The Kill Zone Page 10

  McGarvey glanced again at the list. “Phoenix-II was the fact-finding mission. The field operations themselves are still classified.”

  “But you were involved, weren’t you,” Brenda Madden said, unable to contain herself. “You were right up to your elbows in blood over there. It must have been a grand time.”

  McGarvey counted to five, maintaining as close to a neutral expression on his face as he could. But Senator Madden must have seen something, because she flinched. “Fifty thousand American men and women were killed in Vietnam, Senator. I can’t believe that it was a grand time, as you put it, for anyone over there.” He shook his head. “Senator Hammond spent a tour in Vietnam. Maybe you should ask him.”

  “There were torture squads conducting Phoenix,” Hammond continued without missing a beat. “What was your part?”

  “I was an observer.”

  “Did you participate in the torture of any North Vietnamese prisoners of war?”

  “No, Senator, I did not.”

  “But you didn’t stop it.”

  “Not.”

  “You spent two tours of duty in Vietnam,” Brenda Madden said. “You must have, at the very least, found the place interesting.”

  “There was a job to be done, and I thought that I could help make a difference.”

  Brenda Madden could hardly contain herself. She nearly laughed out loud. “Come now—”

  “The CIA recruited you right out of the air force,” Senator Clawson broke in. “You spent a third tour in Saigon as a civilian. Do you believe that you made a difference?”

  McGarvey had asked himself that same question many times. It was one of the questions on his recurring list. He shook his head. “I don’t think that any of us made a difference in Vietnam, Senator. We should not have been there in the first place. But since we were, we should have been allowed to fight the war to win it.”

  “Then why did you keep going back?” Brenda Madden demanded.

  “Because I love my country,” McGarvey said. His tone of voice and posture were a direct challenge to her. She had been skirting around the issue of his loyalty as well as his abilities to run the CIA, during the hearings and in the media.

  Television cameras were split between focusing on Brenda Madden’s face and on McGarvey, who sat unmoving, looking at her as if he might be looking at an interesting new species of animal in a zoo. Almost no one missed his expression, least of all Senator Madden.

  Paterson sat forward. “Mr. McGarvey has demonstrated his loyalty to his country time and again over a long and distinguished career,” he said. “I might respectfully remind the senators that Mr. McGarvey took the same oath of office that every CIA officer takes—”

  “The same oath that Aldrich Ames swore to?” Brenda Madden blurted. She immediately recognized her mistake. She tore her eyes away from McGarvey and looked over at Hammond, who had his gavel in hand.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Chairman,” she said. She turned back to McGarvey. “I did not mean to imply in any way a comparsion between you and Mr. Ames.”

  McGarvey nodded. “I didn’t think you had, Senator.”

  “Thank you, Mr. McGarvey,” she said. “There will be other areas that I’ll want to explore with you.”

  “But not today.” Senator Hammond jumped into the breach. “These proceedings are adjourned. We will reconvene tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning.” He banged his gavel once, and started gathering his files.

  An even bigger mob of reporters was waiting for them in the corridor and outside on the Capitol steps.

  Yemm and his security detail kept them at arm’s length, and Paterson thought it best that McGarvey answer no questions on the way out.

  Riding away, McGarvey thought about all the other DCIs who had been called to the Hill and raked over the coals. Now it was his turn, and he was feeling something dark riding over his left shoulder. Maybe it was his past catching up with him. Tomorrow the questions would begin in earnest: in the meantime he had the India-Pakistan problem to deal with.

  NINE

  EVERY MAN BELONGED TO HIS OWN AGE.

  LANGLEY

  Otto Rencke stopped at the security gate leading to the CIA, trying to quell the voices inside his head that threatened to drive him nuts. He’d been going crazy all of his life. But this time it was serious. He was frightened. He rolled down the window of Louise Horn’s RAV4 and handed out his security pass to the civilian guard. He recognized the man. But he thought that he recognized everybody. He couldn’t get the pictures out of his head.

