David Hagberg - End Game

It meant Calder was a spy for Marty. Part of his job.

Otto’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and the image on the screen changed, the train of characters slowed down, and the background went from a pale blue to a medium violet.

He didn’t disturb the ongoing decryption program — just hid it — and instead brought up on the monitor a version of the search that was six hours old, just before the word BERLIN had popped up en clair.

The state of his search was no one’s business except his and Mac’s. Everyone else — and that was everyone with a capital E —was an outsider as far as he was concerned. When the decryption was a done deal and he had shared it with Mac and they had produced the results they were after, then it might be time to spread the wealth. Until then, nada.

One of his monitors chimed. “Excuse me, dear, but Mr. Calder is at the door.” The computer voice was Louise’s.

“Let him in, sweetheart.”

The door lock popped, and Calder walked into the outer of the two rooms that were Otto’s domains. The first meant for a secretary or assistant he used for generally unclassified searches: the weather at some specific place and time, tides, moon phases (most operators liked to go out in the field during a dark night), airline, train and ship schedules, social security, passport, and driver’s license information — the easy stuff.

“In here, Tom,” Otto called.

Calder came into the inner sanctum and looked up at the main monitor. He was a slender man, thinning hair — a prematurely old man’s malady, one of many, he liked to say — and a shuffling gait. His expressions were always pleasant, and his eyes, pale blue, were kind and intelligent. Otto thought that he was a pleasant man, someone people immediately thought could be a friend.

BERLIN came up on the monitor.

“Ah, progress,” Calder said.

Otto glanced up at the monitor. “Just a key word. It’s come up several times.”

“What’s your best guess? Twenty-four hours maybe?”

“Twenty-four hours, twenty-four days, twenty-four years. Maybe never.”

Calder laughed softly. “I might believe that coming from anybody but you,” he said. “Marty’s keen on this, you know.”

Otto shrugged. “I’ll let you guys know soon as.”

Calder held his gaze for a beat then nodded. “Do that, please. We’d like to get this mess behind us.”

“Sure.”

Calder started to leave. “Have you heard from Mac or Ms. Boylan? Bob Blankenship wants to know what’s going on. Quite an embarrassment with his guy being taken and all.”

“He got back in one piece?”

“Thankfully.”

“They’re off campus, is all I know at the moment,” Otto said.

“Right,” Calder said, and left.

“Lou, is he gone?” Otto asked.

“Down the hall to the elevators,” his computer replied. “You have an interesting development on your Kryptos search engine.”

Otto brought up the decryption program in real time. After the briefest of pauses, he sat back and laughed, suddenly knowing with certainty what was buried in the hills above Kirkuk, and the why, but not who had buried it, though he had his strong suspicions.

AND GOD SAID, LWET TRHER BE LIGHT: AND THERE WAS LIGHT X AND THE LIGHT WAS VISIBLE FROM HORIZONQ TO HORIZON X BERLIN X AND ALL WAS CHANGED X ALL WAS NEVER THE SDAME X AND GOD SAID LET THERE BE PROGRESS X AND THERE WAS X PEACEF

Once McGarvey and then Pete Boylan had left, the entire atmosphere of the house had changed. It was late afternoon, and Schermerhorn stood at the head of the stairs, nervously listening to the clomping around on the ground floor.

Pete Boylan was an unknown, Mac had been the Rock of Gibraltar, but Bob Blankenship’s guys downstairs were amateurs. They were pretty good at what they did, providing muscle for security details. But so far as he’d ever been able to determine, they’d never make it in the field. Even the odd lot NOC would chew them up for breakfast without raising a sweat.

And right now he wasn’t feeling a lot of comfort.

He went back to his bedroom, which was at the front of the house, and looked out the window. Two Caddy SUVs were parked in the driveway, and he spotted at least three guys in dark nylon Windbreakers down there; one was behind a tree at the end of the driveway, another was off to the left at the edge of the woods to the west, and the third was leaning against the fender of one of the vehicles. He was actually smoking a fucking cigarette.

McGarvey had apparently suspected that Alex was going to slip away, and the fact that she had believed George was no longer on campus. He and Pete were following her; at least he figured that was their plan, though following Alex wouldn’t be so easy. She was damned good at spotting a tail and then evading it. Even double or triple teams were no match for her.

But it left two major concerns in Schermerhorn’s mind: Alex only suspected George was gone, and even if he had left, maybe he would double back to finish the job.

They’d all fallen in love with him almost from the moment he’d dropped in on them, with his urbane self-assurance, his ready smile, and his intellect and talent. All of them were smart, and well trained by some of the best instructors in any secret intelligence or military special forces organization in the world. But George outclassed them all from every angle.

The first was how he had come to them, with absolutely no fuss or bother. One day they were on mission, and the next he was in their midst and the mission had changed.

“You and I know no WMDs have ever been found here,” he’d told them.

“Not yet,” someone — it could have been Alex — had shot back.

George had laughed, that soft upper-crust British chuckle that said so much about his sophistication versus theirs and exactly what he thought about the difference. “No, not yet.”

“So what are you doing here?” Schermerhorn had asked.

“To put the fear of God into the rag heads down there,” George had said, waving an arm in the general direction of the oil fields a few thousand feet below.

He hadn’t meant the ordinary roustabouts, the drillers, the guys who worked the rigs; he’d meant the Iraqi military clumped around the waste gas fires, in hiding from infrared spy satellites.

At the time none of them knew exactly how he was going to accomplish the new mission, and if they had known, Schermerhorn wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t have gone along with him.

Isty had suggested they use their satellite burst transmitter to get a clarification of their orders. He had meant to keep his conversation private with a few of them, but George had been right there, in the darkness, like an apparition, and had heard everything.

“Excellent idea, Mr. Refugee,” he’d said.

And it hadn’t dawned on any of them until later that George had known their handles along with their nicknames — like Isty instead of Istvan.

“But you might want to consider a couple of things before you actually phone home. Not everyone has approved the new mission orders, so you’re likely to get some foot-dragging until a decision is made. In the meantime, the clock ticks, and when the troops come pouring across the border, a lot of the enthusiasm for battle we would have drained from the Iraqis will be in full strength. A lot more troops will lose their lives.”

As he thought about it now, it struck Schermerhorn that George had never once said our troops. He’d used the term the troops. But none of them had caught it at the time.

“What else?” someone had asked.

“We’re not going to fight a conventional war. I want you to understand that from the beginning. What I propose has nothing to do with the Geneva Conventions, because we will be taking no prisoners. No quarter for the wounded. What I do propose is terrorism, raw, up close, and bloody. I’m here to ram it home to the bastards, with or without your help.”