End Game (38 page)

“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.