  “How’re you feeling, Mr. Rencke?” the guard asked. He was a younger man, very short hair, stand up bearing, probably a former marine. He was smiling pleasantly.

  “Well, ya know, I’ve had better days,” Rencke said. He spread out his arms and let his head droop. “Hell of a way to spend Easter.” The guard didn’t get it, and Rencke saw it at once. He grinned. “Sorry. Bad, bad joke. I feel like I’ve been in a car accident. My head hurts, my shoulder hurts, even my butt hurts.”

  “You’ll be black-and-blue. But from what I heard, you were lucky.” The guard handed Rencke’s ID back. “Anyway, welcome back.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  The road had been plowed, but it was icy in spots. Rencke drove very carefully though he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. Sometimes he was superattuned to his surroundings. At other times, like now, the world around him was an out-of-focus blur.

  Early in his study of mathematics, when he was seven or eight, he had learned to compartmentalize his brain. Much like a computer works on a complicated problem by breaking it down into its constituent parts and then chewing on each of the parts simultaneously, Rencke had learned to divide his thinking.

  He’d explained to a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin’s Van Vleck Hall that he was like a juggler keeping a half-dozen balls in the air while balancing on one foot, singing and watching television. He was able to work on a number of different problems at the same time. There were perhaps as many as a half-dozen compartments running as many problems at any given time in his head. When he had the bit in his teeth, like now, the number rose to a dozen or more. He’d never been able to count them all without breaking his concentration. He thought of his abilities like a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If you stopped to count the operations, the operations themselves fell apart.

  But the problem he’d always faced, especially now, was that each compartment in his brain was separated from all the others by a gigantic wall. Sometimes when he wanted to find the doors between the walls he couldn’t. It was like being lost inside a constantly moving kaleidoscope. The images were beautiful, and complex, and very often useful, but he wasn’t able to see the real world because of his fragmented thinking.

  Usually, if he tried very hard, he could find a ladder and climb over the top of the wall and look out over the entire field. But this time he couldn’t even find the ladder. Which is why he thought that he was going seriously crazy.

  The driveway through the woods branched off into the various parking lots. It was a few minutes after noon and all but the visitors’ lot were full. Rencke was a high-ranking officer, so he had an assigned spot in the underground garage.

  This place had become home to him. Everyone else came here to work. He came to live.

  The nurses had given him a sponge bath at the hospital, and Louise had brought his fresh jeans, a bulky knit sweater, clean socks and new Nike running shoes, and she’d had his MIT jacket cleaned. His long frizzy red hair was covered by the bandage, over which he wore a watch cap. When he came through the doors the guards did a double take. They’d never seen him cleaned up.

  Upstairs in the computer center he went directly back to the area he’d been using for the past few weeks. He stopped in his tracks. The dozen monitors were still up and running, but the desk and long worktable he’d used were clean of everything except nonclassified materials. The wastepaper baskets and shredder bins were empty, the photos and charts h
e’d taped to the wall dividers had been taken down, and the litter on the floor had been picked up.

  “Sorry, Otto,” Karl Zimmerman, chief of computer services, said.

  Rencke spun around so fast he almost lost his balance. He was lightheaded from the accident. Louise wanted him to stay at home, but he’d left as soon as she’d lain down on the couch and fallen asleep.

  “Hey, take it easy,” Zimmerman said, reaching for him, but Rencke pulled away.

  “Where are my things?”

  “It was Mr. McGarvey’s call. We put everything in the safe room. Are you okay?”

  “What about the stuff in my car?”

  “We’ve got that, too,” Zimmerman said. “Would you mind telling me what you’ve been working on? We burned a couple of your disks trying to find out.”

  Rencke glanced at his monitors.

  “We didn’t dare touch them,” Zimmerman said. “The whole place would probably blow up.” The chief of computer services was a slightly built man with thinning gray hair and a pencil-thin mustache. He was very bright, although his real strength was administration: “If you can direct the geeks, you can run the system,” he said, not unkindly.

