nodded.

“Did the others also know this dark secret had been buried?”

“I think so.”

“Is it why Wager and Fabry were murdered? And why you went deep?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Did you ever get the feeling someone was coming after you?”

“Not until a couple of days ago,” Coffin said. “Could I get a little more wine?”

Pete got up and took his glass. “What I don’t get is why didn’t you go public.”

“You have to be kidding. My life was on the line as it was — still is — and if I’d blown the whistle, someone from the Company would have come after me.”

“We don’t assassinate our own people,” Pete said, a very hard edge to her voice.

“Not unless there’s a valid reason for it.”

She looked at him for a moment then went to fetch more wine.

“Do you think your control officer — the guy who parachuted in — is the killer?” McGarvey asked.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” Coffin said.

“It’s only been a couple of days since the murders in the CIA.”

“I knew someone would be coming for us.”

“Who?”

“Either our control officer or Alex. They were a thing the moment he dropped into our camp. It’s like they’d known each other all their lives.”

“His name?”

Coffin smiled. “We came to think of him as the Avenging Angel. The first time he came down to the oil fields with us, he took out two roustabouts — I don’t even think they were Iraqis. It didn’t matter to him. The next time, Alex came with us — it was a first for her — and she was just as good and ruthless as he was. They made a hell of a pair.”

“Avenging Angel — why that name?” Pete asked, coming back with the wine.

“The war was close, he told us, so it didn’t matter how many bodies were stacked up in plain sight. He wanted the Mukhabarat to know someone was looking down on them and taking revenge for all their sins.”

“They didn’t send someone up to search for your guys?”

“They did for a couple of days, but when all hell began to break loose, they took off — some of them to the front but a lot of them across the border into the already big refugee camps in Turkey and Syria.”

“You didn’t call this guy by name?”

“George.”

“American?” Pete asked.

Coffin shrugged. “Brooklyn maybe. An East Coast Jew. At least that’s what I thought at the time.”

“But you know better now,” McGarvey said, careful to keep his voice neutral. He’d heard stories from Otto and others inside the Company, especially when he’d served briefly as the DCI, about hidden caches of money or heroin — besides the WMDs — in Iraq. But they were rumors. Popular myths. Internet “truths” that the conspiracy nuts loved to hash out.

“Damned right. It didn’t make sense to me then. But I saw it with my own eyes, and gradually began to realize what had happened and why. I just didn’t think they’d kill to keep it a secret. And especially not the way Walt and Istvan were done. But I understand now.”

“We’re listening,” McGarvey said.

“The thing is, I don’t think there’s a damned thing you can do about it. You get involved, and you’re a dead man walking.”

“We’re already involved,” Pete said. “So tell us this big secret of yours.”

“Shit,” Coffin said. He was in distress. It had come to him slowly during the interview, and now he had a crazy look in his eyes, almost as if he were a wild animal that had been cornered. But the odds were so overwhelming, he didn’t know how to fight back.

“Quit the bullshit,” Moshonas said. “If you have something to say, get on with it, or I’ll take you in this minute. And I won’t give a damn if I have to shoot when you try to escape.”

“You have to understand that it’s more than what’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk.”

“An area where the inspectors never searched,” Pete said.

Coffin nodded.

“So it’s still there — whatever the it is.”

Again Coffin nodded. “And it’ll never be found unless you have the coordinates.”

“Which you have.”

“All of us did.”

“Now it’s only Knight, Schermerhorn, and the woman.”

“Plus our control officer.”

“What’d he say at your debriefing when you got back to the States?”

“He never came back with us. He got as far as Ramstein, but when we boarded the plane to come home, he wasn’t aboard.”

“Nobody ever mentioned him?” Pete asked.

“No.”

“Not you or the others?” McGarvey asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because of what he told us about Kryptos. The solution to number four, he told us, would lead to what he called the ‘empirical necessity.’”

Everyone in the mess knew about the encrypted sculpture in the courtyard outside the New Headquarters Building. Every day employees eating in the cafeteria looked at it, though most never really saw it.

“Only the first three panels have been decrypted so far,” Pete said. “They’re mostly nonsense.”

“Except two talks about something buried in an unknown location,” McGarvey said. “Otto mentioned it to me once.”

“Did he solve four?” Coffin asked.

“Two has the latitude and longitude of the burial site, which, as I remember, was a couple of hundred feet or less southwest of the sculpture.”

“That’s wrong,” Coffin said.

“And three is just a paraphrase of what the archeologist Howard Carter supposedly said when he looked inside the tomb of King Tut for the first time.”

“Which leaves four. Maybe you should have Mr. Rencke try his hand at translating it before someone else is killed.”

“You’re saying whatever’s on panel four makes sense of what’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk.”

“That’s what George told us in the end, when he swore us to secrecy. ‘The truth will come out sooner or later,’ he said. ‘When it does you’ll understand. The entire world will understand the empirical necessity.’”

“So what’s buried up there?” Pete asked.

Coffin got up and handed his empty glass to her. “Another one, please,” he said. He moved around the table to one of the open portholes.

“Sit down,” McGarvey said.

“I need some air,” Coffin said, looking back. “The rain smells good.”

“Sit down, God damn it.”

