End Game

And God said, lwet trher be light.…

FORTY-SIX

It was early evening, Washington time, and Maggie Jones, their flight attendant, came back and touched McGarvey on the shoulder. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep.

He looked up. “Yes?”

Pete was curled up in one of the wide leather seats near the back of the cabin, wrapped in a blanket, a pillow under her head.

“There is a call for you. The captain says you may use the aircraft’s phone system; it’s in your console.”

“Thanks.”

“May I get you something, Mr. Director?”

“How far are we from landing?”

“One hour.”

“You might wake Ms. Boylan and see if you can come up with something to eat — I suppose breakfast would be best.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was Otto on the phone, and as soon as McGarvey picked up, he switched on his backscatter encryption program.

“Schermerhorn was killed less than two hours ago. I just got off the phone with Blankenship. The entire campus is in a serious uproar this time. Somehow the White House finally got wind of what’s been happening, and the president has sent for Walt.”

“Tell me,” McGarvey said.

Pete had been awakened by the tone of McGarvey’s voice. She came forward and sat down across from him.

McGarvey put the call on speakerphone.

Otto relayed everything Blankenship had told him, including the business with the three flash bang grenades hidden in the woods, either timed to go off at three-minute intervals or remotely detonated.

“Could be the bastard set the grenades and got into the house hours ago — maybe right after Alex left and you and Pete went after her.”

“She didn’t double back, so it wasn’t her,” McGarvey said.

“George?” Pete suggested. “Could be she’s led us on a wild goose chase so George would have an open field.”

“Blankenship said he had four of his guys on the outside and another two in the house,” Otto said. “Makes him damned good.”

“And when the first grenade went off, no one thought to go upstairs to check on Schermerhorn,” McGarvey said.

“They were focused outside,” Otto said. “And after he made the kill — there was blood everywhere — he apparently took a shower and changed clothes.”

“Find out who passed through the gate after that time; maybe something will pop out.”

“Already did it. Nada. The bastard could still be on campus.”

McGarvey glanced at Pete. She shrugged.

“She could have run to save her own life because she knew George would be coming after her and Schermerhorn,” he said. “But why specifically Paris?”

“Good city to get lost in,” Otto said. “Obviously, she wanted to draw you out. Maybe she knew your background in France and counted on the DGSE to slow you down.”

“But not to meet George, unless she knew he was going to kill Schermerhorn and she was going to Paris to wait for him to join her. Drawing me and Pete off helped.”

“Or unless it was someone else,” Otto said. “Someone we don’t know about. Another Alpha Seven member. Someone connected with the mission. Someone who is desperate enough to make sure that whatever was buried in Iraq stays hidden.”

“Back where we started from,” Pete said.

“We still have Alex,” McGarvey said. “And if there is a third person, we also have George.”

“A Frenchman?”

“At this point I’m betting Mossad.”

“It would fit with what I’m thinking,” Otto said. “But at this point, only Alex and George know what’s buried out there and where it’s buried.”

“Schermerhorn knew,” Pete said.

“So did everyone else on the team. It’s what got them killed. Someone wants to keep it a secret at all costs.”

“Who’s directing it?” Pete asked. “Who’s pulling the strings? Because if you guys are suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, it has to be someone who was either in the White House during that time period, or someone very high in the Pentagon.”

“Colin Powell,” McGarvey said.

Pete was surprised. “I’m not going to buy anything like that,” she said.

“Not him, but there had to have been people on his staff when he was at the UN who liaised with the White House and the Pentagon. Maybe someone on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or on the security council.”

“You’re talking about a fall guy in case something went wrong,” Pete said. “If that’s the case, he or she has to be pretty nervous by now.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with,” Otto said. “In the meantime, what are you going to tell the DGSE if they show up? And I’m betting they will.”

“Depends on who they send,” McGarvey said.

“But not the truth.”

“Some of it, but not all.”

Charles de Gaulle ground control directed them to a hangar well away from the commercial gates, near an Air France maintenance facility not occupied.

As soon as they were parked and the jet’s engines spooled down, Maggie opened the hatch and lowered the stairs. She stepped aside and ducked into the cockpit as an older man with thick gray hair came aboard.

McGarvey recognized him at once. “Captain Bete,” he said, rising.

“Actually, its colonel now, and no one calls me bête noire any longer.” Bete was French for a “beast” or an “animal,” and a bête noire was a bugbear. Twenty years ago he’d resented the play on his name.

McGarvey introduced him to Pete, and they shook hands and sat down across from each other.

“I will come directly to the point, Monsieur le Directeur. Why have you come back to France? Your presence is making a number of people nervous, as you can well imagine.”

“Your service might be aware of a disturbance at the CIA.”

“There have been rumors.”

“We have a serial killer on the campus who has already murdered four people at Langley and another two in Athens. We’ve followed a woman we think may know something about it.”

Colonel Bete sat back in his seat. “You are a dangerous man, and violence seems to find you. But you have never been a liar. Is yours an official service-to-service request for assistance?”

“No.”

“I thought not,” Bete said. “Who is this woman?”

“Her actual name is Alex Unroth, though she’s traveling under the name Lois Wheeler, coming in on an Air France flight from Dulles in an hour or so.”

“Who is she, exactly? Dangerous?”

“Extremely. She was an NOC, and very good at killing.”

“Do you want us to arrest her?”

“No. She’s come here to meet someone. I want to know who it is. And when the meeting actually takes place, I’ll make the decision either to take her into custody or continue to follow her.”

“An action she will resist.”

“Yes.”

“With force.”

“Yes,” McGarvey said.

FORTY-SEVEN

Air France 9039 pulled up to the gate ten minutes early, and Alex was among the first off. She’d been exhausted, and had slept in the wide first-class seat that converted into a flat bed, not staying awake for the afternoon meal or complimentary champagne.

At this point she was awake if not refreshed, and she took care with her tradecraft after she was passed through immigration and had picked up her overnight bag and attaché case. Making her way through the main concourse, which was busy, she kept within groups of passengers so far as it was possible.

Twice she darted into a ladies’ room, the first time lingering in one of the stalls to see if anyone suspicious came in — but no one did. And the second time, walking in, turning around immediately, and heading back to the gate she had landed at.

A number of the passengers seemed somewhat suspicious to her, but then they either passed by or went to the ticket agent at a gate.

Airport cops were everywhere, mostly traveling in pairs, but in this day and age their presence wasn’t unusual, and not one of them paid her the slightest attention.

As she headed down the escalator to the ground transportation exits, she paused for a moment to wonder if no one paying her any attention was in itself significant. She was still an attractive woman, and just about everywhere she went she turned male heads. But then this was Paris — the city of well-put-together women.

The only things she could not gauge were the overhead cameras, but she kept her head lowered as much as possible.

Outside, she got a cab and asked the driver, in French, to take her to the InterContinental. “The one on Avenue Marceau.”

By the time they left the airport and got on the ring road traffic was heavy and until she got to the hotel, it would be impossible for her to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She’d considered taking the cab to the vicinity of a train station, and from there another cab to a metro entrance, and from there eventually back to the hotel. But she had decided against it. It wasn’t likely she had been followed this far this soon.

She had picked the InterContinental as a sort of a message to McGarvey: Here I am. Do you want to talk on neutral ground?

Of course he would not, and in fact, he would probably try to take her into custody. But she had read enough about him in his Agency files that although he was a dangerous man, he was principled. He was a man of high morals for whom collateral damage of any sort was completely out of the question.

If it came to a stand-up fight in the hotel, or on a crowed street — the Champs-Élysées was just around the corner — he would hesitate. It would be enough for her to escape.

The only dark cloud was the poor bastard she’d killed in Georgetown. She had no idea why she had done it, except that it had been a release for all the tension she had been under since Walt and the others had been murdered on campus. She knew George was coming after all of them, her included, to keep them quiet. It had only been their superinflated egos concerning their abilities that had stopped them from coming forward with what they knew. That, and the likelihood that if they were to blow the whistle, they could very well be signing their own death warrants.

Either George was going to kill them, or someone else would — so it was up to them to go deep.

But it had not worked for Walt and the others on campus. Or for Joseph or even Larry in Athens. Nor for her in the DCI’s office.

All that was left was coming face-to-face one last time with George and hopefully leading McGarvey to him. If George told what he knew, she figured she would have a shot at guaranteeing her own life and maybe her freedom.

Except for the guy in Georgetown.

The cabby dropped her off at the hotel, and a liveried doorman in a blue morning coat came out to help her with her bags.

“Bonjour, Madame,” he said, and followed her to the front desk, where the night manager stood.

“Madame Wheeler?”

“Mademoiselle,” Alex said, graciously smiling. She handed over her credit card and passport.

The manager was a younger man with a short haircut. He was impeccably dressed in a tasteful blue blazer and vest, white shirt, correctly knotted tie. The InterContinental under new management had transformed from the iconic former mansion of the Comte de Breteuil, used as a stuffy hotel, into a hip boutique hotel. She had to wonder if McGarvey had been back since the change.

She signed the card. “Have my things brought up, and in two hours have my bed turned down and draw me a very hot bath. First I’m going to take a walk.”

“Of course.”

Alex smiled again. “Thank you.”

“May I suggest that if you walk, stay away from the Jardin. It is sometimes dangerous at this hour of the morning.”

Alex walked out of the hotel and headed down to the Jardin des Tuileries, the morning pleasantly cool after Washington’s humidity. She didn’t bother with her tradecraft for the moment. If McGarvey had traced her this far already, she wanted to see if he could be induced to approach her. Away from people, away from any danger of collateral damage.

She was betting, however, that if he had followed her to Paris and had not tried to stop her from leaving the campus or getting on the flight, it was because he figured she was on her way to meet George.

Two possibilities, she thought. Either he would try to arrest her, in which case her best immediate defense was to always surround herself with innocent civilians. Or he wanted her to lead him to George, in which case he might show himself but would leave her alone.

Coming here to the deserted park at this hour of the morning would test the second possibility. That, and she was feeling irascible again, and she wanted someone to try something with her.

The Jardin was one of the more highly structured parks in the city, with rows of flowers and trees and a couple of ponds. From just about anywhere inside the park, Paris was highly visible, unlike much of Central Park, which in many places hid from the city. And yet Alex felt a sense of isolation here, as she had even in times past when the place was busy with old couples resting on benches, or young fathers pushing baby carriages, or children running and playing — almost too quiet, as French children often were.

Maybe if her life had been different as a child, if she’d had a normal upbringing, a normal father, she might have turned out differently. Maybe she would have gotten married — a lot of NOCs did. They had their careers and their partners.

A half dozen kids — two of them girls, all of them in their early teens — suddenly appeared on the path to her left. They had wild haircuts, Mohawks and the like, tattoos, piercings in their ears and noses and lips and eyebrows, and they were either drunk or high.

One of the boys pulled out a knife and, holding it low, swooped in toward her, swinging the blade at her midsection.

At the last moment she stepped aside, took his wrist and, using his momentum, yanked his arm up and sharply backward, dislocating his shoulder and tearing his rotator cuff.

He skipped out of the way, howling in pain.

The others, all of them with knives in hand, circled her. No one except the kid with the screwed-up arm said a word, and he only muttered something dark Alex couldn’t quite catch.

Coming to the Jardin against the advice of the night manager and getting into the middle of something like this was exactly what she had wanted in some perverse way. Maybe to prove that after too many years of sitting behind a desk, she still had some moves left.

One of the girls came in from the right, while at the same moment a tall-drink-of-water boy who might have been sixteen or seventeen ran at her from her left.

Alex turned, grabbed the boy’s wrist and elbow, and spun him around so his knife rammed into the shoulder of the girl, directly above her right breast.

The others moved in at the same time.

FORTY-EIGHT

McGarvey and Pete sat in the back of a Police Nationale Citroën parked on the Rue de Rivoli, watching images on a laptop computer. A nearly silent camera-equipped drone had been circling overhead ever since Alex had left the InterContinental and strolled into the Jardin as if she were a woman without a care in the world.

Bete, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, watched the images from the drone on another laptop. “She is an impressive woman, hein?”

“That she is,” McGarvey agreed.

“Shall we send someone to help her?”

“Not unless you want to save the kids from themselves. She knows I’ve followed her, and she’s staged this thing, figuring I would get involved.”

“To save the children.”

“Something like that. But she won’t kill them.”

All of it, the stealth helicopter that had followed her cab from de Gaulle, the use of Sûreté officers and the air force drone, had been put into play within minutes after the colonel had signed on. But only after McGarvey had explained what he thought was going on.

“Your government might not be so pleased if you uncover their little secret,” Bete had said on the Gulfstream.

“The reaction of my government is not my concern right now. I’m trying to solve a murder mystery. I know the likely why of it now, but not the who.”

“Not her?” Bete asked.

“No. She’s here to try to avoid being the next victim.”

Two more kids went down with dislocated kneecaps, and the last two boys stood in front of her, panting because of their exertions, and pissed off but obviously wary. Alex was a slightly built woman. An ancient in their minds. An obviously easy mark for a little fun — a rape for sure, and maybe even a few euros if she had any on her, or jewelry. Maybe a watch. But all of it for fun plus a little drug money.

The angle of the camera was wrong, so the expression on her face wasn’t clear on the monitors, but the way she held herself, nonchalant, just about hipshot, arms at her sides, waiting for the boys to come in at her, was of a woman without concern for her safety.

After what seemed like a very long time, she turned and walked away, not bothering to look over her shoulder.

The boys stood there for a while but then pocketed their knives and helped the others. Within a few minutes they were gone, in the opposite direction of Alex.

“Formidable,” Bete said.

“If you want to arrest her, you’ll have to give your people plenty of room,” McGarvey said.

“What now, Colonel?” asked the young Sûreté officer behind the wheel.

“We’re finished here. You may recall the drone, and give my thanks to Major Lucien.”

“Where may I drop you, sir?”

“That’s up to Monsieur McGarvey,” Bete said.

Alex was heading up toward the Champs-Élysées.

“Looks like she’s going for a walk,” McGarvey said. “Get back to the InterContinental and toss her room. I doubt if she’ll have left anything important behind, maybe a passport or two and some cash and credit cards.”

“How delicate shall I be?”

“Use a soft touch, but let her know someone was snooping around.”

“What about me?” Pete asked.

“Check us in, and try for the same floor,” McGarvey said. “I won’t be long.”

“She’s looking for trouble,” Pete warned.

“She knows I’m here, and she’s sent me a message.”

“Which is?” Bete asked.

“That she can handle herself, but that unless she’s seriously provoked, she won’t kill anyone. She’s here to meet someone, or at least get word to him.”

“George,” Pete said, but not as a question.

McGarvey took a last glance at the monitor, then got out of the car and started walking fast back toward the Pont de la Concorde, figuring that if Alex were intending for the Champs-Élysées, he would be in time to tuck in behind her.

The Place de la Concorde, with its slender obelisk, was at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, and it was alive with traffic, including pedestrians on their way to sidewalk cafés on the avenue or even the McDonald’s for their morning coffees and croissants.

McGarvey crossed the Rue Boissy d’Anglas, dodging traffic and heading along the upper side of the avenue, paying attention to who was coming up behind him or shadowing him from the other side. Alex was the only one left from Alpha Seven, and since she hadn’t killed Schermerhorn, nor almost certainly the others, it meant she was the last target.