  “It’s too early,” Rencke mumbled. “Lavender, you know. Bad. Getting badder.” There was light spilling over some of the walls in his head, like the sun on the horizon, or like the blue glow from the core of a swimming pool reactor. That in itself was a thought: a chain reaction building like a chain letter. What if there were impurities in the core? What if just the right impurities were added, would the results tell what was going on inside. Like an alloy. “Bring my things back,” he said, absently.

  He took off his jacket, tossed it toward a chair, which it missed, then started bringing his search engines back on-line one at a time.

  Even now when his head was fragmenting he could appreciate the simple beauty of his programs. His machines had no opinions except for an appreciation of a deft touch on the keyboard. They didn’t care about his background, about how he looked, his clothes, his hair, his mannerisms, which he knew were sometimes odd, out of the ordinary. They did things for him without question or judgment.

  When he looked up it was a few minutes after six and he was surprised to see that someone had brought back all of his files. The table was piled, the floor was littered and several satellite shots of downtown Moscow were pinned to the divider.

  Zimmerman was gone and McGarvey stood in the doorway in his place. He seemed tired to Rencke, maybe even a little battered and bruised, as if he, too, had been in a car accident. He looked sad, the thought popped into Rencke’s head.

  “Oh, wow, Mac,” Rencke said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to find out what the hell is happening to a friend of mine. His name is Otto Rencke. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

  Rencke turned back to face his monitor. He was inside the SVR’s Washington embassy computer center. He touched the escape key and the monitor went blank.

  His narrow shoulders were hunched forward. He was aware of the aches and pains from his accident; he wasn’t taking the pills the doctor had given him. He wanted his head screwed on as straight as possible under the circumstances.

  For the first time ever he didn’t know what to say to Mac. Something terrible was about to happen, and he had no idea how to explain it to anyone. Even his own thoughts were so compartmentalized that his brain was a jumble; a jagged mishmash of garishly colored shards of glass. He remembered when Mac had come to him the first time here in Washington, in Georgetown, at the Holy Rood house. The CIA had dumped them both. Mac had gone to ground in Switzerland, and Otto had hidden out in the open at home. Neither one of them had been doing much of any significance.

  But then Mac had come calling with a little problem that had wound up with the deaths of Baranov and the Company’s DDO, John Lyman Trotter, Jr. But more than that, Mac’s coming back had legitimized Otto. Given him a fresh purpose for his life. It was a gift that he could never repay. Not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand million years of trying.

  He could see McGarvey’s reflection in the blank screen of his monitor. “I’m busy, what do you want?”

  “I want to know what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Louise called. She’s worried. You should be at home.”

  Rencke shrugged. “How about that.” He spoke to the computer screen. “My girlfriend calls, and the DCI comes running. What are you really doing down here?”

  “The Russians have been looking for one of their people from the old days. They’ve asked Interpol and the DGSE for help. He disappeared in August, and you requested his file not too long after that. You’ve got Liz involved now, and Karl is worried that you’re going to fry his entire system. Put all of us out of work.”

  Rencke had been holding a pent-up breath. He blew it out all at once as if he was trying to fog up his monitor. His fingers flew over the keyboard, burying the program he’d been working with to a place where it could not be retrieved by anyone but himself.

  “It’s lavender, didn’t I tell you?” He glanced at the extremely high-altitude Moscow photos on the wall, then turned to McGarvey. “I’m down here in my lair doing my job, just like you hired me to do, ya know,” he grumbled. “But I can’t do it like this. People coming and going, screwing with me.”

  Some of the files on the table lay open, some of them displayed the old KGB’s sword-and-shield logo. Post-it notes were stuck to some of the pages.

  “The hospital was boring,” he said, looking away again. “Nothing to do. The nurses were as bad as Louise. She’s trying, ya know, but trying too hard. Sometimes it drives you crazy, ya know?” He grinned and shook his head. It was the best he could do, but he was bleeding inside. Hemorrhaging. “She should be at work. We should all be at work. Twenty-four, seven.”

