It was coming up on noon, and McGarvey had left the bulk of the interrogation to Pete, content to let her lead because she was damned good. Schermerhorn, even as cynical as he was—as most NOCs tended to be out of necessity—had warmed to her, and a couple of times in the past half hour he had actually anticipated a question and answered it before she could ask.
“Would you like to stop for lunch?” she asked. “We can eat here, or there’s an Olive Garden not too far away.”
“We’re almost done. When I walk out the door, I’m going deep and I won’t be back.”
“We’re up to late oh two, just before the Second Iraq War, when you met Alex for the first time in Munich,” Pete said. “Tell us about it.”
“I’d never met the others till then,” Schermerhorn said. “I hadn’t even heard of them. And actually, it was in Frankfurt, at what had been an old Nazi Kaserne.”
This last bit came as a surprise to McGarvey. “The Drake Kaserne?” he asked.
“Yes, you know it?”
“I spent a couple of days there a while back. As a guest of the BND. If you were there, they knew about your op.”
Schermerhorn glanced at Pete and grinned. “Actually, we were thumbing our noses at them.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It was Bertie Russell’s idea. He was our chief mission-training officer. Been with us from the beginning. He was sort of like a father figure, except to Alex, who didn’t trust him. And the feeling was mutual.
“Our first task was to get to the Kaserne without being detected by the Germans, and simply knock on their door. We had passes that were worthless anyplace else. They scrambled, but they let us in. It was a fallback, you see, in case something went wrong in Munich. Bertie wanted us on record as being in country, so if it came to it, we wouldn’t get shot. And that was a possibility.”
“What was your cover story in Frankfurt?”
“Extrajudicial rendition. It was supposedly the real start to the hunt for bin Laden. The Germans were content to go along with us as long as we didn’t cause trouble for any German citizens. They were just happy we had let them in on what we were doing.”
“Did they ever catch on?”
“No. When we were done in Munich, we just packed up and left. In the mountains one day, and up at Ramstein on the big bird for Saudi Arabia the next.”
“This Bertie Russell, would he confirm any of your story?” Pete wanted to know.
“Ran over an IED in oh four, after all the bloody fighting was supposedly done and gone.”
“Convenient,” McGarvey said.
Schermerhorn flared. “Look, I came out of the woodwork to help you guys.”
“Help save your own life.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. Walt, Isty, and Tom didn’t do so well on campus. What makes you think it’d be any different if I let you take me into protective custody? So just let’s get that shit out of the way. I’m here to help.”
“With what?’ Pete asked, and the sharp question from her stung Roy.
Schermerhorn took his time answering that one. He got up again and went to the window, this time with a lot more caution. “Who else knows I’m here?”
“Otto Rencke.”
“Who else?”
“By now our deputy director of operations and the DCI,” McGarvey said. Otto had texted a query earlier, and McGarvey’s cell phone was on vibrate-only mode. He had excused himself and gone into the bathroom to answer.
“Bloody hell.”
“If you can’t trust people at that level, then what are you doing here with us?” Pete asked. She sounded as if she were gentling a skittish horse.
“Preventing world war three,” Schermerhorn said, coming back to the couch. “It’s there, the warning on panel four.”
“Save us the trouble and give us the message.”
“It’s not going to be that easy. You, Otto, whoever, needs to come up with the decryption if you’re going to believe it. Kryptos is the Holy Grail in a lot of people’s minds. My telling you won’t wash. Especially not on the Hill or at the White House.”
“You’re playing games with us now,” McGarvey said. “Your life is at stake here.”
“Here, yes, it is. Once I walk away and as long as I stay on my own and on the move, I’ll be fine while you do your job.”
“Okay, Roy,” Pete said. “Tell us how you did it. Changed the carvings on four. To this point we’ve stayed totally away from it. We didn’t want to call any attention to the thing. Everyone knows what’s carved into the copper plate, so no one really looks at it.”
“I suggested that the sculpture looked like shit, weathered and green. My supervisor didn’t agree, said copper out in the weather was supposed to look like that. It was the effect Sanborn was looking for. I couldn’t push it, of course, so I bided my time, until I pointed out that all the steel and burnished aluminum on the outside of the New Headquarters Building looked shiny and new. Kryptos didn’t match. It’d be my job to take off the crud and make it look new. And maintain it that way. If someone complained, we could also let it go back to natural.”
“And they went along with it?”
“Lots of really smart people work on campus. Lots of PhD’s, but if you ever look real close at them, you’ll find out just how naive and gullible they are outside their own narrow little specialties. They were easy.”
“You polished the sculpture. Then what?”
“Actually, it was a big job, because I not only had to do the plates themselves, but I had to polish the insides of each carving by hand, one by one. When I got to four, instead of polish, I used liquid metal to which I had added a copper tint.”
McGarvey saw the possible flaw. “In order to make something like that work, you couldn’t have changed, let’s say an A to an I, or vice versa. You would have needed to work out whatever message you wanted to put on panel four, and then figure out the code that would work as an overlay on the original letters.”
Schermerhorn shrugged. “I had a little help with my laptop, but my specialty was cryptography, and I just needed to come up with a modified one-time cipher. It’s completely random like the original, which is why no one was able to break the thing in the first place.”
“But you did.”
“You have to learn to think in random.”
“What’s on panel four?” Pete asked. “What did you try to tell us?”
“Something you wouldn’t believe if I just sat here and mapped it out for you. Plus, I don’t have all the answers—none of us ever did—except for maybe George. Listen, I’m just one guy on the run, a liar, con man, thief, killer by trade. And there’s only me and Alex left from Alpha Seven.”
“Plus George.”
“Yeah, but my guess is he’s never been on campus. Most NOCs never go near the place.”
“Except for Wager, Fabry, and Knight.”
“But someone on the inside, someone with access to real-time intelligence information has to be,” Schermerhorn. “Surely, you guys have figured that out by now.”
“Security has turned the entire campus upside down,” Pete said. She was clearly frustrated.
“Tell Otto what I said about four, and he’ll decrypt it in no time at all if he’s as smart as everyone says he is.”
“The only one left from your team is Alex Unroth,” McGarvey said.
“The Working Girl.”
“So you’re saying it’s she who killed the three on campus? What about Carnes and Coffin in Athens?”
“She moved around a lot. One day here, the next day somewhere else. Did it during our training at the Farm—sometimes she’d bug out for a day or two, and no one could get anything out of her. She did it in Germany, and of course in Iraq with George. We should have called her the Ghost, because she was damned good at disappearing right while you were looking directly at her.”
“She’s on campus in plain sight?” Pete said.
“Ever play Hide the Thimble?” Schermerhorn asked. “She’s there.”
“And you’re going to help us find her,” McGarvey said.