But whoever the killer was had a very good source of intelligence inside the CIA. Not only good enough to pinpoint Wager, Fabry, Knight, and Schermerhorn, and Alex, but to get on and off campus without raising any alarms.

He and Otto had suspected it might be someone working for Blankenship — or possibly even the director of security himself. But Blankenship had been in his office when Schermerhorn was murdered, and had been driving through the main gate when Knight had been attacked. Nor had he been absent from his desk when Coffin had been shot and killed on the boat in Piraeus.

Alex’s alibis weren’t as tight — she was on a long weekend when Coffin was shot, and as an NOC in Iraq she had been an excellent marksman with the Barrett sniper rifle — and she was definitely off campus when Schermerhorn had been murdered.

But if she thought the killer was George, and that he was somewhere here in Paris, and if he was indeed the killer, she was playing with fire, because it was possible he knew she had come to Paris.

Two-thirds of the way to the Arc de Triomphe, he spotted her sitting at a sidewalk table at the Café George V. The waiter had just set two coffees down and was walking away.

She was obviously expecting someone. McGarvey waited for a couple of minutes, watching her, waiting for whoever it was to show up, but when no one came, he walked over.

“Your coffee is getting cold,” she said, looking up.

“I thought you might be waiting for George,” McGarvey said, sitting across from her.

She smiled. “He’s the last person I wanted to see. Tell me about Roy. Do you think he’ll survive the night?”

“That why you ran?”

She looked at something across the broad avenue. “That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Then why the little display in the Tuileries?”

“Just kids out to have a little fun.”

“They’ll think twice before they attack another woman.”

She smiled again. “That’s the whole point, Mr. McGarvey. I can take care of myself, and I mean to do so.”

“I found you.”

“I let you find me. But unless you or Pete or Otto have told anyone about my movements, I figure I’ll be reasonably safe here for a few days or so.”

“Then where?”

“That’ll be up to you, won’t it?” she said. “If you find George, I’m home free. Relatively speaking.”

“Otto’s decrypted the fourth panel.”

“What’d it say?”

“‘Let there be light.’”

Alex laughed, the sound low from the back of her throat. “Sounds like Roy. Anything else?”

“And there was peace.”

She nodded wistfully. “Then you know what’s still buried over there.”

“Schermerhorn’s dead.”

For a long moment Alex didn’t react, but then her face fell by degrees, and she looked down. “I thought by leaving it would draw him away. I thought he’d come after me, just like I knew you would. And if my luck held, the two of you would come face-to-face.”

She’d laid a copy of The International New York Times on the table, and a chance breeze ruffled it. She suddenly moved to the left to reach for it, when a rifle shot struck a nearby male patron in the chest, and he was slammed violently backward. He had been seated at the table just behind them.

McGarvey rolled to the right and dropped to the sidewalk, searching the roof line across the broad boulevard in time to see a figure in a second-floor window disappear.

A woman passing by screamed, and people in the café began to react, some of them scrambling out of their seats, trying to escape what to them had to look like the start of another terrorist attack.

When he looked over his shoulder, Alex was gone.

FORTY-NINE

Alex raced through the restaurant, into the busy kitchen, and out the back door and onto a narrow lane across from the rear of the U.S. Embassy, which fronted on the Avenue Gabriel. She turned left and, walking fast, made it to the Rue de Miromesnil before she looked over her shoulder to see if McGarvey was behind her. He wasn’t.

The shot had been fired from a high-power rifle, which to her had sounded like a Barrett, and it was only by happenstance that she’d suddenly moved to keep her newspaper from blowing away. But she’d been in time to glance up and get a quick glimpse of the shooter, who’d been in the second-floor window of the building across the avenue.

It had been a man, she was certain of it. But she got the impression he was tall and very ruggedly built — the opposite from George. And that only made sense if George wasn’t the one doing the killings — or if he wasn’t working alone.

At the corner, she turned around and walked back to the Champs-Élysées, half a block up from the George V. A crowd had gathered in front of the café, and two police cars had already arrived. A cop was in the middle of the street, directing traffic, as an ambulance, its siren blaring, came around the corner two blocks away.

If McGarvey was somewhere down there, he was lost in the crowd.

She headed up the avenue toward the Arc de Triomphe, and in the next block she entered the VIP World Travel Agency, housed in a small storefront.

A young woman seated behind the desk looked up and smiled. “Bonjour, Madame,” she said pleasantly.

“Good morning,” Alex said in English, and the young woman switched languages.

Alex put her real passport on the desk. “I would like to make a trip to Tel Aviv, but first I need to get a message to your director.”

The agent glanced at the passport but did not reach for it.

George had told them all that if ever they got in over their heads over the business in Iraq, they were to get word to him through the travel agency either in Washington, London, Berlin, or here, in Paris. The procedure was to lay their real passport — no matter what other name they might be using — on the agent’s desk, and ask to get a message to the agency’s director before making a trip to Tel Aviv.

The company had been set up by the Israeli Mossad in the late fifties as an elaborate front so that its agents could travel to Argentina to capture Adolf Eichmann and bring him back to Israel. The thinking was that if they used their own travel section, the operation might not be discovered and Eichmann would not disappear again.

The company had remained in existence all this time because it was successful as an ordinary travel agency, and it was even expanded to Berlin, London, and Washington from its original office here in Paris. It wasn’t a very closely guarded secret — at least not from the CIA — that the occasional Mossad operator still used the company.

“Do you have the name of our current director?” the woman asked.

“It’s been some years.”

“What name do you know?”

“George.”

The agent took Alex’s passport to a machine in one corner, made a copy of the bearer’s pages, and brought it back.

“And when would you like to travel to Tel Aviv?”

“As soon as George responds to my query.”

“Are you staying in the city?”

“Yes, but I’ll call you at noon,” Alex said.

“What is the message?”

“‘I’m the last. Shall I come?’”

“Very well. It will go out within the hour. But I cannot guarantee there will be a response, or if there is one, when it will arrive.”

“Will there be a fee?”

“No, but I will take an impression of your credit card to make the travel arrangements,” the agent said.

Alex handed her the Lois Wheeler credit card. The agent made a copy of it, but she said nothing that the name was different from the passport.

“I won’t wait long,” Alex said.

“I understand,” the agent said.

Alex caught a cab a half block away and ordered the driver to take her back to the InterContinental.

McGarvey had followed her to Paris, which had been no real feat of tradecraft, not with Otto Rencke’s wizardry. And she’d known he would be right behind her, so she’d put on the little show for him in the Tuileries, and then had gone to the sidewalk café, figuring he would want to talk.

What she hadn’t counted on was the shooter also tracing her to Paris and to the specific restaurant. Whoever it was, they had information from inside the CIA.

It came back to George. If he was the killer, he had help this morning from the shooter across from the sidewalk café. And if it was him, he also had help inside the CIA. Someone on campus, doing his dirty work. But whoever it was had to be insane not only to kill the Alpha Seven team one by one but to mutilate those who’d been on campus.

That last bit was the sticking point for her. George had done horrible things in Iraq — and so had she — but those had been done as acts of war. Acts to demoralize the enemy, which in fact had happened.

This now, over the past few days, made no sense from her perspective.

And the last bit that gave her some pause was the hotel. She’d been traced here by McGarvey and by the shooter. The hotel was no longer her safe haven. Yet she decided it was the only place for her to be. If the shooter came after her again, she would be on familiar ground, McGarvey as her backup.

FIFTY

McGarvey got to the river in time to see the shooter reach the bottom of the stairs from street level and head to the right, toward the Pont de l’Alma. He recognized the guy from the dark jacket and yellow shirt he wore, and the fact that his haircut was military.

The Barrett had been left where the sniper abandoned it: leaning against the wall next to the window of what was a two-room office being remodeled. Painters’ drop cloths covered the wooden floors, and plasterwork around the crown moldings was drying. The walls had been stripped, in some places down to the bare laths, and even the light fixtures and wall outlets were still missing.

The shooter’s intel had been spot-on. So much so that he had even picked the one empty room within shooting range of a sidewalk café where he somehow knew Alex would be. Even if he had insider information from the CIA, more was going on here than made sense.

But from Schermerhorn’s and Alex’s descriptions of George, the shooter was too big and too young to be the same man. Either someone else was gunning for her, or George had help — damned good help.

Some of it pointed to the Mossad, and that made a certain kind of logic to McGarvey’s thinking. But other bits didn’t fit. They were still missing something, because it made no sense that Schermerhorn and Alex had both been so circumspect about who was coming after them and why, even though their lives were on the line.

McGarvey reached the bottom of the stairs at river level, and started after the shooter. A fair number of people, many of them couples, hand in hand, strolled along the river walk. A Bateaux-Mouches less than half full passed, going downriver, and McGarvey could still hear sirens in the distance, up toward the Champs-Élysées.

The man was taking his time, and McGarvey easily came up behind him before he reached the bridge. He was a head taller and perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, with a military bearing and stride to match his haircut.

It did not appear he was carrying a pistol. His jacket was snug fitting, and there was no telltale bulge at his waist or under his arm.

“You left your rifle behind,” McGarvey said.

If the man was startled, he didn’t show it. He merely glanced over his shoulder. “Beg your pardon?”

“The Barrett. Though how you could miss at that range is beyond understanding for a man of your training. I’m sure George will be disappointed when you get back to Tel Aviv.”

The shooter stopped and faced McGarvey. “I have no idea what you are talking about, Monsieur. Shall I call the police?”

“If you’d like, although the DGSE has taken an interest in this business.”

The man’s eyes were dark, a five-o’clock shadow on his broad chin. He looked dangerous. “Stay out of this, Mr. McGarvey. We have no ill will toward you.”

“By we, do you mean the Mossad?”

The man glanced up as a couple pushing a baby carriage passed by. They were laughing and talking. The morning was perfect, nothing to worry about.

“Was it you in Piraeus? The Greeks found the Barrett where it was left. No fingerprints of course. And that shot was a good one. Fifteen hundred meters. But then Coffin’s head was framed by the open porthole. Made a good sight pattern.”

“You’re not here officially,” the shooter said, and the comment didn’t really come as a surprise to McGarvey. “You followed Alex from Langley and actually sat down to have a cup of coffee and a friendly chat with her. Strange.”

“She’s looking for George. She thought he’d be here. And until you took the shot, he was our best suspect in the killings. But if he and you are Mossad, the problem becomes even more interesting.”

“I suggest you stop right now and go home. Perhaps it’s time you visit with your granddaughter. We understand she’s a lovely child.”

“I think the DGSE will be interested in having a word. You killed an innocent civilian this morning.”

The shooter backed up a step, his arms loose at his sides, his eyes narrowed, his legs slightly bent at the knees. “No way to prove it.”

“I think there might be. The French don’t have the same aversion to waterboarding as my people do. Who knows what information you might be willing to give up if a deal were put on the table?”

There were more sirens in the distance, but none of them were getting any closer.

“Or you can talk to me,” McGarvey said.

“Get away from here while you still can, old man.”

“Whatever happened to interservice cooperation, or just plain politeness?

The shooter came at him, swinging a roundhouse punch, but McGarvey sidestepped it at the last instant, grabbed the shooter’s wrist and arm, and levered the man forward to his knees.

He bounded up and came back again, moving fast, swiveling to the left and taking two karate chops, which Mac easily deflected.

The shooter moved like a ballet dancer, up on the toes of his left foot as he swung his right leg in a long arc.

McGarvey caught the leg and flipped the man onto his back.

A couple of young guys had stopped to watch, and they applauded and said something McGarvey couldn’t quite catch. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that several people, including the couple with the baby carriage, had turned around to watch the spectacle.

The shooter was on his feet in an instant, charging and swinging blow after blow that McGarvey batted aside as he retreated a few meters.

Suddenly the man bent down and pulled a small pistol, almost certainly a subcompact carry-and-conceal Glock, from an ankle holster under his khaki trousers.

McGarvey stepped forward and a little to the left, and snatched the pistol out of the man’s hand. “You’ve already done enough collateral damage for the day, you stupid bastard.”

The growing crowd all applauded. They thought they were watching a couple of street entertainers doing a skit. It was common on the river walk.

McGarvey ejected the magazine and tossed it into the river, levered the round out of the firing chamber and field-stripped the pistol, tossing the pieces over the edge.

“You’re unarmed now — no Barrett, no Glock. You’re obviously not much of a street fighter, though you’ve been trained somewhere — by the IDF, I suspect.”

The shooter came in, head down, butting McGarvey in the chest, and knocking him backward on his ass.

Before he could turn and run away, McGarvey hooked a foot around the man’s leg, bringing him down.

The man was up on his feet in a flash, and McGarvey had to roll left to avoid a kick to his head, and he sprung to his feet.

He pulled his Walther from the holster under his jacket at the small of his back. “That’s enough now.”

The shooter backed up warily.

More people had gathered, but they kept their distance.

Someone had apparently called the police, because a patrol car, its siren blaring, screeched to a halt on the street above.

“For now it’s out of my hands,” McGarvey said.

The shooter glanced up as two uniformed police officers came down the stairs on the run. He turned on his heel and in three steps was at the edge and threw himself into the river.

The cops were shouting. “Arrêtez! Arrêtez!”

McGarvey laid his pistol on the pavement, then backed up to the river’s edge in time to see the shooter swimming very fast downstream with the current, toward the bridge.

The cops were on McGarvey just as the shooter reached the middle arch at the same time a commercial barge came upriver, its horn blaring five warning blasts.

The shooter was swept aside by the bow of the boat, and for several seconds it seemed as if he would get clear, but then he was sucked underwater just forward of the stern. Almost immediately the river turned red, his body caught in the screw and chopped up.

FIFTY-ONE

Alex got out of the cab, but instead of immediately going into the hotel, she walked a few doors down to a Godiva chocolate shop, where she dawdled over buying a small box of truffles and having a pleasant chat with one of the clerks.

The place was reasonably busy, mostly with tourists — some of them Brits, and a few Germans and a Russian couple. But no one suspicious. No one was following her now.

Back at the hotel, the uniformed attendant held the door for her and she went down the short corridor directly to the elevators. Again, to her eye, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Presumably, McGarvey had come back here after the shooting, and it was more than likely that Pete Boylan had stayed behind, probably to search her room.

Upstairs, a maid was coming out of her room. “Mademoiselle, your room is ready,” the woman said.

“Merci,” Alex said, and gave the woman the box of chocolates. The woman thanked her, surprised.

Someone other than the maid had been in the room. The attaché case was lying at a different angle on the luggage stand, and the zipper on her overnight bag was completely closed. She had left it unzipped by half an inch.

It was made to look like amateurs had done this. It was possible that the maid or someone else on the hotel’s staff had been looking for something to steal, but it was more likely in her mind that she had been given a message. Hopefully, by McGarvey or Pete Boylan.

She tossed her purse onto the bed and searched the attaché case and the overnight bag, but nothing was missing, though some of the contents had been very slightly rearranged.

Her room looked down on a pleasant courtyard with a small fountain, some trees, and flowering bushes. No way out from there. It left only the front door and presumably a delivery entrance and dock, and possibly a path across the roof to another building.

She had not been the least bit surprised when McGarvey had shown up; in fact, she had expected him. Her only concerns were that she had not detected him behind her, and that she had come into France unarmed.

