The Kill Zone Read online

  “I’ll leave Todd here,” McGarvey said.

  “Yeah,” Elizabeth replied absently. She looked at her mother. “He and I have some things to work out.”

  McGarvey’s heart went out to his daughter. He wanted to cradle her in his arms for the rest of her life, to protect her from the demons and gremlins. But he couldn’t do it. Leastways not like that.

  “It’ll be okay, baby.”

  “I know it will, Daddy, because we’ll make it so.” She looked at him. She was crying again. “You’ll make it so.”

  TWO

  IT WAS AS IF HE WERE BEING TEASED BY SOME TRUTH, SOME SUDDEN INSIGHT THAT WOULD MAKE EVERYTHING CLEAR TO HIM.

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  McGarvey rode alone in the backseat out to Langley, Otto once again up front with Yemm, content to be alone for a little while with his thoughts. Idly he watched the traffic. In a way Washington was like Los Angeles. People were on the go, moving, always in a hurry. Nothing stayed the same. Everything was in a constant state of change. Focusing on any one thing or person for very long was more difficult than ever. Cell phones and the Internet had not isolated people as many critics had predicted. The new technologies brought people together. But only superficially. These days you were far less likely to talk to a neighbor three houses away than you were to an anonymous chatroom personality halfway around the world. And now there was terrorism.

  It was an issue of trust.

  McGarvey understood the concept at the gut level. But it was a forgotten muscle in his body, a gene that somehow had not been switched on at birth. And the harder he tried to trust people, the more he wanted it, the more he wanted to rely on someone, to go back-to-back with them for protection against the world, the more difficult it became.

  After Santiago he had run to Switzerland to lick his wounds. It was the most neutral place on earth that he could think of. The CIA had abandoned him, the Senate oversite committee, one of whose key members was Darby Yarnell, had thrown him to the wolves, and even Katy had given him an ultimatum: “Me or the CIA.” So he had bailed out.

  The Swiss Federal Police knew who he was, of course, and his presence in Lausanne made them nervous. Not enough to kick him out of the country, but enough to send three cops to watch over him. One was Dortmünd Füelm, who became his partner in a bookstore. The second was a young woman who passed herself off as Füelm’s daughter. She kept trying to get McGarvey to sleep with her. And the third was Marta Fredricks, who shared his apartment, his bed and his life until the end, when he was recalled to Washington. She had fallen in love with him, and their parting had been difficult for both of them.

  “But I love you, Kirk. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

  McGarvey lowered his head. Marta said that to him the day he walked out on her in Lausanne. And she said it to him again in Paris, where she had come looking for him. He rejected her both times because he was not able to trust her, not even a little. The first time her heart had been broken, and the second time in Paris, when he had sent her away, she was killed in the crash of a Swissair flight. He could never forget her last words, or the look on her face.

  They crossed the river and went down the Parkway to the CIA. The afternoon was clouding over. It looked like snow again. They were passed through the gate, and Yemm pulled up at the executive entrance. McGarvey let himself out and went inside. Otto and Yemm came right behind him.

  “I’ve got work to do,” Otto mumbled, and, head down, he hurried off to the computer center.

  “Are you going to need me, boss?” Yemm asked.

  “No.”

  Yemm hesitated just a moment. “Liz is going to be okay, and so is Mrs. M. now that we know what’s going on.”

  McGarvey looked at his bodyguard curiously. “What’s going on?”

  “Somebody’s after you, and they’re not above going after your family to get to you.” Yemm shrugged pragmatically. “Except for the chopper pilot on Hans Lollick, nobody’s been killed.”

  Scratching, nagging, worrying at the back of his head. He wanted to run. “Except for the baby,” McGarvey said, and he took the elevator upstairs leaving Dick Yemm standing flat-footed in the corridor.

  Ms. Swanfeld was waiting for him when he barged through the outer office and into his office. She took his coat, hung it up, then got him a cup of coffee, into which she poured a healthy measure of brandy.

  “I thought that you could use this,” she said, setting it down on the desk.

