“Where?”
“Athens.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No,” McGarvey said. “You’re going back with Otto to help set up a public funeral for Wager and Fabry. Their families are going to insist, and only a very brief mention of their participation in the war will be released to the media.”
“Marty will never go for it.”
“Let him think it was his idea. We just want to know if any of their Alpha Seven buddies show up.”
“Then what?”
“Let Marty figure it out, because I have a feeling none of those guys is the killer.”
“Then why the ruse?” Pete asked.
“To keep the killer distracted.”
EIGHT
Lawrence Thaddeus Coffin sat alone at a sidewalk café in the Plaka district of Athens, very near the Acropolis and on top of the ancient city. It was a historical district and almost always busy with tourists, which made it anonymous. It was one of his favorite people-watching spots in a city he’d come to love, because of its international flavor.
Greece from ancient times had been at the crossroads of trade not only in goods but in ideas, among them the arts, the sciences, and government itself.
He was a slender man, a bit under six feet, with thinning light brown hair and pale blue eyes that had always made him seem like a dreamer to those who didn’t know him. Someone whose thoughts and concerns were far away from the everyday.
The waiter brought him another ouzo and a demitasse of very strong coffee, his third for the late afternoon, along with his bill on a tiny slip of paper.
He’d had no idea anything had started to go bad until he’d read the brief squib in the International New York Times this morning about the funerals for two CIA officers who’d openly been identified as Wager and Fabry. It was a fact he found extraordinary. NOCs were never given public recognition. When they were killed in the line of duty, they were given a star on the granite wall in the lobby of the OHB. And that was that.
After Carnes and now these two, it left only him and three others who he expected would eventually make their way here to him. But it was all for nothing, especially after Snowden and the others had taken the fall. Nothing was left, except for Kryptos, which was the key if anyone took the time to understand the message — the entire message, which was scattered all over the campus.
A game, actually, he told himself. Deadly, but a game nevertheless.
When he was finished, he paid his bill, then got up and made his way down the block and across the street, traffic horrible at this hour. He was safe from retaliation to this point because of the measures he’d put into place more than a year ago. Necessary, he’d thought then, and still did. With Wager’s and Fabry’s deaths, the issue would soon be coming to a head. He could finally make his move.
A half dozen blocks from the taverna, he stopped across the narrow cobblestone lane to light a cigarette while he studied the two-story house he’d paid nearly a million euros for three years ago. The front was stuccoed in a pale pink, two iron balconies on the second floor — one for the sitting room and the other for the master bedroom, which jutted out over the street.
On March 25—that was the Greek independence holiday from Ottoman rule — each of those three years, he’d hung the Greek flag and bunting on the balconies as most of his neighbors did and went out into the streets for the festival and dancing.
He’d fit in very well, because that was what he was trained to do by the CIA. Blend in with the surroundings, mingle with the people as one of them. And the entire key to success, he’d learned very early on, was lying to yourself and believing it to such an extent that even under torture you would never reveal anything except your legend, the lies.
In the field, he’d played the part of an oil exploration engineer — studying enough textbooks and technical manuals to convince even another oil engineer. A UN aid worker, even issuing aid checks, and helping drill freshwater wells while spying on a military installation. Working as an independent arms dealer, a financier from London, a chef from San Francisco in Saudi Arabia to understand Arab cooking, and to introduce California fusion dishes to royalty while spying on them.
But his latest role, that of an independently wealthy dealer in rare books, artwork, and pieces of antiquity, had come about when all but the last panel on the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters had been decrypted, and the talk on the Internet hinted that the fourth was soon to fall.
He’d allowed himself to be caught red-handed with three tiny Greek sculptures: one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, desire, and pleasure; Hera, the queen of the heavens and goddess of marriage, women, childbirth, heirs, kings, and empires; and of Athena herself, the goddess of intelligence, skill, warfare, battle strategy, handicrafts, and wisdom.
After a brief hearing before a judge five months ago, during which he’d pleaded guilty, he’d been fined one hundred thousand euros or one year in prison. He refused to pay the fine.
The house was quiet, the same blinds in two of the upstairs windows half drawn, as he’d left them. No suspicious car with its left wheels up on the sidewalk, no telltale glitter from the lenses of binoculars, no radio antenna, no small satellite dish of the kind often used as a television receiver but could also be used for burst transmissions to and from a satellite — the same sort he and the others on Alpha Seven had used.
A taxi rattled past. Tossing his cigarette aside, he crossed the street and let himself inside using the code on the keypad. He was dressed in tight jeans and a plain red muscle T-shirt rather than the sport coats or suits he’d worn as an arts dealer.
In the past he’d hinted he was gay, and his neighbors — most of them married couples — left him alone. Coming here like this, as he had for the past four months, raised no suspicions. It was just one of his gay friends stopping by from time to time to check on things. He sometimes stayed for several hours, but he always left before eight in the evening.
The downstairs hall was deathly silent. He took the SIG Sauer pistol from the hall table, held his breath, and cocked an ear to listen for a sound. Any sound that would indicate someone was here.
No out-of-place scents were on the air; the slight layer of dust on the table and on the cap of the newel post and the stair rail had not been disturbed since the last time he’d been here. Nevertheless, he methodically checked the hall closet, reception area, guest bathroom, dining room, kitchen, and pantry, as well as the breakfast nook, which looked out over a pretty courtyard with a small fountain at the rear of the house.
Upstairs he checked the three bedrooms and attached bathrooms and closets before he went into the sitting room he had used as his office. Before he’d left for prison, he’d destroyed anything that tied him in any way to the CIA, but left everything else. Since the police raid and investigation, nothing else had been disturbed.
He checked the street from a window, but no one had shown up since he’d come inside, and he breathed a small sigh of relief.
Downstairs, he opened a good bottle of Valpolicella and took it out to the small iron table in the courtyard, where he sat listening not only to the sounds of the neighborhood but to his inner voices — the ones he’d very often had trouble understanding.
He’d been a man alone for most of his life. Growing up as a child in Detroit, mostly on the streets and later at the community college in Lansing, where he’d studied psychology, running out of money six months before graduation. Afterward he’d learned to count cards, and he went to Atlantic City, where he made twenty thousand before he had to run to avoid getting arrested or, at the very least, beaten up.