She got undressed, and took a quick shower, mostly to refresh herself. It was the middle of the night her time, and she was beat, but her adrenaline was pumping hard enough that she was wide-awake. She had come looking for George, and she had sent him the message. She wanted to be awake to find out if he responded, not only to that but to the failed assassination attempt.

She phoned room service and asked for a pot of tea with lemon, and a croissant with butter and raspberry confit.

Paris was already coming to an end for her. If George responded, it would possibly be off to Tel Aviv or wherever he suggested. If not, she would have to go deep, and it would have to be a lot deeper than any of the others had gone.

Roy had changed the fourth panel on Kryptos, which she had to admit was pretty clever, and now McGarvey knew what was probably still buried above Kirkuk, though possibly not the entire reason why, nor who had put it there.

When she was dressed, she called the operator and asked to be connected to McGarvey’s room.

Pete answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” She sounded stressed.

“In my room. Has Kirk returned yet?”

Pete hesitated for just a beat. “Quite a show you put on in the park.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes. And when you took off, Mac followed you on foot. Did you see him?”

“Briefly at a sidewalk café on the Champs-Élysées, where someone tried to kill me. I managed to get out of there, but Mac didn’t follow me. I suspect he went after the shooter.”

“Did you see who it was?”

“Some guy with a rifle in a second-floor window across the avenue. I think it was a Barrett.”

“Hard to miss at that short a range,” Pete said.

“I got lucky.”

“Was it your George?”

“I didn’t get that good a look, but I don’t think it was George.”

“Who else wants you dead?”

Alex managed to laugh. “I can think of a few people. An Iraqi or two, among others. But George could have sent someone. I’ve left word for him.”

“Where?”

“Doesn’t matter. What does is whether or not he answers and what he says.”

“What was your message?”

“Just that I was the last of the team, and did he want to meet with me?” Alex said. “What about Kirk? Have you heard from him?”

“Not yet,” Pete said. “Look, I’m coming to your room. We need to talk.”

“I just got out of the shower. Give me a couple of minutes.”

“Okay.”

Alex went to the window and called the travel agency on her cell phone. “Has there been an answer yet?”

“Yes,” the agent said. “One word: Come.”

“How soon can you get me there?”

“You’re booked business class on Turkish Airlines, flight eighteen twenty-four, leaves de Gaulle this afternoon at five.”

“Any other information?”

“No,” the travel agent said. “Have a good flight, Ms. Wheeler.”

Someone knocked at her door. “Room service,” a man called.

Alex ended the call, tossed the phone onto the bed, got a couple of euros from her purse, and answered the door.

An old man with a barrel chest and thick gray hair stood there, holding up an identification wallet. “I’m Colonel Roland Bete. I’d like to ask you a few questions concerning a shooting at a sidewalk café on the Champs-Élysées.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mr. McGarvey was there. At the moment he is in the custody of the Sûreté. Evidently, he was involved with an incident a few blocks away by the river in which a man was killed in a boating accident. Witnesses said there was a fight.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“It would be for the best if you allowed me to come in, unless you would rather be taken to an interrogation cell, from which point your fate would be completely out of my hands.”

Pete came down the corridor. “I heard,” she said. “What’s the real issue?”

“He was armed,” Bete said.

“Can we have him released?”

“Perhaps, if Mademoiselle cooperates,” Bete said. “But it will have to be soon. Major Lucien has given me one hour to present a proper reason why.” He looked at Alex, his expression completely neutral. He could have been discussing the weather. “We found the documents in your attaché case. And we know a seat has been booked on a Turkish Airlines flight to Tel Aviv for a Lois Wheeler.”

Alex stepped aside to let them in. “It was you who tossed my room? Very unprofessional.”

“It was suggested we let you know. And Monsieur McGarvey is a very persuasive man. He was allowed one call, and it was to me. Your life is in danger.”

Alex laughed. “I got lucky in the café.”

“The shooter was a professional. Perhaps Mossad? What do you hope to gain by going to Tel Aviv? Is it to meet with this person you have only identified as George?”

“Yes.”

“And what would stop him from merely having you killed? Perhaps a random shooting. Incidents like that happen all the time. Israel is a violent country.”

“McGarvey,” Alex said, and watched for a reaction in Pete’s eyes. And she saw exactly what she expected to see.

FIFTY-TWO

McGarvey looked up from where he was seated at a small metal table across from the two Sûreté officers who had been interviewing him, when a whip-thin man with a large Gallic nose and dark complexion came in.

“Monsieur McGarvey is cooperating, but we’ve got nothing of any use so far,” one of the interrogators said.

“I’ve been listening,” the dark man said. He was jacketless, his tie loose, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up above the elbows. “Leave us.”

The two interrogators left the room, and the dark man sat down. “I’m Major Lucien.”

“Colonel Bete mentioned you. He said you were aware I came into France with a weapon. Do you know if he’s made contact with the woman I was seated with at the café?”

“I just spoke to him on the telephone. She is at the hotel with him and the CIA officer you arrived with this morning.”

It was the first piece of good news this morning. “Then she’s corroborated my story.”

“That she was the target of an assassination attempt in which an innocent bystander was killed instead. And that both of you left the scene before the police could arrive.”

“She ran to save her life, and I ran to catch the killer.”

“Neither of you stayed to offer assistance to the man who had been shot.”

“It was a sniper rifle. Little hole in, big hole out. He never had a chance, something I told your people.”

“And the man you confronted by the river — do you think he was the shooter?”

“Yes. Did you recover his body?”

“What there was left of it. But he carried no identification, nor were there any traces of blowback from the Barrett — which we found in the upstairs office across the avenue.”

“Let me guess,” McGarvey said. “You found a pair of rubber gloves.”

“In the gutter around the corner. But we haven’t been able to find any usable prints or DNA; the insides of the gloves had been coated with Vaseline or some substance like it.”

The shooter hadn’t learned that from the IDF. “I need to get out of here before someone else makes another attempt.”

The major shook his head, and McGarvey knew what was coming next.

“I’ve never been an enemy of France.”

“No, but each time you have been here, people have died. This time the death toll is two. So far. How many more will it be if I release you?”

“Did Colonel Bete tell you why we came to France?”

“Something about a serial killer in the CIA. It’s not France’s problem.”

McGarvey leaned forward. “It might be, the next time the DGSE needs some help preventing another terrorist attack. France is crawling with Muslims. Mosques on just about every corner in all the poor districts of Paris and every other city. Breeding grounds for Islamic dissidents.”

Lucien said nothing, but he was steaming.

“The Sûreté has a problem. You have a problem.”

“My job is to deal with current problems. And at this moment you and the woman you followed here are it.”

“She’s committed no crime here.”

“But you have, by carrying an undeclared firearm into France.”

“Check with Colonel Bete.”

Lucien rapped a knuckle on the table. “Salopard. The service is not in charge of internal affairs. That falls to the Sûreté. In Paris, to me.”

McGarvey’s sat phone, which was lying on the table, chimed.

“There can be no signal in this building,” Lucien said, staring at it as if it were a dangerous bug.

The phone chimed again.

Lucien picked it up and answered it. Otto’s voice came over the speaker.

“Major Pierre Lucien of the Sûreté, Paris homicides, if I’m not mistaken.”

“There can be no telephone calls in here,” the Sûreté major said.

“To your switchboard, and then through the building’s wiring,” Otto said. “Easy shit, actually. But we have a problem you need to solve before more bodies start to pile up in Paris. Wouldn’t do much for your nearly spotless record. And with less than eight years until retirement, you wouldn’t want to be dismissed. What would your wife, Pauline, say?”

“You son of a bitch,” Lucien said, and reached to turn off the phone.

“Technically, you’re right, but let’s leave my mother out of this. The point is, we have a serial killer on the loose in Langley, and in order to find out who it is, we followed Ms. Wheeler to Paris so she could attempt to make contact with someone she thought could help with the investigation. Instead someone tried to kill her. You can’t take her into custody, because she’s broken no laws there. So she should be free to go.”

“That’ll be up to Colonel Bete.”

“Yes. She has a flight to Tel Aviv this afternoon. We think she will be killed when she arrives. We want to prevent that.”

“I don’t care.”

“But you must,” Otto said. “Mr. McGarvey and his partner, Ms. Boylan, must be allowed to leave Paris this afternoon.”

“Monsieur McGarvey will be brought before a magistrate this afternoon, where he will be formally charged with accessory to murder and entering France with an illegal firearm. We have strict laws.”

“But that would be a mistake.”

Lucien tried to switch the phone off.

“Hang in there, Mac,” Otto said. “I’ve recorded everything from the moment you were arrested. Your aircrew has refueled the Gulfstream and is ready to leave as soon as you and Pete get to the airport.”

“Is Pete okay?”

“She’s with Bete right now.”

Lucien tried to switch off the phone again.

“I’ll spring you in about five minutes,” Otto said, and was gone, but the phone would not power off.

“Who was that?” Lucien demanded.

“Otto Rencke. He’s director of special projects for the Company, and he, too, lived here a number of years ago, but you probably won’t find anything in your databases. He’s pretty good with stuff like that.”

“We’re past that point,” Lucien said. “The rest will come out at your trial.” He got up and, not bothering with the sat phone — it was something he couldn’t control — left the room

“You still there?” he asked.

“Yes, but pick up. They’re recording everything,” Otto replied.

The speaker function shut off when McGarvey picked up. “What do you have in mind?”

“Do you know the name Andre Tousseul?”

“He used to be the director general of the Sûreté.”

“Still is. He was listening in on your interview — especially with Lucien. I had Walt explain the situation to him earlier, and he understood perfectly. Mostly because he wants all this to go away. The sooner you and Pete and Alex are out of France, the happier he’ll be, though he promised Walt any assistance he could give to the CIA.”

“Her flight leaves in less than three hours. She takes it, there’s a good chance she’ll be killed when she gets there.”

“I think Pete should go in her stead. You and Alex can fly over in the Gulfstream. I’ll have your clearance to land within the next thirty minutes.”

One of the officers who had conducted their initial interview came in. “If you will come with me, sir, I’ll have you signed out and your belongings returned to you.”

“On my way. Thanks, kemo sabe,” McGarvey said. He switched off the phone, and this time it stayed off.

“Sir.”

“Where is Major Lucien?”

“He’s been called away.”

FIFTY-THREE

Room service had brought up a cheese plate with mousse and pâté de foie gras, along with a good bottle of ice-cold Pinot Grigio. Pete and Alex sat at a small marble-topped table in front of the open window. That she had a minder wasn’t lost on Alex, but she made no bones about it, for which Pete was grateful.

She didn’t like the woman, but she felt sorry for her. Being an NOC had been the only possible profession for her, and yet the years of service in the field, and since Iraq, the constant looking over her shoulder, had taken its toll. She could see it around the corners of her eyes, the sometimes firm set of her mouth, and the tilt of her head, as if she were listening for something gaining on her.

Bete was waiting downstairs for McGarvey to arrive, and when he got there, they would head to de Gaulle, where Pete would take Alex’s place on the Turkish Airlines flight, and Alex would go with Mac on the CIA’s Gulfstream. They would leave as soon as possible in order to get to Tel Aviv before Pete’s flight arrived. He wanted to be at immigration first to see who showed up to meet the flight.

“It’s a dangerous game you’re playing,” Pete said.

“You, too, going in my place.”

“I don’t get it. Someone tries to kill you here, and yet you’ve sent a message to George and he’s told you to come to Tel Aviv. Right into the hornets’ nest. What do you think you’ll achieve?”

Alex shrugged. “If he kills me, then I guess it’ll prove he still has something to hide after all these years. But you have to know he isn’t your serial killer.”

“How did you send him the message that you wanted to meet? I mean, did you call some number direct? Maybe an Israel country code?”

Alex told her about the Mossad-backed travel agency, but Otto had already traced the Turkish Airlines booking to the agency on the Champs-Élysées not far from the sidewalk café.

“We were given a code phrase to use if we needed help. The travel agent made the call or sent the e-mail.”

“So the call could have gone to a private cell phone at Langley. Or more likely to a blind number somewhere in the vicinity. The killer still could be George. He could have hired the hit man here in Paris, and since that failed, he’s made arrangements for you to be taken out in Tel Aviv.”

“We’ll see when we get there,” Alex said.

She seemed to Pete to be resigned. Too resigned? “Do you think you’ll recognize him?”

“It’s always the eyes,” Alex said. “You can wear contacts and change the color, and you can even have plastic surgery. But you can’t hide what’s in them.” She nodded. “If we come face-to-face, I’ll recognize him.”

“And then what?”

“I’ll ask him why he did it. We kept our mouths shut; there was no reason to kill everyone. And especially not the way he did it.”

“The same as you and he did in Iraq.”

“For different reasons. I keep telling you the same thing. Anyway, we’ve grown up since then — or at least, I have.”

Pete’s cell phone vibrated. It was Mac. “We’re on the way up. Are you ready to leave?”

“Anytime you are. I’m in her room with our things.”

“You’re taking a cab to the airport. Do you have her passport?”

“The pictures don’t match.”

“They never do,” McGarvey said.

Pete hung up. “One last thing I don’t get,” she told Alex. “When Walt Wager was murdered, why didn’t you contact the others and set up a defensive position together? You’d worked as a team before.”

“When Joseph bought it in Athens, I thought it was just an accident. But when Walt was killed, I knew what was going on. The only trouble was, I didn’t know where the rest of them were.”

“Okay, I can buy the likelihood that you guys didn’t know where the others were hiding. But after Wager went down, you didn’t even try to look for the others. You were out just for yourself, just to save your own skin.”

“You’re damned right,” Alex said. “Survival is the name of the game — the only game worth being good at.”

She got up and went to her bag, grabbing a billed cap. She gave it to Pete. “Wear this — it’ll at least cover your hair. You’re flying business class, but don’t get off at the front of the crowd. Stick around till most of the tourist-class passengers get off. Might buy you a little time.”

Someone knocked.

Pete drew her weapon and went to the door. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Me,” Mac said.

Pete let him in. Bete hadn’t come with him.

“We’re going first,” he said. “Give us five minutes, then check out and take a cab to the airport. But listen: anything goes wrong, even if you have the slightest suspicion something is about to happen, push the panic button. Otto’s programs are watching for it.”

Star 111 on Pete’s sat phone would set off an alarm that Otto would pick up immediately. It would give her precise GPS position anywhere on Earth and at any altitude.

“Nothing’s going to happen in the air, and you’ll be in Tel Aviv at the international terminal when I get there,” she said, though she had a little flutter in her stomach.

She was primarily an interrogator — and a damned good one. It was a job she’d always liked. The only reason she’d become a field agent was because of Mac. She supposed she had fallen in love with him almost from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. But she had given him room because of the death of his wife.

“Give me your weapon,” he said.

Pete handed over her pistol, and Mac stuffed it into his bag. Then, at the door with Alex and her attaché case, he turned back and went to her.

“When this is over, we’re going to New York to dinner in the Village. I know an Italian restaurant, homemade pasta, a great Bolognese sauce, and Valpolicella. It’ll be a Saturday, and we’ll make it late and wander around until the Sunday Times comes out. We’ll find a bakery just opening and have coffee and something sweet for dessert. Date?”

“Absolutely,” Pete said.

