The Kill Zone Page 16

  It was possible that someone could be watching them from up in the hills. But McGarvey doubted it. If they made a hit here, the assassins would have trouble getting away. Boats were slow, there were very few airstrips, and everyone on the islands knew everyone else. This was a very closed community, despite the tourists.

  “What’s going on?” Yemm demanded when he reached them. His eyes flitted from the dense jungles above the cliffs, the rocks at the end of the beach, and the few boats in the distance.

  “Nothing,” McGarvey said. “But we’re getting out of here. Call the helicopter. The picnic was a bad idea.”

  They headed down the beach toward the picnic area. Yemm put away his gun and used his cell phone to call the Island Tours dispatcher. He kept his eyes in constant motion, scanning the beach, the ocean and the hills.

  “They’ll be here in under ten minutes,” Yemm informed them.

  By the time they reached the spot where Yemm had set up their lunch on blankets, Kathleen was shivering and starting to cry. She tried to hold it back. “I’m sorry I’m such a pain,” she apologized.

  “You’re not alone, Mrs. M., it’s been a tough week for everyone,” Yemm tried to console her. “The Washington grind gets to all of us sooner or later.”

  He set about packing up the picnic things, and McGarvey helped him.

  “Even you?” Kathleen asked. She stood in the shade, hugging herself as if she were cold.

  “Especially me, sometimes,” Yemm told her. “My solution is to go down to the pistol range and shoot off a box of ammunition. All the noise does the trick. Usually.”

  She managed a tentative smile. “How about your wife?”

  Yemm shook his head. “She died about ten years ago. Car accident. A drunk broadsided her over in Alexandria.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kathleen said, and her eyes started to fill again.

  “Easy,” McGarvey said softly.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. M.,” Yemm told her. “It really is. Taking care of your husband and you is a good job for me.”

  They heard the helicopter in the distance. McGarvey looked up and waited until he could see the registration number on the fuselage. It was the same chopper that had brought them out here. He allowed himself to relax a little. But Kathleen seemed to be getting worse. Her complexion had turned pale.

  They waited until the helicopter touched down and the fury of blowing sand dispersed before they carried the picnic things down the beach.

  Mr. Afraans, a puzzled, unhappy look on his face, reached across and popped open the passenger door. “Has something gone terribly wrong?” he shouted. He looked at Kathleen and a genuine expression of sympathy came over him. “My heavens, Mrs., it’s nothing to worry about. Nobody has stolen your bag. I still have it.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “What bag?” she asked.

  “Why, the one you left in my machine.”

  “No,” Kathleen said. She held up a brightly colored canvas bag. “This one is mine.”

  “But Mrs.—”

  “No,” Kathleen shrieked. She shoved her husband aside. “Something’s wrong.”

  “What’s going on?” McGarvey demanded. Kathleen was out of her head with terror.

  The pilot reached in the back for a canvas bag, the twin to the one Kathleen was holding.

  Yemm was the first to react. “She’s right,” he shouted. He shouldered McGarvey away from the open passenger door.

  Mr. Afraans was trying to lift the bag, but it was caught on something.

  Sudden understanding dawned on McGarvey, too. “Get out of here!” he shouted. “Go! Go! Go!” He turned away from the helicopter, grabbed Kathleen by the arm and headed down the beach.

  They got twenty yards before the helicopter exploded with an impressive flash and bang; the pressure wave knocked the three of them off their feet.

  Metal, plastic and burning pieces of something fell all around them, as a giant fireball rose two hundred feet into the sky, followed by a thick plume of black smoke.

  Yemm had scrambled over to them and had shielded their bodies with his. When the debris stopped falling he rolled off, and they all sat up.

  There was nothing left of the helicopter except for a pile of burning wreckage. The heat made their eyes water, and the smell of burned fuel, and burning rubber and plastic, was very strong.

  Kathleen’s face was coated with sand. She sat looking at the fire, shaking her head. “No,” she said softly. “Oh, God, no. No. Oh, God, no.”

  TWO

  SUSPICIONS

  Jealousy feeds upon suspicion, and it turns it into fury …

  —François de La Rochefoucauld

  Suspicion is the companion of mean souls …

  —Thomas Paine

  ONE

  “A TRIGGER WAS TRIPPED SOMEWHERE … A THRESHOLD REACHED. IT WAS DESIGNED TO BEGIN AUTOMATICALLY.”

  PARIS

  It took a week for Nikolayev to find the man he was looking for in the crowded Montmartre, what the locals called the Butte.

  Nikolayev was an old man, but he had not forgotten his tradecraft—fallbacks, switched cabs, boarding the metro train and leaving it at the last second as if he had changed his mind. Window stops to catch the reflections of the pedestrians coming up behind him. Crossing a street in a crowd with the light, then turning around and darting back the way he had come as the light changed. Turning down narrow side streets that were completely devoid of traffic to see who followed.

  He was a man not frightened of physical harm at those times. His primary objective was to find Vladimir Ivanovich Trofimov without leading another pair of shaved-headed, leather-jacketed thugs to him.

