End Game (10 page)

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

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

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

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

“Pretty much…?” McGarvey prompted.

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

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

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

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

 

SIXTEEN

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

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

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

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

“Lifeline?” Pete asked.

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

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

Coffin nodded.

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

“I think so.”

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

“Almost certainly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I knew someone would be coming for us.”

“Who?”

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

“His name?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You didn't call this guy by name?”

“George.”

“American?” Pete asked.

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

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

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

“We're listening,” McGarvey said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coffin nodded.

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

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

“Which you have.”

“All of us did.”

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

“Plus our control officer.”

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

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

“Nobody ever mentioned him?” Pete asked.

“No.”

“Not you or the others?” McGarvey asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

“Did he solve four?” Coffin asked.

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

“That's wrong,” Coffin said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sit down,” McGarvey said.

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

“Sit down, God damn it.”

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

 

SEVENTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that hadn't worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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