He kissed her on the cheek, and he and Alex left.

She stood for a long moment or two before she went back to the window and looked down at the pretty courtyard. She hadn’t known for sure if she had a chance with him. But now she knew, and she also knew she would move heaven and earth for him.

Traffic was heavy out to Charles de Gaulle, as it always was on just about any highway in or around Paris. The cabby dropped Pete off at the Turkish Airlines counter, where she showed her Lois Wheeler identification and picked up her boarding pass.

At the international terminal, she showed her passport and boarding pass. The male security officer looked at the photo, then at Pete. “Doesn’t look like you, Madame,” he said.

“It was taken a few years ago. I’m a little older now.”

“Your hair is not the same.”

Pete smiled. “What woman’s is?” she asked. “It’s our prerogative.”

The officer looked again at the passport photo. “What is your birth date?”

Pete gave him the date from the passport. It was a few years older than she was.

The officer initialed her boarding pass and handed it and her passport back. “The photo does you no justice, Madame.”

Her shoulder bag and the one carry-on bag were sent through the X-ray machine, and she passed through the security arch.

The man ahead of her was taken aside for a pat-down, but she was allowed to collect her things and head down the broad corridor to the gates, the first and easiest of her hurdles behind her.

Tel Aviv wouldn’t be so easy, because it was possible someone would be gunning for Lois Wheeler.

FIFTY-FOUR

Colonel Bete had three Citroën C5 black sedans waiting in front of the hotel. McGarvey and Alex rode in the back of the middle car, Bete riding shotgun in the front seat. Two men sat in the front of the lead and follow cars, in the backseats of which were a man and a woman.

“There have already been two deaths in Paris over this business,” Bete said as they pulled away. “Lucien, for all the problems he faces now, was correct in his concern over your presence here. I personally want to make sure you are gone as quickly as possible.”

“Thanks for your help,” McGarvey said.

Bete turned around in his seat. “You are a good and capable man, Monsieur le Directeur, and in many ways France owes you and the CIA a debt of gratitude. But you are like a lightning apparatus. You attract trouble. I’m not the only one who will breathe a sigh of relief when you are gone.”

“Maybe I’ll come back on vacation someday.”

Bete laughed. “I sincerely hope not. You have not been officially designated as a persona non grata, but I think the next time you would not be allowed entry.”

“Too bad for France, Colonel,” Alex said. “One of these days you might need his help. But then if France asks, he’ll probably come running. It’s what he does, didn’t you know?”

Bete didn’t answer.

They took the feeder road that ran alongside the Seine to the ring road that connected to the A3 out to Charles de Gaulle, sweeping past traffic, their speeds sometimes topping 150 kilometers per hour.

At the airport they were passed through the security gates to the commercial hangar, where the Gulfstream had been trundled out to the tarmac, its engines idling, its hatch open, its stairs down.

Bete got out with them. “I understand your sentiment, Mademoiselle Unroth. Despite who you are, Monsieur McGarvey has stepped into the fray to help save your life, though it’s beyond me why, except that, as you intimate, he is a good man. But he is no longer welcome in France.” He glanced at McGarvey and nodded. “At least not in the near term.”

He and McGarvey shook hands, and Alex went first aboard the Gulfstream, McGarvey right behind her.

Their pilot, Donald Roper, was turned in his seat as Maggie pulled up the stairs and closed and dogged the hatch. “We’ll have to hustle to beat the Turkish Airlines flight by the one hour you want. She’s a 747–400 and has about ten knots on us.”

“Anytime you’re ready, Captain,” McGarvey said.

He and Alex went aft and strapped in.

Maggie came back. “We’re eighth for takeoff. May I get either of you something to drink? I’ll be serving steaks with baked potatoes and salads once we’re at ten thousand feet.”

“May I have a glass of champagne?” Alex asked.

“Of course. For you, Mr. Director?”

“A cognac, and then I’m going to get some sleep. It’s been a hell of a long day.”

“No dinner?”

“Not for me.”

The attendant went forward.

“She’s a pretty girl, but then so is Pete,” Alex said. “She’s in love with you.”

“Stay out of it,” McGarvey growled.

They started away from the hangar and onto the taxi way, toward the active runway, and joined a lineup of six much larger jets and a Boeing 777 just turning into place for takeoff.

“Once they find out Pete’s an imposter, they’ll figure out I came in the back door with you, and George will send someone to try to kill me.”

“Then why are you doing this? Why go to him?”

“To see if someone actually tries.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll find him, providing you let me keep Pete’s papers and CIA identification booklet. And her gun.”

“The Israelis won’t appreciate the CIA bringing in a ringer right under their noses. Armed.”

“Only to defend myself.”

“That’s what the Hezbollah terrorists claim.”

Alex looked away. “I’ll do it on my own if I have to,” she said. “But once Pete is outed, the Mossad is going to take a real interest in you. They might even bring you to someone who will claim to have been the control officer for the op in Iraq. But you won’t have any possible way of knowing if he himself isn’t a ringer.”

“Not with you there.”

Alex looked at him and nodded. “You’re probably right,” she said.

It was early evening, Tel Aviv time when the pilot called McGarvey and said they were one hour from landing at Ben Gurion, which would put them nearly one hour ahead of the Turkish Airlines flight.

“Who will be meeting us?”

“They didn’t say, but from the tone of the guy I just got off the radio with, it’ll be Mossad. They’ve already checked Langley to find out who we were. Your name and Ms. Boylan’s were mentioned, and they wanted to know the nature of your flight. I played dumb.”

“Good job, Captain, thanks. I’m going to make a sat phone call now.”

“You may use the aircraft’s equipment.”

“Thanks, but from this point, they’ll be monitoring every transmission that comes from us.”

“But not your sat phone?”

“Mr. Rencke designed it,” McGarvey said.

“I see.”

Otto was at his desk when Mac’s call came in. “The Mossad has taken an interest in you guys,” he said. “But Walt’s still backing you up, over Marty’s objections.”

“Is anyone on the Hill or the White House asking questions?”

“Nada, except they want updates on our serial killer. But everyone’s damned glad the problem seems to have gone away. I let it slip that the killer was definitely off campus, and probably out of the country. Marty sent our station chiefs the heads-up.”

“No mention of Alex?”

“None. Unless someone takes a look at the Sûreté’s day sheets over the past twenty-four hours. But the DGSE has promised to temporarily delay making positive IDs on you or Alex.”

“I’m sure no one in France is happy about it.”

“A firestorm would be more accurate. Wouldn’t have been half so bad except the guy who took the hit at the café was a stockbroker. He was there meeting his mistress, who is the wife of the minister of finance. Figaro is speculating he was assassinated on the minister’s behalf, and that his recent string of successes on the Paris Bourse were because of insider information he was getting from the wife.”

“That story won’t hold for long,” McGarvey said.

“How much time do you need?”

“Seventy-two hours ideally, but at least forty-eight. I think we’re getting close.”

“Somebody else does too; otherwise, they wouldn’t have taken the risk of trying to take her out in Paris,” Otto said. “One other thing: the DGSE thinks it has a positive ID on the shooter they fished out of the river. The Barrett was registered to a fictitious name at an accommodations box in London, which led them to an SIS investigation of a Brit by the name of Hamid Cabbage — mom was an Israeli, dad was a Scotland Yard counterterrorist officer who sometimes did contract work for the Mossad. Thing is, the son took off on his own and did some freelance assassinations.”

“Trained in Israel, but then left after a short period?” McGarvey asked.

“The French sent over blood and mouth swab samples for a DNA match. But that’s going to take a few days.”

“He could have been working for the Mossad, or for someone else,” McGarvey said.

FIFTY-FIVE

Otto turned his battered old Mercedes diesel over to the valet parker at the Hotel George, just down the block from Union Station, and went inside to the bistro and bar. He gave the name Tony Samson to the maître d’, who had a server take him to a table upstairs, where an older woman with gray hair, sagging eyelids, and drooping jowls was just finishing a martini.

“Mrs. Fegan,” Otto said.

The woman looked up and then smiled uncertainly. “Actually, it’s been Ms. for the past five years. You’re Mr. Samson?”

Otto nodded and sat down. The waiter came, and Otto ordered a house red. She ordered another Tanqueray martini straight up.

“I don’t know how much help I can be. I don’t have any proof. Only things I heard.”

The woman had been on Robert Benning’s staff when he was the assistant ambassador to the UN. Her job had been to expedite the briefing papers and books he used. She’d made it clear during their two Skype conversations before she agreed to meet that she had never created any positions, or even interpreted the raw data that came into the office. Her job was just a small step above a secretary’s.

Louise had dressed Otto for the occasion, with new boat shoes, crisply ironed jeans, a spotless button-up white shirt, and a dark blue blazer from Brooks Brothers. His long frizzy red hair was tied in a ponytail. She assured him he looked fashionable.

“I’ll work on finding the proof. I’d just like to hear your story.”

“I looked up your name. You don’t work for the Post.”

“Samson’s not my real name. Not at this stage of this story.”

“I’ll deny everything if you use my name,” she said. “I just want you to know that from the beginning. You won’t use a recorder or take written notes, anything like that.”

Otto nodded. Last year Pete had coached him on the primary principle of being a good interrogator. “Keep your mouth shut,” she had told him. “Know the answers to the questions you ask, and then let the subject do all the talking. And especially don’t say a thing when it seems like they’re done. Let them fret. They’ll fill in the silences, because they’ll either be afraid of you, or more often than not, they’ll try to impress you.”

The woman stared at him but then looked away as their drinks came.

“Would you like to order?” the waiter asked them.

“Not yet,” she said. She took a deep draught of her martini, and Otto nearly winced, seeing her lack of reaction to the raw alcohol.

“You must have already guessed what was going on; otherwise, you wouldn’t have sought me out.”

Otto sipped his merlot. It wasn’t bad, though when he’d lived in France, even the table wines — the vins ordinaires—were better.

“Everyone was so frantic to find Saddam’s WMDs, they jumped on the yellow cake story. And even when it looked as if that wouldn’t pan out, they couldn’t just walk away. They started looking for nerve gas and biological weapons mobile factories.”

Otto wanted to talk for her, lead her to cutting to the chase, but he just nodded.

She finished her second martini and held the glass up to the waiter for another. The alcohol was like water to her.

“They needed the justification so badly, they were willing to lie to make it true. But you can’t imagine the pressure all of us were feeling. It even filtered down to the janitors, who weren’t allowed into the offices until someone signed off that any scrap of paper with the least bit of sensitive material had been accounted for — either locked up or shredded.

“Finally people started whispering about the it. ‘It was in place. It would convert the critics. Make believers out of them all. It showed we had been right from day one. Saddam had sold out his own people. Something Israel had been warning about from the start. After all, bin Laden was only one problem; we had much bigger fish to fry.’”

She fiddled impatiently with her empty glass. “It was about then that my husband and I began having our troubles. I was spending too much time at work, and he was traveling all the time. And not alone.”

Pete did caution that if they seemed to be wandering off course, to jog them. “But lightly,” she’d said.

“Any idea what the it might have been?” he asked.

She laughed, the sound ragged. She was a big drinker, but Otto figured she was also a heavy smoker. “No one wanted to come out and actually say something specific. Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Otto sipped his wine.

“Someone was going to have to find the damned thing before it was too late, for Christ’s sake. Don’t be dense.”

Otto waited for nearly a full minute, until the waiter had brought Ms. Fegan’s third drink, before he pulled out folded sheet of paper and laid it on the table.

“I won’t talk to you if you try to take notes,” the woman said.

“No pencil, no pen,” Otto said. Though he’d played around with superthin tablets that could be rolled up or folded and still record sounds and video, this was only plain paper.

“The last I heard, it had been moved, and only a handful of people on the ground knew where it was, and just about everyone was frantic to find out.” She took a drink, her hand steady. “But that was more than ten years ago.”

She knocked back her drink and looked for the waiter.

“Why don’t we have some dinner first?” Otto said.

“Fuck you,” she said, but not harshly.

Pete had warned that sometimes an interrogation would come to a dead end, and then you’d have to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

“What if there’s no rabbit?” Otto had asked.

“There’s usually at least one right under your nose.”

“Have you ever heard of the sculpture Kryptos, over at the CIA?”

She nodded. “I went over one time with Bob, and we were given a tour. It’s in one of the courtyards, as I remember, some sort of a coded message chiseled into the plates.”

“Four plates, actually, three of which have been decrypted, but the fourth has stumped all the code breakers until a few days ago.”

The woman just looked at him.

“We think it has something to do with what was hidden in the hills above Kirkuk.”

“That’s not possible. I remember we were told that the sculpture was dedicated in the early nineties.”

“The message on the fourth panel was changed in the past five years or so,” Otto said. “Would you like to know what it says?”

“This is bullshit,” the woman said. But she nodded.

Otto read from the paper. “‘And God said let there be light, and there was light, and the light was visible from horizon to horizon. All was changed, all was never the same. And God said let there be progress.’”

The waiter came and asked if Ms. Fegan would like another drink, but she declined and he left.

“The last line was: ‘And there was peace.’” Otto looked up at her. “About what you guys were working for, wasn’t it? A reason to take Saddam out, so Iraq could be rebuilt?”

“But it didn’t work out that way, did it? In more ways than one. And now we’re stuck with one hell of a big problem no one knows how to fix.”

“What’s buried out there?”

“Figure it out for yourself,” the woman said as she got her purse and started to rise.

“Someone thinks they know, and is willing to kill for it. So far at least eight people are dead.”

“Not my problem.”

“I think I know who moved it and why, but at least tell me who buried it in the first place.”

She was frightened, and she started to move away, but Otto jumped up and caught her arm.

“Why did you agree to talk to me in the first place if you weren’t willing to tell me something I already didn’t know?”

“Leave me alone,” she said. She pulled her arm away and scurried downstairs.

Otto left a fifty-dollar bill on the table and followed her just as she was leaving through the front door.

She turned and spotted him, then darted out into traffic at the same time a black Range Rover accelerated down 15 E Street NW, hitting her full on, tossing her body in front of a taxi coming in the opposite direction.

The SUV continued up toward Union Station, its license plate light out.

FIFTY-SIX

It was seven in the evening local when their Gulfstream landed at Ben Gurion and taxied to an Israeli Air Force hangar. As soon as the engines spooled down, the wheels chocked by two ground crewmen, the hatch was opened and the stairs lowered.

“We’ve been instructed to remain aboard,” Roper called back from the cockpit.

“As soon as possible, refuel and work out a flight plan for Ramstein,” McGarvey said. “If we’re not back in twenty-four hours, leave without us.”

A dark-green Mercedes C–Class pulled up, and a short slightly built man wearing khaki slacks and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, got out from the driver’s side and came aboard.

“Mr. Director, welcome to Tel Aviv. My name is Lev Sharon, and we met once a few years ago just before you moved off the seventh floor.”

They shook hands. “You’re Ariel’s son?” McGarvey asked.

“Nephew, actually,” he glanced briefly at Alex. “The fuel truck should be here in the next five or ten minutes, so we should be able to get you turned around and out of here well within the hour. But we’re curious as to why you came, unannounced.”

“We called ahead for permission to land, and were given it.”

“Yes, of course. But this is an unscheduled visit, and you certainly didn’t come as tourists. So we’d like to know why you’re here.”

