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.”
“And suddenly, after all these years, someone is running around killing all the Alpha Seven people, to keep the secret, maybe because someone is getting too close to finding it or knowing about it? What?”
“The manner in which they were murdered has significance,” Page said. “We’re being sent a message.”
“Or it’s simply the work of someone truly deranged,” Bambridge said. “Which is something I think is more likely. Even if there is this something—whatever—buried in the hills, it’d be damned near impossible to go back, dig it up, and get it out without some al-Qaeda nut case or some trigger-happy Taliban hill people finding out.”
“A brilliant someone,” McGarvey said. “Among perhaps two or three people—the two left from the old Alpha Seven team and their control officer, whose identity we don’t have yet.”
“Whoever it is, they’re still out there, and they have money and intelligence resources,” Otto said. “Mac gave me the bank account number and password for the guy Larry Coffin was using as a substitute prisoner in Korydallos. He wanted to confirm that Coffin was the paymaster. Well, he might not have been. I’ve found most of his money in Athens and a few other places, but the money to pay the substitute came from Bank Yahav, a password account, of course, and a pretty sophisticated one. Has to be more than eight characters. One of my darlings has been working the problem for six hours and hasn’t come up with the solution yet. But it’ll happen.”
“Israel?” Pete asked.
“Yeah, Jerusalem,” Otto said. “But you guys won’t like the next part. The full name translated from Hebrew, is ‘Bank Yahav for Government Employees Limited.’”
All the air left the room.
Page sat back, a stunned look on his face, his mouth set. “I don’t know if I very much want to go in that direction,” he said.
“It’s not a government bank,” Otto said. “Just a government employees’ bank. Like one of our government employees’ credit unions.”
“Does it mean Coffin was working for the Israelis?” Bambridge asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Either that, or someone knew about Coffin’s situation and paid the substitute fee,” McGarvey said.
“Why?” Page asked.
A dozen threads were running through McGarvey’s head, the first of which was panel four of the Kryptos sculpture. “I don’t know,” he said absently. “But I’m going to ask them just that.”