David Hagberg - End Game

Her mother didn’t report her husband missing until the next morning, and it wasn’t until late that afternoon that his body was found. His time of death couldn’t be fixed to anything closer than a six-hour window, and when Alex’s mother had been questioned, she had no alibi. It was Alex who produced the time-and-date — stamped receipts from a couple of department stores that fell within the six hours, and she told police she had come home immediately after shopping, and then she and her mother had watched television together.

The brutal murder of Leonard Unroth was never solved and eventually went into the cold-case files. But for a time the people of Sarasota had been traumatized that a seriously disturbed nut-case killer was running around loose among them.

Alex graduated at the top of her high school class and then did three years at Northwestern, earning her degree with honors in foreign affairs with a double minor in Russian and Chinese. She had only a handful of boyfriends, but in Sarasota she sometimes worked the North Trail as a prostitute, and the kinkier the sex, the better she liked it.

At college, during the short breaks between the spring semester and summer semester, and then until the fall semester started, she went out to Las Vegas, where she worked first as an ordinary prostitute. Then one night a high roller picked her up — because he liked young stuff — and her second real education began.

She got a taste for the seriously bizarre, including role-playing, S&M, and a few other tricks, including orgasm at the moment of suffocation. Timing was everything in that game. At exactly the right instant during sex, her on top and her John on the verge, she would place a plastic bag over his head. At the instant he was about to pass out, he would come.

A certain type of man and a few women she had sex with liked it that way, and were willing to pay top dollar. Until the one night it went too far. Her John, paying her one thousand dollars, begged her to put the bag over his head, but he was too early. He had a heart problem, and he died while she was astraddle him.

She was honest with the hotel security people, who she’d always tipped very well, and they let her go.

“You just can’t come back here, sweetheart,” the chief of security told her with regret. He liked the money, but he also liked his sex with her straight.

Two weeks later she was in Washington, applying for a job with the CIA. And two weeks after that, her initial background check completed, she was called to an office in a federal building on the Beltway for her second interview with a case officer who wasn’t much older than she was and who sported an actual military-style crew cut. He said his name was Dominick.

“Northwestern’s a good school, and you picked the right studies,” Dominick told her. He looked up from her file. “What do you want to do for the CIA?”

She had smiled. The office was plain, only a table and two chairs, with a lousy view of the parking lot four stories down. The walls were bare, the floor a bland off-white tile, and there was nothing else.

“Truth, justice, and the American way — isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?”

Dominick showed no reaction.

“Seriously, I want to be a field officer. An NOC.”

“Why’s that?”

“I want to kill bad guys. I think this country has some serious shit coming its way. I want to be one of the guys on the front line, but I definitely don’t want to join the Marines.”

“Says you were questioned in the murder of your father when you were sixteen. Did you kill him?”

“Stepfather,” she said automatically. “No, but I should have. The son of a bitch tried to rape me. Someone else just beat me to it.”

“You don’t think you’d have any trouble killing a human being?”

“It would depend on who it was.”

Dominick gave her a long, appraising look. “You’re staying at the Hay-Adams. Expensive hotel.”

“I have a little money set aside,” she’d said.

“An inheritance?”

“No, I earned it the old-fashioned way.”

Dominick closed her file and got up. “We’ll get back to you, Ms. Unroth.”

“Don’t take too long. I was thinking about going to work for Microsoft.”

“You know computers?”

“I get by. But they’re going global, and they need someone who understands Russian and Chinese.”

Dominick showed her out, and she took a cab back to the Hay-Adams, where, before she went inside for an early lunch, she stopped a moment to look across Lafayette Park toward the back of the White House. Troubling times were coming for the country, and she wanted to be part of it. Soon.

Two weeks seemed to be the magic number for the CIA, because it wasn’t until then that they called her again, and in the same office she spent the better part of the day with a couple of clerks, filling out forms and questionnaires about her work preferences, her previously unreported skills, her work history, her next of kin — which was no one. Her mother had drunk herself to death last year.

The next day she was driven in a panel van with three men about her age to Camp Peary where her third real education began.

Marty Bambridge came in, and Alex looked up and smiled. The nameplate on her desk said: DOROTHY GIVENS.

“Good morning, sir. Go right in. The director is expecting you.”

“How was your vacation?”

“More like a long weekend,” Alex answered. “But it was good to get away from all the hullabaloo around here.”

“Amen.”

It was coming up on noon, and McGarvey had left the bulk of the interrogation to Pete, content to let her lead because she was damned good. Schermerhorn, even as cynical as he was — as most NOCs tended to be out of necessity — had warmed to her, and a couple of times in the past half hour he had actually anticipated a question and answered it before she could ask.

“Would you like to stop for lunch?” she asked. “We can eat here, or there’s an Olive Garden not too far away.”

“We’re almost done. When I walk out the door, I’m going deep and I won’t be back.”

“We’re up to late oh two, just before the Second Iraq War, when you met Alex for the first time in Munich,” Pete said. “Tell us about it.”

“I’d never met the others till then,” Schermerhorn said. “I hadn’t even heard of them. And actually, it was in Frankfurt, at what had been an old Nazi Kaserne.”

This last bit came as a surprise to McGarvey. “The Drake Kaserne?” he asked.

“Yes, you know it?”

“I spent a couple of days there a while back. As a guest of the BND. If you were there, they knew about your op.”

Schermerhorn glanced at Pete and grinned. “Actually, we were thumbing our noses at them.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It was Bertie Russell’s idea. He was our chief mission-training officer. Been with us from the beginning. He was sort of like a father figure, except to Alex, who didn’t trust him. And the feeling was mutual.

“Our first task was to get to the Kaserne without being detected by the Germans, and simply knock on their door. We had passes that were worthless anyplace else. They scrambled, but they let us in. It was a fallback, you see, in case something went wrong in Munich. Bertie wanted us on record as being in country, so if it came to it, we wouldn’t get shot. And that was a possibility.”

“What was your cover story in Frankfurt?”

“Extrajudicial rendition. It was supposedly the real start to the hunt for bin Laden. The Germans were content to go along with us as long as we didn’t cause trouble for any German citizens. They were just happy we had let them in on what we were doing.”