“Are you still working for the Mossad?”

Sharon was young, but his shoulders were already sloped, his face filled with lines as if he were a man in his sixties, and not in his late thirties. “I can tell you this, of course. We’re all friends here. Yes, I am.”

“Then you have heard about the problems we’ve had at Langley.”

“We heard some back-burner rumors, that there may have been a murder on your campus.”

“Four.”

Again Sharon glanced at Alex, who stared back. “What does this have to do with Israel?”

“We’ve traced a former CIA NOC to a Turkish Airlines flight from Paris scheduled to land in about an hour,” Alex said. “She’s traveling under the work name Lois Wheeler.”

Sharon’s expression of mild interest did not change. “Yes?”

“She sent a message through VIP World Travel on the Champs-Élysées to a man she only indentified as George, who she wanted to meet. He replied she should come.”

“What does this have to do with us?”

“The travel agency is a tool of the Mossad — has been for years, since the Eichmann business — and there was a pro phrase she had been instructed to use if she wanted to initiate contact.” A pro word or phrase was a code of the sort Alex had used.

“Does the CIA have any idea who this George might be?” Sharon asked McGarvey.

“We think he works, or may have at one time worked, for the Mossad. We’re simply following a lead to see where it takes us.”

“And here you are. And what do you expect will happen?”

“We’d like to meet the flight without her knowing we’re here, and find out who she meets and where she goes.”

Sharon, who’d been leaning over the back of one of the seats, abruptly turned around and got off the airplane.

“That didn’t go so well,” Alex said, but McGarvey held up a hand for her to keep still.

From where he sat, he could see Sharon standing next to his car. The Israeli was talking to someone on a cell phone.

At one point Sharon looked up and spotted McGarvey in the window. He turned away.

“He doesn’t know what to do with us,” McGarvey said. “He’s called for orders.”

“What do you think?” Alex asked.

“He’ll either let us in, or he’ll order us to leave.”

“If the latter?”

“We’ll give Pete the heads-up, and have the chief of station here meet the plane.”

“Then we lose.”

“We’ll have gotten their attention,” McGarvey said noncommittally. He was more interested in her reaction than in Sharon’s or the Mossad’s. But her expression was neutral.

Sharon got off the phone and came back aboard. “We’ll see if someone meets the plane and pulls your NOC aside when she presents herself at immigration.”

“George?” Alex asked.

“It won’t be one of us. No one knows who George is. Nor was any message received from the travel agency. We’re just as mystified as you are.”

“We’d like to be there,” McGarvey said.

“Are you armed?”

“Yes.”

“Your weapons stay here,” Sharon said. “I want your word on it.”

McGarvey took out his Walther PPK and laid it on the seat table.

Sharon smiled. “We wondered if you still carried the Walther.”

“An old friend.”

The Turkish Airlines flight arrived at the gate in Terminal 3 exactly on time, eight minutes later. McGarvey and Alex watched an overhead monitor one level up from the immigration hall as the first-class and business passengers began emerging from the arrivals gate.

Sharon and a female introduced as Sheila, in jeans and a khaki military shirt, the sleeves rolled up and buttoned above the elbows, waited with them.

When those passengers were off and the tourist class began unloading, Sheila stepped up. “Maybe she’s not on the flight.”

“She’s a professional; she’s biding her time,” Sharon said.

“She got a reply from George, so she’s expecting someone will be meeting her,” Alex said. “Could be she thinks she’ll be assassinated.”

Sharon was surprised. “Here, in the airport?” he asked.

“No, wherever George is waiting for her.”

“There may be no George,” Sharon said.

“Then who answered her message at the travel agency?”

“I have no idea,” Sharon said. He turned to McGarvey. “And neither do my signals people who monitor such traffic. Which either means she was lying, or your information is unreliable, or the reply came from Paris.”

“Either that or your signals people are unreliable or you’re lying,” Alex shot back.

“Lev?” Sheila said.

“I thought your people were more efficient than that,” Alex said.

Pete came from the gate area.

“It’s her,” McGarvey said.

She was tucked in behind a knot of a dozen tourist passengers, and she glanced up at the ceiling camera and winked.

“Resourceful woman,” Sharon said. “She knows someone is watching her.”

“George,” Alex said. “How long before she’s through with immigration and your people grab her?”

“Maybe twenty minutes. Depending on how fast her luggage is delivered.”

“She only has a purse and a carry-on.”

“Ten minutes,” Sharon said.

“Good, because I need to take a pee,” Alex said. “Would you like to come and watch?” she asked Sheila.

“I’d be delighted,” the Mossad operative said.

“Not such a good idea,” McGarvey said.

“Go with her,” Sharon told the woman. “I’m not having anyone wander around the airport unescorted this morning. Especially no one from the CIA.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

Cameras were everywhere in the terminal, and as Pete approached the passport lane, she was certain Mac and Alex were watching a monitor somewhere near. The issue was who else was here, waiting for her.

She got in line, and when it was her turn, the uniformed officer merely glanced at her passport, stamped it, and handed it back. He hadn’t paid any attention to her photograph, nor did he ask her the purpose of her trip.

On the other side, she joined the line for one of the customs agents to check her bag and purse. An older man in civilian clothes emerged from an office to the left and came to her.

“Ms. Lois Wheeler?” he asked politely.

“Yes, are you George?” Pete asked. He was about the right age, but he didn’t seem to have the kind of fire in his eyes she figured George would. Especially if he were the killer, or the man who had directed the killer — or killers.

“No,” the man said. “If you would just come with me, I have some questions for you.”

A few of the other people in line were curious, but most of the passengers looked away. What was happening was none of their business.

“May I see some identification?”

The man pulled out an identification wallet and showed his badge. He was airport security, but she didn’t quite catch his name before he pocketed the wallet. “Ms. Wheeler?”

Pete glanced up at one of the cameras in the ceiling and followed the man across the hall to the windowless office that was furnished only with a plain metal desk and a couple of chairs.

The security officer took her bag and purse and quickly searched them before he motioned to one of the chairs and sat down across from her. “May I see your passport, please?”

Pete handed it to him, and he studied it, comparing the photograph to her face.

“This is not yours.”

“No, it was last-minute in Paris, and the amateur who’d come highly recommended did a botched job.”

“What is your real name?”

“That doesn’t matter. I assume you’re here representing George, which of course isn’t his real name.”

“Give me a name that will be of some use.”

“Alex. George and I knew each other some years ago.”

“Yet you thought I was George.”

“No, I was merely testing the waters. I wanted to see what your reaction might be.”

The security officer stared at her. “Why did you come here?”

“I sent a message to George and he replied: Come.”

“Yes, but why do you want to see him? What is so urgent to you now, after all these years?”

Pete suppressed a smile. There was a George after all, and he was somewhere here in Israel. Alex had been right. “There have been a series of incidents at Langley, and in Athens and yesterday in Paris. I need some answers.”

Again, the man playing the role of an airport security officer hesitated. “Give me your work name.”

“Alex Unroth. What do I call you?”

“Mr. Smith will do for now.”

He took a small tablet from his jacket pocket, brought up an e-mail address, and entered the Unroth name. A minute later he glanced up. “You were a member of the CIA’s Alpha Seven team in Iraq.”

“That’s right. I’m the last one.”

“Last one?”

“The others are dead. Murdered. It’s something George knows about.”

“And you think he is somehow responsible?”

“I do.”

Smith nodded, a little sadness in the gesture. “That said, you came here, which means you are a very brave woman or a stupid one. And I only say that because if you truly understood the importance of what happened in Iraq, you would have disappeared. With your skills, you could have gone very deep. But then you’re not really Alex Unroth. In fact, your real name is Pete Boylan, and I expect Alex directed you in what to say and how to act. Perhaps it was even you who sent the message from Paris.”

“Will you take me to him?”

“Of course, if that’s what you really want. But I think you will be disappointed, because you will not find the answers you came looking for. But you might find some you don’t want to hear.”

As Smith got to his feet, the door opened.

Pete looked over her shoulder. A man in civilian clothes who she had never seen before was there, McGarvey right behind him. Mac winked and she grinned, but the man in the doorway did not seem happy.

Smith said something in Hebrew. He, too, was angry.

The man in the doorway stepped aside, and Smith followed him out of the office. Mac came in and closed the door.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“So far so good, but I’m glad to see you. Where’s Alex?”

“She took off. Mossad’s looking for her. What’d you tell this guy?”

“That I was looking for George. He checked with someone online, and he knew my real name. But he said he would take me to George if that’s what I really wanted. Said I would be disappointed. But how’d Alex give you the slip?”

“We worked it out ahead of time. Soon as we saw you wink at the camera, you had to know we were watching. She went to the bathroom with her female minder, and got away.”

“She didn’t hurt the woman?”

“Not seriously except for her pride. She left her half-unconscious in one of the stalls.”

“But why?”

“I think this guy who pulled you out of the line might take you to George, or someone claiming to be George, but they’re going to want more out of you, and us, than they’re willing to give. Alex will try to make her own contact.”

“You trust her?”

“No other game in town,” McGarvey said. “She’s the only one who can ID George.” He glanced over his shoulder at the door, then bent down and kissed Pete on her cheek just beside her right ear.

She looked up, surprised.

“These guys are scared shitless; it’s the only reason I let Alex go. Whatever song and dance they give us, we’re going along with it. I think our lives could depend on it.”

Lev Sharon came back with Smith.

“I think we have it straight now,” Sharon said. “You’ll be taken to see General Yarviv. He played the role as an adviser for Aman during the Iraq war.” Aman was the Israeli military intelligence directorate.

“Be careful with what questions you ask, Mr. Director,” Smith said. “If you step over the line, you could be subject to immediate arrest and prosecution under the Israel Secrets Act.”

“Don’t threaten me and my people,” McGarvey shot back. “We’re dealing with a serial killer on campus. Some kind of a psychopath, and at this point everything has led us here to George — if indeed General Yarviv is the guy who came to Alpha Seven in the hills above Kirkuk.”

“This isn’t the United States, you son of a bitch,” Smith said, his temper at the edge.

“Do you want to know how the four guys at Langley were killed?”

“I don’t care—”

“The same way George killed his victims on the oil installations outside of Kirkuk. He ripped out their carotid arteries, and as they were bleeding to death, he chewed off their faces like some animal.”

“You have no proof linking the general to those acts.”

“If I find it, and the reasons, you won’t dare bring this to a court of law. The Iraqis were soldiers, but it was before any declaration of war had been given. And there was no reason to kill the Alpha Seven team just to keep them quiet. They’d kept their part of the bargain. They were simply trying to forget and to survive.”

“So let’s go talk to General Yarviv,” Pete said, and Smith glared at her.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Alex got up from where she had been sitting for the past fifteen minutes with the people waiting for the early morning British Airways flight to London. First- and business-class passengers, along with the frequent flyer members, were already shuffling past the gate agent and into the Jetway.

A lot of airport security uniformed officers and a number of guys she spotted as plainclothes cops had streamed by, but not one of them had thought to check out the passengers waiting to board a flight at a gate that was just steps away from the women’s room she’d used.

She moved forward in line as the zone one passengers were invited to board. When it was her turn to present her boarding pass, she pushed past the man ahead of her and raced down the Jetway.

The female boarding agent shouted something, and when Alex reached the aircraft’s open hatch, one of the male flight attendants stepped off the plane and got in front of her. He tried to grab the strap of her shoulder bag, but she strong-armed him, shoving him backward, and slammed open the Jetway’s exit door and clambered down the steps to the tarmac.

A siren sounded from behind her as she ducked under the fuselage and ran inside the baggage processing area. Around the corner she slowed down and strode normally across the big open space as if she belonged there.

A tractor hauling three carts filled with baggage for the London flight trundled past, momentarily blocking the view of a cop who appeared at the open service door at the foot of the Jetway’s stairs, giving her time to slip behind a pile of luggage coming down a conveyor belt. Two men in white coveralls were loading suitcases, boxes, and other things on the carts of a second tractor.

Glancing over her shoulder to make sure the cop wasn’t coming around the corner, she waited until both ground crewmen were looking the other way, then took a wheeled suitcase from the pile and walked in the opposite direction, keeping in the shadows as much as possible.

Someone was making a commotion behind her, and she sped up, coming to the entrance of a luggage carousel that wasn’t in use.

After climbing up on the slideway, she parted the rubber curtains and looked out to the baggage hall, where checked luggage that had already passed security was being routed to the proper flights. Two men were loading luggage three slideways to the left, intent on their work, their backs turned to her.

She ducked out on the slideway, hurried to the right, and continued to the far end of the hall, where she opened a door a crack and looked out. The conveyor belts coming from the ticketing area two levels up, the ones used to send checked luggage down to the preliminary sorting area, were idle.

Stepping out, she crossed the large room and slipped out a door on the other side, where she found herself in the arrivals hall, busy at this hour of the evening.

She was on the outside of the secured area now, and she pulled the suitcase behind her as she went outside and then climbed into a taxi. The driver put her suitcase in the trunk and got behind the wheel.

“The Hilton, please,” she told him.

“You’re an American?” the driver asked, pulling away.

“Canadian, actually,” she said. She took out her phone and called Otto.

He answered on the first ring. “You’re not at the airport,” he said.

“I’m in a cab heading to the Hilton. Is Pete okay?”

“Yes. An Aman officer met her at customs, but Mac and Sharon are with her. All hell has broken loose at the airport. Sharon is convinced it was Mac who engineered your escape.”

“They can’t prove it,” Alex said. “But right now I need you to do a couple of things for me.”

“I thought you were going to stick with Mac so you could identify George, who, as it turns out, now might be an Aman general?”

“I’m going to do exactly that, but my own way. I value my hide more than to simply walk into wherever this guy wants to meet.”

“I’ll have to let Mac know.”

“Naturally.”

“You didn’t have time to make a reservation at the Hilton, so I’ll take care of that right now. What else?”

A bright flash lit up the early morning sky far to the southeast, behind them.

“Hezbollah,” the driver said. “And right on time.”

“A Hezbollah rocket just landed,” Alex said.

“It’s been happening just about every night for the past week,” Otto said.

“Are Mac and the others still at the airport?”

“Yes. They’re still trying to figure out what to do about you. They know Pete’s real identity, and Mossad wants to throw her in jail for traveling under a false passport.”

“What about Aman?”

“The general has been told, but he still wants the meeting.”

“Has Walt Page been informed?”

“The chief of station in Tel Aviv sent a flash message to Marty, so I’m sure he’s called Page.”

The situation was unfolding exactly the way she wanted it to. She needed the delay. “I want to know the moment they leave the airport, and I’ll want to know exactly where they’re going — that’s if they haven’t taken Mac’s sat phone.”

“He still has it. I’ve booked you a suite for three days, under Pete’s name, with a Congolese Faith Ministries Gold Amex card.” It was a sometimes-used CIA front.

Alex had to laugh. “I didn’t think we still used that one.”

“They’re saying now that you injured one of the Mossad officers. They’re going to issue a warrant for your arrest.”

“I just put her down. She couldn’t have been out for more than ten or fifteen seconds.”

“If the warrant is issued, and the cops try to pick you up, you’ll surrender peacefully. No one gets hurt.”