Coffin was suddenly flung forward off his feet, a small red hole in the back of his head and his entire face exploding in a spray of blood, bones, and brain matter.

SEVENTEEN

Thomas Knight arrived at the CIA’s ground-maintenance building just after six thirty in the morning. He was short, something under five ten, with a stocky build that had turned a little soft over the years. His eyes were wide and deep blue — his best feature, his wife, Stephanie, told him. The worst, the back of his head, where a bald spot was growing bigger every year.

This was his favorite time of the day, just before dawn, when everything was cool and peaceful. The campus always looked the prettiest to him at this hour. The lights of the OHB in the distance — American’s bastion against the real world — safe and secure, reassuring.

He parked around the side, unlocked the service door, and powered up the three garage doors, behind which were the riding mowers, tree-trimmer buckets, and other grounds equipment.

He lit a cigarette and then brought the Starbucks he’d picked up on the way in from Garrett Park, across the river, to the open door, where he breathed deeply of the woodland scents.

He was wearing his usual white coveralls, the CIA’s logo on the breast pocket, totally spotless. How his wife got the grass and mud stains out was the big mystery to the crew.

“She’s a magician,” one of the guys had said.

Knight had to smile, thinking about it. No, that had been Joseph, but he was dead now, like Walt and Istvan. And maybe the others, because none of them had stayed in contact once the op was finished and they’d been debriefed.

Larry Coffin had suggested they go deep and never make contact with one another.

They’d met at a McDonald’s in Williamsburg just a few miles from the front gate at Camp Peary — the Farm. Even Alex had shown up, and she’d told them she’d never eaten at a McDonald’s in her life.

“Yeah, right,” Fabry said. “Even in Paris, on the Champs-Élysées, there is a McDonald’s where you may have le hamburger and a glass of wine. And you have been to Paris.”

“Oui, but lunch at Le Jules Verne,” she’d said. It was the restaurant on the first level of the Eiffel Tower.

They’d all laughed, but the tension had run high that day, because once they left the restaurant, they would be on the run. And there was no telling how long it would be, if ever, before they could resurface.

“Hide the thimble,” Carnes had said. It was the children’s game in which a thimble used for sewing something by hand was placed out in the open when all the contestants were out of the room. When they came in, they were supposed to find it. But it was a frustrating game, because even though the tiny thimble — it was small enough to fit over the tip of someone’s thumb — was in plain sight, almost everyone had a hard time seeing it.

Carnes was going to hide somewhere in plain sight, under the theory that if George were looking for them, he’d look deep, not on the surface.

But that hadn’t worked.

Someone was coming, as he’d known they would ever since they’d gotten back from Iraq and George wasn’t with them. The fact that no one ever mentioned the man’s name or his absence had been the clincher.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” the Magician had cautioned. “But go deep, at least for the time being.”

The others had disappeared, except for Walter and Istvan, who, like him, had come back to the CIA, but under new identities. Nothing whatsoever connected them to their careers as NOCs, and especially not to Alpha Seven. Even their fingerprints, blood types, and DNA on record with the Company were false.

They’d learned to blend in — or at least they’d learned to enhance the skills of something they’d been doing most of their lives. The one thing they had in common was the ability to lie so convincingly that most of the time they believed it themselves.

Knight was a kid from Des Moines who’d been a dreamer all his life. He lived in books, and at times he played the roles of his heroes. Don Quixote had been his hands-down all-time favorite, for reasons even he couldn’t say. But one of the guys — or maybe it was Alex, on one of their soul-searching evenings after they’d had sex — had found out about his near obsession and then came up with his operational handle. He’d never objected.

When he finished his cigarette, he went inside and started the wide-swath riding mower he was to use for this morning’s assignment. He was working the fringe on both sides of the driveway up from the main gate to the OHB, and after lunch he and Karl Foreman would be working the slope from the rear of the OHB down to the woods, past and around the dome.

Mindless work, but satisfying for all of that, because until two days ago he’d begun to relax, begun to actually take a deep breath from time to time.

Before he got up on the seat, he pulled out his 9-mm Beretta 92F pistol and checked the load. No crazy son of a bitch — whether it was George, their control officer, or Alex, who Coffin never trusted — was going to get the better of him. Rumor was that Walt and Istvan had not only been murdered, but their bodies had been mutilated.

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.”

“You weren’t authorized to conduct interviews,” Bambridge snapped. “Stick to your computers.” He was totally on edge.

“Just a phone call. I needed to make sure of the match. At this point it looks as if Wager and Fabry were hiding in the open, but Knight was here under a work name.”

“He was the most frightened,” Pete suggested.

“Of what, my dear girl?” Patterson asked. He was an old man, nearly eighty, and long past his retirement age. But he loved the business and, he’d confided to McGarvey a few years back, most of the people.

“Me excluded?” McGarvey had pulled his leg, one of their rare lighter moments.

“You especially. Because you’re just about the last of a dying breed I most admire. A true conservative without any left-wing biases or right-wing allegiances.”

The insiders, the few people in the Agency who had known McGarvey almost from the beginning, had slapped the moniker of Superman on him — behind his back, of course — when he served as DCI. Superman’s motto from the beginning had been: “Truth, justice, and the American way.” Those few words pretty well summed up who and what he was.

