“I pulled up the newspaper accounts,” Otto said. “The murder was never solved, though the wife was a prime suspect.”
“But that’s Alex Unroth,” McGarvey said. “What about the DCI’s secretary? Can you at least make a guess? You said you would recognize the eyes.”
“She’s squinting,” Schermerhorn said again, staring at the image. Yet his gut reactions were bouncing all over the place.
He turned to look at Rencke and McGarvey. He wanted to run and hide deep more urgently than he’d ever wanted to in his entire life. Larry Coffin and Joe Carnes had evidently tried without success in Athens. And Walt, Isty, and Tom had tried right there on campus, supposedly the safest place in the world for an NOC who’d come in out of the cold. And that hadn’t worked either.
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked again at the image, absolutely hating what he was going to say next. “I’ll have to see her in person.”
“I’ll find out if she’s still on campus,” Otto said, and started to leave, but Schermerhorn stopped him.
“We need to go in cold; otherwise, she’ll figure out what’s coming her way and run.”
“She knows by now,” McGarvey said. “If she’s not on campus, we’ll go to her house — wherever she lives.”
“You’d better bring the militia, and you better expect there’ll be some serious collateral damage.”
“She might kill again?’ Otto said.
Schermerhorn laughed. “Who’s left? Just me and George.”
THIRTY
McGarvey sat behind the wheel of his Porsche SUV, parked in a lot adjacent to a small apartment building in a pleasant neighborhood north of Washington in Chevy Chase — coincidentally not far from the house he and Katy had lived in before they moved to Florida. It felt odd to him, being back like this.
Pete rode shotgun next to him, and Schermerhorn sat in the backseat, nervously checking out the neighborhood. Traffic was light at this hour, but except for the streetlights, it was very dark under an overcast sky.
“We’ll go in first,” McGarvey told Pete. He phoned her, and when they were connected, he put his cell phone in the lapel pocket of his jacket without turning it off. Whatever happened, she would hear it.
Otto had checked with Agency security, who told him the DCI had left around six thirty, and his secretary fifteen minutes later. Neither of them were still on campus. He pulled up Dotty’s address from the file.
Schermerhorn had asked for a pistol before they left the house. “If it turns out to be Alex, I don’t want to go up against her unarmed. You can’t believe how fast she is.”
Pete took a standard U.S. military — issue Beretta 92F out of the glove compartment and handed it back to him. “She won’t be much help to us if she’s dead.”
“Neither will I,” Schermerhorn said. He ejected the magazine to check its load, seated it home in the handle, and cycled a round into the firing chamber. He stuffed the pistol under his belt and beneath his shirt. “Let’s get it over with. I want to be long gone an hour from now.”
“We’ll see,” McGarvey said. He didn’t feel particularly comfortable, having a man such as Schermerhorn armed, but he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to shoot the man center mass if he became a threat. Or even looked like he was about to cause trouble. “You’re out here tonight just to make a positive ID.”
“You’d better be prepared for some serious shit to go down. Because if it is Alex, she’ll recognize me the minute we come face-to-face.”
It was exactly what McGarvey hoped would happen.
“I can have a SWAT team out here by chopper in fifteen minutes,” Pete said.
They’d discussed it before they’d left the safe house, and McGarvey had vetoed the idea. “There’ll be other people living in the building. I don’t want this to become a hostage situation.”
“Not her style,” Schermerhorn said. “If it’s Alex, she’ll have a plan for getting free no matter what the odds are against her. She might shoot someone, but she wouldn’t want to be slowed down with a hostage in tow.”
“Let’s go,” McGarvey said, and he and Schermerhorn got out of the car and headed across to the apartment building.
Pete got behind the wheel and turned the car around so it faced the street.
McGarvey’s main worry had always been collateral damage. Innocent people getting in the way of a gunfight. He’d been in the middle of such things far too many times in his career, and he didn’t want another repeat. He’d come to the opinion that he would rather let the bad guy walk away free than corner him — or her — where other people could get hurt.
Voltaire had the same philosophy a couple of hundred years ago: he reasoned it would be better to let a guilty man go free than to convict one innocent man.
They approached the building from the front and buzzed apartment 301 at the front on the top floor. Dorothy Givens lived in 104, at the rear on the bottom floor.
A man answered the intercom. “Who is it?”
McGarvey held up his open wallet. “Metro police.”
“What’s this about?”
“Open the door, Mr. Reading,” McGarvey said, reading the name off the tag beside 301. “We’re not here for you, but we could be.”
The door lock buzzed and they went inside. Down a corridor was the elevator, to the right a row of built-in mailboxes, below which were two larger lockboxes for packages. The doors to the two front apartments were left and right of the main entrance, and the doors to the rear two down a corridor past the elevator.
McGarvey went first.
Schermerhorn hung back a little, drawing his pistol and concealing it behind his right leg.
“Don’t shoot unless there’s no other way out,” McGarvey warned.
“I want this to be over with as much as you do. I’m tired of always looking over my shoulder. And if anybody has some answers, it’ll be Alex.”
“And your message on Kryptos.”
“But they moved it, and none of us knew where. Only Alex and George.”
McGarvey’s anger spiked, and he turned. “Moved what?”
“The package.”
“You’ll fucking well tell me what it is right now. No bullshit about Alex or the message on four.”
“One thing at a time. I want Alex neutralized, and I’m going to want a whole shitload of assurances first.”
“We’ll decrypt the thing.”
“By then I’ll be long gone, and it’ll be your problem. The biggest problem you’ve ever faced.”
McGarvey had considered the possibility that Schermerhorn was the killer. But he knew that was wrong five minutes after the guy had shown up at Union Station. The former NOC was determined, but he wasn’t certifiable. The killer had some sort of deep-seated psychosis that required him — or her — to destroy the faces, and therefore the identities, of their victims.
If Alex had been telling them the truth in Iraq about killing her father and slicing off his face, she was the obvious fit to the profile.
The problem he was having was coming up with the reason. In his way of thinking, it had to be more than just insanity. Crazy people had purpose, though almost always their motivations were obscure and often senseless.
They came to 104. “You’re here to identify her, nothing else,” McGarvey said.
“And?”
“The next move will be hers.”
“Christ. You have no idea who you’re dealing with, do you?”
McGarvey knocked on the door. The building was quiet, and the corridor smelled faintly of cleaning fluid, even furniture polish on the shiny chair rails and oak wainscoting. Solid upper middle-class, no trouble here.