The Kill Zone Read online

  And the CIA needed Otto.

  McGarvey had always used the compact Walther PPK autoloader in its 7.65mm version. But recently he’d been convinced to upgrade to the 9mm version, and he was still having a little trouble with the placement of his second and third shots. The more powerful ammunition tended to raise his pattern. But he was quickly getting a handle on the problem.

  Yemm went with him, and they each fired two hundred rounds. Afterward McGarvey went back to his office. He had to get some help for Otto before it was too late.

  Dr. Norman Stenzel, chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services Psychology Clinic, came right up. Ms. Swanfeld was gone for the day, and Yemm waited in the outer office, the door to McGarvey’s office open.

  It was snowing again. McGarvey watched how it blew around the lights, and he shivered. Every man belonged to his own age. It was a snatch of something he’d picked up somewhere. Voltaire would not have liked the twenty-first century. Nobody these days cared about the primacy of the Catholic Church. Religion was not such a big part of most people’s lives as it had been in the eighteenth century, though Voltaire would have perfectly understood the current struggle between Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

  McGarvey turned when he heard the Company psychologist come in. Dr. Stenzel looked like an academic, as did a lot of the people in the CIA. Beard, longish hair, tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, even corduroy trousers and a serious, studious demeanor; all of it was right out of the sixties. He reminded McGarvey of the actor Robin Williams, with his boyish, offcenter smile.

  “Have a seat, Doc,” McGarvey said. “It’s not me who needs you, I’m asking for a friend.”

  Dr. Stenzel’s grin widened. “That’s what they all say.”

  “It’s Otto Rencke.”

  Stenzel had started to sit down, but he stopped, his good cheer instantly evaporating. “I see.” He sat down. “What’s the problem.”

  “He’s under a lot of strain. I think that he might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

  “I’m not surprised, Mr. Director. In fact I’ve expected it for a long time.” Stenzel tried to regain his smile, but it was uncertain. “People like him are always on the edge. Classic.”

  “I’d like you to talk to him.”

  Stenzel thought about it for a few moments. “I’ll try, if you can get him to come to my office. We’ll have to do this on my turf. God only knows any shrink would love to get his hands on someone like Otto Rencke. The man is fascinating. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything for him.”

  “But you’ll try.”

  “Sure. It’s guys like him who design the tests I’m going to use. If he doesn’t want to open up, it’ll be me who comes out looking like a basket case.” Stenzel shrugged. “What’s he done that made you call me?”

  “He’s irritable, forgetful, off in another world. More than normal. Maybe even dangerous. It’s like he’s ready to explode. The person I used to know as Otto Rencke isn’t the same person working for me now. It’s like somebody’s impersonating him.”

  “That’s not possible, is it? A double?”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “He’s coming apart, Doc. I think he needs help.”

  “I’ll do what I can. How about tomorrow morning. Ten?”

  “He’ll be there.”

  Dr. Stenzel eyed McGarvey with some curiosity. “What about yourself, Mr. Director? You look as if you could use some R and R.”

  “It’s the season.”

  Stenzel waited.

  McGarvey got up and came around the desk. “We’re putting in a lot of hours because of my confirmation hearings and because in the meantime the real work still has to get done around here.”

  The meeting was obviously over, but Stenzel didn’t get up. “My job description is real simple. I’m supposed to look after the mental health of everyone in this building. A lot of bad stuff can happen if someone goes nuts around here. Including you, Mr. McGarvey. Maybe especially you.”

  “No, I didn’t hate my mother.”

  “That’s nice,” Stenzel said, grinning like he was getting a joke.

  “It’s overwork. We’re all tired.”

  “I understand that you and your ex-wife got remarried. Congratulations. How is she handling what they’re trying to do to you on the Hill?”

  Yemm had come to the door. McGarvey glanced over at him, and Yemm shrugged. Stenzel was doing his job.

  “It’s depressing her,” McGarvey said. “She’s tired, like the rest of us. Distant sometimes, forgetful. She and our daughter are going round and round.”

  “Speed bumps,” Stenzel said. He got up. “We all get them from time to time. Tells us to slow down and smell the roses.”

  “That simple?”

  “Yup. You need a vacation.”

  “Tell me about it,” McGarvey said. Stenzel made to leave, but McGarvey stopped him at the door. “How can you be so sure about my wife without first talking to her?”

  “When you were put up for DCI, another background check was automatically put into motion. That includes the backgrounds of your wife and daughter, as well as your friends. I’m a part of the process.”

  Speed bumps, McGarvey thought. They all were going a little crazy because of the hearings, because of the workload and, in Liz’s case, because she was pregnant.

  His daughter hadn’t been herself for several months. Part of it was the pregnancy; she was a little frightened about losing the baby again, and a little angry because her physical abilities were diminishing. But that was only a part of it. According to Otto she had set herself up as her father’s biographer. Looking down his track would affect her. But he didn’t know if he could help her come to terms with what she was discovering, because he himself hadn’t fully come to terms with his own past.

  Rencke was already gone, so McGarvey phoned the apartment and got a worried Louise Horn.

