David Hagberg: End Game

After that, teaching Voltaire had lost some of its charm for him.

“We have a problem,” Otto said. “Walt sent me out to fill you in, and Pete asked if she could tag along.”

“I had a feeling I was going to get involved,” she said. In her job as an interrogator, she’d been one of the CIA’s all-time best. Her good looks, slight build, and the fact that she was a female who also had a kind, understanding manner made her subjects want to talk to her. Sometimes she even brought them to the point where they begged to tell her their story. And she was never judgmental, which was even more effective.

“There’s been something in the news over the past couple of weeks that Walt could be stepping down. They’ve mentioned Daniel Voight to replace him. This have anything to do with why you’re here?”

Voight was the former Democratic senator from California who’d first made a name for himself as a defense attorney for a very large Washington law firm before he’d gone home to enter politics. A lion’s share of his career had been designing and pushing for reform in the intelligence community. He’d been dead set against creating the office of national intelligence, calling it little more than another layer of government bureaucracy. He was called the Architect at Langley and the other fourteen military and civilian intelligence agencies.

“Walt doesn’t want to leave on this kind of a note. It’s why he agreed to let me ask you for help.”

“Voight is a good choice.”

“Probably, but it’s better the devil you know than the one you don’t. Morale is a little low on campus. And it’s going to get lower once our problem gets out.”

“Marty sign on for you coming out there?”

“No. He wants to do this himself. Everyone thinks he’s angling for Fred Atwell’s job.”

Atwell was the deputy director of the CIA, and since it wasn’t likely he would take the top spot when Page left, it was assumed he would resign. He was a professional intelligence officer, and the biggest problem in the CIA for a very long time was that its directors were almost always politicians, not professionals, while the DCIs were. Bambridge, as much as McGarvey didn’t like him, would be the logical choice.

McGarvey sipped his wine. Otto and Pete were skirting the issue, which was highly unusual for both of them. Whatever it was had to be big.

“What is it?” he asked. “Why’s Walt asked for my help?”

“We have a serial killer on campus,” Otto said. “Two bodies so far, but there could be more. Everyone involved thinks it’s likely.”

“No one is allowed to go anywhere on campus alone,” Pete said. “Everyone’s in pairs. Marty’s taken the blame for it, telling everyone that part of the Agency’s new strategic plan is to expect a possible terrorist incursion and get ready for it.”

“That would take someone from the inside,” McGarvey said.

“Right. Everyone is a suspect, so no one works alone.”

“Even for bathroom breaks,” Pete said. “People have started calling the OHB Gestapo Headquarters.”

“That’s not the real issue,” Otto said. “It’s how they were killed that has Blankenship and his people freaked out. Me too, because it makes no sense unless the killer is a total psycho. But nothing like that shows up on anyone’s psych evals.”

“I’m listening,” McGarvey said, and glanced at Pete. She was a little pale.

“Both of them bled to death. Their carotid arteries were ripped out of their necks.”

“Ripped or cut?”

“The killer ripped them out with his teeth, like a wild animal. And then while they were bleeding out, he chewed off their noses and lips — even their eyebrows. We found saliva, and we’re running DNA matches as fast as the lab can get the work done. Be a couple more days.”

McGarvey had heard of things like this happening in the early days of the Vietnam War. And he said as much to them. “It was a tactic of the Degar. The French called them the Montagnard, the ‘mountain people,’ and they were fierce. We used them as guerrillas against the VC, who were frightened of them, and rightly so. These guys left their calling cards wherever they went. Go back to Hanoi and leave us alone, or no one will be safe. They cut off heads, genitals, put men headfirst in cages of starving rats. Shoved poisonous snakes down their throats. Made their prisoners swallow the shoots of live bamboo plants that would grow right through their stomachs and intestines, and then let them make it back to their own units.”

“This guy was a Vietnamese soldier?” Pete asked skeptically. “He’d have to be seventy.”

“No, but someone who studied the tactics, because they worked. If we’d given the Montagnards more support and then gotten out of their way, the VC just might have gone back to Hanoi and stayed out of it. He’ll be an NOC,” McGarvey said.

“Eighteen of them on the night shift,” Otto said. “Three of them women, and Wager and Fabry leave thirteen. Soon as we get the DNA results back, we’ll nail the bastard.”

“He’s already thought of that, which means it won’t matter to him what DNA he left behind. It won’t be in his records. He’ll have gotten around that. It’s the whole point: their asses are out in the field, and they sure as hell don’t want anything pointing to their connections with the CIA.”

“Then we’ll take cheek swabs of everyone on the shift,” Pete suggested.

“He may not have worked that shift. Getting on campus through security isn’t all that difficult to do.”

Otto sat back. “Are you in?”

“Of course,” McGarvey said. From the moment Pete had shown up, there’d been no doubt in his mind. “I’m going to need a list of any field assignments Wager and Fabry were ever on together.”

“We already have that,” Otto said. He opened a file on his iPad and passed it across. “Called Alpha Seven. April oh three, little over a month before we started the second Iraq war.”

Wager and Fabry were part of a ground team spread out in the mountains above Kirkuk. They were looking for WMDs. Of the five others, Joseph Carnes was dead, killed in a car crash in Athens last year, and none of the others were currently on the Company’s payroll.

“You have current addresses on three of them, but the fourth is off the grid,” McGarvey said. It was how he would have played it.

Pete was surprised, but Otto wasn’t. “Larry Coffin,” he said. “He and Carnes were pals. Could be our guy?”

“Probably not, but I’m betting he knows something we can use.”

“He could be anywhere,” Pete said. “And he’s certainly demonstrated he doesn’t want to be found.”

“I’ll find him,” McGarvey said.

“Where?”

“Athens.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No,” McGarvey said. “You’re going back with Otto to help set up a public funeral for Wager and Fabry. Their families are going to insist, and only a very brief mention of their participation in the war will be released to the media.”

“Marty will never go for it.”

“Let him think it was his idea. We just want to know if any of their Alpha Seven buddies show up.”

“Then what?”

“Let Marty figure it out, because I have a feeling none of those guys is the killer.”

“Then why the ruse?” Pete asked.

“To keep the killer distracted.”

Lawrence Thaddeus Coffin sat alone at a sidewalk café in the Plaka district of Athens, very near the Acropolis and on top of the ancient city. It was a historical district and almost always busy with tourists, which made it anonymous. It was one of his favorite people-watching spots in a city he’d come to love, because of its international flavor.