  He smiled tiredly. “The boss isn’t supposed to be a drunk.”

  She smiled faintly. “President Lincoln had the same problem with Grant.”

  “I wish it was that simple,” he said. “What’s on the schedule?”

  “You’re supposed to be on the Hill at two.”

  “Not today.”

  “Very well. Mr. Paterson thought that might be the case. He would like a few minutes of your time this afternoon.”

  “Whenever he’s free.”

  “Barry Willis of the New York Times is coming at five-thirty for a back-grounder on the Havana incident. But I suspect that he will actually ask you questions about the Virgin Islands.”

  “Reschedule him for sometime next week.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “In that case, except for Mr. Paterson, you are free for the remainder of the day.”

  “I want a staff meeting at five. I’d like to see the preliminary NIE and Watch Reports. I’d like to speak with Fred Rudolph at some point, and then the President.” McGarvey glanced at the door to Adkins’s office. “Is Dick here this afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir. But he had a terrible night of it. Mrs. Adkins is back in the hospital.”

  McGarvey felt terrible for him. “I’ve tried to force him to take a leave of absence. But he won’t do it.”

  “Neither would you, Mr. Director,” Ms. Swanfeld countered sternly.

  “But I’m—”

  “Indispensable?” she asked.

  He was going to say under fire, but he just shook his head. “Point well taken.”

  “How is Elizabeth?”

  “She won’t let go of the teddy bear. She says to tell everybody thanks.”

  Ms. Swanfeld smiled warmly.

  “She’s black-and-blue, and her back hurts, but she wanted to come back to work this afternoon.”

  “Good heavens. Pardon me, sir, but you are not going to allow that child to resume her duties this soon, are you?”

  “No, they’re keeping her overnight at the hospital, and she’ll be out on sick leave for at least a week. Maybe longer. My wife will be returning home, probably tomorrow morning. I’ll see if I can’t convince Elizabeth to come home to help out. Her mother could use her.”

  “Indeed,” Ms. Swanfeld said. Her manner brightened, as if a burden had been lifted. “I’ll go make your calls.”

  “Give me a half hour.”

  “Yes, Mr. Director.” Ms. Swanfeld went to the door. “I’m glad Elizabeth is back safe and sound.”

  “So am I.”

  McGarvey stared out the windows at the deepening gloom as he finished his coffee. Then he went next door to his DDCI’s office. Adkins, in shirtsleeves, was just sitting down at his desk as the outer door from his office closed.

  “Who was that?” McGarvey asked.

  Adkins looked up, startled. “Oh, hello, Mac. Elizabeth got back okay?”

  McGarvey nodded. “She’s going to spend the night in the hospital. We’ll see tomorrow. But it’s good to have her back.” He glanced at the door.

  “That was Bob Johnson, he had a final report on Otto’s accident. Somebody did tamper with the wheel bearing. Curious though, whoever did it wasn’t a mechanic. They just jacked up the car, took the wheel off and dug around in the wheel bearing well with a screwdriver, or something.”

  “So it could have been Otto himself.”

  Adkins nodded glumly. “But whoever did it wasn’t trying to fix anything. They were trying to sabotage the wheel so that it would come off.”<
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  “I was told that Ruth’s back in the hospital. What happened, Dick?”

  “She had another relapse,” Adkins said, looking down at his hands. “This time she was puking up a lot of blood. But there are no bleeders. Nothing they can fix.”

  “Ulcers—”

  “She’s riddled with cancer. It’s everywhere in her body. She’s disintegrating from the inside out.”

  McGarvey was disturbed. “I can’t believe that you came in today. Get the hell out of here. You need to be with your family.”

  “The girls arrived last night, they’re with their mother.” He shook his head again. “There’s nothing I can do for her that makes any sense. She’s in intensive care, and—”

  “And nothing, Dick.” McGarvey softened his tone. “I mean it, you have to get back to the hospital, if for no other reason than your daughters.”

  “They don’t want me.”

  “Bullshit, and you know it. I’m placing you on sick leave right now. Dave Whittaker can help take up the slack for the time being.”

