“The Second Gulf War started on the twentieth of March oh three,” Coffin said. “By then we’d been inside Iraq for three months, looking for WMDs, which we never really found. At least not the ones we’d been told to look for.”
“What did you find?” McGarvey asked.
“Not what we were supposed to find.”
Moshonas pushed away from the wall. “That’s enough. This piece of shit will tell you only what he thinks you want to hear. He murdered a man in prison, and combined with his art theft conviction, he’s going back.”
“This is a matter for the CIA,” Pete said. “We have the murders of two innocent men we have to figure out.”
“The CIA has no jurisdiction in Greece.”
“Take care, Special Agent,” Coffin said, his voice quiet, but with conviction. “The NIS might not want to get involved.”
Moshonas started to object, but McGarvey held him off. “What did you people find in the mountains? What was in the cache?”
“I need to tell you the circumstances about the other operators, because you’re going to need that information if you’re going to do something about the situation.”
“That still exists after ten plus years?” Moshonas asked.
“Yes,” Coffin said, and the way in which he said it, quietly, confidently, struck McGarvey as ominous.
“Let’s start with Joseph Carnes right here in Athens,” McGarvey suggested. “He was the first to die.”
A light came into Coffin’s eyes. “You think I killed him. It’s why you came here. That’s the connection you were looking for. Well, you’re wrong. I never even knew he was here until I saw the squib in the paper about him being killed. They even had his real name, which meant he wasn’t undercover.”
“Was there a reason for you—and not him—to be hiding under an assumed identity?”
“You’re damn right I was after Iraq. Check the Company’s records. Every one of Alpha Seven quit the Company.”
“Except for Wager and Fabry,” Pete said.
“Yeah, and even hiding out in a place they figured was secure didn’t help them in the end.”
“Nor did it help you hiding in Korydallos,” McGarvey said. “Are you sure it was Carnes? Did you go to the morgue and identify the body?”
“Are you kidding? Soon as he was killed, I came up with my little bit of fiction. I figured if I dropped out of circulation for a year, whoever it was might try somewhere else. Which they did. Joseph just made a dumb mistake, staying out in the open like that. He must have figured the threat was over and done with. But he was wrong.”
“But now you’re out. Maybe we should just cut you loose and see what happens.”
“Carnes was the weakest link, and the oldest. We celebrated his thirtieth birthday in Munich a few days before we shipped out to our staging spot in Turkey, a place called Van, which was a hundred and fifty klicks from the Iraqi border. There was an airport there. Anyway, we all had too much to drink at the party, Joseph the most. He passed out, and we had to carry him back to our position. The instructors were pissed, but by that time it would have been impossible to replace anyone. We’d become a pretty good team.”
“Letting off some steam isn’t such a terrible thing before going into badland,” Pete said. “Was there more?”
“He got drunk just about every night. We never found out where he got the stuff, but he was a damned good operator. One minute he was standing right next to you, and if you happened to turn away for just a second, he was gone. Never gave an explanation. Alex started calling him the Magician, and it stuck.”
“You were the Chameleon, and Carnes was the Magician. What about the others? How about the woman?”
“We called her the Working Lady.”
“She didn’t mind?”
“None of us did. Walter was MP—Mister Ponderous. Istvan was the Refugee. Roy Schermerhorn was the Kraut, of course, and Tom Knight was the last to get his handle.”
“Which was?”
“Don Quixote, because the day after we settled down in country, he wanted to go work, blowing up shit. There were big oil fields nearby, and he figured we could go down there and raise some hell.”
“You were supposed to be looking for WMDs.”
“Everybody knew they weren’t there, just like everybody knew the war was coming. Tom wanted to pave the way. Saddam’s military wouldn’t be very effective if they ran out of gas.”
“But you didn’t let him go.”
“Of course not. Alex said he was just trying to tilt at windmills, which was how we came up with his handle. And he liked his more than the rest of us liked ours.”
“What did you do?”
“Tracked the movements of military convoys, mostly. There was a lot of activity around Kirkuk.”
“We were putting up Keyhole satellites as early as seventy-six,” Pete said. “I expect they could have done a better job monitoring the military’s goings-on up there.”
“The Iraqis were smarter than that. They hid their shit right out in the open—up next to where waste gas was burning day and night. Infrared equipment was useless from overhead, but from ground level we didn’t have that problem.”
“So you did go down to the oil fields.”
“Yes, but not to blow up anything, just to look,” Coffin said.
“They must have had security patrols,” McGarvey said.
“They were mostly easy to avoid.”
“Mostly?”
“There were a couple of close calls.”
“What’d you do with the bodies?”
“Buried them in the foothills,” Coffin said. “Anyway, we were just going through the motions out there. Like I said, there were no WMDs, and everyone with half a brain at Langley knew it.”
McGarvey suddenly got it, or at least part of what Coffin was leading up to. “You had to report by radio every day?”
“Every twenty-four-hour period on a rotating schedule. Never the same time of day or night. Encrypted burst transmissions to one of our spy birds in geosync orbit about thirty degrees above the horizon.”
“Alpha Seven never found anything, but you didn’t report it that way.”
“Of course not,” Coffin said. “When the war wound down, where do you think the coalition force inspectors went looking?”
“The caches Alpha Seven found and marked,” McGarvey said. “All of it fiction.”
Coffin looked over his shoulder at Pete, almost as if he were appealing to her for an understanding he wasn’t getting from McGarvey. “Pretty much,” he said. “May I have that glass of wine now?”
Pete went to the galley in the adjacent compartment and came back a minute later with a glass of red wine for Coffin, who sipped at it delicately and then smiled. “We should have stopped at my place first. I have a decent cellar.”
“Pretty much…?” McGarvey prompted.
“We got out shortly after the shooting began, but they wanted to hold us, possibly for our testimony on camera on the Hill. We got out the same way we came in: airlifted across the border into Turkey and from there Incirlik, then Ramstein and home, straight to Camp Peary, where we were debriefed.”
“No weapons of mass destruction were ever found,” Pete said.
“We were just another mission that had gotten things wrong.”
“Not all your reports to headquarters were fiction. You said pretty much. Take me back to Iraq before the war began,” McGarvey said.