  Trofimov apparently lived quite in the open in a small apartment building off the rue des Trois Frères near the Place Émile Goudeau. But when Nikolayev arrived and spoke with the old lady concierge it was only to find that the place was simply an accommodation address. M. Trofimov lived somewhere else.

  “Peut-être dans les quartiers. Perhaps elsewhere, monsieur.”

  After one hundred francs exchanged hands, the woman suddenly became Nikolayev’s sly confidante; batting her eyelashes and coquettishly lowering her eyes. What was it about him that suddenly attracted old Frenchwomen?

  “On Saturdays M. Trofimov is to be found at the Louvre. In the Cour Carrée. The department of Egyptian Antiquities. I tell him that Sundays have free admission, but he insists on Saturdays. I have seen the carnets des billets, and the special notices he receives.”

  More misdirection? Nikolayev wondered on the way back down into the city. But for all spies there was a level ground—home plate, the Americans called it. A place where the spy’s own truths were known, where he was safe, in order to preserve his sanity.

  Spies often met their end not because they were betrayed at the field level, or because their tradecraft was faulty. They very often failed because their home plates were insecure. They had no place to run to.

  The bad ones invented a series of truths that sometimes they could not unravel themselves. Those were the ones who ended up putting a pistol to their own heads and pulling the trigger.

  If the concierge and the accommodation address were not Trofimov’s home plate, the man would nevertheless be watching the Louvre for whoever might be coming behind him.

  Since General Zhuralev’s death in Moscow, Trofimov would be taking care with his tradecraft. He would have to think that he might be next.

  The cabbie dropped Nikolayev across from the Place de Valois, and he went the last few blocks on foot to the Place du Louvre. He entered the museum through the Porte St-Germain l’Auxerrois, turning immediately to the left into the ground-floor ancient Egyptian exhibits. A stairway led to the crypt of Osiris, and, at the end of the long hall, stairs led up to the galleries where Egyptian history was traced forward to Roman times.

  He stopped just within the gallery at the head of the Osiris stairs. The museum was not as crowded as it can get, but there were enough people coming and going that
he had trouble keeping track of them all. School groups on field trips. A tour guide and his flock of elderly people, possibly Americans. A half-dozen Catholic nuns in black habits. A few young artists, sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, sketching exhibits.

  Trofimov had been a small man, with a narrow face and rapid, birdlike motions. He was a few years younger than Nikolayev, but still an old man by now. Possibly stoop-shouldered; certainly wearing glasses; white hair, pale complexion. He had worked in Department Viktor as General Baranov’s chief of staff in the sixties and right up to the early seventies. He would have been privy to everything, or nearly everything that went on in the department.

  Nikolayev had been certain that he would be able to convince General Zhuralev to cooperate. It was still Moscow, and there were a lot of long memories there. Memories that were easily accessible so that an old man might be frightened by them. In addition, Zhuralev had lived in near poverty. His meager military pension could have been discontinued at any moment.

  It was different with Trofimov. This was Paris, and from what Nikolayev had been able to gather from his researches, the man had left Moscow, if not wealthy, at least comfortable, even by Western standards. There’d be no interrupting his pension.

  Nikolayev started through the main gallery. It was arranged to look like an Egyptian temple, lined with statues, columns and carved doorways. The hall was impressive. Some of it reminded Nikolayev of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. That museum had the tsars to thank; this exhibit had Napoleon’s army to thank.

  “I suppose that I should be flattered that someone has come all the way from Moscow to seek me out,” someone said in Russian at Nikolayev’s shoulder.

  Without breaking his stride, Nikolayev glanced at the skinny old man beside him. “Vladimir Ivanovich—”

  “Da,” Trofimov replied. “What do you want?” His tie was crooked, and it did not match his brown houndstooth jacket or dark blue dress slacks. He almost certainly lived alone. His hair was dyed black, and he wore dark glasses. He looked like a spy from a fifties movie.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “I know you. Otherwise, I would never have allowed you to see me. What do you want?”

  “Operation Martyrs. I think it has started.”

  Trofimov stopped. He looked like a deer caught in headlights. “Do you think that’s why Gennadi Zhuralev was murdered? The old fool.”

  “I wanted to talk to him.”

  “So did a lot of people. But it’s over now, or very nearly so. Just a few more months. Maybe six or seven.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The bank accounts, of course. The money. That’s what it’s about now.” Trofimov gave Nikolayev a curious look. “What’s your part in Martyrs? You were a Baranov man, weren’t you?”

  “I want to put a stop to it.”

  “Why?”

  “The old days are gone. They’re starving in the streets of Moscow. We need the West’s help. I don’t want to die eating rats for my dinner.”

  “They’re always starving in Moscow. But they always have enough vodka.” Trofimov shrugged. “Anyway, it’s going to stop of its own accord once the money is gone.” He shook his head, then gave Nikolayev another appraising look. “What does this have to do with me? Why did you come here? What do you want?”

  “I need the names of the assassins and their targets. Martyrs has been buried all these years. Why all of a sudden has it gone active? Why all of a sudden is somebody closing the funding accounts?”

  “A trigger was tripped somewhere,” said Trofimov. “A threshold reached. It probably happened by accident. Some bright young officer found the money trail and went after it. Then when the agents in place found out that their paydays were about to end, they went into action.”