  Adkins’s mood, which seemed terribly matter-of-fact, did not match the situation. It was denial. This wasn’t happening to him. By throwing himself into work he could forget for a few hours what was really going on around him.

  And yet there was something else. Another layer of meaning in Adkins’s gestures and words. As if he were hiding something so terrible that he had to watch his every movement lest he give himself away.

  “I’m ordering you out of here,” McGarvey said. He gestured to the pile of folders on the desk. “Are those the NIE and Watch Report?”

  Adkins nodded.

  “Give them to me, then put on your coat, tell your secretary that you’ll be gone until further notice, get in your car and drive over to the hospital.”

  Adkins reluctantly handed the thick file folders to McGarvey. “There’ve been no substantive developments in the past five days.”

  “Call me when you can. Let me know what’s happening,” McGarvey said. “Tell Ruth that … we’re thinking of her.” McGarvey went to the door.

  “I hate to leave like this, Mac.”

  “I know,” McGarvey said, and he walked back into his own office.

  He sat down at his desk and forced himself to flip through the reports. No matter what else happened to them individually, the business of the world and therefore the CIA, continued.

  Adkins came to the door a few minutes later, his coat on. “I’m gone then,” he said.

  “If you need us, we’re here for you, Dick,” McGarvey said.

  Adkins nodded. “I know,” he said. “Good luck.” He turned and walked out.

  McGarvey was about to call after him, to tell him that no matter how long it took he would be welcomed back with open arms, when his secretary buzzed. “What is it?”

  “It hasn’t been a half hour, but Fred Rudolph is on one for you. Do you want to take it, or should I ask him to call back?”

  “I’ll take it,” McGarvey said. He punched one. “Fred, what do you have for me?”

  “We’re having no luck tracking down Nikolayev in France, and now Dmitri Runkov has disappeared.”

  “What are you talking about, disappeared? Did he return to Moscow?”

  “Not on any flight out of Washington or New York,” the FBI supervisor said. “He’s apparently not at home, and he’s not available at the embassy.”

  “What about his family? Are they still in Washington?”

  “His wife and kids are at the house, living like they normally have. Grocery store, the dry cleaners, the bank, gas station, liquor store, little league hockey. But no Dmitri.”

  “Has this happened before? Has he disappeared like this, I mean?”

  “He’s played games with us, but never like this. Never for so long. Hours usually, never days.”

  Mysteries within mysteries. Nothing was as it seemed to be. The one idea that would solidify everything danced at the edges of McGarvey’s understanding. It was as if he were being teased by some truth, some sudden insight that would make everything clear to him.

  “If he hasn’t managed to slip out of the country under our noses, then it means he’s gone to ground for some reason,” Rudolph suggested.

  “That doesn’t make him guilty of anything,” McGarvey countered, working it out. “Maybe he’s just a cautious man.”

  “You might be right, Mac. But if that’s the case, if he’s just ducked into the nearest bunker, it means that he’s expecting an explosion. Soon.”

  “It would seem so,” McGarvey said. “Dmitri knows something that we don’t.”

  “We’ll keep trying to dig him out,” Rudolph promised. “In the meantime, maybe you should take his example and keep your head down, too.”

  “The thought has occurred to me,” McGarvey said. “Keep in touch.”

  “You too.”

  McGarvey had Ms. Swanfeld call the White House. They got Anthony Lang, the President’s chief of staff.

  “He’s on an extremely tight schedule today, Mr. Director,” Lang told McGarvey.

  “I need a minute of his time,” McGarvey insisted.

  “He’ll call you from Ottawa. His helicopter is here—” Lang was interrupted. “Just a minute.”

  The President came on. “You’ve certainly put a burr under Hammond’s saddle. If he could arrange for a firing squad, you’d be against the wall before sundown.”

  “He has an inside source here at the Agency,” McGarvey told the President. “When we run him down, I’m going to nail Hammond publicly.”