“Sure, if it goes down that way. But if George sends some of his muscle like he tried in Paris, I will defend myself. I just want to get a look at his eyes, and then I’ll back off. You have my word on it, because the next thing I need from you is a piece of equipment I couldn’t bring into the country.”

“A gun.”

“Yes. And I’ll need a car.”

“The car is easy,” Otto said. “I’ll have to think about the other.”

“Don’t think too long about it,” Alex said. “We’re coming to the end game.”

“We could cut to the chase right now, if you’d confirm what’s buried out there and what became of it.”

“You’ve figured it out. Christ, Roy practically drew you guys a picture.”

“I want to hear it from you,” Otto insisted.

“I want Mac to hear it from George.”

When they reached the Hilton, a bellman took the suitcase from the trunk. Alex paid the cabby, and once inside, she showed Pete’s passport and checked in. The morning desk clerk didn’t bother looking at the photo. He just had her sign, and then gave her the key card.

Her suite was on the twelfth floor, overlooking the Mediterranean. She gave the bellman a good tip, then ordered a pot of coffee and a plate of sweet rolls.

She figured that whatever was going down would happen within the next hour or two. She didn’t think that George, or the Israeli authorities, would let it drag out any longer than that.

Her coffee and rolls came, and she’d sat down to eat when someone else knocked lightly at her door.

No one was visible in the peephole, but when she opened the door, a man was rounding the corner to the elevators halfway down the corridor. He’d left a small leather valise.

Otto had arranged for her to have a standard U.S.-issue 9-mm Beretta with a decent suppressor but with only one fifteen-round magazine. She field-stripped the weapon to make sure it was in working order, and then reloaded it.

She sat by the half-open slider, smelling the Med and drinking her coffee, nothing else to do but wait until Otto called.

FIFTY-NINE

The Aman officer identified only as Mr. Smith rode shotgun in an eight-passenger Mercedes van, a taciturn young man in jeans and a T-shirt driving. McGarvey and Pete sat in the second row while Sharon sat in back. Sheila had remained behind to help airport security with the search for Alex.

“Leave her alone, and she’ll show up on her own,” McGarvey had told Sharon. “No one will get hurt.”

“That’s not acceptable,” Sharon had said, and Smith had agreed.

They headed into downtown Tel Aviv directly from the airport, the early morning traffic beginning to pick up, mostly with trucks making deliveries to hotels and restaurants or collecting garbage. It was the same in every city.

An explosion had come from somewhere in the southeast, lighting up the morning sky for just a few moments, but Sharon or Smith didn’t seem to be affected by it. What was common in a place became the norm, and most people ignored it.

The driver was very good, turning down narrow streets and then doubling back, pulling into hotel driveways, including the Hilton’s to see if anyone could be outed behind them, then speeding off in a completely different direction.

“Is someone following us?” Pete asked.

No one answered her. She looked at McGarvey, who shrugged.

“We’ve passed Mossad headquarters twice, but I don’t suspect he’d want to meet with us there,” McGarvey said. “Not unless Mossad and Aman are on better terms than they were when I was DCI.”

“Where is Alex?” Sharon asked. “Do you know?”

“She could be anywhere.”

“That doesn’t help,” the Mossad officer said, vexed. “We’re on the same page here, Mr. Director. We want to help you solve your mystery and we want to stop the killings.”

“Did you know General Yarviv and Alex were lovers during the war?”

Smith laughed. “That’s the woman’s story. I know better.”

“Do you?” McGarvey asked. “Did the general tell you what he and Alex did?”

“You’ve already made your accusations.”

“Yes, but did you ever discuss Iraq with him — if he turns out to be Alex’s George after all?”

McGarvey kept his tone neutral, though he could see he was getting to them, especially to Smith, who was probably Yarviv’s chief of staff or personal friend.

“Was Mossad briefed on the Iraq operation above Kirkuk?” McGarvey asked Sharon. “Or has all this come as a surprise?”

“Mr. Director, you have come here looking for answers I don’t know we can give you,” Sharon said. “But I would caution you to take great care with the questions you do ask, because you might not like the answers.”

“Good advice,” Smith said, his voice soft.

They left the city on Highway 1 toward Beit Dagan, the terrain rising from the narrow coastal plains within less than ten miles to the beginning of hill country, where they turned south on Highway 6, which more or less paralleled the border with the West Bank.

Just before the town of Modi’in, they turned east on Highway 443, and within a couple of miles of the border, the driver turned off the main road and took a stony dirt track up a steep hill through an olive grove to a sprawling stuccoed house nestled in a slight dip just below the crest.

Several ancient outbuildings dotted the west side of the property, and as they drove up, two young men were leading a small flock of sheep away. The scene in that direction was almost biblical.

But the roof of the main house bristled with several antennas, including one used for microwave burst traffic. An American-made Hummer with Israeli-army markings was parked around back, and a fairly new Mercedes S-Class sedan was parked directly in front.

It didn’t look like an ordinary safe house to McGarvey; it was too ostentatious, and nothing was anonymous about the place.

McGarvey and Pete and the two Israeli intelligence officers went up a white river-rock path to the front door that opened as they approached. Their driver had gotten out of the van, but he lit a cigarette and stayed there.

A middle-aged woman in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse, a smile on her round face, stood there. “Good evening,” she said in English. “My husband has been expecting you.”

She showed them back to a large study, its sliders open to a patio and pool beyond which was a garden with a riot of fruit trees and bright flowers in full bloom.

“Lovely,” Pete said.

The woman’s smile broadened. “This is our favorite place of anywhere we’ve lived,” she said. “If you’ll have a seat, the general will join you momentarily. Would anyone like coffee or tea?”

“No, ma’am,” Smith said. “We’ll only be staying for a short time.”

The general’s wife nodded and then left the room.

The study was large, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls, an ancient oak desk with ornate carvings on the front and sides, and an arrangement of a leather couch, a pair of wingback chairs, and a coffee table. One space to the left, which could have used a chair, was empty. Old oriental rugs covered the multicolored terrazzo floor. A couple of very good paintings, one of them McGarvey thought might be an original Renoir, hung on the textured red stone walls. Altogether it was a totally masculine room of a refined man.

“Good evening,” a baritone voice said, coming in from the corridor. He was a broad-shouldered man with a thick head of mostly gray hair, and a large square face with prominent eyebrows that stuck out in all directions. He was dressed in jeans and a white shirt, and he looked like a general. He was in a wheelchair, and he came around to the empty spot.

“Good morning, sir,” Smith said. “Sorry to be a bother so late.”

“It’s okay, Uri. We were expecting some company sooner or later,” the general said. He turned to the others. “Mr. McGarvey, I presume, and Ms. Boylan, I was told. I’m Chaim Yarviv. Until I retired a few years ago, I was a deputy director of Aman, but then a stupid incident put me in this chair.”

“Good morning, General,” McGarvey said. “Do you know why we’re here?”

“Yes, and I knew someone like you might be showing up on my doorstep to get some answers, which neither of our governments would like me to give. But Ms. Unroth isn’t with you?”

“We lost her at the airport,” Smith said.

“I’m told she is an inventive woman, ruthless when need be, but very bright. I expect she’ll be showing up soon.”

“I’m sorry, General, but we think she may still be at the airport,” Sharon said.

“I doubt that,” Yarviv said. “So, to the business at hand. We received the properly formatted message to George, from Alex though our travel agency in Paris. It was brought to me, and I authorized the reply for her to come.”

“You’re George?”

Yarviv smiled. “No. That would have been Jacob Ya’alon. An utterly charming man, one of our best field operators, but a man totally lacking in any sense of morals. He was well educated, but for whatever reason, he could never distinguish right from wrong. Because of that character trait, he was one of our best tools. Shame on us.”

“We have been fighting for our lives here since 1945,” Smith said.

“Yes, but shame on us for using such tools. Only those who believe the ends justify the means can do such things. Hitler’s philosophy. Stalin’s.”

“What became of Ya’alon?” McGarvey asked.

“Major Ya’alon at the end. We took him out of the field and put him behind a desk, hoping to muzzle him. But he became a hopeless drunk, and maybe used some cocaine at the end. He murdered his live-in girlfriend, and we locked him up. That was eight years ago. He went crazy in prison, tried to kill himself a couple of times. But less than a year after he was convicted, he developed cancer — leukemia, I think it might have been — and was dead within eight months.”

“All this time we’ve been chasing a dead man,” McGarvey said, certain the general was telling the truth.

“Ah, but Alex, from what Ya’alon told me, was an utterly convincing operator. The best he’d ever seen. I think he was captivated with her. Maybe even in love, and she with him. They did terrible things together in Iraq. It reinforced who he was, of course, but it must have changed her. Given her some warped sense of herself, some skewed view of the real world. He had that effect on people.”

SIXTY

Alex pushed the Range Rover through Beit Dagan on Highway 1, turning south when she reached Highway 6. They’d been at the compound now for nearly ten minutes, according to Otto. He managed to repurpose a Keyhole satellite that was permanently looking down on the region to pinpoint the compound, even to the detail that the driver of the Mercedes van was still outside and on his second cigarette, and that two men were leading a small flock of sheep off to the west.

Traffic was picking up, but Alex had gotten used to driving on the left within the first few minutes. From day one, her instructors had given her high marks: She’s nothing if not a quick study.

She was driven, had been since she was a small child battling the abuser her mother had married. Her psych eval people had reported she was not in touch with reality, but actually, she knew the difference between her fantasy world and the real one; hers was nothing more than a defense mechanism.

You did what you had to do to survive. The Army Rangers knew that score: Adapt, improvise, survive! Hoorah!

“You’ll turn off on Highway four forty-three,” Otto said. Her cell phone was in speaker mode on the seat next to her.

“How far?”

“About five miles.”

“Then what?”

“There’ll be a dirt road leading up through an olive grove. The general’s house is on the other side, just below the crest.”

Their conversation was encrypted. Whoever was monitoring the call would not be able to decrypt it anytime soon, nor would they be able to pinpoint either phone, except that their techs would guess that both phones were probably somewhere in Japan, or perhaps coastal mainland China. Otto loved screwing with the other side’s techies.

“Are you monitoring their conversation?”

“I’m getting no signal. I think they took Mac’s phone and pulled the SIM card. But I don’t think the general is your George.”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

“Christ.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m betting it’s someone else.”

“Why?”

“A hunch.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something wasn’t right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked over her shoulder.

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

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

She lowered the Beretta to the ground.

SIXTY-ONE

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

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

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

“Are you okay?” McGarvey asked.

She didn’t reply.

“Alex?” Mac prompted.

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

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

“Who answered my message?”

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

“Then who’s the killer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who was the shooter in Paris?”

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

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

“Mossad did not hire him,” Sharon said.

“Neither did Aman,” Smith said.

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

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

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

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

“She could have killed her, Lev.”

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

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

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

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

Everyone held their silence.

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

She looked at the general.

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

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

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

“I don’t know. We never found out.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

“A suitcase bomb,” Pete said.

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

“No markings?” McGarvey asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“Or came to their senses,” Pete said.

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

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

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

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

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

“No one did,” Pete asked.

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

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

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

“I thought he was killed in Iraq.”

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

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

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

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

“It was meant to be detonated.”

SIXTY-TWO

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s not the killer? For sure?”

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

“Somehow that’s not very comforting.”

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

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

“Will do,” Otto said, and hung up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“I’m waiting for a call from Mac, and then I’m getting out of here myself.”

“It’ll only take a minute, honest injun’.”

Otto had to laugh. He used the same expression himself, and he thought he was the only one. “Okay.”

A couple of minutes later the door buzzed, and Otto glanced at one of his monitors. Marty’s number two was there, in jeans and a white shirt, an apologetic smile on his small round mouth.

Otto pushed the unlock command, blanked his monitors, and got up and went into the outer office as Calder came in.

As usual, the assistant deputy director of operations wore prescription eyeglasses that were darkly tinted. “I thought my eyes were bad, but yours are worse,” he said, taking off his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot, just like Otto’s. “The hours we keep to make sure our country stays safe.”

It sounded pompous, like something Marty might say.

Otto perched on the edge of a desk. “You promised to make it only one minute,” he said. Calder was okay, but he didn’t want to screw around with the guy right now. Once Mac called, he was going home.

“Marty got a call from upstairs that he asked me to check out with you. The director apparently got a call from the State Department about one of its former employees who was hit by a car and killed. Her name was Jean Fegan. Thing is, the police said an unidentified man, possibly an employee of the CIA, may have provided the identification. You?”

“Yeah.”

“The description matched,” Calder said. “Anything to do with our goings-on?”

“I don’t know. It’s one loose end in a basketful I’m trying to run down.”

“You don’t think it was an accident?”

“No.”

“And your being there was no accident either. You met with her at the hotel. Care to share with me the substance of your meeting?”

“No, because I don’t know what the hell to make of it, except that it could have something to do with the second Iraq war and the Alpha Seven people who were among the advance teams.”

“WMDs?”

“Could be,” Otto said. “What’s Marty’s take?”

Calder stepped closer. “Don’t be coy with me, Otto, please. We’re all on the same team here. And we appreciate — Marty and I do — everything you and McGarvey are doing to run this to ground. But for goodness sake, all we ask is for a little cooperation. Tell us what you’ve come up with, and perhaps we can put our heads together. Everyone wants this to go away.”

Organ music, very faint, came from Calder’s shirt pocket. It sounded to Otto like Bach.

SIXTY-THREE

Roper called back from the cockpit. “We’ve just cleared Israeli airspace, Mr. Director.”

McGarvey looked out the window as the F-16 fighter that followed them on their port side peeled off, the one on the right doing the same. The Med was a featureless gray-blue that stretched one hundred and fifty miles south to the Egyptian coast.

“I’m going to make a call now,” he said.

Pete was sitting across from him, but Alex had stretched out in the back and had fallen asleep. She’d been exhausted after the ordeal she’d survived. The situation could have gone south at any moment. If she’d seriously hurt the Mossad agent who had accompanied her to the ladies’ room, or if she had fired a shot — just one even without hitting anyone — there would have been nothing McGarvey could have done. She would be in an Israeli military prison cell. Or, just as likely, she wouldn’t have let herself be taken, and there would have been more deaths — hers included.

The problem was that they were no closer to solving the issue, except that the killer was probably still on campus at Langley.

He phoned Otto’s rollover number, which would reach him wherever he might be. Otto answered on the first ring.

“Where are you?”

McGarvey put it on speakerphone so Pete could hear. “We’re headed up to Ramstein to refuel. Just cleared Israeli airspace. You?”

“In my office. Tom Calder dropped over for an update. Hang on a sec.”

McGarvey could hear the sounds of a printer in the background, and maybe some music but extremely faint, as if it were coming from another room. Otto’s voice was over it.

“I’ll have something on your desk before noon, but besides what Mac found out in Israel, I’m in the middle of running down a couple of other leads I think might make some sense of what’s been happening.”

“Any hint?” Calder asked. “Even just the tiniest?”

“Well, we think we know who the killer isn’t.”

“That’s progress of a sort,” Calder said. “I’ll just let myself out. Good luck, and good morning to you, Mr. Director.”

The music faded to nothing, and McGarvey could hear the door from Otto’s outer office closing and gently latching.

“He’s gone,” Otto said.

“What was that all about?”

“Someone at State called Walt, wanted to know what we knew about the death of one of their employees last night. She was hit by an SUV. Cops said an unidentified CIA employee witnessed the hit and run. It was me.”

