David Hagberg - End Game

It was exactly what McGarvey hoped would happen.

“I can have a SWAT team out here by chopper in fifteen minutes,” Pete said.

They’d discussed it before they’d left the safe house, and McGarvey had vetoed the idea. “There’ll be other people living in the building. I don’t want this to become a hostage situation.”

“Not her style,” Schermerhorn said. “If it’s Alex, she’ll have a plan for getting free no matter what the odds are against her. She might shoot someone, but she wouldn’t want to be slowed down with a hostage in tow.”

“Let’s go,” McGarvey said, and he and Schermerhorn got out of the car and headed across to the apartment building.

Pete got behind the wheel and turned the car around so it faced the street.

McGarvey’s main worry had always been collateral damage. Innocent people getting in the way of a gunfight. He’d been in the middle of such things far too many times in his career, and he didn’t want another repeat. He’d come to the opinion that he would rather let the bad guy walk away free than corner him — or her — where other people could get hurt.

Voltaire had the same philosophy a couple of hundred years ago: he reasoned it would be better to let a guilty man go free than to convict one innocent man.

They approached the building from the front and buzzed apartment 301 at the front on the top floor. Dorothy Givens lived in 104, at the rear on the bottom floor.

A man answered the intercom. “Who is it?”

McGarvey held up his open wallet. “Metro police.”

“What’s this about?”

“Open the door, Mr. Reading,” McGarvey said, reading the name off the tag beside 301. “We’re not here for you, but we could be.”

The door lock buzzed and they went inside. Down a corridor was the elevator, to the right a row of built-in mailboxes, below which were two larger lockboxes for packages. The doors to the two front apartments were left and right of the main entrance, and the doors to the rear two down a corridor past the elevator.

McGarvey went first.

Schermerhorn hung back a little, drawing his pistol and concealing it behind his right leg.

“Don’t shoot unless there’s no other way out,” McGarvey warned.

“I want this to be over with as much as you do. I’m tired of always looking over my shoulder. And if anybody has some answers, it’ll be Alex.”

“And your message on Kryptos .”

“But they moved it, and none of us knew where. Only Alex and George.”

McGarvey’s anger spiked, and he turned. “Moved what?”

“The package.”

“You’ll fucking well tell me what it is right now. No bullshit about Alex or the message on four.”

“One thing at a time. I want Alex neutralized, and I’m going to want a whole shitload of assurances first.”

“We’ll decrypt the thing.”

“By then I’ll be long gone, and it’ll be your problem. The biggest problem you’ve ever faced.”

McGarvey had considered the possibility that Schermerhorn was the killer. But he knew that was wrong five minutes after the guy had shown up at Union Station. The former NOC was determined, but he wasn’t certifiable. The killer had some sort of deep-seated psychosis that required him — or her — to destroy the faces, and therefore the identities, of their victims.

If Alex had been telling them the truth in Iraq about killing her father and slicing off his face, she was the obvious fit to the profile.

The problem he was having was coming up with the reason. In his way of thinking, it had to be more than just insanity. Crazy people had purpose, though almost always their motivations were obscure and often senseless.

They came to 104. “You’re here to identify her, nothing else,” McGarvey said.

“And?”

“The next move will be hers.”

“Christ. You have no idea who you’re dealing with, do you?”

McGarvey knocked on the door. The building was quiet, and the corridor smelled faintly of cleaning fluid, even furniture polish on the shiny chair rails and oak wainscoting. Solid upper middle-class, no trouble here.

A shadow blocked the peephole.

“Who the hell are you?” a woman demanded.

“Ms. Givens? We’re from Mr. Page’s office.”

“Shit,” the woman said, and opened the door. She was tall, with a long thin neck and narrow features, high cheekbones, and blue eyes. Her hair was wet, and she was wrapped in a bath towel. “Has something happened to Dotty?”

“No,” Schermerhorn said.

“She’s fine so far as we know,” McGarvey said. “The director has been trying to contact her, but she doesn’t answer her cell phone. We were sent out to tell her there’s trouble with the White House meeting first thing in the morning.”

“I can’t help you guys. She’s not here.”

“This is really important.”

“She called about an hour ago, said she was spending the night with her boyfriend. She does that sometimes.”

“How do we contact him?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s got a place somewhere in Georgetown, but I don’t have the address or phone number.”

“You’re Ms. Givens’s roommate?”

“No, just a friend from New York. We used to work together at the UN, and I come down here from time to time. She comes up to stay with me every now and then.”

“Do you at least have a name for her boyfriend?”

The woman shrugged. “No last name — just George.”

Alex had the cabby drop her off near the end of Dumbarton Avenue NW, just a block from the edge of Rock Creek Park, and less than two blocks from Otto Rencke’s safe house, which itself wasn’t far from Kirk McGarvey’s apartment.

The evening was dark and quiet, the only real traffic and activity in Georgetown at this hour was down in the tourist section along M Street, with its bars, restaurants, and chichi shops. After work, she’d driven to her second apartment in Tysons Corner, just across the Dulles Access Road and not far from the CIA’s back gate, where she’d packed a few overnight things in a bag.

She called her sometimes roommate, Phyllis Dawson, using an untraceable pay-as-you-go cell phone. “I’ll be with George tonight, maybe tomorrow. I think he might propose to me.”

“What trouble are you in now?”

“Nothing serious, but someone from the Company might pay you a visit.”

“What do you want me to tell them?”

“The truth.”

“Yeah, right,” Phyllis had said, and laughed.

They’d worked together at the UN, spying on delegates for an international lobbying firm that worked for a consortium of international businesses. But they’d been too effective, both of them posing as high-priced call girls. When the WikiLeaks were made public, a couple of Brazilian diplomats had been burned, and Alex and Phyllis, who’d worked under assumed names, were forced out. Their control officer and his boss were more than satisfied when the girls simply disappeared without a fuss, happy to sweep the entire incident under the rug.

Phyllis, working under a new identity, had landed a job gathering intel for another international lobbying firm, this one dealing in the secrets of big banks.

They kept in touch from time to time to share gossip, the only people in the world with whom they could be totally open. Or nearly so, in Alex’s case.

Around the corner, Alex used a universal electronic key to open the door of a Ford Fusion, started it, and drove the two blocks to the Renckes’ safe house, where she parked across the street and a few doors down from the electric gate.

A few lights were on in the house. While driving past, she had spotted two old cars parked in back — one a Mercedes, the other a Volvo station wagon. One belonged to Otto, the other to his wife, who still used her maiden name of Horn.