  “The men who came after Gennadi took something away with them. Something that the SVR was afraid of.”

  Trofimov wanted to be amused. He took Nikolayev’s arm and led him across the hall to one of the stone benches. “You don’t understand something,” he said.

  “I understand that people are going to start dying unless we can stop it. The SVR isn’t interested in doing anything except covering it up. If Martyrs follows the procedures we used to use, there’ll be a big payday at the end. Providing the operation has been accomplished. That’s quite a motivation.”

  “People die every day, but there’s only ever been one Valentin Baranov.” Trofimov looked inward. “He was a genius, of course. No one could keep up with him. He worked with a Cuban defector living in Miami. A little nobody by the name of Basulto. We didn’t know what the general was up to. But when it was ended, maybe six months after it had begun, two extremely important men in Washington were dead. One of them was the director of the CIA, and the other was his friend, one of the most influential lobbyists in America.” Trofimov smiled with admiration. “The general scarcely lifted a finger. The work was done for him. All he did was talk to a few people. ‘It’s the talking cure,’ he told us. Baranov was the Sigmund Freud of Department Viktor. His friends called him Sigi for a few months afterward. Until the next operation.”

  “Who set up Martyrs?”

  Trofimov looked at Nikolayev. “Why, you, of course. Isn’t that why you really came to see me? To salve your conscience?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nikolayev said. But he supposed that Trofimov was right. The man’s next words nailed it.

  “You asked who the assassins were? Your research with LSD and brainwashing helped make the program possible. The assassins were people who became killers because they were led to it. They were conditioned to become assassins.” Trofimov smiled and spread his hands as if the conclusion was so simple it needed no explanation.

  “Each of the killers has a target and a control officer?” Nikolayev asked.

  Trofimov nodded. “I suspect that’s what the SVR took from Zhuralev. A list of the control officers and their Johns.”

  “What was he doing with such a list? He must have known that someone would come after him once it was known what he had.”

  “You made the appointment with him. You were the one conducting the researches.” Trofimov held up a tiny hand that looked like a bird claw. “That’s all I know.”

  “You must know the triggers,” Nikolayev insisted.

  “That kind of information was only in Baranov’s head. He told me that the supreme irony would be that he’d be credited with more operations after his death than while he was still alive.”

  “Meaningless—”

  “Maybe not. You already have the name of one of the targets, or you would not be so concerned about Martyrs that you came to see me. If you know that name, then you must look for the people who have access to him and the control officer who will always be at their side. The assassin must get constant reassurance, constant pressure, constant brainwashing in order to remain active.”

  “That could be anybody,” Nikolayev said in despair.

  Trofimov nodded. “Indeed. General Baranov sowed suspicion like wheat seeds in the wind. The method was his trademark, and the soil was, and still is, fertile.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  Trofimov got to his feet. “Don’t come looking for me again, because the next time I see you, I’ll kill you.”

  He turned and headed back to the Porte St-Germain l’Auxerrois and the street outside.

  Nikolayev watched in frustration. There was more. Trofimov had to know the names of at least some of the control officers. One of them. It would help him understand who they were and the nature of their connections between what they were doing now, and what they had been doing more than twenty years ago that engendered such loyalty to a dead KGB general.

  He got up and hurried down the gallery as Trofimov disappeared around the corner. His heart fluttered in his chest, and his jaw on the left side ached as if he’d been struck there.

  Trofimov had reached the street and was hailing a cab when Nikolayev got
outside to the stone bridge that once crossed over a moat. A dark Peugeot sedan pulled up. Its passenger-side doors opened, and two men jumped out. They rushed to Trofimov’s side and grabbed him by the arms.

  Nikolayev stepped back into the shadows beneath the tall archway. There was nothing he could do to help. If they spotted him, they would take him, too.

  Trofimov managed to struggle free. He turned but got only a few steps before one of the men pulled out a pistol and fired three shots. At least one hit Trofimov in the back, sending him sprawling forward. Another hit the back of his skull, the side of his head erupting in a spray of blood and bone.

  A woman began screaming as Trofimov hit the sidewalk. The two men scrambled back into the Peugeot, and the car was gone in seconds.

  Nikolayev walked back through the museum, emerging a few minutes later from the Porte Marengo. He hailed a cab back to his hotel, and, three hours later, his business finished, he was boarding a train for Orleáns.

  Someone would be coming for him. He would make sure that it was the right person. He did not want to end up like Zhuralev and Trofimov.

  TWO

  “WE DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THE EXPLOSION WAS AN ACCIDENT. WE THINK THAT THE INCIDENT WAS AN ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON THE LIFE OF MR. McGARVEY.”

  WASHINGTON

  Otto Rencke took the call at four in the afternoon, when Louise Horn was at the grocery store.

  The McGarveys were picnicking on a deserted island. The helicopter that was supposed to take them back to St. John exploded on the ground. Mr. McGarvey, his wife and their bodyguard, Dick Yemm, were unharmed. The civilian pilot was dead.

  “Bad dog. Bad bad dog—”

  He held the phone to his ear, and he began to hear that the OD was still talking.