“Did Calder make the connection?”

“Yeah, that’s why he came over to talk to me. Her name was Jean Fegan. She was on Bob Benning’s staff when he was an assistant ambassador to the UN. I met with her to see if she knew anything about the Alpha Seven team, and something they might have found in Iraq.”

“Did she give you anything?” McGarvey asked.

“Not much. She was frightened out of her mind. She admitted she knew what was buried out there, and left it to me to figure out. I read her Schermerhorn’s message on panel four, especially the last line: And there was peace. Said it was about what they were working for — a reason to take Saddam out so we could rebuild Iraq.”

“How’d she leave it?” Pete asked.

“Oh, hi, Pete. She said things didn’t work out that way, and now we were stuck with one hell of a big problem no one knows how to fix.”

“And?” McGarvey prompted.

“She got up and walked out. By the time I caught up with her, she was already outside and running across the street when the SUV knocked her into the path of a taxi.”

“No tag number?”

“The license plate light was out.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, I got a firm ID on the contract killer in Paris, but not who hired him to take out Alex. She’s with you on the plane? She got out okay?”

“She’s here.”

“He did work for his own government as well as the Germans and for Mossad. I was able to track down most of his money in a couple of offshore banks — nothing matched with Paris. But I came up with one thing that at first seemed really far-fetched. It’s possible he has an account at a credit union in Venice, just ten miles from your place on Casey Key.”

McGarvey sat up. “At first?”

“Yeah. A guy’s body was found in an apartment in Georgetown, not far from your place. The ID he was carrying didn’t match anything the cops had, but when they ran his fingerprints, they came up with the name Norman Bogen, a former Army Ranger. No known address, or criminal record. But, kemo sabe, he has an account at the same credit union in Venice. And that’s fringe. Not only that, but a bartender in a place on M Street about two blocks from the apartment said he saw the guy leaving with a slender, attractive woman. Same time Alex was on the loose.”

“Don’t tell us his face was chewed off,” Pete said.

“No, his neck was broken. But it’s my guess he was another contract killer targeting Alex. She just beat him to the punch.”

“Whoever knew she would be in Georgetown on the loose had some damned good intel,” Mac said.

“Narrows the field,” Otto said. “What about you guys? How’d it go?”

“Alex’s George was a Mossad agent. He was a nut case. Died in prison years ago. When Alex’s message from Paris showed up, the general answered it.”

“There’s no longer any George, and Alex isn’t the serial killer. Leaves someone on campus,” Otto said. “What we figured all along.”

“What’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk is a nuclear demolitions device,” McGarvey said. “In a duffel bag without the aluminum case.”

“That’s also just about what we figured. The suitcase doesn’t matter. Did they give you a serial number?”

“No, but I don’t think the Israelis buried it. I think they knew about it, which is why they sent George out to find it. Alex’s story that George showed them where it was buried was a lie.”

“Alpha Seven buried it?”

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “But it’s only us and the Soviet Union that ever made the things.”

“That doesn’t help much. About that time, maybe a little earlier, some Russian official admitted they may have lost a hundred of the things. Could be anybody who buried it.”

“I hear a but in there, Otto,” McGarvey said.

Otto took a moment to answer. “It almost has to be us,” he said. “I don’t think it was the president or his cabinet who authorized it — I don’t think I want to go that far. But I think we were so sure Saddam had WMDs we might never find, someone took it upon themselves to somehow get a device and somehow transport it to Iraq and somehow bury it in the hills. Alpha Seven would find it and blow the whistle — let the whole world know we were right.”

“Lots of somehows in there.”

Again Otto hesitated. “I checked, Mac. No demolition devices missing from our inventory. At least not in the records. So if it was one of ours, whoever got it had to be very high up on the food chain. Someone with lots of pull.”

“Civilian or military?” Pete asked.

“Could be either.”

“Whoever it was, they’re willing to kill the entire Alpha Seven team,” she said.

“But the way it’s been done?” McGarvey said. “Makes no sense.”

“Only if you’re thinking through the lens of normalcy. They hired a lunatic to do the job. Afterward they could claim insanity. Conspiracy theory. That kind of shit.”

“We’ll be home by nine or ten,” McGarvey said. “I want you to listen real carefully to me, my friend. I want you to go home now. Trust no one. Not Walt Page or Carleton Patterson or Marty or anyone else. Lock up tight. Don’t order a pizza or Chinese delivery. Don’t even ask Blankenship for help, or anyone from the Farm.”

“I have a couple of things to look into—” Otto said, but McGarvey cut him off.

“Do you have a pistol in your office?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t bother shutting off your programs. No one can get to them anyway. Just take your gun and leave right now. Otto: I mean right this instant. Hang up, take the SIM card out of your phone so no one can track you, and go. You’re the next target.”

SIXTY-FOUR

Otto’s pistol was a standard U.S. military — issue 9-mm Beretta 92F that McGarvey had taught him how to use years ago. He checked the magazine and then made sure a round was in the chamber.

He left his darlings running but added a self-destruct code that would wipe everything out should anyone try to tamper. Rather than take the SIM card out of his phone, he left the phone on his desk. Somebody wanting to find him would think he was still in his office.

He checked the monitors in the corridor outside his office to the elevator, the elevator itself, and finally the parking garage.

No one was coming or going. Security was still extremely tight; Blankenship had placed the entire campus on all but a full-scale lockdown. Everyone’s comings or goings would be noticed and recorded.

He hesitated at the door. The trouble was he’d never been a field officer. He was a certifiable geek whose best friend in all the world was a gun-toting operator, a man who figured out things and killed people. The thing in Otto’s mind was that Mac was a hell of a lot more than just a shooter; he was understanding.

Stupid, actually, to define a friend with only one word. Mac was kind. He was gentle when he needed to be gentle — his wife and daughter had been just about his entire life, and when they had been assassinated, he’d grieved, but he hadn’t gone off the deep end, as so many men would have done.

He lifted people up, he helped those needing help, he told the truth no matter whose toes he stepped on doing it, and Otto had never known anyone who’d had more love for country than Mac.

People good or bad, countries good or bad — he understood and helped where it was needed. Like now.

Keeping the pistol at his side, the muzzle pointed away from his leg like Mac had taught him, he slipped out into the empty corridor and hurried down to the elevator. The car was on the basement level, and it took a seeming eternity for it to come up to three.

Otto stepped aside, out of the line of possible fire — again something Mac had taught him — as the door opened. But the car was empty.

His hand was shaking a little as he hit the P1 button.

It seemed to take another eternity for the door to close and the car to start down, and another eternity before it reached the executive parking level 1.

He flattened himself against the wall of the car and raised the pistol.

His Mercedes was parked three rows to the left, nose out from the wall.

The garage was mostly empty of cars. Nothing moved. There were no sounds.

Ducking out of the elevator, Otto swung the pistol left to right as he sprinted to his car. He switched gun hands so he could dig his car keys out of his pocket and jump in behind the wheel.

Mac had told him something else about situations like these. Something important, but his heart was beginning to race and he could think of nothing except getting the hell out and into the open air. The underground parking ramp had become claustrophobic.

As he reached the exit, the security scanner read the bar code on his windshield and raised the gate at the same moment he realized not only about how Mac’s wife and daughter had been assassinated with a car bomb but how Fabry had been killed by someone hiding in the backseat of his car.

He skidded to a halt, snatched the pistol from the passenger seat, jumped out of the car, and stepped back.

But if it had been a car bomb, it would have exploded the instant he’d switched on the ignition. And so far as he could tell, no one was in the backseat.

He moved back to the car and, holding his pistol at the ready, yanked open the rear door. For just an instant he didn’t know what he was seeing except for shadows cast by the streetlamp, until he realized it was his own shadow cast into the rear of the car, and he lowered the pistol at the same moment he released a pent-up breath.

The couple of times he’d been in a firefight, Mac had been at his side. And at home he would have the electronic security of the place, as well as Louise at his side. He only thanked his lucky stars they had sent Audie down to the Farm, where she would be safe.

Otto breezed through the checkpoint at the main gate, and on the long drive back to McLean, where he and Louise had moved a few days ago, he kept looking in his rearview mirror. There was other traffic on the road, none of it apparently following him. Nevertheless, he passed his normal exit off the Parkway and got off instead at Kirby Road, then took Old Dominion the back way to their main safe house.

He drove through town almost to where the road reached the Beltway, before he turned around and went home, reasonably sure no one had followed him.

Louise was at the kitchen door when Otto came into the garage. As soon as he got out of the car and she could see his face, she hit the button to close the service door. She was holding a compact Glock pistol.

“No one followed me,” he told her.

“How would you know?” she asked sharply.

“Mac taught me what to do.”

As soon as the door was closed, she pulled him inside the house with her free hand and threw her arms around his neck. “Christ, I was worried sick about you.”

“I know,” Otto said. After a moment he reached back, took the pistol out of her hand, and laid it on the kitchen counter. “I’d rather not get shot by my own wife.”

“Oh,” she said, flustered. “I tried to call you, but your phone just rang. So I called Mac, and he said he told you to get the hell out of there. Did you take a gun?”

“It’s on the passenger seat.”

“No trouble getting out?” she asked, searching his eyes.

“It was spooky, but no,” Otto said. “We have to button up this place right now.”

“I took care of it as soon as I talked to Mac. When I picked you up on the east camera, I opened the center front portal to let you in. It’s closed again. We’re good here.”

“For now,” Otto said. He went back to the car and got the Beretta.

Louise had made coffee, and she poured him a cup and got a package of Twinkies from the cabinet. “I couldn’t bring myself to buy whipping cream, but I thought you might need a lift.”

“Shit,” he said, and sat down at the counter. “I already had some at work.”

“About what I figured, but none here,” Louise said. “Mac didn’t tell me everything that’s going on, except that the killer wasn’t George but he was probably still on campus. He wants us to stay put until he and Pete get here.”

“And Alex,” Otto said. “He’s going to use her, and me, as bait.”

“Peachy,” Louise said without humor. It was an expression she’d picked up from Mac’s wife, Katy. “So, who’s the killer? What’s your best guess?”

“Could be anyone from Walt Page or Fred Atwell all the way down to Marty Bambridge or someone on his staff, or Len Lawrence and his staff.” Lawrence was the deputy director of intelligence.

“You’re not serious?”

“I am,” Otto said. Louise had poured a cup of coffee for herself, and Otto handed her one of the Twinkies, which she tried.

“Jesus, this shit tastes like fuel oil.”

He laughed. “And all the time you thought I liked them.”

Her pent-up tension suddenly released, and she laughed so hard, tears streamed from her eyes. She drank some coffee. “I bought another package.”

“They do sorta taste artificial.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Soon,” Otto said.

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

SIXTY-FIVE

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

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

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

“Jet stream?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Water,” Alex said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah. He’s next on the list.”

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

“A half hour ago.”

“Was he alone?”

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

“Did you record the call?”

“No reason to,” McGarvey said.

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

“Probably.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otto came on. “What’s up?”

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

“I record everything.”

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

“Let me get my tablet powered up.”

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

Otto came back. “Okay, here it is.”

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

You promised to make it only one minute.

Alex leaned in and cocked an ear.

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

“Wait,” Alex said. “Go back.”

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

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

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

“Do you hear that?” Alex said.

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

“Can you raise the volume?”

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

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

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

“That’s our control officer’s music.”

“George is dead,” Pete said.

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

SIXTY-SIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And so will the president.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was no good for him here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exactly.”

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

SIXTY-SEVEN

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

“Just about ready to touch down.”

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

“Calder?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?” McGarvey asked.

She looked at him. “Kirkuk.”

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

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

“Not in your mind, not even in mine, but we’re talking about Bertie Russell.”

“A seriously disturbed man.”

Alex nodded. “But not in the way you think,” she said. “He was a superpatriot — though we called him the Cynic because he thought our country was going to hell in a handbasket. He said we’d sold out to the Japanese and Germans after the Second World War, and now we were selling out to the Chinese because we were losing the economic war.”

“Sane people don’t go around chewing off the faces of people they’ve just killed,” Pete said.

“He was rabid about the Vietnam War. Said we had bungled it badly. The White House, starting with JFK, had screwed the pooch, and by the time it was Johnson’s and Nixon’s turns, they made things even worse. Bertie said if we had fought the war like the Montagnards had — like we had in the beginning — we wouldn’t have lost.”

“So he was willing to do something about Iraq,” McGarvey said. “Change things. But he couldn’t have done it alone. He must have help from somewhere.”

“A lot of the top brass over at the Pentagon were in love with him, or at least they agreed with him. He pretty much had free access to Iraq anytime he wanted.” Alex smiled a little. “But stuff like that is what makes a good NOC — the ability to make friends and set up contacts who can help you down the line when you need it.”

“Like now,” Pete said. She turned to McGarvey. “Would it be worth trying to find out who he’s been talking with over there lately?”

“We could try, but I doubt if anyone would give us anything worthwhile.”

“He liked Paris, so it could be he’ll start there,” Alex said. “So did George. One of the reasons I went there. That, and Mossad’s travel bureau.”

“I’ll scan every Paris-bound flight leaving from those three airports at any time today,” Otto said.

“You might want to stretch it out for a few days,” Alex said. “Could be he’ll go to ground somewhere close for the time being.”

“He could be driving west, maybe to Chicago,” McGarvey said. “Anywhere.”

“That’s right, but I think he’ll end up in Iraq one way or another,” Alex said. “One thing is certain: whatever he does will be a misdirection. He’ll get us looking one way while he slips off in another.”

“I’ll check every airline that leaves for Paris anywhere from the continental U.S. for the next three days.”

“Under what parameters?” Pete asked.

“That’s easy,” Otto told her. “I don’t think Calder was planning on going anywhere until after he came to my office and talked to me this morning. I’ll check reservations made starting then.”

“He knows how to backdate them,” Alex said. “Make it look as if he made the reservations last week, or last month.”

“I’ll find out,” Otto said.

McGarvey phoned Bob Blankenship at Langley, and when the chief of security answered, he sounded out of breath and very short-tempered.

“What?”

“Any sign of Tom?”

“I don’t know what the hell you and Rencke have cooked up, but I’m having a real hard time picturing Tom Calder as our serial killer. Christ, whoever is doing it has to be a nut case, and in the five years I’ve known Tom, no one could be more opposite. And Marty agrees with me.”

“Where is he? At home?”

Blankenship hesitated. “No. Maybe he has a mistress. Could be he stopped by to see her. We’ve all been under a lot of tension these past few days. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Have your people coordinate with the TSA guys at Dulles, Reagan, and BWI. Could be he’s trying to get out of the country. Maybe to Paris. Otto will be sending you a list of possible passengers. But, Bob, if he is our guy, tell your people to go with care.”

“Yeah,” Blankenship said, resigned.

Maggie came back. “The captain says we’re coming in on final, so it would help if you cut your call short until we’re on the ground.”

“Got to go, Bob,” McGarvey said. “Keep me in the loop.”

“Where are you?”

“Just landing at Andrews,” McGarvey said, and broke the connection.

The winds were gusting, but Roper was a pro and the landing was smooth. In five minutes they were taxiing to the hangar the navy used for its VIP flights.

“So, what now?” Pete asked.