  “Not such a good idea,” the President disagreed. “You and I are in a tough spot right now. I have a vote on my armed forces modernization bill coming up that Hammond and Madden are going to pull out all the stops to oppose. And some nut with a grudge is out there gunning for you and your family.

  “Now, I’m not willing to kiss Hammond’s ass, just like you’re not going to surround yourself with the National Guard. When you find your leak, you can hang him or her. They’ll deserve it. But not publicly. We’re going to give Hammond that round. In return he’s going to give us your nomination, and he’s going to roll over and play at least neutral if not dead on my bill. It’s two for one. Not a bad return.”

  “Until the next time—”

  “Tom Hammond is an elected representative of the people. He’s not going away anytime soon, and I wouldn’t want him to. He serves a very useful purpose. He’s part of the system, and we’ll live with him. In the meantime, give me what I want, and Hammond will give us what we want, which should clear the way for you to find out who’s after you.”

  “No further hearings.”

  “Not until you’re in the clear.”

  McGarvey could hear the deal maker in the President. Haynes was famous for it. Someone trying to harm the director of the Central Intelligence Agency was a big deal. But not as big a deal as arms limitation talks, or world trade agreements, or terrorist attacks in Washington and New York. Every event had its own perspective against the backdrop of the world’s problems. One man, even one as important as a DCI, could not swing the balance of millions of lives in jeopardy. It was a fact of life. Reality.

  “Have a good trip, Mr. President,” McGarvey said.

  “You’ll find out what’s happening. You always do,” the President said. “But stay safe.”

  Lawrence Haynes was the most popular president since Reagan because he was an honorable man with a squeaky clean past and a picture-perfect wife and daughter whom the American public had adopted from the beginning of his campaign in New Hampshire. But he had retained his popularity because he kept his administration simple.

  Simplicity had become the White House watchword. The most complex and perplexing problems were broken into their constituent parts, each much simpler and easier to deal with than the whole. His staff found the new way of thinking a breeze. And so did the public.

  McGarvey got up and went to the windows that looked over the Virginia countryside t
oward the Potomac River. Snow was falling in delicate, almost weightless flakes. The whispering nagging was there at the back of his head, but he was beginning to understand the why of someone coming after him, and he felt that Nikolayev might have the answers to the how. It was something psychological.

  Keep it simple. Always simple. When he had the answers to the first two elements—the why and the how—he would have two legs of an isosceles triangle, and the third would be a fait accompli.

  THREE

  “MY HUSBAND KILLED HIM, YOU KNOW. SHOT HIM RIGHT THROUGH THE OLD EYEBALL.”

  BETHESDA

  Norman Stenzel tapped a Marlboro out of his pack and lit it, tossing the match in the ashtray on the long conference table.

  His neurologist friend, Dr. Robert Love, sat across from him. They’d been going over Kathleen McGarvey’s medical file and the results of her tests—or rather, the lack of results—for the past hour. As far as Stenzel was concerned he was no closer to understanding what was happening to the woman than he had been in the beginning. The joke among psychiatrists when they didn’t know what was wrong with a patient was to simply say that they were nuts.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her, Norm,” Dr. Love said. He and Stenzel were opposites. Love was a precise man, in his manner, in his impeccable suits and hand-tailored shoes and two-hundred-dollar haircuts, in the twelve-cylinder Mercedes that he drove. Stenzel, on the other hand, was a dreamer, a speculator. He looked and acted shoddy; his hair was too long, his corduroy trousers were baggy and his eleven-year-old Chevy Blazer was pockmarked by rust and dents as if it had been in a war zone. But they respected each other’s professional abilities, and they were friends.

  “Except that she’s nuts,” Stenzel replied.

  “There’s nothing wrong inside her head. No lesions, normal EEG, nothing from the MRI, no tumors, no bleeders, no asymmetries. Nothing showed up from the lumbar tap, her sugar level was normal. Nothing obviously wrong with her blood chemistry. She has a slightly higher than optimal B/P, her cholesterol is at 190, her lipids and tryglicerides are just about what you’d expect for a woman of her age and lifestyle.” Dr. Love spread his hands. “She’s as healthy as you or I.”