End Game (25 page)

The cover and linings were formed into patterns that allowed X-ray machines to see through to the inside, but because of the patterns, the existence of the passports and other documents did not show up; instead they blended in.

One separate envelope contained a thousand dollars in cash, most of it American. In addition, a half dozen contracts for travel magazine pieces were contained in a file folder. Several travel guides for Europe and the Middle East, along with a compact Nikon digital camera and several copies of the magazines
Travel
+
Leisure
and
Condé
Nast Traveler
filled the case.

From another carton she took out a small roll-about suitcase that contained enough clothes and personal toiletries to last her for at least two weeks of travel. They were a little musty, though she changed the items every month or so.

She took the attaché case and roll-about to the Caddy, then came back and put the cartons in place in the pile so it would take someone searching the locker hours to discover something might be missing.

All that had taken less than twenty minutes before she was driving out the gate and back onto the Pike.

Traffic had picked up a little, a lot of it garbage trucks, delivery vans from bakeries, and fresh produce suppliers for restaurant prep chefs. By six or six thirty every road from the Beltway into the city would be jam-packed. White noise.

Again taking care with her tradecraft, she drove back to her apartment in an erratic route, again pretty sure she hadn't picked up a tail, though every hour that passed, the likelihood that the security officer had managed to call in to report his situation grew exponentially.

No suspicious cars or vans were parked anywhere near, nor had the Impala she'd parked next door been disturbed so far as she could tell by merely driving by.

She made two more passes before she parked the Caddy on a side street a block away, and walked back to the Chevy, where she put the attaché case and roll-about into the trunk. Before she drove off, she quickly checked the trunk, under the seats, in the glove compartment, and under the dash for any bugs or homing devices. So far as she could tell, the car was clean.

Three blocks later she pulled into a service station and filled up the tank. The sign in front advertised that a mechanic was on duty twenty-four hours every day. One of the service doors was open, the bay empty.

She walked in and the mechanic came over. “Good morning. You have a problem?”

“Might be leaking a little oil. Wonder if you could put it on the lift and check it out.”

“That's a Hertz rental. Have them come out and switch cars.”

“I don't have time to screw around with them this morning unless there's problem. I'm driving up to New York.”

“Sure, bring it in,” the mechanic said.

She drove slowly into the bay, and the mechanic raised it on the lift. She started her own inspection of the undercarriage and wheel wells from the rear as he checked under the engine for leaks.

“Technically, you're not supposed to be in here. Insurance.”

“How does it look?” Alex asked, moving forward.

“I don't see anything wrong. What makes you think there's an oil leak?”

“Just a feeling. My dad was a wrench, and he checked our cars every time we took a trip. Guess it just rubbed off.”

The mechanic stepped aside as she checked under the engine and in the front wheel wells, again finding nothing suspicious.

She gave him a smile. “The brakes look good too. What do I owe you?”

“Make it a twenty and we're even.”

When the car was down, she paid him and drove off. The inspection only proved that the Company wasn't using obvious bugs. The ones the size of a book of matches. But with the right satellite overhead, something as small as the end of a pencil would work, and no casual inspection would have found it.

Still, she didn't think the car had been traced to her.

Instead of driving back to I-495, she took the Leesburg Pike a couple of miles north, where it connected with the Dulles Access Road, traffic definitely picking up as people headed to the airport for their early morning flights.

She continued to watch her tradecraft, but with the increased traffic she had no need for such drastic action as before. But each time she changed lanes to pass, she watched behind her to make sure the same car behind her wasn't doing the same thing.

If someone was following her, she decided they were a lot better than she was.

*   *   *

It was just six when she pulled into the Hertz return lanes, and a man with a clipboard came out, checked the car over, entered the odometer and date and time into a handheld unit, and printed the receipt for her.

She got her bags from the trunk as another car drove up, and the attendant went to check it in. While no one was paying attention to her, she opened the attaché case and pulled out a passport, Gold Amex card, a few hundred in American dollars, and other items of identification under the name Lois Wheeler, and stashed her Unroth and Alice Walker papers inside.

The airport was the weakest link in her flight plan. Once they knew she was gone, they would expect her to run. But Dulles and Reagan National were obvious, especially since very few flights to Europe took off until later in the afternoon—most of them between four thirty and seven. It would leave her exposed her at the airport for nearly twelve hours, during which an even casual sweep would pick her up.

Except for Air France flight 9039 if she could book a last-minute seat.

She went into the main terminal, where she found a seat by a window and connected on her cell phone with the Air France website. Picking up reservations, she went to 9039 for this morning's 11:45
A.M.
flight to Paris. All but four seats were filled, one of them in tourist and the other three in first class. She booked a first-class flight, paying for it with her American Express card.

Next she called the Hotel InterContinental and booked a suite for five days, beginning this evening, so that when she arrived, she would have a room.

It was a bit of irony. The InterContinental was the hotel McGarvey often stayed at.

 

FORTY-THREE

At Dulles, McGarvey watched as Alex passed through security into the international terminal and disappeared down the long walkway into the concourse. So far as he had been able to determine, she had not spotted him behind her from Turkey Run Park down to the Tysons Corner storage facility, over to the apartment building where she'd left the Caddy and had picked up the Impala, or out here to the airport.

But a couple of times it had been close. She was a damned good field operator, and paranoid as hell now. Rightly so.

A forensics team had been dispatched to the storage facility and to the Caddy, but those moves were only a moot point designed to appease Blankenship, who was beside himself with anger.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Director, but if you had allowed me to leave four of my people there in the first place, none of this would have happened. As it was, Lloyd could have been shot to death. There's no telling what this woman is capable of.”