“Afraid of exactly what happened to him,” she replied.

“And why,” McGarvey added.

Everyone looked at him, the moment frozen in glass. Bambridge especially wanted to know; he was clearly the most agitated.

“What happened in Athens?” Page asked, breaking the silence. “What did you two find?”

“We found Larry Coffin, the fourth member of Alpha Seven, serving time in Korydallos prison for art theft.”

“He’s okay,” Bambridge said.

“He was shot to death while we were interviewing him in an NIS safe house. A high-power rifle, possibly a Barrett. They took a shot through an open porthole to the back of his head.”

“Destroying his face,” Bambridge said softly. “A pattern. Someone is targeting the Alpha Seven operators. But why, for heaven’s sake? That war’s been over for a long time; it’s not like Iran or Syria. And why the mutilations?”

“We don’t know yet, but it means something to the killer or killers, and there’s more.”

“There always is,” Bambridge said.

McGarvey took his time going over everything he and Pete had done and learned, including their connection with Spiros Moshonas, the NIS officer, and the manner in which Carnes had died, his face completely destroyed.

“That is a great deal to take in,” Patterson said, making the understatement. “But aside from whatever supposedly has been hidden in some mountain cache in Iraq, Alpha Seven wasn’t the only team looking for weapons of mass destruction over there. All of them consistently reported that they’d found nothing. Only the one team was sending glowing reports.”

Bambridge shot him a look, and Patterson smiled.

“I have access to operational records. I can read and draw conclusions,” Patterson said. He turned back to McGarvey. “But there were none, of course, and you’re saying the team sent false reports to steer the inspectors away from the cache — whatever it contained.”

“And suddenly, after all these years, someone is running around killing all the Alpha Seven people, to keep the secret, maybe because someone is getting too close to finding it or knowing about it? What?”

“The manner in which they were murdered has significance,” Page said. “We’re being sent a message.”

“Or it’s simply the work of someone truly deranged,” Bambridge said. “Which is something I think is more likely. Even if there is this something — whatever — buried in the hills, it’d be damned near impossible to go back, dig it up, and get it out without some al-Qaeda nut case or some trigger-happy Taliban hill people finding out.”

“A brilliant someone,” McGarvey said. “Among perhaps two or three people — the two left from the old Alpha Seven team and their control officer, whose identity we don’t have yet.”

“Whoever it is, they’re still out there, and they have money and intelligence resources,” Otto said. “Mac gave me the bank account number and password for the guy Larry Coffin was using as a substitute prisoner in Korydallos. He wanted to confirm that Coffin was the paymaster. Well, he might not have been. I’ve found most of his money in Athens and a few other places, but the money to pay the substitute came from Bank Yahav, a password account, of course, and a pretty sophisticated one. Has to be more than eight characters. One of my darlings has been working the problem for six hours and hasn’t come up with the solution yet. But it’ll happen.”

“Israel?” Pete asked.

“Yeah, Jerusalem,” Otto said. “But you guys won’t like the next part. The full name translated from Hebrew, is ‘Bank Yahav for Government Employees Limited.’”

All the air left the room.

Page sat back, a stunned look on his face, his mouth set. “I don’t know if I very much want to go in that direction,” he said.

“It’s not a government bank,” Otto said. “Just a government employees’ bank. Like one of our government employees’ credit unions.”

“Does it mean Coffin was working for the Israelis?” Bambridge asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Either that, or someone knew about Coffin’s situation and paid the substitute fee,” McGarvey said.

“Why?” Page asked.

A dozen threads were running through McGarvey’s head, the first of which was panel four of the Kryptos sculpture. “I don’t know,” he said absently. “But I’m going to ask them just that.”

TWENTY

Otto’s safe house in Georgetown was a three-story brownstone with a parking area and a garden in the rear. From the outside, it looked ordinary, like just about every other brownstone in the neighborhood. But inside it was comfortable and completely impervious to mechanical or electronic surveillance of any sort.

He and Louise had another safe house, off the grid so far as the CIA was concerned, in McLean — a traditional colonial where they lived when their daughter, Audrey, was in residence. But whenever there was trouble, like now, Audie, who was going on four, was sent to Camp Peary, and he and Louise came here.

Otto called ahead, and when he got home with McGarvey and Pete in tow, Louise had cold beers laid out, baked potatoes keeping warm in the oven, and steaks on the barbie.

She and Pete hugged. “How about putting together a salad? Everything’s in the fridge.”

“Glad to,” Pete agreed.

Louise and McGarvey hugged. “So, Otto tells me you’ve got another bone in your teeth. This one not so nice or tidy as some of the others.” She was a tall woman, well over six feet and slender. She was almost as bright as her husband, and for a long time worked as chief photo analyst for the National Security Agency. Now she was Otto’s partner in every meaning of the term.

“Five people are dead already, and it’s likely at least one more will be murdered soon,” McGarvey said.

She sat him down at the kitchen counter and gave him a Dos Equis with a lime in the neck of the bottle, but no glass. She gave Otto a bottle of lemon-flavored carbonated water.

“I need to tend to the steaks,” she said, and went out to the rear patio.