  “I made an appointment for Otto to see Dr. Stenzel in Medical Services tomorrow at ten. Make sure he’s there, would you?”

  “I’m worried about him, Mr. Director.”

  “Yeah, so am I.”

  After he hung up he stared out the windows for a long time. The entire world around him was going crazy. But thinking like that was in itself crazy.

  What price? he asked himself. What price?

  THURSDAY

  TEN

  THEY WERE COMING FOR HIM NOW. BACK FROM THE GRAVE. FROM A PAST THAT HE COULD NOT CHANGE.

  WASHINGTON

  They arrived at the committee hearing room a couple of minutes before 10:00 A.M. McGarvey hadn’t slept well last night, and he looked forward to being here with a sense of despair, of uselessness, of wasted effort.

  The same media crowd waited on the steps and in the broad marble corridor, but civilian guards at the chamber doors barred their entry. Only those with the proper passes were allowed inside. This morning’s session was to be held in camera. Dark secrets were to be revealed, senators exercising their oversight duties. All patriotic and necessary.

  But it was a horrible joke as far as McGarvey was concerned. DCIs had been testifying before Congress in secret sessions since before Colby, and reading their exact words the very next morning in the Washington Post or New York Times.

  There were more people in attendance than McGarvey had expected. He didn’t know most of them, but the senators had the right to invite anybody they chose.

  A Senate page brought over a manila envelope to Carleton Paterson. “Senator Clawson sends this to you with his compliments, sir,” the young girl said.

  The envelope contained lists of everyone who’d attended the hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as a list of those expected to be here this morning.

  Dmitri Runkov, the Russian intelligence service Washington rezident’s name wasn’t on either of the first two days’ lists. Neither were any Russian embassy representatives. Their absence struck McGarvey as ominous.

  Something was happening. Something just beyond
his grasp. Otto knew about it and was lying. The Russians not being here meant something.

  “Problem?” Paterson asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s nothing urgent.”

  “Wouldn’t do me any good to press you, I suppose,” Paterson said. He handed another list to McGarvey. This one contained a couple of lines on each of ten supersensitive Track III operations that McGarvey had been involved with during his twenty-five-plus-year career with the CIA. Track I operations were intelligence-gathering missions. Track II, which were more sensitive, involved some type of covert action. Track III actions, the most secret and most sensitive, involved the use of deadly force. In each of the cases on McGarvey’s list there had been a death. In some cases many deaths.

  The list brought back a lot of very bad memories for Mac. Too late to erase them now, he thought. Too late to go back and undo what had already been done. We can only hope to change the future, and even that hope is a slim possibility.

  “Those are the problem areas we discussed,” Paterson explained. “Whatever you do, don’t volunteer information. But if Hammond or Madden has this same list, or even a part of it, we’re in a fair bit of trouble.”

  Former CIA director Bill Colby called such operations the CIA’s family jewels. They had to be protected at all costs.

  McGarvey pulled himself out of his funk, and smiled. “Not too late to pull out, Counselor.”

  Paterson shook his head. “I wouldn’t miss this brouhaha for all the world, Mr. Director.”

  The clerk came in, called the chamber to order and the senators, led by Hammond, filed in and took their places.

  “I remind Mr. McGarvey that he is still under oath as far as concerns these proceedings,” Senator Hammond said. He looked as if he hadn’t slept well last night either. It was well-known that the senator was a big drinker. Yesterday’s contentious session could not have done much for his stress level.

  “Yes, Senator, I understand,” McGarvey said, thinking suddenly about Katy. At least she would be spared most of the ugly details today.

  Paterson sat forward. “Do we have this committee’s assurances that the members of the audience have the proper clearances and have been briefed on the necessary security procedures?”

  “That goes without saying,” Senator Hammond sputtered.

  “Excuse me, Senator, but I’d like to ask a question before we get started this morning,” New York senator Gerald Pilcher said.

  Hammond motioned for him to go ahead.

  “Mr. McGarvey, on Tuesday you were asked if you wanted this appointment, and you told us no, that you did not. But that you would accept the job because President Haynes asked you to.”

  “That’s correct, Senator.”

  “Then let me ask you a related question. Why did you join the CIA in the first place: What was it, twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago? And two follow-up questions: Who recruited you and how was it done?”

  McGarvey went back. He’d been young, cocky, brash, certainly arrogant. He was doing something that counted, something that his father and mother could be proud of. He caught Brenda Madden’s eye. She was sitting back in her tall leather chair, fingers to her lips, a scowl on her face, her eyes narrowed. She looked like an animal ready to pounce.

  “The CIA recruiters were on campus in my senior year. I talked to them. But Vietnam was chewing up our people, and I thought that I could do some good in the military rather than dodging the draft. By the time I finished OCS and Intelligence Officers School it was the spring of 1972, and I was sent to Saigon. I did my two tours, came back to the States and resigned my commission in June of 1974.”

  “Our troops were being brought home by then,” Senator Pilcher said.

