“I have no idea what the hell they want, and it’s driving me crazy.”
“Money?” she suggested. “I was thinking a stash of heroin, a cash cow on the open market. Or maybe someone grabbed a bunch of Saddam’s gold at the end and hid it up there until things settled down and they could go back for it.”
McGarvey shrugged.
“But it isn’t that easy, is it?”
“Never is.”
She took the beer from him, and drank some. “There’s nothing left here for us,” she said.
“We’re going back to DC, but the flight doesn’t leave till after one.”
“Good, I’m tired.”
McGarvey’s cell phone rang on the bed, and he went inside to answer it. Otto was on the line, and he sounded breathless.
“We’ve had another one, about two hours ago,” he said.
He motioned for Pete. “I’m putting this on speakerphone. What happened?”
“Marty’s sent a Gulfstream from Ramstein for you guys. The whole place is in an uproar. No one knows what the hell to do.”
“Tell me,” McGarvey said, not at all surprised.
“He was a goddamned groundskeeper, name of Bob Maddox. Worked for the subcontractors about ten years. Happened before seven this morning our time. Looked like an accident. He was run over by his own moving machine and ripped all to hell. I found out about it twenty minutes ago, and what struck me right off the bat was that his face had been destroyed. I told security to look for a remote-control device, which they found. FM band, line of sight. They screwed with the engine, and when he got off to check it out, the machine backed over him, the mower blades running. Makes three.”
“Five,” McGarvey said, and he told Otto about Carnes and Coffin.
“Two to go,” Otto said.
“There was a control officer Coffin only knew as George. Maybe Brooklyn, a Jew.”
“Only seven show on the op file.”
“This guy along with the woman — Alex Unroth — supposedly were quite the pair. If anyone would know the control officer, it would be her.”
NINETEEN
Security at the CIA’s main gate was tighter than it had ever been, and Marty Bambridge himself had to drive down to personally vouch for McGarvey and Pete, even though they had been picked up at Andrews by a pair of CIA security officers in a Company Cadillac SUV. And even though Mac had once been the DCI.
They followed the deputy director back up to the VIP parking garage in the OHB.
“What about your bags, sir?” one of the security officers asked.
“Have someone take them up to the impound area. They can pick them up on the way out,” Bambridge said. The impound area was actually a locker where items people weren’t allowed to bring past security in the lobby were kept while they were inside.
McGarvey and Pete surrendered their weapons, which included a couple of extra magazines of ammunition and, in Mac’s case, a silencer.
“Did you find Larry Coffin?” Bambridge asked in the elevator on the way up to the seventh floor.
“Yeah, but someone shot him to death while Pete and I and an NIS officer were interviewing him,” McGarvey said.
“Good Lord. Any notion who the shooter was?”
“A couple of ideas, and no one will be happy about what we found out.”
Bambridge scowled. “No one usually is when you get back from one of these things,” he said. “But it’s not over, is it?”
“Not by a long shot.”
Walt Page was waiting for them in his office, along with Carleton Patterson, the CIA’s general counsel. Otto breezed in right after them, a flushed look on his round face. It looked as if he hadn’t slept or changed clothes since Serifos.
“I can’t lie to you and say we’re making much progress here, and that the campus isn’t in nearly complete shambles,” Page said. “So I hope you two have brought something useful back from Athens.”
“How’d you know Maddox was one of the Alpha Seven operators? Larry Coffin told us none of their real fingerprints or DNA samples were on record.”
“Otto gave us the heads-up when he told us to look for a remote-control device, which we found,” Bambridge said. “Soon as it was confirmed it wasn’t an accident, we went looking in the old files.”
“I found photographs of all of them,” Otto said. “Knight’s was the closest match. He was one of two cryptographers on the team, and one of the guys he works with on the maintenance crew said he was always messing around with puzzles, like Sudoku, the Rubik’s Cube, stuff like that.”
“You weren’t authorized to conduct interviews,” Bambridge snapped. “Stick to your computers.” He was totally on edge.
“Just a phone call. I needed to make sure of the match. At this point it looks as if Wager and Fabry were hiding in the open, but Knight was here under a work name.”
“He was the most frightened,” Pete suggested.
“Of what, my dear girl?” Patterson asked. He was an old man, nearly eighty, and long past his retirement age. But he loved the business and, he’d confided to McGarvey a few years back, most of the people.
“Me excluded?” McGarvey had pulled his leg, one of their rare lighter moments.
“You especially. Because you’re just about the last of a dying breed I most admire. A true conservative without any left-wing biases or right-wing allegiances.”
The insiders, the few people in the Agency who had known McGarvey almost from the beginning, had slapped the moniker of Superman on him — behind his back, of course — when he served as DCI. Superman’s motto from the beginning had been: “Truth, justice, and the American way.” Those few words pretty well summed up who and what he was.
“Afraid of exactly what happened to him,” she replied.
“And why,” McGarvey added.
Everyone looked at him, the moment frozen in glass. Bambridge especially wanted to know; he was clearly the most agitated.
“What happened in Athens?” Page asked, breaking the silence. “What did you two find?”
“We found Larry Coffin, the fourth member of Alpha Seven, serving time in Korydallos prison for art theft.”
“He’s okay,” Bambridge said.
“He was shot to death while we were interviewing him in an NIS safe house. A high-power rifle, possibly a Barrett. They took a shot through an open porthole to the back of his head.”
“Destroying his face,” Bambridge said softly. “A pattern. Someone is targeting the Alpha Seven operators. But why, for heaven’s sake? That war’s been over for a long time; it’s not like Iran or Syria. And why the mutilations?”
“We don’t know yet, but it means something to the killer or killers, and there’s more.”
“There always is,” Bambridge said.
McGarvey took his time going over everything he and Pete had done and learned, including their connection with Spiros Moshonas, the NIS officer, and the manner in which Carnes had died, his face completely destroyed.
“That is a great deal to take in,” Patterson said, making the understatement. “But aside from whatever supposedly has been hidden in some mountain cache in Iraq, Alpha Seven wasn’t the only team looking for weapons of mass destruction over there. All of them consistently reported that they’d found nothing. Only the one team was sending glowing reports.”
Bambridge shot him a look, and Patterson smiled.
“I have access to operational records. I can read and draw conclusions,” Patterson said. He turned back to McGarvey. “But there were none, of course, and you’re saying the team sent false reports to steer the inspectors away from the cache — whatever it contained.”