Otto set up his tablet, which had once been an iPad until he and a couple of friends in the science and technology directorate had modified it, and brought up the Kryptos file, with detailed photographs of the main sculpture itself, along with the translations of the first three panels.

“Coffin said it was an empirical necessity,” Otto said.

Pete was across from them, pulling the salad fixings out of the fridge. “Not logical, but empirical,” she said. “What do you make of it? Was their control officer just blowing smoke rings?”

“Logical wouldn’t work — nothing mathematical about something buried in the hills, except for the fact itself. A latitude and longitude. There’d be no consequences. But an empirical necessity? Whatever’s up there could change things their control officer thought should be necessary.”

“Coffin guessed him to be from Brooklyn, maybe a Jew. And the bank you came up with is for Israeli government employees.”

“Mossad?” Pete suggested.

Otto looked up from his tablet. “It’s a thought. Iraq’s certainly in the neighborhood, a possible staging point for an attack through Syria’s back door. Maybe a staging point for an attack against Iran. Or at least it was when we had serious boots on the ground there.”

“Something the Israelis knew couldn’t last,” McGarvey said. “We were going to leave sooner or later.”

“Doesn’t explain why they want the Alpha Seven operators dead,” Pete said.

“They know what’s in the cache, and for some reason the Israelis want them to keep quiet about it,” Otto said.

“Okay, but despite the timing, why the brutality? The way those guys were murdered is not the methodology of an intelligence service. It’s more like that of total insanity.”

“Pete’s right,” Louise said, coming in with a platter of steaks. “Who fits that sort of a profile?”

“And what’s their agenda? What do they want?”

Otto brought up the translations of the first three panels. “Okay, here it goes. You know that the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, worked with Ed Scheidt, who headed up our Cryptographic Center, to come up with the codes. And Jim said there was a riddle within a riddle that could only be solved after all four panels were decrypted. So far only the first three have been cracked.”

“Why haven’t you played around with it?” Pete asked. “It’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

“It’s a toy, and I’ve always been busy with real shit, ya know? Bill Webster, when he was DCI, is supposedly the only one Sanborn gave the plaintext to, but wasn’t much after that when Sanborn reneged and said he’d not given the entire decryption. Show business.”

“But not now,” Pete said.

“Panel one,” he said, bringing up a printout of the letters chiseled into the copper plate. “It’s a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using ten alphabets, and was actually quite simple. I checked it, and the decryption seems valid. They used the old Vigenère tableau, just about the same one they used on two. Anyway, the key words were Kryptos—Greek for “hidden”—and Palimpsest—also Greek, for a manuscript page on which the writing has been erased so some new text can be set down.”

He brought up the decrypted text and turned the iPad around so everyone could read it.

“Doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Louise said. “And there’s a misspelling.”

“Sanborn supposedly put the q in to keep the code breakers on their toes,” Otto said. He brought up the much longer decryption for panel two. “Same substitution cipher, except this time he used only eight alphabets, and the key words were Kryptos and Abcissa—which is a high-school math term for the ‘horizontal position on a two-dimensional graph.’”

“It mentions something buried,” Louise said. “But that latitude and longitude isn’t in Iraq; it’s right here.”

“Actually, about one hundred fifty feet southeast of the sculpture,” Otto said. “So far as I know, nothing’s been found there. But that could have been a ruse to throw everyone off. Maybe the key was ‘it’s buried out there somewhere.’”

“WW, William Webster?”

“That’s the current thinking, but he’s never been willing to answer any questions about it. Like I said, I always thought the thing was nothing more than a toy.”

He brought up the decryption for the third panel. “This one is a transposition cipher. A regular mathematical system that shifts the letters on the sculpture to the plaintext ones.”

“It’s Howard Carter talking when he opened King Tut’s tomb in 1922. And the question at the end was asked by Lord Carnarvon, who was standing right there. To which Carter supposedly said something like: ‘Yes, wonderful things.’”

“The big problem is the dates,” Pete said. “The sculpture was dedicated in ninety, which means Sanborn must have been working on the thing in the late eighties. But Alpha Seven didn’t get to Iraq until the spring of oh three. So unless the guy could see into the future, the coded message has nothing to do with what’s hidden outside of Kirkuk.”

“Coffin didn’t mention anything about them burying whatever was out there — just that they saw it,” McGarvey said. “Could have been buried before Kryptos was devised. Webster was the DCI from eighty-seven to ninety-one. Maybe it was buried then.”

“Maybe he knew about it,” Pete said.

“Or maybe it was buried five thousand years ago,” Otto said. “But I’m betting in the last five or ten years.”

“Why?” McGarvey asked.

Otto brought up the fourth panel. “This one hasn’t been solved yet, even though a lot of seriously bright cryptographers have been working on it since ninety. A few years ago Sanborn published a clue. He said letters sixty-four through sixty-nine—NYPVTT—en clair read BERLIN.”

He turned the iPad so everyone could see the screen. It was split in two columns of fourteen lines each.

“They’re different,” Pete said.

“Yes,” Otto said dreamily. “The column on the left is the one that’s been published since 1990. The one that’s in all the books and on every Internet site. The one the code breakers have been working on since then.”

“The one on the right?” Pete asked.

Otto looked up at her and then Louise and finally McGarvey. “I took that picture this morning.”

