End Game by David Hagberg Page A

to hide somewhere in plain sight, under the theory that if George were looking for them, he’d look deep, not on the surface.
    But that hadn’t worked.
    Someone was coming, as he’d known they would ever since they’d gotten back from Iraq and George wasn’t with them. The fact that no one ever mentioned the man’s name or his absence had been the clincher.
    â€œLet sleeping dogs lie,” the Magician had cautioned. “But go deep, at least for the time being.”
    The others had disappeared, except for Walter and Istvan, who, like him, had come back to the CIA, but under new identities. Nothing whatsoever connected them to their careers as NOCs, and especially not to Alpha Seven. Even their fingerprints, blood types, and DNA on record with the Company were false.
    They’d learned to blend in—or at least they’d learned to enhance the skills of something they’d been doing most of their lives. The one thing they had in common was the ability to lie so convincingly that most of the time they believed it themselves.
    Knight was a kid from Des Moines who’d been a dreamer all his life. He lived in books, and at times he played the roles of his heroes. Don Quixote had been his hands-down all-time favorite, for reasons even he couldn’t say. But one of the guys—or maybe it was Alex, on one of their soul-searching evenings after they’d had sex—had found out about his near obsession and then came up with his operational handle. He’d never objected.
    When he finished his cigarette, he went inside and started the wide-swath riding mower he was to use for this morning’s assignment. He was working the fringe on both sides of the driveway up from the main gate to the OHB, and after lunch he and Karl Foreman would be working the slope from the rear of the OHB down to the woods, past and around the dome.
    Mindless work, but satisfying for all of that, because until two days ago he’d begun to relax, begun to actually take a deep breath from time to time.
    Before he got up on the seat, he pulled out his 9-mm Beretta 92F pistol and checked the load. No crazy son of a bitch—whether it was George, their control officer, or Alex, who Coffin never trusted—was going to get the better of him. Rumor was that Walt and Istvan had not only been murdered, but their bodies had been mutilated.
    Crazy things had been done to the Kirkuk roustabouts, some of them not even Iraqis.
    â€œWe’re here to send them a message,” George had told them from day one.
    And such a message they had sent that, when they got back, even their debriefers handled them with respect—and maybe a little fear. Alpha Seven consisted of the most out-of-control operators in the entire national clandestine service.
    Knight put the pistol back in the holster strapped to his chest under his coveralls, and headed out the door and down the gravel path to the driveway a quarter of a mile away.
    The morning shift hadn’t started coming in yet, and the sun was just peeking over the horizon, the day still cool, the sky perfectly clear. Saturday he and Stephanie were thinking about driving down to Williamsburg for the day and maybe a night.
    She was from St. Paul. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s town,” as she liked to boast. As a kid, and still as a grown-up, she lived in her own literary fantasy world. It was one of the many reasons she and Knight had connected.
    He’d chugged past the lower end of the parking lot and was turning onto the fringe beside the driveway when Foreman drove up in his Ford F-150, driver’s window down, and pulled over.
    â€œWhat the hell in sweet Jesus are you doing out here already?” he demanded. He was from Oklahoma, and at fifty-five had done his twenty and was retiring in a year or so. He liked Knight, but then again he liked everybody.
    â€œMowing the grass. What the hell does it look like I’m doing, you dumb