“She is not the serial killer,” McGarvey had said, trying to calm him down.

“You bet the life of one of my people on that opinion, you know.”

“Yes.”

He phoned Pete next and brought her up to speed. “She made a couple of phone calls in the main terminal here at Dulles, and ten minutes later went to the Air France ticketing counter, where she got her boarding pass. She just now went across to the international terminal.”

“She's getting out of Dodge. Paris?”

“Possibly, but most of those flights don't leave until later in the afternoon or even early evening.”

“She won't want to hang around there that long,” Pete said. “Maybe she's leading you on a merry chase and plans on going out the back door.”

“I don't think so.”

“Just a hunch?”

“Something like that.”

“Then my question stands: What about Schermerhorn? Do we cut him loose, let him walk away?”

“Hold him until I find out where Alex is off to. We still might need his help.”

“Are you going after her?”

“Don't have any choice,” McGarvey said.

He phoned Otto, who sounded excited. “Oh wow, Mac, the decryption is really close. I got Berlin, but it's just a key, not the real part of Schermerhorn's message.”

McGarvey explained where he was and what Alex had done.

“Give me a sec,” Otto said. He was back in less than fifteen seconds. “Air France flight 9039 leaves for de Gaulle at quarter to twelve this morning. Gets to Paris at noon.”

“It'd be a last-minute booking, within the past fifteen minutes.”

Otto was back again in under fifteen seconds. “Lois Wheeler, first-class, five A. Hang on.” Ten seconds later he came back. “I ran the passport number she used—it's valid—and her Gold Amex just came up also as valid.”

“Arrange a jet for me at Andrews. I want to be waiting for her.”

“What about clothes, your passport?”

“I'll stop at my apartment on the way.”

“That'll take too long with traffic on the Beltway. I'll send someone over to pack your things and meet you at the plane.”

“You'll want to know my fail-safes.”

Otto chuckled. “This is me you're talking to, kemo sabe
.
”

“Right,” McGarvey said, and started back to where he'd parked his car a few rows from the Hertz return lanes.

“I know it's redundant to say, but watch yourself, Mac. If she joins up with George, there's no telling what they'd be capable of doing. To you or anyone who gets in their way.”

*   *   *

Morning rush-hour traffic was in full swing when McGarvey got back on the Beltway. Joint Base Andrews was just over forty miles away, skirting to the south of Alexandria and across the river. Near Annandale an eighteen-wheeler had jackknifed and crashed on its side, blocking all but one of the eastbound lanes. Traffic slowed to a crawl for nearly forty-five minutes.

Otto called him. “Are you caught in that mess?”

“Right in the middle of it.”

“I have a Gulfstream standing by with its crew, and your things are already on board. Do you want to get off the highway somewhere? I can send a chopper for you.”

“How soon do we need to be airborne to beat the Air France flight?”

“We have all morning, but you might run into some trouble with the DGSE. It's possible they won't let you off the plane.” It was France's primary intelligence agency.

McGarvey and Otto—but especially McGarvey—had a sometimes bloody history in France. The French intelligence people had long memories. Although he had been of some service to them at one point or another, trouble always seemed to develop around him.

“That's something I'll have to deal with when I get there.”

“Do you want me to call Walt, see if he can pull a few strings?”

McGarvey thought about it. “No,” he said.

“Okay, are you trying to tell me something?”

“I don't know. But she and Schermerhorn said that whatever is going on—
has
been going on since oh two—is bigger than we can imagine, and they're both frightened out of their wits. Five people have already lost their lives over this thing. Alex has gone runner, and Schermerhorn took the huge risk to change the inscription on panel four. And yet they won't come out and say what the hell they saw buried in Iraq.”

“I can think of a lot of possibilities,” Otto said after a beat. “None of them pretty and at least one so political, the fallout would be more than bad.”

“Bad enough to kill for to keep it quiet,” McGarvey said. He knew exactly what Otto was talking about. He had thought about it since he and Pete had gone to Athens to talk to Larry Coffin.

His biggest problem was reconciling what he thought with what he thought he should do about it.

Traffic finally began to move, and a half hour later he was at the Andrews main gate, where he was expected and waved through.

He drove across the field to where the Navy's C-20H Gulfstream, which the CIA borrowed from time to time, was waiting in its hangar, the forward hatch open, the boarding stairs down.

A chief petty officer directed him to park his Porsche off to the side, at the back of the hangar, and the jet's engines spooled up.

“Your partner is aboard with your things, Mr. Director!” the chief had to shout.

“Thanks!” McGarvey said, knowing exactly who it was and why.

The pilot turned in his seat when he came aboard. “Soon as you're strapped in, we'll get out of here. We have immediate clearance.”

“Give me a minute,” McGarvey said, and went back to where Pete was seated, sipping from a bottle of mineral water.

“Before you start bitching at me, Blankenship assured me Schermerhorn was secure,” she said.

He supposed he was happy to see her, but he was vexed. He worked alone; it's the way he liked it. But Otto had helped him almost from the start. And so had Louise, and his daughter and his son-in-law. And Pete had helped him a while ago in an operation that had gotten her shot. And here she was again, in love with him.

The flight attendant, a young petty officer, first-class, came back. “Sir?” she asked.

“Button up and let's get out of here. And as soon as possible I want a very large cognac.”

 

FORTY-FOUR

Over the past few hours the images on Otto's main monitor had begun to change in a way that was significant to him, and he was unable to stay seated now that he knew he was coming close. He bounced from one foot to the other, something he did when he was excited.

The 120-inch extremely high-def OLED flat-screen mounted on the wall above one of his desks was visible from anywhere in his primary office, but he had to look away from time to time or he knew he would explode.