“Jesus,” McGarvey said. “Someone changed the panel.”

“Probably not long ago. Otherwise, someone might have noticed it,” Otto said. He brought up a photograph of a husky-looking man with a broad Teutonic face and square jaw. “Until last year this guy worked for us as a maintenance man. Name was Ludwig Mann. Part of his job was cleaning the outsides of all the buildings on campus, including the New Headquarters Building.”

“In the courtyard of which is Kryptos.”

Otto brought up another photograph, this one of a man who could have been a very close relative of Mann. Hair a little thicker, a face bit thinner, but with the same jaw and eyes. “Roy Schermerhorn,” Otto said. “Alpha Seven.”

“Let’s put something up on an encrypted site the CIA normally uses to contact its officers, that Carnes and Coffin were murdered in Athens,” McGarvey said. “We want the rest of Alpha Seven to contact us immediately because their lives are in danger.”

“The killer will see it too,” Pete said.

“Right. In the meantime, Otto can work on cracking the new code on four.”

“My darlings are working on it right now.”

“What about us?”

“We’re going to see if we can find Mr. Schermerhorn. He somehow changed the message on four, which means he knows something and maybe has posted a warning.”

“Where do we start?”

“His social security number when he worked here. It’ll be a fake, of course, but it’ll list an address.”

“And?” Pete said.

“I’m betting that once the message goes up on the bulletin board, someone will be calling in,” McGarvey said.

“Or one of the other team members will get themselves killed,” Louise said.

“If they’re as good as they’re supposed to be, they’ll know that the killer has also seen the message and they’ll be on their guard. But for now Roy Schermerhorn is our best bet.”

TWENTY-ONE

On the way home from the Milwaukee Public Library, Roy Schermerhorn took a great deal of care with his tradecraft, switching buses twice, backtracking his way for several blocks downtown. Stopping to light a cigarette while he watched the reflections in a store window of people and cars. Watching the roof lines for snipers. Even a passing police cruiser gave him pause.

He turned suddenly and walked into a tavern already busy mostly with people in suits and ties stopping in for a drink or two before going home. This was beer town USA; stopping in for a beer and a shot after work was the norm.

Sitting at the end of the bar from where he could watch the front door and the short hall back to the restrooms, he ordered a Mich Ultra draught.

Ever since he’d moved here, his normal weekday routine was to stop at the library after work to use one of its computers to cruise the Internet, especially the CIA bulletin boards, and the numerous Kryptos sites. Until this afternoon nothing concrete had been happening, though the campus apparently was conducting some sort of a lockdown drill. One day of which would have been understandable, but it had been going on for three days now.

Then this afternoon he’d used an old password to get into one of the encrypted sites the Company used as a bulletin board, and the Alpha Seven message popped up.

His beer came, and he forced himself to raise the glass with a steady hand, though he was truly more frightened than he’d ever been since ’03, after they’d gotten out and George had disappeared.

Carnes had left first, and a couple of months later Coffin had come over to where Schermerhorn had been living at the time, in Chevy Chase, and said he was going to disappear for a while.

“Just to be on the safe side,” he said. “You know how it’s probably going to work out.”

“No, I don’t,” Schermerhorn had told him, though he did know what he expected everyone else had figured out. But he had wanted to hear it from Coffin’s mouth.

“Alex has disappeared.”

“Probably went with George.”

“That’s right, and you know damned well where that is. And why she left.”

“I know where. Why don’t you tell me why?”

“Don’t be so goddamned dense, you dumb Kraut. The shit’s probably about to hit the fan. My guess is that someone has either found the cache, or is about to, and all of us are going to be in the crosshairs.”

“You think one of us will be blamed for blowing the whistle?”

“Of course I do. I’m going deep, and I suggest you do too. Right now. And I do mean right now.”

They’d been sitting on the balcony of Schermerhorn’s third-floor apartment. He lived alone, except for Henry, his cat, and after his brief but superintense fling with Alex, he preferred things that way. “Where are you going?

Coffin got to his feet. “Take care of yourself,” he’d said, and walked out the door.

Schermerhorn had thought about going away too, but he could not leave things just like that, or else the Georges and Alexes of the world would win. He spent the next two weeks altering his appearance, thinning his hair, aging his face, and building himself a new legend, complete with social security number, driver’s license, military records, and even photos of a family he didn’t have. Bulletproof enough that when he applied for a job as a maintenance man at the CIA, he would pass the background investigation.

It took nearly six weeks before he was hired and had started on the job, and nearly another year before he got into the position he’d wanted. When he was finished, he walked away, changed his appearance and legend again, and disappeared to Milwaukee, where he got a job managing a Hess station and convenience store.

Mindless work, not satisfying but bearable because of Janet, his live-in girlfriend. They wouldn’t last for the long haul, of course, nor would Milwaukee. All of it here was designed to be disposable, like just about every previous day of his life had been.

And it had worked until now.

Someone in a sports coat and tan slacks, his tie loose, came in, and Schermerhorn stiffened, until the bartender pulled out a Bud and set it on the bar for the man. He was a regular, and he didn’t look like George.