  “That’s correct, Senator. The drawdown began in 1973.” McGarvey was back in full force; all of his memories intact and vivid. “I’d been given a telephone number by the CIA recruiters, so I called it, and the next morning I met with Lawrence Danielle who was the deputy director of Operations. He knew my parents, or knew of them, and he told me that I could do just as important a job, maybe even more important than I had in the air force or than my parents were doing down at Los Alamos. I thought about it and agreed.”

  “How long did you think about it?” Brenda Madden mumbled. But everyone heard her.

  “About five seconds, Senator. I believed in my country just as strongly then as I do now.”

  “What happened next?” Pilcher asked.

  “I went through the CIA’s training program and worked on the Vietnam desk at headquarters until late 1975, when I was assigned back in-country.”

  Pilcher was startled. “Saigon had already fallen by then, hadn’t it?”

  “Yes, it had. But besides our POWs who were being repatriated, there were Vietnamese nationals who had worked for us who were marked for arrest and execution. I was sent in to help find them and then get them into Laos and eventually to Thailand.”

  “Who were those people?” Brenda Madden asked.

  “The program was called CORDS. Civilian Operations Revolutionary Development Staff. They were part of what was being called the Hamlet Pacification Program to identify Viet Cong infiltrators at the village level.”

  “And mark them for assassination?”

  “No. The VC were being offered amnesty. If they didn’t want to switch allegiance to the south, they were treated as POWs for the duration.”

  “None of them were killed?”

  “Some of them were killed, yes, Senator.”

  “Then the real reason that you joined the CIA and went back to Vietnam was exactly as I suggested yesterday. Because you wanted to involve yourself in the action by rescuing fellow assassins.”

  “By saving the lives of men and women who gave loyal service to the United States,” McGarvey countered.

  “If we could move along now,” Senator Hammond prompted. “We have a lot of material to get through—”

  “Were your rescue efforts effective, Mr. McGarvey?” Brenda Madden pressed.

  “Not very.”

  She glanced at her fellow committee members. “Don’t be modest. How many of the CORDS people, as you call them, did you actually rescue? I mean get across Laos to freedom in Thailand and then here to the United States. One hundred? Two dozen? Five or ten?”

  “No.”

  “One?” Brenda Madden demanded. “Isn’t it true that not a single one of those people was brought here?”

  “There were some, I think,” McGarvey said. “But not by me.”

  “Why?”

  All the frustration came back to him. He shook his head. “They were not issued visas for one reason or another.”

  “You have no idea why not?”

  “It was political. The war was unpopular, and it was over. We lost. Nobody wanted to deal with it anymore.”

  “Which made you angry,” Brenda Madden said. She didn’t wait for his answer. “That was simply the first step in Mr. McGarvey’s disillusionment with his country, with the CIA, with power in general. With following orders.” She glanced at the other senators while gesturing toward McGarvey. “It was the same in Berlin and Hong Kong and France. Every assignment ended up a disaster for one reason or another. But always it was Kirk McGarvey in the middle of it. Not following orders. Working outside of his charter. Taking matters into his own hands. Charging in, guns blazing.”

  McGarvey sat back in his chair to let her rant. She was right in more than one way. The CORDS rescue operation had been a total disaster. Not as a field exercise, but in the political arena at home. And she wasn’t far off the mark when she accused that the aftermath of the Vietnam War had started him on the path of disillusionment. But then she hadn’t brought up the sorry episode of James Jesus Angleton, who looked so hard for moles inside the CIA that he all but brought the Agency down. And she wasn’t aware of John Lyman Trotter, Jr., McGarvey’s friend since the CORDS days, who turned out to be the mole that Angleton had sought.

  But that was much later,
after McGarvey had been fired.

  Brenda Madden stopped to take a breath, and McGarvey stepped into the breach. “Was there a question in there, Senator?”

  Even Hammond seemed to be fascinated by the California senator’s hatred for McGarvey. But he was content for the moment to allow her to continue. His agenda in the hearings was a purely political one. He wanted to be president, and he wanted to cut President Haynes down to size at every possible opportunity.

  But Madden, who’d moved to San Francisco as a young woman, had shaped her political career as an activist. She was anti–nuclear power plants, anti–free world trade, and virulently anti-Republican and the party’s fiscal conservatism. In her estimation the only reason the social welfare programs of the last half century had failed was because not enough money had been spent on them. Instead of squandering our taxes on the B-2 bomber and stealth fighters, or nuclear submarines and fabulously expensive aircraft carriers, the money could have been much better spent on educating young, black, single mothers.

  President Haynes and the Central Intelligence Agency were prime examples of the people and Beltway “old boys” clubs that she most despised. And McGarvey, who’d once inadvertently wondered out loud at a Washington cocktail party why Madden had never married, epitomized both. He was a friend of Haynes, and he was running the CIA.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. “Actually you weren’t in the CIA for very long. At least not as a card-carrying employee with a desk, a regular paycheck and benefits. Saigon, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Paris with stints at Langley, and then you were fired. Everything that you did afterward for the CIA was freelance. Isn’t that so?”