David Hagberg - End Game

He and Pete rode with Moshonas back into the city and to their hotel at two in the morning.

“If the killer was sloppy, which I don’t think he was, he would have left a shell casing lying around,” McGarvey told the Greek intelligence officer.

“You’re probably right, but it’ll give our people something to do. Something to put in their report.”

“What about us?” Pete asked. She was shook up, but she held her feelings close.

“I don’t know,” Moshonas said after a thoughtful hesitation. “What are we supposed to do with you? You’ll have to at least come in for questioning.”

“Tell me about Joseph Carnes’s death,” McGarvey said.

Moshonas gave McGarvey an odd look. “I don’t know. He was killed in a car crash.”

“His body crushed? Maybe burned in a fire?”

Moshonas shrugged. “What’s your point?”

“How was the body identified? Was there a match with his passport photo?”

“As I recall, his face had been totally destroyed.”

They were sitting in the car in the hotel’s driveway, one piece of the puzzle dropping into place for McGarvey. Carnes, Wager, Fabry, and now Coffin had all been killed by the same person, who had left them some bizarre message by wiping out their faces, erasing their identities.

Moshonas got the connection. “Whoever shot Coffin waited until he turned around so they could hit him in the back of his head, destroying his face.”

“It was the same with the two men killed at CIA headquarters,” McGarvey said.

“Two here in Athens and two in Washington. Leaves three on the original team plus the mysterious control officer. One of them is the killer?”

“It’s possible.”

“Find them before someone else dies,” Moshonas said.

“That’s why we came here.”

“Too late,” Moshonas said. “And now you’re returning to Washington, or wherever the others are. Do you know where?”

“No,” McGarvey had to admit, but he had a bad feeling they were going to find out and very soon.

Moshonas nodded. “Then I wish you good hunting. No one will interfere with your leaving in the morning. But when it’s over, I’d like to sit down with you two over a couple of beers and hear the whole story. Whatever is buried out there is important enough to kill for. I’d like to know what it is.”

“Any ideas?” Pete asked.

“Many of them. But none that make sense.”

When they got upstairs, Pete jumped into the shower, and McGarvey opened a Heineken and went out to the eighth-floor balcony. Syntagma Square was lit up as it always was, and a few people wandered around, despite the hour.

To him, the city had always smelled like what he thought olive oil and fresh fish should, clean with a sense of something good, something promising. But this morning the city smelled like death. Like old mothballs, an old lady’s sachet, scents to cover something disagreeable.

The CIA’s old acronym for why people spied was MICE: money, ideology, conscience, or ego. Except for Alpha Seven’s control officer telling them that the solution to the puzzle would show that what was buried above Kirkuk was an empirical necessity, he would have bet anything that the motivation was either money or ego, or a combination of both. But he wasn’t so sure now.

He called the CIA’s travel agency in Paris and, using his coded phrase, booked first-class seats for him and Pete on the British Airways flight out of Athens leaving in the early afternoon and getting to Dulles at eight thirty in the evening. Otto had set up the account for him a few days ago, and though finance would bitch about first class versus economy or even business, he didn’t give a damn.

Nor thinking about it did he wonder if he gave a damn about a group of NOCs taking some grudge out on one another. It happened once in a while. These people, living out in the cold very often for years at a time, developed deep-seated paranoid fantasies that sometimes tipped them over the edge into insanity. Sometimes they put a pistol into their mouth and pulled the trigger. More often they got divorces or went from one affair to another, looking for something they couldn’t even define.

They were more likely than the average person to explode in road rage, or become drunks or drug addicts. Half of them walked around feeling superior to the rest of the world, while the other half slunk into dark alleys, their eyes downcast, convinced they were no better than pond scum.

A few became thieves. And a few became murderers.

Yet without them, we would lose the same war we had been fighting for two-plus centuries. No one was beating down the walls to immigrate to China. No one was crossing some ocean to illegally reach Angola or Vietnam or Yemen or Iran or Iraq. But they sure as hell were stowing away on ships, crossing rivers, even taking leaky old rust buckets from Cuba or Haiti to reach the U.S. And for the most part even the poor people getting out of Syria because of the conflict loved their home country, and wanted to go home as soon as it was safe to return.

The real problem wasn’t illegal immigrants; it was the kind of people who were so seriously pissed off that everyone wanted to come here, they were willing to kill to stop it, knock it down, make the point that whatever ideology floated their boat was the only ideology — the U.S. was the land of the Satans that had to be destroyed.

“A penny,” Pete said, coming out to the balcony. She wore only a bath towel, and her hair was still damp.

“I have no idea what the hell they want, and it’s driving me crazy.”

“Money?” she suggested. “I was thinking a stash of heroin, a cash cow on the open market. Or maybe someone grabbed a bunch of Saddam’s gold at the end and hid it up there until things settled down and they could go back for it.”

McGarvey shrugged.

“But it isn’t that easy, is it?”

“Never is.”

She took the beer from him, and drank some. “There’s nothing left here for us,” she said.

“We’re going back to DC, but the flight doesn’t leave till after one.”

“Good, I’m tired.”

McGarvey’s cell phone rang on the bed, and he went inside to answer it. Otto was on the line, and he sounded breathless.

“We’ve had another one, about two hours ago,” he said.

He motioned for Pete. “I’m putting this on speakerphone. What happened?”

“Marty’s sent a Gulfstream from Ramstein for you guys. The whole place is in an uproar. No one knows what the hell to do.”

“Tell me,” McGarvey said, not at all surprised.

“He was a goddamned groundskeeper, name of Bob Maddox. Worked for the subcontractors about ten years. Happened before seven this morning our time. Looked like an accident. He was run over by his own moving machine and ripped all to hell. I found out about it twenty minutes ago, and what struck me right off the bat was that his face had been destroyed. I told security to look for a remote-control device, which they found. FM band, line of sight. They screwed with the engine, and when he got off to check it out, the machine backed over him, the mower blades running. Makes three.”

“Five,” McGarvey said, and he told Otto about Carnes and Coffin.

“Two to go,” Otto said.

“There was a control officer Coffin only knew as George. Maybe Brooklyn, a Jew.”

“Only seven show on the op file.”

“This guy along with the woman — Alex Unroth — supposedly were quite the pair. If anyone would know the control officer, it would be her.”

Security at the CIA’s main gate was tighter than it had ever been, and Marty Bambridge himself had to drive down to personally vouch for McGarvey and Pete, even though they had been picked up at Andrews by a pair of CIA security officers in a Company Cadillac SUV. And even though Mac had once been the DCI.