Schermerhorn finished his beer, paid for it, and left the bar. Two blocks later he caught a cab and gave the driver an address a couple of blocks away from the small house he and Janet rented. She worked as a nurse at Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital on North Lake Drive and would be getting home about now.

He called her cell phone, but she didn’t answer, and the call flipped over to voice mail. A little thrill niggled at the nape of his neck. She always answered her phone when she was on break or away from the hospital. She had a lot of friends she texted on what seemed like an around-the-clock schedule.

“What do you guys talk about?” he’d asked once.

She’d just smiled at him. “Stuff.”

He didn’t normally carry a weapon with him, though his 9-mm Beretta was stashed behind some paint cans in the one-car garage. But since the bulletin board announcement and Janet’s not answering her phone, he wished he had it now.

The tree-lined street where the cabby dropped him off was a typical Milwaukee neighborhood — mostly small houses, some of them bungalows, many with brick fronts and almost all with fireplace chimneys. For now it was very neat and orderly, but once the leaves turned and started to drop, the place would be a mess. As fast as you raked them up and bundled them in big lawn and leaf bags, the more would fall.

Used to be you could burn them, and fall in the upper Midwest had always smelled of smoke. Pleasant.

He phoned her again, but she didn’t answer. He shut the phone off and then removed the back and pulled the battery. He tossed the pieces behind some bushes spread over a full block.

At the corner half a block from their house, he didn’t slow down, but almost instantly he cataloged everything going on. No strange cars or trucks or vans. The Wilson boys shooting hoops across the street two doors down from his house. Douglas driving up in his old Saturn SUV. He waved when he got out, and Schermerhorn waved back.

No cops, no sirens, no fire trucks or ambulances.

Their car was in the driveway. Janet usually put it in the garage.

Everything else was normal, but Schermerhorn’s instincts were screaming in high gear. He remembered an instructor from the Farm telling them one of the Murphy’s laws the SEAL Team Six operators swore by: if everything is going good, you’re probably running into an ambush.

It felt like that now.

He crossed the street in front of his house and let himself into the garage by the side door, got his Beretta, checked the load and the action, and stepped across the paved path to the kitchen door.

Janet was on her back in the doorway to the dining room. One leg was crossed over the other. She was still wearing her sneakers, but she usually took them off as soon as she came in the house. The shirt of her blue scrubs was completely drenched with blood. The left side of her neck had been ripped away, and most of her face had been destroyed.

He only knew it was her because of her clothes, her size, and the fact that this was their house. She belonged here.

Her blood was already well coagulated, so what happened here had happened an hour or more ago. Someone had to have called her at the hospital and told her there was an emergency and she needed to come home immediately.

Holding the pistol in the two-handed shooter’s grip, he checked the house, but the killer was long gone. They’d left a message: Not only aren’t you safe, but anyone close to you is a valid target.

Back in the kitchen, he looked at Janet’s body for a long ten seconds, not able to keep himself from imagining what it had been like for her.

But then he stuffed the pistol into his belt, got her keys from the counter, went back out to the garage — where from an old paint can he retrieved a plastic baggie that held an ID kit including a passport that identified him as Howard Tucker — then got in the car and drove away.

TWENTY-TWO

Pete shared a cab into the city with McGarvey. She had an apartment just off Dupont Circle, and the afternoon work traffic was terrible, as it usually was on a workday, so it took forever to get from Langley, the fare almost sixty dollars.

They didn’t say much to each other on the way in, McGarvey’s thoughts drifting between the new message on panel four, the Alpha Seven mission in Iraq in ’03, and the nature in which the operators were being killed one by one. Only two were left now — Schermerhorn and Alex Unroth — plus the control officer, which narrowed the list of possible killers. But the real clue, Otto had told them, was the murderer’s intel sources.

He or she knew not only the security procedures and routines inside the campus, which allowed them to make the three strikes, but they’d also known how to find Carnes and somehow manage to kill him and track down Coffin to the NIS safe house.

Only someone very well connected could have possibly known all of that. And in such a timely fashion.

“Come up for a minute. We need to talk,” Pete said, breaking him out of his thoughts.

The cabby had pulled up to the curb, and Pete was paying with a credit card.

“It’ll be a while before Otto comes up with anything, and I need to take a shower and get some sleep.”

“Five minutes, God damn it,” she said, her tone brittle.

“Do you want me to wait?” the driver asked.

“No,” McGarvey said. He got his bag out of the trunk and followed Pete up to her second-floor apartment. He had a fair idea what she wanted to say to him, and he didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t ready, and they were in the middle of something he couldn’t quite grasp. It was just at the edges, but he wasn’t there yet.

“May I fix you a drink?” Pete asked. “Something to eat? You must be starved.”

They hadn’t eaten since the flight from Greece.

“I’m cutting you loose,” McGarvey said.

“Loose? What are you talking about?”

“This is getting too dangerous. It could have been you in Piraeus instead of Coffin. I’m taking this the rest of the way alone.”

“I don’t want to hear it. Don’t forget it was me and Otto who came to you in Serifos in the first place.”

“You’ll be safer staying here.”

“Yeah, like Wager and Fabry and Knight. The story has gotten out, and it’s only a matter of time before the media gets ahold of it, and when that happens, just about anyone on campus will be out of the loop. Everyone will become a suspect. Just getting in and out will mean running the gauntlet. And if there’re any shooters out there, we’ll all be sitting ducks.”

