It had begun to rain. They could hear the heavy drops hitting the decks, and the light from the partially open hatches had darkened, casting a pall over the mess. Pete got up to switch on a light, but McGarvey gestured her off. The gloom fit his mood just now, because he expected a line of bullshit from the former NOC, who was, after all, probably fighting for his life in the only way he knew how—the big lie, the big scam, the legerdemain, misdirection.
“The one and only report we transmitted that was an actual fact, they ignored,” Coffin said. “Worse than that, I learned later they’d buried it. And all things considered, I suppose it was the right thing to do at the time.”
“How’d you find out?” McGarvey asked. “I thought you and the others walked away?”
“We did, except for Walt and Istvan. Walt told me about it, and Istvan confirmed it. They were worried out of their wits. It was the last lifeline they were going to throw me. From that point I was on my own. Just like the others.”
“Lifeline?” Pete asked.
“A bit of solid information I could use if the need ever arose. But only if it was important.”
“Important enough to die for?” McGarvey asked. “Like now?”
Coffin nodded.
“Did the others also know this dark secret had been buried?”
“I think so.”
“Is it why Wager and Fabry were murdered? And why you went deep?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Did you ever get the feeling someone was coming after you?”
“Not until a couple of days ago,” Coffin said. “Could I get a little more wine?”
Pete got up and took his glass. “What I don’t get is why didn’t you go public.”
“You have to be kidding. My life was on the line as it was—still is—and if I’d blown the whistle, someone from the Company would have come after me.”
“We don’t assassinate our own people,” Pete said, a very hard edge to her voice.
“Not unless there’s a valid reason for it.”
She looked at him for a moment then went to fetch more wine.
“Do you think your control officer—the guy who parachuted in—is the killer?” McGarvey asked.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” Coffin said.
“It’s only been a couple of days since the murders in the CIA.”
“I knew someone would be coming for us.”
“Who?”
“Either our control officer or Alex. They were a thing the moment he dropped into our camp. It’s like they’d known each other all their lives.”
“His name?”
Coffin smiled. “We came to think of him as the Avenging Angel. The first time he came down to the oil fields with us, he took out two roustabouts—I don’t even think they were Iraqis. It didn’t matter to him. The next time, Alex came with us—it was a first for her—and she was just as good and ruthless as he was. They made a hell of a pair.”
“Avenging Angel—why that name?” Pete asked, coming back with the wine.
“The war was close, he told us, so it didn’t matter how many bodies were stacked up in plain sight. He wanted the Mukhabarat to know someone was looking down on them and taking revenge for all their sins.”
“They didn’t send someone up to search for your guys?”
“They did for a couple of days, but when all hell began to break loose, they took off—some of them to the front but a lot of them across the border into the already big refugee camps in Turkey and Syria.”
“You didn’t call this guy by name?”
“George.”
“American?” Pete asked.
Coffin shrugged. “Brooklyn maybe. An East Coast Jew. At least that’s what I thought at the time.”
“But you know better now,” McGarvey said, careful to keep his voice neutral. He’d heard stories from Otto and others inside the Company, especially when he’d served briefly as the DCI, about hidden caches of money or heroin—besides the WMDs—in Iraq. But they were rumors. Popular myths. Internet “truths” that the conspiracy nuts loved to hash out.
“Damned right. It didn’t make sense to me then. But I saw it with my own eyes, and gradually began to realize what had happened and why. I just didn’t think they’d kill to keep it a secret. And especially not the way Walt and Istvan were done. But I understand now.”
“We’re listening,” McGarvey said.
“The thing is, I don’t think there’s a damned thing you can do about it. You get involved, and you’re a dead man walking.”
“We’re already involved,” Pete said. “So tell us this big secret of yours.”
“Shit,” Coffin said. He was in distress. It had come to him slowly during the interview, and now he had a crazy look in his eyes, almost as if he were a wild animal that had been cornered. But the odds were so overwhelming, he didn’t know how to fight back.
“Quit the bullshit,” Moshonas said. “If you have something to say, get on with it, or I’ll take you in this minute. And I won’t give a damn if I have to shoot when you try to escape.”
“You have to understand that it’s more than what’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk.”
“An area where the inspectors never searched,” Pete said.
Coffin nodded.
“So it’s still there—whatever the it is.”
Again Coffin nodded. “And it’ll never be found unless you have the coordinates.”
“Which you have.”
“All of us did.”
“Now it’s only Knight, Schermerhorn, and the woman.”
“Plus our control officer.”
“What’d he say at your debriefing when you got back to the States?”
“He never came back with us. He got as far as Ramstein, but when we boarded the plane to come home, he wasn’t aboard.”
“Nobody ever mentioned him?” Pete asked.
“No.”
“Not you or the others?” McGarvey asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because of what he told us about Kryptos. The solution to number four, he told us, would lead to what he called the ‘empirical necessity.’”
Everyone in the mess knew about the encrypted sculpture in the courtyard outside the New Headquarters Building. Every day employees eating in the cafeteria looked at it, though most never really saw it.
“Only the first three panels have been decrypted so far,” Pete said. “They’re mostly nonsense.”
“Except two talks about something buried in an unknown location,” McGarvey said. “Otto mentioned it to me once.”
“Did he solve four?” Coffin asked.
“Two has the latitude and longitude of the burial site, which, as I remember, was a couple of hundred feet or less southwest of the sculpture.”
“That’s wrong,” Coffin said.
“And three is just a paraphrase of what the archeologist Howard Carter supposedly said when he looked inside the tomb of King Tut for the first time.”
“Which leaves four. Maybe you should have Mr. Rencke try his hand at translating it before someone else is killed.”
“You’re saying whatever’s on panel four makes sense of what’s buried in the hills above Kirkuk.”
“That’s what George told us in the end, when he swore us to secrecy. ‘The truth will come out sooner or later,’ he said. ‘When it does you’ll understand. The entire world will understand the empirical necessity.’”
“So what’s buried up there?” Pete asked.
Coffin got up and handed his empty glass to her. “Another one, please,” he said. He moved around the table to one of the open portholes.
“Sit down,” McGarvey said.
“I need some air,” Coffin said, looking back. “The rain smells good.”
“Sit down, God damn it.”
Coffin was suddenly flung forward off his feet, a small red hole in the back of his head and his entire face exploding in a spray of blood, bones, and brain matter.