David Hagberg - End Game

Louise chuckled. “I’ll believe that when it actually happens. Take care of yourself, sweetheart.”

“Will do,” Otto said, and hung up.

Earlier he’d driven off campus to a convenience store a few miles down the Parkway, where he’d bought a half dozen packages of Twinkies, finally back on the market, and several pints of half and half, the closest to whipping cream he could find. He sat now, eating the things and guzzling the cream — his comfort food — for which Louise would skin him alive if she found out.

All the elements were laid out in neat order on one of his big-screen monitors, all of it pointing toward their serial killer still being on campus. He had to be well connected enough to know the movements of just about everyone working for the CIA — which narrowed the list of possibilities.

One of the analysts from the Watch, someone on Walt Page’s staff — which was why Alex had turned up high on the list — someone on the deputy director of the CIA’s staff, or on Marty Bambridge’s staff in operations.

But all their personnel files were squeaky clean — some of them like Alex’s: almost too perfect.

There were also several disconnected pieces. The contract killer who’d tried to take Alex out in Paris was a former officer in the British Special Air Service by the name of Tony Butterworth. So far nothing had turned up for that hit, though in the past he’d done work for the German BND, his own government’s SIS, and once for the Mossad, though that had been a number of years ago.

Otto had managed to find two of his offshore accounts, one in the Channel Islands and the other in the Caribbean, and matched several of the payments to the dates of the hits. But nothing he’d found matched the dates of the killings here on campus or the two in Athens.

At this point Butterworth was a dead end, except that Otto’s darlings were chewing on at least three other places where the contractor may have hidden his payments — intriguingly enough, one of them with a small credit union in Venice, Florida, less than ten miles from Mac’s house on Casey Key.

The next odd bit that had turned up was the murder of a guy in a small apartment in Georgetown, just a couple of blocks up from the tourist shops and bars along M Street, and coincidentally only a half dozen blocks from Mac’s apartment.

One of the bartenders told police he vaguely remembered seeing the guy leaving with a slender, good-looking woman two nights before his body had been discovered by the landlord, who’d come over to check on a bad smell the neighbors were complaining about.

The name on the lease, and on the driver’s license and other documents on his body, did not match his fingerprints, but matched a former Army Ranger’s by the name of Norman Bogen. But the cops had come up with nothing else — not where he worked, not where he lived, nothing about any family, except that he had no criminal record.

But Otto’s darlings had come with one fact that was as unexpected as it was intriguing. Bogen maintained an account with the Midcoast Employees Credit Union of Venice, Florida. The same bank Butterworth possibly had an account.

The date of Bogen’s death matched the date Alex had been on the loose. And she more or less fit the bartender’s description. But if she had killed Bogen, Otto could not see the connection — though he knew there had to be one.

And last was the murder of Jean Fegan in front of the Hotel George. It had been no accident, Otto was sure of that, and he had beaten himself up that he hadn’t been able to come up with a tag number. But the cops had not been able to find an SUV with front-end damage. After the hit, it had been locked away in some private garage somewhere — either that, or ditched in the Potomac.

His phone buzzed. He thought it might be Mac, but the call was from on campus, though the ID was blocked.

“Yes.”

“I thought you might still be here, though I expect Louise might be cross with you.” It was Tom Calder, Marty Bambridge’s assistant deputy director, the direct opposite of his boss and, therefore, universally liked by just about everyone on campus.

“You’re here too. Marty must be keeping you on a short leash.”

“As a matter of fact, he just left, and I wanted to get the latest from you before I pulled the pin and went home. It’s been a very long few days. May I come over?”

“I’m waiting for a call from Mac, and then I’m getting out of here myself.”

“It’ll only take a minute, honest injun’.”

Otto had to laugh. He used the same expression himself, and he thought he was the only one. “Okay.”

A couple of minutes later the door buzzed, and Otto glanced at one of his monitors. Marty’s number two was there, in jeans and a white shirt, an apologetic smile on his small round mouth.

Otto pushed the unlock command, blanked his monitors, and got up and went into the outer office as Calder came in.

As usual, the assistant deputy director of operations wore prescription eyeglasses that were darkly tinted. “I thought my eyes were bad, but yours are worse,” he said, taking off his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot, just like Otto’s. “The hours we keep to make sure our country stays safe.”

It sounded pompous, like something Marty might say.

Otto perched on the edge of a desk. “You promised to make it only one minute,” he said. Calder was okay, but he didn’t want to screw around with the guy right now. Once Mac called, he was going home.

“Marty got a call from upstairs that he asked me to check out with you. The director apparently got a call from the State Department about one of its former employees who was hit by a car and killed. Her name was Jean Fegan. Thing is, the police said an unidentified man, possibly an employee of the CIA, may have provided the identification. You?”

“Yeah.”

“The description matched,” Calder said. “Anything to do with our goings-on?”

“I don’t know. It’s one loose end in a basketful I’m trying to run down.”

“You don’t think it was an accident?”

“No.”

“And your being there was no accident either. You met with her at the hotel. Care to share with me the substance of your meeting?”

“No, because I don’t know what the hell to make of it, except that it could have something to do with the second Iraq war and the Alpha Seven people who were among the advance teams.”

“WMDs?”

“Could be,” Otto said. “What’s Marty’s take?”

Calder stepped closer. “Don’t be coy with me, Otto, please. We’re all on the same team here. And we appreciate — Marty and I do — everything you and McGarvey are doing to run this to ground. But for goodness sake, all we ask is for a little cooperation. Tell us what you’ve come up with, and perhaps we can put our heads together. Everyone wants this to go away.”

Organ music, very faint, came from Calder’s shirt pocket. It sounded to Otto like Bach.

Roper called back from the cockpit. “We’ve just cleared Israeli airspace, Mr. Director.”

McGarvey looked out the window as the F-16 fighter that followed them on their port side peeled off, the one on the right doing the same. The Med was a featureless gray-blue that stretched one hundred and fifty miles south to the Egyptian coast.

“I’m going to make a call now,” he said.

Pete was sitting across from him, but Alex had stretched out in the back and had fallen asleep. She’d been exhausted after the ordeal she’d survived. The situation could have gone south at any moment. If she’d seriously hurt the Mossad agent who had accompanied her to the ladies’ room, or if she had fired a shot — just one even without hitting anyone — there would have been nothing McGarvey could have done. She would be in an Israeli military prison cell. Or, just as likely, she wouldn’t have let herself be taken, and there would have been more deaths — hers included.