David Hagberg - End Game

“It’s all right, Mr. Director. I’ve been thinking about retiring myself.”

“But you’re too young.”

“Thanks for that, sir, but so are you.”

Page let that hang on the air for several beats. He smiled. “I have a problem. This agency has a problem, and I don’t know what the hell to do about it, except I don’t want to leave without some sort of a solution.”

For once, Alex didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t mean to put any burden on you, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve read your personnel file.”

Alex stiffened. “Sir?”

“Harvard. International law. Impressive then and impressive now, according to your résumé.”

Alex had built a top-shelf résumé for herself mostly out of whole cloth, in which under various identities she had worked in a number of highly sensitive government positions — all of them as a private secretary to men who were dead. She’d fabricated pay records and all the paperwork to support her work history. And everyone vaguely remembered her, though no one could exactly remember what she looked like.

Again Alex held her silence, not knowing where he was going.

“Fact is, I need your advice. Not to be a sexist pig, but I need a woman’s point of view.”

Alex couldn’t help but laugh. “Not to be a sexist pig myself, sir, but sometimes a man does need a woman’s point of view.”

George had called her a man’s woman. It was something she’d resented at first, but operating side by side with him in the field, and in the evenings in bed, she’d come to respect him and had come to understand what he’d meant. Most men were total idiots, but George had been special. And Walt Page, in his old-fashioned gentlemanly way, was special as well.

“You’re aware of the terrible business of the past few days. Three of our people murdered. What you’re not aware of is two other murders, both of them in Athens. Both of them were NOCs, on the same surveillance team in Iraq before the second war.”

“Alpha Seven.”

“Yes. All that’s left of them now is a man and a woman, plus some mysterious man who supposedly was their control officer. But he doesn’t show up in any of our records.”

“Do you think one of them is the killer?”

“We thought so, but one of the operators who was living in Milwaukee showed up, and Mr. McGarvey has him at a safe house.”

“Maybe he’s the killer.”

“Mac doesn’t think so. Leaves the control officer, who for all we know might work right here on campus. It would explain how he could have gotten to Wager and the others.”

“And the woman,” Alex said, fighting to keep her voice and manner perfectly normal.

“Otto’s come up with a list of people who fit the general descriptions and who are about the right age. They’re showing the man photographs from personnel records. Thirty-seven people, nine of them women, you included.”

Alex forced a smile. “Me?”

Page nodded. “I had Otto pull your picture from his list. It would have been a waste of time.”

The photo in her personnel file was four years old, and she didn’t look anything like she had before the war. She had put on about thirty pounds, mostly around her hips and ass — which wasn’t all that terrible. During the war she had been mostly skin and bones. Too skinny, George had told her a couple of times. Her hair then had been thick and dark, but she had thinned it with chemicals, lightened it and highlighted it with blond streaks. Her face was fuller, and she even dyed her eyebrows and lightened her skin tone. The biggest change, and the one she liked most, was the Botox injections into her lips. And she smiled now, something she’d hardly ever done before. These days almost everyone warmed up to her the first time they met.

But the Kraut knew her just about as well as anyone else on the team, except for George, who she thought had truly loved her.

“Wasn’t a very flattering picture, as I remember.”

“I saw it, and everyone else who did wondered why you were smiling. Most of the personnel pictures look like mug shots, but not yours.”

“I guess I’m just a happy person,” Alex said.

Page nodded. “You don’t fit the profile of a killer, and Otto agreed.”

Alex laughed. “That’s a relief to know. But you said you need my advice.”

“I want this mess cleared away before I step down, and the president agrees. It’s where you come in. I want to lean on your woman’s intuition. If one of those eight women on Otto’s list is the killer, I think you could spot her before any of us could.”

“You want me to interview them?”

“Not until tomorrow. I’ll give you the list of names, and I’d like you to spend a couple of hours this afternoon going through their personnel files, see if anything jumps out at you. Look at their photographs, study their eyes. Toby Berenson thinks sometimes whatever’s going wrong shows itself in the eyes.”

Berenson was the Agency’s psychologist. The suicide rate among CIA field officers was much higher than the general population. And so were the rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide. He claimed to be able to detect the early signs by looking into the officer’s eyes.

“I’ll give it a try, Mr. Director,” Alex said. Her eyes were the same as they’d always been: neutral. But she was happy Page had pulled her file from Rencke’s list.

“Let me know by morning.”

It was past eight when Schermerhorn got up from where he’d been seated in front of Otto’s computer in an upstairs bedroom and went to the window to look outside. A car passed, but the streets in this part of Georgetown were almost always quiet, according to Otto.

“Makes it easier to spot someone trying to sneak up on you,” he’d said.

“But not impossible for the right man,” Schermerhorn had replied.

None of the photos Otto had brought back on his iPad rang any bells, nor did they even when displayed on the much larger screen upstairs. After dinner, Otto had retrieved the Agency’s complete dossiers on each of the thirty-seven possibles, and Schermerhorn had spent a couple of hours going over them.

“Nothing?” McGarvey asked at the door.

“No. It’s quiet out there.”

“I meant in the files. Did you recognize any of them?”

“There were two or three guys who looked possible. But unless their files were faked, none of them ever had the field experience the rest of us had.”

“How about the eyes?”

“No. But there’s a problem with the files.”

“What’s that?”

“There were supposed to be nine women, but I only count eight. One’s missing.”

Otto appeared on the monitor. “She’s Dorothy Givens, Walt Page’s secretary,” he said. He was seated at the kitchen counter, eating a piece of leftover pizza.

“That’d be just like Alex. She could be anyone anywhere.”

“I’ll be right up,” Otto said.

“It’d explain how your killer got their intel. If it is Alex, she would have bugged the director’s office.”

“It’s clean,” Otto said, pushing past McGarvey. “We checked.”

“Physically checked?” Schermerhorn asked. He’d heard this sort of crap before. It was part of one of their training evolutions. Look for the unexpected. Think out of the box.

“Old-fashioned,” one instructor had told them. “Like opening someone’s mail — paper mail. Peeping through keyholes, looking through bedroom windows.”

“His office was swept.”

“Maybe she put a water glass to her ear and listened through the wall,” Schermerhorn said. He was frustrated. Otto was supposed to be the best — but that was electronically. And now his worry that he wasn’t safe even here spiked.