“It can’t be helped.”

Pete was stricken. “Can you at least tell me where the hell you’re going?”

“That depends on Schermerhorn and Alex Unroth, whoever contacts us first. But I suspect I’ll end up in Jerusalem at the government employees bank and then Tel Aviv.”

“You think the Mossad is somehow involved?”

“I think their control officer is or was a Mossad operative.”

“You’ll need someone to cover your back. It’s something I’ve done before.”

“I’m not going to risk it,” McGarvey said. “You’re staying here.”

“What?” Pete shrieked. She put a hand to her mouth and turned away for a moment. “I’m not going to do this, God damn it.” She turned back. “I’m not your dead wife, Kirk. She wasn’t a professional, and from what I read in the case file, she wasn’t even the target — you were.”

All that horrible time came blasting back at him in one ugly piece. He’d been in the car behind the limo in which Katy and their daughter were riding from the funeral of their daughter’s husband when the limo drove over an IED. Right in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery. They’d been killed instantly, with absolutely zero chance for survival. Nothing of their bodies had been identifiable, except by their DNA.

Every woman he’d ever allowed to get close to him had died, had been murdered because of him. It was a never-ending nightmare from which he couldn’t escape, not even hiding on Serifos.

“The Company has trained me well. I can take care of myself and you know it, so whatever reason you’re cutting me loose has nothing to do with protecting a helpless female. If I were a man, it would be different.”

“It’s not that,” McGarvey said, knowing damn well what was coming.

“What about Otto, then? He’s still on campus. Don’t you think it’s possible someone will come after him? Or what about Louise, at their safe house? How about her life?”

“They were never Alpha Seven.”

“Neither was I.”

McGarvey picked up his bag from where he had dropped it by the door. “Take care of yourself,” he said.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” Pete said.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Do you think I need this, or want it?”

“I work alone.”

“Don’t make me beg, Kirk,” Pete cried. “I will, if I have to. I don’t have a shred of self-respect left when it comes to you. I’ll do anything you say. Just don’t tell me to turn my back and let you walk away.”

McGarvey dropped the bag. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. People around me tend to become targets.”

“And I don’t want you to get hurt.”

McGarvey was at a loss for words. The situation was surreal, and yet he’d been here, done that before. Too many times before.

She laughed. It was strained. “How many interrogators do you know who’re also good shots?”

It had been wrong for him to come up here, knowing what she was probably going to say to him. And he felt bad for her that she was pleading this way. And yet he wanted to take her into his arms and make love to her. And that was the problem. Once that happened between them, he would never take her into the field with him. Out there, he watched his own back. If he got shot, it was his fault, his problem, no one else’s. And he wanted to keep it that way. Clean and simple.

On the other hand, if he did bring her with him, if he did allow her into his inner circle and they worked together on this thing, and something happened to her, he didn’t know how he would be able to live with himself.

He didn’t know if he could handle such a loss again, because he felt very deep down, in some secret compartment, that he, too, was beginning to fall in love with her. He felt guilty for betraying Katy and yet… and yet…

His cell phone chirped. It was Otto.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at Pete’s apartment. What’s happened?”

“Roy Schermerhorn made contact through the bulletin board. He wants to meet in the next twelve hours.”

“Where?” McGarvey asked. He switched the phone to speaker mode so Pete could hear.

“Anywhere except the campus.”

“How about the Farm?”

“No. Somewhere neutral. He wants an escape route, if from no one else than us.”

“Union Station,” Pete said. “Below the Attic block on the main floor.”

Otto heard her. “Good. Exactly where and when?”

“Prometheus—the statue. Ten tonight.”

“Stand by, he’s online,” Otto said.

Pete looked at McGarvey. “It’s a break,” she said.

“Eight in the morning,” Otto said. “And there’s a potential problem. His live-in was murdered — and he’s the main suspect.”

“Where?” McGarvey asked.

“Milwaukee.”

“Can you confirm it?”

“An APB for Dana Peterson,” Otto said. “I’ve aged the one photo of him we have — I’ll send it. But he could have altered his appearance as well as his name.”

TWENTY-THREE

McGarvey and Pete showed up at the south entrance of Union Station by seven in the morning, and they had a clear sight line on the huge statue of fire above the main floor. The place was chockablock with commuters, mostly those coming into the city, and just about everyone was in a hurry.

Otto had sent them an old file photo of Schermerhorn that was useless except in a very general sort of way — mostly the man’s build and the shape of his head and face. But Otto had sent back decent photos of Mac and Pete.

“Makes us sitting ducks,” she’d said last night.

They’d agreed that once they’d made initial contact with the former Alpha Seven operator, they would move the meeting to her apartment. She’d not lived there very long, so it had only taken them a couple of hours to sanitize the place and move her things over to McGarvey’s apartment in Georgetown, a few blocks from the Renckes’.

He’d taken the couch and had pretended to be asleep the two times she’d gone to the bedroom door to look at him. She been wearing only a sleep shirt that didn’t reach her knees, and she had looked wonderful to him.

But he wasn’t ready. Especially not now in the middle of an op.