“Nothing much for us until Otto or Bob comes up with something,” McGarvey said.

“No one left for him to kill.”

“It’s not over with yet,” Alex said.

“You?” McGarvey asked.

“I think he’s given up on me.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

They pulled into the hangar, and as the engines spooled down, Maggie opened the hatch and lowered the stairs.

At that moment Otto called.

“The son of a bitch is at the Farm,” he said. “He’s got Audie!”

“Get me a chopper!” McGarvey shouted to Roper.

SIXTY-EIGHT

McGarvey picked up the call on his sat phone as he got off the Gulfstream, Pete and Alex right behind him. “Switch the call over to me.”

“I need to stay on the line,” Otto said, just about beside himself.

Audie’s little voice came on.

“It’s your grampyfather. Are you okay, sweetheart?” McGarvey said, his heart aching.

“Oh yes. I’m a little tired, you know, but Uncle Tom is a nice man. He brought me some candy.”

“Where are you right now?”

“Oh, we went for a walk in the woods. I like it here.”

“Is Uncle Tom still with you?”

“Yes, I’m holding his hand.”

“Give him the phone for just a minute.”

“Okay,” Audie said.

“Good morning, Mr. Director,” Bertie Russell said pleasantly. “You have a lovely granddaughter. I hope you appreciate just how special she is.”

“You have her. Now what?”

“Why, a face-to-face meeting between us. At your earliest possible convenience. I’m sure you can arrange for a helicopter to get you down here within the hour. I think it’s time you and I got to know each other a little better. There’s so much I would like for you to understand.”

Roper came to the Gulfstream’s door. “A Sea Ranger is being prepped for you,” he said.

“Make it fast,” McGarvey told him. He turned back to the phone. “Leave my granddaughter out of it. You got my attention. It’ll be just you and me.”

“But then I’d have no leverage. Where’s the percentage for me?”

“My word, Bertie. Give Audie back to her minders, and I’ll make sure you’ll be allowed to leave the base. When I get there, we’ll talk, and no matter what comes up, you’ll be free to walk. I’ll even guarantee you a two-hour head start.”

“But then you will resume your pursuit.”

“Yes. But you were an NOC. Two hours should be plenty of time to go to ground.”

“Is Alex with you at this moment?”

“She’ll be one of our topics of discussion. At the moment she’s under arrest for the murder of a man in an apartment in Georgetown.”

“You say you have her under arrest?”

“Yes.”

“Good luck with that, Mr. Director. But I’ll do as you say. There is a camping area just west of the interstate. It’s called Toano. I don’t think it’ll be very busy at this time of the year. Your pilot can find it on the chart.”

“First I’ll need to verify that Audie is back with her minders and unharmed.”

“As you wish,” Bertie said. “Oh, and leave your weapons behind.”

“Not a chance,” McGarvey said. “If need be, I will defend myself, but you have my word I’ll give you two hours.”

Bertie rang off.

“I’ll be airborne in a few minutes,” he told Otto. “Let me know as soon as Audie is safe.”

“Kill him,” Otto said.

“Count on it,” McGarvey said, and hung up.

“I’m going with you,” Pete said.

“Stay here with Alex.”

“I’m going back to McLean to give Otto and Louise some backup in case the bastard tries to get to them instead of waiting for you to show up,” Alex said. “Camp Peary and your granddaughter could be just a diversion.”

McGarvey stepped close to her. “Don’t fuck with me, Alex. The people we’re talking about mean a great deal to me. If you try anything, I will put a bullet between your eyes without a moment’s hesitation, even if it takes me the rest of my life. And believe me, I’ll enjoy it.”

Alex shrugged. “You gave your word to Bertie, and he trusts you. I’m giving you my word that I won’t do a thing to Otto or Louise. I want this to be done even more than you do, because I’ve lived with it for nearly a third of my life now. And all my friends are dead.”

“You’ve never had friends,” Pete said.

McGarvey called Otto. “Alex is coming to stay with you guys in case Tom decides to make an end run on you. Are you okay with that?”

“Wouldn’t do her any good to take us out,” Otto said. He was a lot calmer now. “Send her over. Anyway, Audie’s safe, and Calder is already on his way off base.”

A gray Chevy Equinox with navy markings came to the hangar door. McGarvey tossed Alex the keys to his Porsche, and he and Pete rode in the Chevy, he in the front and Pete in back, over to the helicopter, its engines warming up.

The pilot was a young navy lieutenant, and he found the campground on his chart. “I grew up in Norfolk, so I know the area,” he said.

“How quickly can you get us down there?” McGarvey asked.

“We cruise at a hundred and twenty knots, but I can push it to one thirty if it’s urgent.”

“It’s urgent.”

“Under one hour.”

“Let’s go. I’ll tell you what I have in mind on the way down,” McGarvey said.

Bertie, driving just five miles per hour over the speed limit on I-64, passed the Toano exit at mile marker 227, and continued back to Washington, the day gorgeous, traffic light, his mood lifting.

All his life, especially since as a five-year-old kid learning chess by studying the games of the masters, he had come to appreciate most of all the end game. The opening moves were critical. And the middle game, when the majority of the strategy was concentrated on controlling the center of the board, was intense. But it was the end, when the player who reached the jugular vein first — usually the one who lured the opposition’s queen into a trap, maybe from a trade, a bishop for a queen — that he’d enjoyed the most.

Nothing had changed in the intervening years. The preparations and training for an op were interesting, and even the opening moves and first contacts were intense. But it was at the end that he soared.

He phoned Admiral Matthew Koratich’s private number at the Pentagon. Koratich was assistant chief of air operations for the Atlantic area, who Bertie, as Tom Calder, had befriended a number of years ago.

They’d met at an Army-Navy game a year after Bertie’s wife had died of cancer, and they had hit it off immediately. Their politics were the same brand of the conservative “America first” ideal, and it wasn’t long before Bertie was passing him hard intel about Russian satellite surveillance systems the CIA hadn’t been sharing with the military at the time. It had to do with not compromising the US’s sources in Moscow, and Koratich’s star had risen based on some shrewd decisions he’d made.

His secretary put Bertie’s call through.

“Tom, haven’t heard from you in a while,” Koratich said. “Rumors are you guys are having some trouble over there.”

“We have some nut case running around, causing us a world of shit, but it’s nothing we can’t handle,” Bertie said. “But I need to ask you for a favor.”

“Anything,” Koratich said without hesitation.

“I need to get to Baghdad ASAP. I mean, like, right now.”

“CIA has access to a lot of aircraft.”

“I know, but this has to be on the q.t. Could be the guy we’re looking for over there has some serious intel linked to a couple of Saddam’s people still in hiding. I’d also need a car and a driver. But someone anonymous. Civilian.”

“I can work something out,” Koratich said. “How soon? Like, today?”

“I’m about two hours away from Andrews.”

“Stand by,” Koratich said.

Bertie reached into his shirt pocket and switched on his MP3 player, the music coming from a Bluetooth earpiece also in his pocket. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. Serious music for serious business. Precise, mathematical, and therefore beautiful. It was the remastered performance by Albert Schweitzer in 1935. Always had been his favorite.

Koratich came back. “I have a Gulfstream, just landed an hour ago. She’s being refueled. I can have a new crew out there by the time you show up. How long will they have to stand by?”

“No time at all, Matt. Soon as they drop me off, they can refuel and head home.”

“Happy to lend a hand,” Koratich said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

SIXTY-NINE

They flew low southeast of Richmond, following a slow-moving creek that didn’t start to widen out until the campground and ten miles farther, where it emptied into the James River. Their pilot, Lieutenant Billy Cox, knew his business, his touch light on the controls, sometimes just skimming the creek, the trees close in on both sides.

Otto called when they were just a few minutes from Toano. “He left his car in the short-term parking lot at Dulles. He made reservations for a flight to Paris this evening under the name Walt Wager.”

“He has a sense of humor,” McGarvey said.

“But I also came up with reservations for Istvan Fabry out of Baltimore, Larry Coffin from LaGuardia, and Roy Schermerhorn from O’Hare. I’m sure I’ll find reservations — all of them for Paris — under the names of the other Alpha Seven operators. But security at the Farm said he was driving a Chevy Impala. I checked Dulles again, and a guy matching his description rented the car from Hertz for six days.”

“Hang on,” McGarvey said. He tapped Cox on the shoulder. “We’re looking for a black Chevy Impala.”

“The campground is just around the next bend. Sixty seconds.”

“We’re just about there,” McGarvey told Otto. “Is Alex behaving herself?”

“She never showed up.”

“Shit,” McGarvey said. “Get us the hell out of here!” he shouted to the pilot.

At that same instant, Cox was already hauling the chopper in an almost impossibly tight turn to the left. “We have an incoming missile,” he said calmly.

“The son of a bitch led us into a trap,” McGarvey told Otto. “We’re being fired on. He and Alex were working together all the time.”

“Hang on. This will be close,” Cox said. He could have been discussing the weather.

“Find them,” he told Otto, and rang off.

Flying just off the surface of the creek, Cox jinked farther left toward the highway at the last moment, into an opening in the trees just a few feet wider than the diameter of the main rotor’s blades.

A second later the man-launched missile that had been fired exploded in the trees so close to them, Cox nearly lost control of the chopper.

But then they were out and over a clearing.

“Someone down there doesn’t like you, Mr. Director,” Cox said. “That was a Stinger.”

“Circle around. I want you to put me down at the edge of the woods,” McGarvey said. “I’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”

“Pardon me, sir, but shouldn’t we get the hell out of here, or at least call for backup?”

“Drop me off and go,” McGarvey said.

Cox hauled the chopper around and into another tight turn, setting them down with a flourish at the edge of the clearing.

McGarvey popped the hatch and jumped out, but before he could close it, Pete, pistol in hand, jumped out beside him.

“They were shooting at me, too,” she said before he could object.

McGarvey hesitated for just a moment before he closed the hatch. He and Pete, keeping low, headed into the woods and in the direction of the campground as the Sea Ranger lifted off and headed northwest, in the clearing and below the level of the treetops.

In a few minutes they got to a point where the woods abruptly thinned out, beyond which was what looked like a parking area, and they held up.

Behind them on the other side of the clearing was the interstate highway, and ahead, just beyond the parking area, was the creek. A plain white windowless van was parked off to the right. Nothing else was out there that McGarvey could see, but he smelled the characteristic odor of burnt solid fuel, almost like Fourth of July fireworks. The Stinger had been fired from somewhere along the edge of the creek.

“It’s not Tom,” Pete said, her voice barely a whisper.

“He sent someone,” McGarvey told her. “Camp Peary was just a diversion to get me down here.”

“Alex warned us.”

“Yes, she did.”

“How many?”

“At least two, a shooter and a spotter.”

“They must have figured out by now that the chopper dropped us off,” Pete said. She was mostly hidden behind the bole of a tree.

A piece of the thick trunk just at her chest level suddenly exploded, shoving her backward off her feet, and an instant later they heard the whipcrack of what sounded to McGarvey like an M16.

He dropped to his knees and scrambled over to where Pete lay on her side. Blood soaked the side of her polo shirt from a gash just above her left collarbone. She was in pain but conscious. No major blood vessel had been hit.

“That felt like a freight train,” she said, grunting.

McGarvey felt her forehead; it was cool but not clammy. “They know you’re down, but they’ll want to know where I am. Pretend like you’re in shock.”

“That won’t be so tough.”

“God damn it, Pete, hang in there,” McGarvey said. He wanted to pick her up and get her the hell out of harm’s way.

“I’ll be okay, honest injun’, darling.”

“I know,” he said. He checked over his shoulder toward the parking area, where he figured the shot had come from, but there was no movement. “I’ll be close.”

Keeping very low, he hurried away, deeper into the woods. About twenty feet out he pulled up behind a tree that gave him a decent sight line to Pete.

Seconds later a stocky man, dressed in jeans and a dark jacket, came from Mac’s left, stopped for a second several feet from Pete, and then, keeping his short-barreled Colt Commando pointed at her, said something McGarvey couldn’t make out.

Mac rose up on one knee and, steadying his pistol hand against the tree trunk, fired two shots, one missing, the second hitting the guy in the chest, causing him to stagger to the side but not go down.

Something moved in the woods off to his right, and McGarvey turned that way when the muzzle of a rifle touched the back of his neck at the base of his skull.

“Drop your gun, and get slowly to your feet, Mr. Director,” a man said.

McGarvey did as he was told, and turned to face the rough-looking man, somewhat short, square face, a serious look in his pale eyes. He had to be in his early forties, and the way he stood, it looked as if he favored his right hip. Ex-GI. Probably special forces. By the time guys like him got out, their knees and hips were usually mostly shot. Still, many of them went to work for contracting companies. They knew how to kill people and blow up stuff.

“Clear!” his captor called out.

The man standing over Pete was holding the assault rifle on her, evidently not wounded. He was likely wearing a vest under his jacket.

“What do you want?” McGarvey asked the contractor standing in front of him.

“How much you’ve figured out.”

“You mean about Tom Calder killing just about everyone who’d worked for him in Iraq? Or how he became a raving lunatic?”

A third man also carrying a Colt Commando came through the woods from the right.

McGarvey glanced over at him. He was dressed like the other two, in jeans and a dark jacket that gave his torso some bulk. Even from fifteen feet away, McGarvey could tell he carried himself like a field operator.

“Or do you want to know about the nuclear demolitions device buried in the hills above Kirkuk?” McGarvey asked. “Maybe your boss wants to know if we have the GPS coordinates?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, you can kiss my ass, you little prick,” McGarvey said.

In one deceptively slow movement, he batted the muzzle of the assault rifle to one side, the weapon firing a three-round burst, stepped in close, hooked his right arm under the shooter’s left, and forced the man to turn even farther to the right, the assault rifle firing another three-round burst, this one catching the contractor coming up on them in the chest, knocking him backward.

Drawing his pistol cross-handed, he used his left to shoot his captor in the side of the head, and as the man collapsed, McGarvey turned and fired three shots at the contractor to the right, who’d been staggered, two of the rounds hitting the guy in the face.

At that instant three shots from an assault rifle came from behind him, and he swiveled in time to see Pete fire one shot into the shooter’s face at nearly point-blank range, and as he went down, she fell back.

McGarvey’s heart hammering, he crashed through the woods to her side. Her eyes were open but fluttering, and her breath came in ragged gasps. She was pale, white. But she hadn’t lost her grip on her pistol.

“Did I do good?” she asked.

“You did good,” McGarvey said. He pulled off his jacket, folded it into a bundle, put it over the wound in her chest, and brought her hands up to hold it in place. “Just don’t die on me.”

“Promise,” she whispered.

He called Otto and told him where they were. “Pete’s down. Get a medevac chopper here right now.”

“Billy Cox stuck around, and when he heard the shooting, he called for one,” Otto said. “It’s coming from the Farm. Stand by.”

“It’ll be okay, Pete,” McGarvey said, but he was truly afraid for her.

She smiled. “Of course it will be.”

McGarvey heard the inbound helicopter at the same moment Otto came back.

“Exactly where are you?”

“Just in the woods, across from a white van in the parking lot.”

“We have our docs prepping for you guys. How’s Pete?”

“She took a round in the chest, but she’s still awake,” McGarvey said, looking into her eyes. “I’m not going to lose this one, not this way, not now.”