David Hagberg - End Game

“On what charge? Thumbing her nose at us?”

“Suspicion of murder.”

“Look, McGarvey, there’s something you guys don’t understand. Even if Dorothy Givens is really Alex Unroth — and I couldn’t even tell you if that’s her real name — you have no proof she murdered Walt or the others.”

“She was gone from the office on the same weekend Joe Carnes was murdered in Athens last year, and again when Coffin was hit.”

“Check all the records, and I have a hunch you’ll find she was gone other times. Whenever the DCI was out of town and she had no work on her desk, she was free to go. Wasn’t it the same for your secretary when you were DCI?”

“Yes.”

“So that part is coincidental.”

“What about the killing of her stepfather? You said she admitted to doing it, and that she was perfectly capable of doing the same thing to Walt and the others. She and George did the same thing in Iraq.”

“Just because she was capable, doesn’t mean she killed our guys.”

“Why the sudden change of heart?” McGarvey asked. “This morning you were convinced she was the killer, but now you’re not so sure.”

“I’ve had time to think about it,” Schermerhorn said. He looked out the window again, half expecting to see her walking by or sitting in a car across the street. She was privy to everything the DCI knew, and probably a lot more than that. She would have made friends all over the place. The kind of people who fill in the blanks, the guys who tend to the details — the bits and pieces the bosses never have to deal with.

“You were in love with her.”

“We all were.”

“Still are.”

Schermerhorn focused on his reflection in the window glass, and he shrugged. “Yes. No. Hell, I don’t know.” He turned back. “But I can tell you I admire her, even if it turns out she did kill those guys.”

“Christ,” McGarvey said.

“You were out in the field. You know how it was.”

“Never as an NOC. I wasn’t that good of a liar.”

“Maybe not, but you were a damned good assassin.”

“Point?”

“The point is, if Dorothy Givens is Alex and we can prove she killed our guys, she won’t allow herself to be taken in. Could be you who’d have to track her down and kill her.”

“If need be.”

“But you’d need the proof first.”

“Yes.”

“Hold her down long enough to maybe take a cheek swab or maybe grab a glass or a cup she drank out of. Toss her apartment — toothbrushes, hairbrushes, lipstick, makeup. Lots of places to come up with a sample of her DNA, because I can guarantee the one that’s in her Company file won’t be the real one.”

“Again, what’s your point?”

“Have you seen the autopsy reports on Walt and Isty?”

“No.”

“But you know how they were killed. Their throats were sliced, their faces removed.”

“There were human teeth marks. The killer chewed open the arteries and then bit off their lips and nose and eyebrows,” McGarvey said.

“Right. But did you check the autopsies for DNA?”

“There was none. Apparently scrubbed away with alcohol.”

Schermerhorn nodded. “And it’s driving your forensics people nuts. You have a psycho killer running around loose inside the campus. But they’re smart enough to leave absolutely no physical evidence tying them to the crimes. So prove it’s Alex.”

“First we have to find her.”

“That’ll be the relatively easy part. If it is she who is doing the killing, then I’m next. She’ll come to me. But unless you catch her in the act, how will you prove it’s her?”

“I’ll ask her,” McGarvey said.

Schermerhorn was at a loss for words. Looking at McGarvey, he suddenly had a very clear understanding that everything ever said of the former DCI and more was true. And for a moment he was just as frightened for Alex that she was the killer after all, as he was frightened she wasn’t — and that the killer was George and they were all playing with fire.

Just the message he’d carved into the fourth Kryptos panel, and now he didn’t know why he had done it. What was the point? He had the urge to tell McGarvey what he had written, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Alex was front and center for now.

Alex walked back down to M Street before six in the morning, where she got a cab over to Reagan National. She rented a Chevy Impala from Hertz, using the work name documents for Alice Walker and paying for the car with a clean Capital One Platinum credit card.

Traffic was beginning to pick up, and she was careful with her tradecraft to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She took I-395 up past the Pentagon — where she’d thought George had been some sort of a liaison officer, but she had never been able to prove it — and then past Arlington National Cemetery and finally I-66.

Her primary instinct was to run, go deep, because there was no way in hell she was going to spend the remainder of her life in some jail cell. At the very least, sooner or later Jeff’s body would be found in his love nest, and someone at Clyde’s would remember her leaving with him.

It’d all be circumstantial, of course — she’d always made sure that any evidence tying her to any crime was weak. But if the Company’s investigators caught a break or two, there’d be enough to convict her.

And the thing of it was that she didn’t know why she had killed the poor bastard who’d just wanted a one-night stand while his wife was probably fucking her senator. Ever since she was a child, before she murdered her stepfather, she would blank out from time to time; she’d do things that later she couldn’t understand.

None of this was in any of her Company profiles, of course. She instinctively knew how to lie to shrinks, even good ones, and she never failed a question on a polygraph test, unless it was a lie she wanted to be caught at in order to prove she was human after all.

She checked her rearview mirrors at intervals, but nothing other than the Harley that had been on her tail for a mile before it passed her and sped off, and the old Lexus that had followed her all the way to where she’d turned north but had continued on I-66, no one else had been of any interest.

Driving past her apartment in Tysons Corner, she watched for signs that anyone had shown up or that a drone was circling overhead before she parked the Chevy around the corner at another apartment building a block away and went back on foot.

The car would be noticed sometime today, or perhaps tonight, but by then she figured her situation would be resolved one way or another. In any event, it would never be traced back to her real identity.

No one had tampered with the fail-safes on her front door, nor had the security panel just inside been touched. Had someone been here, the panel would have sounded a silent alarm and then gone into a default mode that was impossible to reverse.

She changed into a khaki pants suit, white cotton blouse, and sneakers. She kept a decent pair of black pumps in a desk drawer at work, which she changed into for important meetings, but like just about every other woman on campus, she preferred to be comfortable whenever possible.

Her real go-to-hell escape kit of several passports and other forms of identification, plus several credit cards and five thousand in cash — mostly U.S. and Canadian dollars, but a few hundred in euros and an equal amount in pesos — she kept in a storage unit nearby, filled mostly with boxes of old clothes she had bought at Goodwill and other thrift stores in the area. If the place were searched, half the boxes would have to be pulled out and emptied before her kit would be found.

As she stood at the door, she looked at the apartment that had been her secret home for the better part of four years. It was small, only one bedroom, and very neat and modern, with good furniture, top-shelf appliances, a big flat-screen TV and sound system, and some nicely framed art reproductions on the walls. But it meant nothing to her. In her entire life she’d never had a home that meant anything.