David Hagberg - End Game

He called her cell phone, but she didn’t answer, and the call flipped over to voice mail. A little thrill niggled at the nape of his neck. She always answered her phone when she was on break or away from the hospital. She had a lot of friends she texted on what seemed like an around-the-clock schedule.

“What do you guys talk about?” he’d asked once.

She’d just smiled at him. “Stuff.”

He didn’t normally carry a weapon with him, though his 9-mm Beretta was stashed behind some paint cans in the one-car garage. But since the bulletin board announcement and Janet’s not answering her phone, he wished he had it now.

The tree-lined street where the cabby dropped him off was a typical Milwaukee neighborhood — mostly small houses, some of them bungalows, many with brick fronts and almost all with fireplace chimneys. For now it was very neat and orderly, but once the leaves turned and started to drop, the place would be a mess. As fast as you raked them up and bundled them in big lawn and leaf bags, the more would fall.

Used to be you could burn them, and fall in the upper Midwest had always smelled of smoke. Pleasant.

He phoned her again, but she didn’t answer. He shut the phone off and then removed the back and pulled the battery. He tossed the pieces behind some bushes spread over a full block.

At the corner half a block from their house, he didn’t slow down, but almost instantly he cataloged everything going on. No strange cars or trucks or vans. The Wilson boys shooting hoops across the street two doors down from his house. Douglas driving up in his old Saturn SUV. He waved when he got out, and Schermerhorn waved back.

No cops, no sirens, no fire trucks or ambulances.

Their car was in the driveway. Janet usually put it in the garage.

Everything else was normal, but Schermerhorn’s instincts were screaming in high gear. He remembered an instructor from the Farm telling them one of the Murphy’s laws the SEAL Team Six operators swore by: if everything is going good, you’re probably running into an ambush .

It felt like that now.

He crossed the street in front of his house and let himself into the garage by the side door, got his Beretta, checked the load and the action, and stepped across the paved path to the kitchen door.

Janet was on her back in the doorway to the dining room. One leg was crossed over the other. She was still wearing her sneakers, but she usually took them off as soon as she came in the house. The shirt of her blue scrubs was completely drenched with blood. The left side of her neck had been ripped away, and most of her face had been destroyed.

He only knew it was her because of her clothes, her size, and the fact that this was their house. She belonged here.

Her blood was already well coagulated, so what happened here had happened an hour or more ago. Someone had to have called her at the hospital and told her there was an emergency and she needed to come home immediately.

Holding the pistol in the two-handed shooter’s grip, he checked the house, but the killer was long gone. They’d left a message: Not only aren’t you safe, but anyone close to you is a valid target .

Back in the kitchen, he looked at Janet’s body for a long ten seconds, not able to keep himself from imagining what it had been like for her.

But then he stuffed the pistol into his belt, got her keys from the counter, went back out to the garage — where from an old paint can he retrieved a plastic baggie that held an ID kit including a passport that identified him as Howard Tucker — then got in the car and drove away.

Pete shared a cab into the city with McGarvey. She had an apartment just off Dupont Circle, and the afternoon work traffic was terrible, as it usually was on a workday, so it took forever to get from Langley, the fare almost sixty dollars.

They didn’t say much to each other on the way in, McGarvey’s thoughts drifting between the new message on panel four, the Alpha Seven mission in Iraq in ’03, and the nature in which the operators were being killed one by one. Only two were left now — Schermerhorn and Alex Unroth — plus the control officer, which narrowed the list of possible killers. But the real clue, Otto had told them, was the murderer’s intel sources.

He or she knew not only the security procedures and routines inside the campus, which allowed them to make the three strikes, but they’d also known how to find Carnes and somehow manage to kill him and track down Coffin to the NIS safe house.

Only someone very well connected could have possibly known all of that. And in such a timely fashion.

“Come up for a minute. We need to talk,” Pete said, breaking him out of his thoughts.

The cabby had pulled up to the curb, and Pete was paying with a credit card.

“It’ll be a while before Otto comes up with anything, and I need to take a shower and get some sleep.”

“Five minutes, God damn it,” she said, her tone brittle.

“Do you want me to wait?” the driver asked.

“No,” McGarvey said. He got his bag out of the trunk and followed Pete up to her second-floor apartment. He had a fair idea what she wanted to say to him, and he didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t ready, and they were in the middle of something he couldn’t quite grasp. It was just at the edges, but he wasn’t there yet.

“May I fix you a drink?” Pete asked. “Something to eat? You must be starved.”

They hadn’t eaten since the flight from Greece.

“I’m cutting you loose,” McGarvey said.

“Loose? What are you talking about?”

“This is getting too dangerous. It could have been you in Piraeus instead of Coffin. I’m taking this the rest of the way alone.”

“I don’t want to hear it. Don’t forget it was me and Otto who came to you in Serifos in the first place.”

“You’ll be safer staying here.”

“Yeah, like Wager and Fabry and Knight. The story has gotten out, and it’s only a matter of time before the media gets ahold of it, and when that happens, just about anyone on campus will be out of the loop. Everyone will become a suspect. Just getting in and out will mean running the gauntlet. And if there’re any shooters out there, we’ll all be sitting ducks.”

“It can’t be helped.”

Pete was stricken. “Can you at least tell me where the hell you’re going?”

“That depends on Schermerhorn and Alex Unroth, whoever contacts us first. But I suspect I’ll end up in Jerusalem at the government employees bank and then Tel Aviv.”

“You think the Mossad is somehow involved?”

“I think their control officer is or was a Mossad operative.”

“You’ll need someone to cover your back. It’s something I’ve done before.”

“I’m not going to risk it,” McGarvey said. “You’re staying here.”

“What?” Pete shrieked. She put a hand to her mouth and turned away for a moment. “I’m not going to do this, God damn it.” She turned back. “I’m not your dead wife, Kirk. She wasn’t a professional, and from what I read in the case file, she wasn’t even the target — you were.”

All that horrible time came blasting back at him in one ugly piece. He’d been in the car behind the limo in which Katy and their daughter were riding from the funeral of their daughter’s husband when the limo drove over an IED. Right in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery. They’d been killed instantly, with absolutely zero chance for survival. Nothing of their bodies had been identifiable, except by their DNA.

Every woman he’d ever allowed to get close to him had died, had been murdered because of him. It was a never-ending nightmare from which he couldn’t escape, not even hiding on Serifos.