David Hagberg - End Game

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

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

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

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

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

“How were they killed?” Coffin asked.

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

“Any DNA evidence at the crime scenes?”

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

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

“Teeth.”

“Animal or human?”

“Human.”

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

“You know who it is?” McGarvey asked.

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

“I want his name.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The German mission evidently was a success.”

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

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

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

“Anyway, it was fun,” Pete suggested.

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

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

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

“Including you?”

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

“Then why did you walk for good today?”

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

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

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

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

“No woman on the list.”

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

“What else?” McGarvey asked.

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

“Was she sleeping with him?”

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

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

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

“Where is she?”

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

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

“The cache in the mountains.”

“Containing what?” McGarvey asked.

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

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

“What did you find?” McGarvey asked.

“Not what we were supposed to find.”

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