  McGarvey cleared a spot on the table and perched on the edge. Otto kept trying to avoid eye contact, but McGarvey was patient. As if he had all the time in the world.

  “Sometimes it’s easier to see than other times. Then Zimmerman comes in here and wipes out everything I was trying to do. Tossed some of it, cause I can’t find a whole bunch of stuff. Shelved the rest. I lost good time here.” His left hand rested on the keyboard, as if he were making reassuring contact with an old, troubled friend.

  “His name is Nikolayev,” McGarvey said. “The Russians haven’t been able to find him, and neither has Interpol. He was one of Baranov’s Department Viktor experts. I think maybe you’ve found him.”

  Rencke shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You requested his file.”

  “No.”

  “Jay Newby said you did,” McGarvey said, suddenly angry. His patience was wearing thin. “What the hell are you playing at, Otto?”

  Rencke’s eyes were wide. “If I pulled his file, it had to be something routine. Probably the Interpol request. But I don’t remember, Mac. Honest injun.” He waved his arms. “Circle the wagons, but I’m on the inside, kimo sabe, not on the outside.”

  “You’re lying—”

  “No!” Rencke cried. “Liz is just looking down your track to write the history. She wants to be her father’s biographer. But it’s hard on her, too, ya know?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Rencke was frightened. His eyes were filling. He couldn’t control his hands. “It was the pictures of your folks. The accident. She saw the file. I tried to stop her.”

  McGarvey’s parents had been engineers at Los Alamos toward the end of the Manhattan Project. For a few years they were suspected of being spies for the Russians. The taint had carried over to their only son. But it wasn’t true, of course. The whole thing had been a complicated Baranov plot to discredit McGarvey before he rose to become a power in the CIA. They had been killed in an automobile accident that had probably been engineered by the Russians. The Kansas Highway Patrol accident scene photographs had been expli
citly grisly.

  Elizabeth had a chip on her shoulder. Maybe she was angry at her father for not sharing the details about her grandparents’ deaths. Seeing those pictures now had to have been a terrible shock.

  “What are you doing rummaging around inside the old KGB files?”

  “It’s for Liz.”

  “She can run a computer,” McGarvey said. “You were supposed to be working up the NIE in-depths on Pakistan’s and India’s technical capabilities.”

  “I transferred the file to your machine two days ago,” Rencke said. He was defensive, like a cornered animal.

  McGarvey glanced at the Moscow photos. They were date- and time-stamped for sometime in August. “You’re lying to me, Otto. You’re into something down here that you’re not telling anybody. Lavender, you said. What’s lavender?”

  “Maybe it’s you who are lying,” Rencke shot back. There was a cold, distant edge in his voice. “Maybe you don’t want to be DCI after all.”

  The remark took McGarvey’s breath away. It was so unlike Rencke. He was practically family. It was as if a favored son had turned on his father for no reason.

  “You’re right, it is lavender, and it’s getting worse,” Rencke said. “Two weeks, maybe less, then I’ll tell you.”

  “Now—”

  Rencke shook his head. “You can’t be boss of everything. You lost that right the first time you pulled a trigger.” Rencke suddenly clasped his hands in his lap, and his jaw tightened. He was on the verge of something terrible.

  McGarvey nodded. “Get out of here, Otto. Go home and get some rest.”

  “Are you firing me?”

  “Go home and get some sleep. We’ll talk later.” McGarvey walked out without looking back.

  Rencke closed his eyes and saw bright flashes of color: spikes of blue, circles of orange, shards of red; violets, purples, lavender.

  The dark beast was coming, and he didn’t know how to stop it. He was sure that he was finally going crazy.

  McGarvey went downstairs to the indoor pistol range in the basement more than a little confused. Otto was an odd duck, but he was a friend. He’d never thrown a tantrum like this before. Something was eating at him; something serious enough to change him. He’d had a maniacal look in his eyes that McGarvey had never seen. He was on the verge of fragmenting into a billion pieces. McGarvey was afraid that if Otto fell apart, there’d be no one strong enough or bright enough to put him back together.