David Hagberg - End Game

Otto grinned. “You’re right, but she checks out. You can’t believe the hoops someone wanting that job has to jump through. She came out clean.”

“You picked her in the first place. Where’s her file?”

“Page vouched for her.”

“Her file, or don’t you guys give a shit?”

McGarvey nodded, and Otto shrugged and went to the computer. With a few keystrokes, he pulled up the secretary’s file. Schermerhorn got the feeling he’d been had.

The photograph of a woman with a broad smile filled the screen, and Schermerhorn’s first instinct was to step back. But he didn’t know why. The face was more or less the same shape, a little heavier than Alex had been. And the lips were filled out. In Germany and later in Iraq when they’d made love — more accurately when they’d had sex — she had complained that her worst features were her small boobs and skinny lips.

“But I know how to use them, don’t I?”

“No complaints from me,” he’d said.

As he looked at her image on the screen, he was pulled in from the get-go; yet staring at it, he also wasn’t sure.

“Well?” Otto asked.

“She’s squinting.”

“It’s called smiling. Dotty does a lot of it.”

Alex almost never smiled in the old days. And when she did, it was as if she were laughing at you. Nothing about her rare smiles had any warmth in them. She measured people by what they were worth — to her personally.

But she’d also been an expert at disappearing right in front of your eyes. Usually she didn’t have to move; instead, somehow, she instantly became a stranger. Someone you’d never seen before.

The last time they had made love, he had rolled over onto his back, still inside her, and when he looked up into her face, he didn’t know who he was making love to. The woman above him was someone he’d never met. And the effect had been so extraordinary, instantly his mood had drained completely away and he couldn’t wait to get free.

She’d laughed. “What’s the matter, Kraut? The cat got your ardor?”

And an instant later she was the Alex he’d been making love to, but the cat or something had gotten his ardor.

It was in Iraq the week before she and George had started on their rampage, as they’d called it. “Teach ’em a little respect,” George had said, and Alex had agreed wholeheartedly.

Nothing was ever the same for any of them after that, though Alex and George were the one subject all of them avoided, at all costs. The two of them were taboo. They were afraid to even approach them, the same as if the two of them were dangerous IEDs ready to explode and kill them all at the slightest touch.

In fact, thinking about them now, Schermerhorn remembered that when they got to Ramstein and George wasn’t with them, they were relieved. No one wanted to bring up his name. Not even Alex had mentioned him.

They were debriefed individually, but so far as he knew, no one was asked about George. He became the forgotten man in everyone’s minds. Left behind somewhere in Saudi Arabia.

All that came back to him in a rush as he stared at the image of the DCI’s secretary.

“The DCI was in California, Thursday, two days before Coffin was killed,” Otto said. “His secretary took Friday off and wasn’t back at her desk until Monday morning when the director was back. Common practice.”

“As his secretary, she potentially had access to everything he knew,” McGarvey said.

“That included personnel records for everyone,” Otto said. “She is in a perfect position to know what the killer knew.”

Schermerhorn couldn’t tear his eyes from the image on the screen. “Did you know that when Alex was sixteen, she murdered her stepfather? She told Tom about it one night in Munich. The two of them were drunk, and he’d asked her something stupid, like, if it came to it, could she actually pull the trigger to kill someone? ‘In a heartbeat,’ she said. ‘Been there, done that already.’”

“It was in her initial interview,” Otto said. “But no charges were ever filed.”

“Of course not. Even at that age, she was too good to get caught. But she told Tom that when her stepfather tried to rape her, she stabbed him in the heart, then cut off his dick and peeled his face with a fish-filleting knife.”

“I pulled up the newspaper accounts,” Otto said. “The murder was never solved, though the wife was a prime suspect.”

“But that’s Alex Unroth,” McGarvey said. “What about the DCI’s secretary? Can you at least make a guess? You said you would recognize the eyes.”

“She’s squinting,” Schermerhorn said again, staring at the image. Yet his gut reactions were bouncing all over the place.

He turned to look at Rencke and McGarvey. He wanted to run and hide deep more urgently than he’d ever wanted to in his entire life. Larry Coffin and Joe Carnes had evidently tried without success in Athens. And Walt, Isty, and Tom had tried right there on campus, supposedly the safest place in the world for an NOC who’d come in out of the cold. And that hadn’t worked either.

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked again at the image, absolutely hating what he was going to say next. “I’ll have to see her in person.”

“I’ll find out if she’s still on campus,” Otto said, and started to leave, but Schermerhorn stopped him.

“We need to go in cold; otherwise, she’ll figure out what’s coming her way and run.”

“She knows by now,” McGarvey said. “If she’s not on campus, we’ll go to her house — wherever she lives.”

“You’d better bring the militia, and you better expect there’ll be some serious collateral damage.”

“She might kill again?’ Otto said.

Schermerhorn laughed. “Who’s left? Just me and George.”

McGarvey sat behind the wheel of his Porsche SUV, parked in a lot adjacent to a small apartment building in a pleasant neighborhood north of Washington in Chevy Chase — coincidentally not far from the house he and Katy had lived in before they moved to Florida. It felt odd to him, being back like this.

Pete rode shotgun next to him, and Schermerhorn sat in the backseat, nervously checking out the neighborhood. Traffic was light at this hour, but except for the streetlights, it was very dark under an overcast sky.

“We’ll go in first,” McGarvey told Pete. He phoned her, and when they were connected, he put his cell phone in the lapel pocket of his jacket without turning it off. Whatever happened, she would hear it.

Otto had checked with Agency security, who told him the DCI had left around six thirty, and his secretary fifteen minutes later. Neither of them were still on campus. He pulled up Dotty’s address from the file.

Schermerhorn had asked for a pistol before they left the house. “If it turns out to be Alex, I don’t want to go up against her unarmed. You can’t believe how fast she is.”

Pete took a standard U.S. military — issue Beretta 92F out of the glove compartment and handed it back to him. “She won’t be much help to us if she’s dead.”

“Neither will I,” Schermerhorn said. He ejected the magazine to check its load, seated it home in the handle, and cycled a round into the firing chamber. He stuffed the pistol under his belt and beneath his shirt. “Let’s get it over with. I want to be long gone an hour from now.”

“We’ll see,” McGarvey said. He didn’t feel particularly comfortable, having a man such as Schermerhorn armed, but he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to shoot the man center mass if he became a threat. Or even looked like he was about to cause trouble. “You’re out here tonight just to make a positive ID.”

“You’d better be prepared for some serious shit to go down. Because if it is Alex, she’ll recognize me the minute we come face-to-face.”