David Hagberg: End Game

“It has to be one of us,” Blankenship said. “I don’t see how anyone else could have gotten in here this morning. It means it has to be someone on the night schedule.”

“Plus people like you and me who are bound to show up at any hour of the day. Narrows field,” Bambridge said. “Pull the personnel records of everyone, including mine, see whose psych evals have come up shaky in the past six months. And find out who had connections with Wager and Fabry — not just either of them. I want a common denominator.”

“The shift change starts in a few hours. What do you want to do about it?”

Bambridge’s knee-jerk reaction was to keep everyone on campus and hold the new shift from coming to work until the buildings and grounds had been sanitized, but he thought better of it. “Let it go on as normal. If we get out of our routine, someone is going to sit up and take notice. Whatever happens, we need to keep the media out of this for as long as possible. We’re already in enough trouble as it is.”

Two years ago the scandal about the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans had bled over to the CIA. The Agency’s charter specifically forbade any operations on U.S. soil, but that hadn’t been the case since the Cold War days. The CIA went wherever its investigations led, including the continental U.S.

“We’ll be letting the suspect walk out the gate.”

“What suspect?” Bambridge demanded angrily.

“The killer.”

“Give me a name. Everyone on the grounds at this moment is a suspect.”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“Besides anyone with connections to Wager and Fabry, I want the names of anyone who’s ever worked as an instructor at the Farm or served time in the field, either working for us or for the military — special forces. Both of those guys were NOCs, too highly trained to let someone come up on them so easily.”

“I’ve already started on that list. Anyone else?”

“Guys just about set to retire.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s about stress. A lot of guys are burned out after twenty — especially Watch officers. And we’ve made some pay cuts and we’ve reduced hours. Check those people.”

“We don’t have the personnel to do this very quickly,” Blankenship said. “Could take a month or more of cross-checking.”

“Then I suggest you get started right away,” Bambridge said, and hung up.

He came to the main gate and stopped directly across from the gatehouse until one of the security guards came out.

“Mr. Bambridge, is there a problem, sir?”

“Yes, why wasn’t I stopped for a positive ID?”

“Your tag came up, and you showed positive on the facial recognition program.”

“I could have been an imposter in disguise who killed the deputy director and stole his car. I want everyone coming through this gate to be checked.”

“Yes, sir,” the security officer said. “Is there a problem we should know about?”

“Just a drill. So keep on your toes. There’ll be an eval tomorrow.”

As he drove the rest of the way through the woods to the OHB, where he parked in his slot in the basement, he could not remember hearing or reading about anything like this ever happening. No business seemed to be immune from the disgruntled employee coming to work with a loaded weapon, or weapons, and opening fire. Or setting off a bomb. Movie theaters, schools, federal building — no place was safe. Except, until now, for the CIA.

Upstairs in his office, he powered up his computer to see what Blankenship was up to, but except for a personnel list with about one hundred names highlighted, there was nothing else. So far the chief of security had not come up with any connections between Wager and Fabry or anyone else except for the people in the sections where they had worked.

He phoned Page at home. “There’s been another murder,” he told the director.

“My God, who?”

“Istvan Fabry. Looks like the same guy probably did it.”

“Has the Bureau been contacted?”

“They’re here along with one of their CSI units,” Bambridge said. “I’m going to text and e-mail everyone involved that we’re postponing the conference this morning.”

“Don’t do that,” Page said. “There’ll be too many questions. And make sure the officers on perimeter duty — especially at the Parkway and Georgetown Pike gates — maintain a low key. We don’t want to tip off anyone — not the killer, and sure as hell not the media.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about everyone else out there at the moment?”

“Sir?”

“Assuming the killer hasn’t already left, someone else could be a target. Double up everyone — no one goes anywhere alone. Tell them it’s a drill; tell them anything you want to tell them: we’re beefing up security because of our VIP guests coming this morning.”

“I’ll tell them the vice president might drop in unannounced.”

“I’ll be in my office in one hour. I want you up there, along with Bob Blankenship, and see if you can get Rencke to come in.”

“I don’t think including him is such a good idea, sir.”

“Do it,” Page said. “I want answers.”

Otto Rencke could not remember ever having slept for more than one or two hours at a stretch. Until he’d married Louise, most of his naps were in front of his computer, or listening to music on headphones in a secure spot somewhere. But from the beginning, her primary goals in life had been taking care of their child, now four, and straightening out her husband’s act, which included requiring him to come to bed with her every evening for at least six hours.

He’d fought her on that one at first, until she’d told him that sometimes she got frightened in the middle of the night and she needed him to watch over her. And he’d agreed — spending his waking hours listening to classical music and operas in his head, and solving tensor calculus problems, matrices of partial differential equations of the type Einstein had used to develop relativity.

In his early forties, Rencke was of medium height, slender with a head too large for his body, and long frizzy red hair held in place by a ponytail. He almost always wore jeans and sweatshirts — some from Disneyworld and some from the old KGB or CCCP, as a sort of joke inside the CIA campus — and at Louise’s prodding, decent boat shoes instead of raggedy sneakers that were always dirty, always unlaced.

Marty wouldn’t explain why Page wanted to see him at this hour, but as Otto came up to the main gate, he saw four backed-up cars he had to get through, and while he waited, he pulled up the CIA’s mainframe to see what was going on to create a delay here.

Nothing jumped out at him, but when he connected with his search programs in his office, he came up with a series of requests from security to pull the personnel records of everyone working the midnight-to-eight shift. Security’s search parameters included psych evals, time to retirement, Agency assignments, previous military experience, and connections with Walter Wager — and with Istvan Fabry, a name he knew.

Fabry had come to him with help on a special cybercrimes project. The guy was bright but something of a milquetoast despite the fact that his rep as a fearless field operative — an NOC — was rock solid. The guy had struck Otto as being the happiest man in the world for finally being in from the cold.

When his turn came, he was passed through security by one of the officers who mentioned something about a drill, which Otto knew was total bullshit, and he drove the rest of the way up to the OHB, where he took his parking spot in the basement.

He went to his third-floor office to make sure nothing had been disturbed since he’d left late yesterday afternoon, then took the elevator to the seventh floor. McGarvey once told him that paranoia was an agent’s most powerful tool: Worry that someone or something might be coming up on your six, and it might save your life one day.