In the morning he was up first, and after she got dressed, she came out and had coffee with him.

“If the killer reads the same bulletin boards, he could show up at Union Station,” she’d suggested, and he’d agreed.

“As long as we can get to Schermerhorn first, he should be able to ID Alex or their control officer.”

Security was loose on the main concourse, only a few uniformed cops patrolling on foot, looking for needles in a very large haystack. They’d been trained to look for signs, even small signs, of developing trouble. Spot the face of the nervous man, or a woman wearing too many clothes for the weather. But someone reasonably well dressed walking up behind a person and firing one silenced shot into the small of their back and walking away, this would not be noticed until it was too late.

“There,” Pete said. She was looking across the concourse at a man standing directly below the statue of Prometheus.

“No,” Schermerhorn said behind them.

Pete turned and reached into her shoulder bag for her pistol, but McGarvey stayed her hand.

Schermerhorn appeared much older than in the photograph Otto had come up with, though his general build was the same, as was the shape of his face. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, untucked, the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. It was impossible to tell if he was armed.

“I understand you’re wanted in Milwaukee for murder,” McGarvey said. “Might be a good idea if we got out of here and went somewhere more secure.”

“It was my girlfriend, and I think whoever murdered her murdered the others — and in just about the same fashion,” Schermerhorn said. His voice held the very slight British accent of a Londoner, and he could have been discussing the weather. It was an act.

“Whoever did it wanted you and has probably read the same bulletin board message and even hacked your contact with us. It’s possible they’re here.”

“Rencke’s better than that,” Schermerhorn said. “But they managed to penetrate the campus. Not so hard — all of us did it at one time or another as an exercise. A lot of NOCs have. Where do you have in mind?”

“I have an apartment not far from here,” Pete said.

“And who the hell might you be?”

“Could be one of your newest best friends.”

They drove over to Pete’s apartment in McGarvey’s Porsche Cayenne. He circled the block a couple of times before parking around the corner. The morning was starting to cloud over, and already it was sticky.

“You’ll be safe here,” Pete said.

“Yeah, right,” Schermerhorn said, laughing.

“Just until we can figure out what the hell to do with you,” McGarvey said.

“You wanted to talk to one of us — well, here I am. And when we’re done — which won’t take long, I guarantee it — I’m gone. So don’t be handing me any crap about protective custody or safe houses.”

“No, it didn’t work for you in Milwaukee. The question on my mind is if they wanted you, why didn’t they stick around after killing your girlfriend?”

Schermerhorn looked away. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe they were sending you a message,” McGarvey said. “Not to talk to us.”

“But here I am,” he repeated, “so let’s get on with it.”

McGarvey had made sure they hadn’t been followed; nevertheless, Pete went ahead to make sure the apartment was clean before she phoned the all clear. Upstairs, she was waiting at the end of the short corridor, her pistol in hand. The door to her apartment was open.

“What about the other people in the building?” Schermerhorn asked.

“This is a singles’ place; everyone is at work,” Pete said.

“Did you check all the apartments in the building?”

“No.”

“Sloppiness like that might get you — maybe the both of you — killed one of these days. I suggest you tighten up your act. You have no idea who you’re up against this time.”

“This time?” McGarvey asked, once they were inside.

“I read your file, Mr. Director, or at least some of it — I suspect there’s more. You’ve been around, and you’ve survived. It’s the only reason I’m here for now and not long gone. But if you don’t watch your step with these people, you’ll be dead.” He glanced at Pete. “Both of you will be.”

He went to the window and looked down at the street and across to the apartment buildings.

“Do you want a beer?” Pete asked.

“No,” he said. He went to sit on the arm of the couch. “Not such a hot idea to drink when you’re on the run. Impairs the judgment.”

“Who’s after you?” McGarvey asked. “Let’s start there.”

“I don’t know. Could be Alex. She was capable of doing something like this. My girlfriend’s face was destroyed. Was it the same with the others?”

“Yes.”

“Then it could be her, or George. They were the hot item at the end. I was — we all were at one point or the other. But it didn’t take very long for me to figure out that being with her was a guaranteed one-way street straight to hell.”

“Do you have any idea where she is?”

“In the States somewhere. Probably back here in Washington by now, if it was her in Milwaukee.”

“Who else could have done this?” McGarvey asked.

“George? It could have been him, too — or the both of them together. They were certifiable. George would do something a little outrageous, and Alex would jump in and top him. Then he would try to top her, and it just kept going. Crazy shit, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. But they’re the last two.”

Schermerhorn laughed. “Don’t count on it. If it was the Israelis, then they have the entire Mossad or even Aman to draw from. And some of those people are seriously disturbed. Just like a lot of our people.”

“Israeli military intelligence?” Pete said.

“Yeah.”

“Why? What are they protecting after all this time? Was it something they buried in Iraq? We were told there was a cache you guys discovered in the hills above Kirkuk.”

“I don’t know for sure. Could have been them, could have been Saddam. Hell, it could even have been us or the Russians, or the North Koreans.”

“But you do know,” McGarvey said. “It was you who changed the fourth panel on Kryptos.”

“Insurance,” Schermerhorn said. “But you contacted me, and that means you haven’t decrypted it yet.”