David Hagberg - End Game

“Did they ever catch on?”

“No. When we were done in Munich, we just packed up and left. In the mountains one day, and up at Ramstein on the big bird for Saudi Arabia the next.”

“This Bertie Russell, would he confirm any of your story?” Pete wanted to know.

“Ran over an IED in oh four, after all the bloody fighting was supposedly done and gone.”

“Convenient,” McGarvey said.

Schermerhorn flared. “Look, I came out of the woodwork to help you guys.”

“Help save your own life.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it. Walt, Isty, and Tom didn’t do so well on campus. What makes you think it’d be any different if I let you take me into protective custody? So just let’s get that shit out of the way. I’m here to help.”

“With what?’ Pete asked, and the sharp question from her stung Roy.

Schermerhorn took his time answering that one. He got up again and went to the window, this time with a lot more caution. “Who else knows I’m here?”

“Otto Rencke.”

“Who else?”

“By now our deputy director of operations and the DCI,” McGarvey said. Otto had texted a query earlier, and McGarvey’s cell phone was on vibrate-only mode. He had excused himself and gone into the bathroom to answer.

“Bloody hell.”

“If you can’t trust people at that level, then what are you doing here with us?” Pete asked. She sounded as if she were gentling a skittish horse.

“Preventing world war three,” Schermerhorn said, coming back to the couch. “It’s there, the warning on panel four.”

“Save us the trouble and give us the message.”

“It’s not going to be that easy. You, Otto, whoever, needs to come up with the decryption if you’re going to believe it. Kryptos is the Holy Grail in a lot of people’s minds. My telling you won’t wash. Especially not on the Hill or at the White House.”

“You’re playing games with us now,” McGarvey said. “Your life is at stake here.”

“Here, yes, it is. Once I walk away and as long as I stay on my own and on the move, I’ll be fine while you do your job.”

“Okay, Roy,” Pete said. “Tell us how you did it. Changed the carvings on four. To this point we’ve stayed totally away from it. We didn’t want to call any attention to the thing. Everyone knows what’s carved into the copper plate, so no one really looks at it.”

“I suggested that the sculpture looked like shit, weathered and green. My supervisor didn’t agree, said copper out in the weather was supposed to look like that. It was the effect Sanborn was looking for. I couldn’t push it, of course, so I bided my time, until I pointed out that all the steel and burnished aluminum on the outside of the New Headquarters Building looked shiny and new. Kryptos didn’t match. It’d be my job to take off the crud and make it look new. And maintain it that way. If someone complained, we could also let it go back to natural.”

“And they went along with it?”

“Lots of really smart people work on campus. Lots of PhD’s, but if you ever look real close at them, you’ll find out just how naive and gullible they are outside their own narrow little specialties. They were easy.”

“You polished the sculpture. Then what?”

“Actually, it was a big job, because I not only had to do the plates themselves, but I had to polish the insides of each carving by hand, one by one. When I got to four, instead of polish, I used liquid metal to which I had added a copper tint.”

McGarvey saw the possible flaw. “In order to make something like that work, you couldn’t have changed, let’s say an A to an I , or vice versa. You would have needed to work out whatever message you wanted to put on panel four, and then figure out the code that would work as an overlay on the original letters.”

Schermerhorn shrugged. “I had a little help with my laptop, but my specialty was cryptography, and I just needed to come up with a modified one-time cipher. It’s completely random like the original, which is why no one was able to break the thing in the first place.”

“But you did.”

“You have to learn to think in random.”

“What’s on panel four?” Pete asked. “What did you try to tell us?”

“Something you wouldn’t believe if I just sat here and mapped it out for you. Plus, I don’t have all the answers — none of us ever did — except for maybe George. Listen, I’m just one guy on the run, a liar, con man, thief, killer by trade. And there’s only me and Alex left from Alpha Seven.”

“Plus George.”

“Yeah, but my guess is he’s never been on campus. Most NOCs never go near the place.”

“Except for Wager, Fabry, and Knight.”

“But someone on the inside, someone with access to real-time intelligence information has to be,” Schermerhorn. “Surely, you guys have figured that out by now.”

“Security has turned the entire campus upside down,” Pete said. She was clearly frustrated.

“Tell Otto what I said about four, and he’ll decrypt it in no time at all if he’s as smart as everyone says he is.”

“The only one left from your team is Alex Unroth,” McGarvey said.

“The Working Girl.”

“So you’re saying it’s she who killed the three on campus? What about Carnes and Coffin in Athens?”

“She moved around a lot. One day here, the next day somewhere else. Did it during our training at the Farm — sometimes she’d bug out for a day or two, and no one could get anything out of her. She did it in Germany, and of course in Iraq with George. We should have called her the Ghost, because she was damned good at disappearing right while you were looking directly at her.”

“She’s on campus in plain sight?” Pete said.

“Ever play Hide the Thimble?” Schermerhorn asked. “She’s there.”

“And you’re going to help us find her,” McGarvey said.

Otto showed up at Page’s office twenty minutes behind Bambridge, and fifteen minutes behind Carleton Patterson. He was distracted and didn’t wait for the DCI’s secretary to announce him; instead he just barged in.

“You’re late,” Bambridge said.

Page was behind his desk, Marty and Carleton seated across from him. The office was large, bookcases on the west wall, big — surveillance-proof — windows looking out over the Virginia countryside on the south, and a couple of good Wyeth paintings on the east.

Otto went to Page’s desk and wrote a note on a memo pad: When’s the last time this office has been security scanned?

Five days ago, Page wrote.

Otto motioned him to silence, and he used his cell phone to call a friend of his in the directorate of science and technology’s office of electronics. “Come up here now, would you?”

He hung up and again motioned for Page and the others to remain silent as he went to the director’s desk, picked up the phone console, and turned it over to look for any obvious signs of tampering.

“I just talked to Mac, and he and Pete are at a dead end,” he said. He got on his hands and knees and followed the phone cord to the jack in the floor.

“I didn’t think this was going to be all that easy,” Carleton said, picking up on Otto’s ruse.

“This kinda stuff never is,” Otto said, getting to his feet. “Toni Borman is on her way up with the old tapes of the preliminary interviews we did with Wager, Fabry, and Knight. Might be something we missed. Mac suggested it.”

He removed the battery and SIM card from his cell phone and laid them on Page’s desk, and then motioned for the others to give him their phones, which he dismantled as he talked.

“Thing is, we think whoever whacked our guys is long gone. I don’t know how the hell they got off campus, but there’s no way in hell they’re still here. Not with all the extra security we’ve put in place in the last thirty-six hours.”