The Kill Zone Read online

  Kathleen was already up, had the coffee on and was out for her 5-K run. He splashed some water on his face, then put on a tee shirt, a pair of shorts and gym shoes. He turned the television to CNN and started on the treadmill; slowly at first, with a moderate resistance, the machine automatically building to its maximum within a few minutes. It was a mindless physical routine that felt good. His body was even leaner and harder with more stamina than a few months ago when he still smoked, and he was tromping across the mountains in Afghanistan. But his mind wandered away from the television and he was back in the tunnels beneath the ruins of a sixteenth-century castle in Portugal. No lights, water running because the pumps had failed, explosive charges ready to go off, trapping him in a permanent coffin beneath millions of tons of rock. Somewhere in the blackness Arkady Kurshin was waiting to kill him. I won’t die here. Not now, not like this. Panic rising like a secret monster; jaws agape, claws coming to reach. Christ—

  He came back to the present, forty minutes later, his shirt plastered to his body, the muscles in his legs beginning to bunch up, his gut hollow.

  He switched the treadmill to the cool down mode and looked at the television. Nothing new happening. Still trouble in Afghanistan; an American tourist murdered in Havana; Pakistan reneging on its promises to hunt down al-Quaida terrorists, Iran, Iraq, North Korea.

  The treadmill was slowing down. Why had the business with the Russian assassin Arkady Kurshin come to mind now, of all times? He touched the scar on his side, where he had lost a kidney and nearly his life. Kurshin was dead. The era was gone.

  He took a long, hot shower and when he had shaved he came back to the bedroom, where Kathleen had laid out a pair of gray slacks, blue blazer, white shirt and club tie. Old-fashioned, but utilitarian; the clothes had become his new uniform.

  Downstairs Kathleen was seated at the kitchen counter, the television on Good Morning America, reading the morning paper with her coffee. Her cheeks were rosy from outside, and without makeup, her hair undone she looked fresh.

  “Good morning, darling,” she said, looking up. “Sleep well?”

  “Like I was hit over the head.” McGarvey poured a cup of coffee and, standing on the opposite side of the counter from his wife, reached over and gave her a kiss. “How about you?”

  “Must have been something in the water. I slept like I was dead.” She smiled warmly. “But then making love with you always does that to me.”

  “Maybe I should get a patent.”

  She chuckled at the back of her throat. “Do you want some breakfast?”

  McGarvey glanced at his watch. It was already coming up on eight. He shook his head. “Dick will be here in a couple of minutes, and it’s going to be a heavy day.” He shrugged. “Mondays. How about you?”

  “I have some shopping to do, and Elizabeth and I are having lunch somewhere downtown, if she can get free. She’s supposed to call. At two I have a Red Cross executive board meeting, and I’m supposed to call Sally about the Beaux Arts Ball. Oh, and I’m interviewing two housekeepers, and the carpenters are supposed to start on your study this morning.”

  He’d forgotten about that. Before he’d moved back the room had been a catchall, a place to iron, and sew on a button, a place for the odd cardboard box. With his Voltaire studies, the room had become a serious workplace. Katy had ordered built-in bookcases, recessed lighting, a new desk and computer station, and a cabinet with long shallow drawers to store maps and large manuscripts flat. “How long’s that going to take?”

  “A few days. They promised they’d be done by Friday at the latest.”

  “No chintz.”

  “No chintz,” she agreed. “Saturday night we’re having the party, so don’t forget.”

  They were having the former DCI Roland Murphy and his wife over for cocktails and a buffet supper. It was supposed to be a surprise party for him. She’d invited some of his old friends from the other law enforcement and intelligence agencies in town, a couple of generals from the Pentagon and a few congressmen from the Hill. Inappropriate because of the upcoming hearings? He’d wondered about it, but she didn’t think that it was a problem, and she knew about things like that.

  “You worry too much,” she said, reading his mind. “Anyway, is there anything you should lock up in your study?”

  “Voltaire is in the safe, and there’re no Agency files.”

  “Guns, bombs, missiles?”

  He laughed and shook his head. Her sense of humor had come back since they were remarried. She wasn’t so desperate to be formal and proper like she used to be.

  “Seriously, where’s your pistol?”

  “One is upstairs under my side of the bed, one’s out in the garage—” He opened his coat and turned to reveal the quick draw holster at the small of his back. “And this one.”

  “Sorry I asked.” She was suddenly serious. But it was something that she had to deal with if they were going to be together. They had discussed the situation more than once. It’s what I do, he’d told her, and she’d given him the same uncertain look then as she was giving him now. But she was trying.

  The doorbell rang. “You okay, Katy?”

  “I’m fine. Something light for supper tonight?”

  “Sounds good.” He kissed her on the cheek, got his topcoat from the closet and went outside.

  His driver/bodyguard Dick Yemm was waiting with the armored Cadillac limousine, his eyes constantly scanning the neighborhood. “Mornin’, boss.” He opened the rear door. He was an ex-SEAL, smart, competent, alert and very tough, hard as bar steel and just as compact.

  “Good morning, Dick. Good weekend?”

  “Not bad.”

  McGarvey climbed into the car, and Yemm went around to the driver’s side. “I went down to the Farm to do a little shooting with Todd.” Yemm chuckled. “Either I’m slipping or your son-in-law has gotten a whole hell of a lot better since he married Liz.”

  “They’re competing with each other.”

  Yemm pulled out of the driveway and got on the radio. “Hammerhead in route. ETA twenty-five.”

  “Roger, one.”

  “Anything interesting in the overnights?” McGarvey asked. He unlocked the slender steel case that Yemm had brought out from Operations and withdrew the leather-bound folder that contained the highlights of what the Agency had taken in and analyzed over the weekend.

  “Pretty quiet for now, knock on wood.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way,” McGarvey said absently. He started to read and was back on the job, unaware that Yemm was watching him in the rearview mirror.

  Pakistan and India were rattling their nuclear sabers again, no surprise. Tribal wars continued to erupt all over Afghanistan, but there wasn’t much we could really do about that situation either, except provide support to our peacekeeping forces there. The international hunt for terrorists went on, amidst sharp protests from Iran and North Korea and bombast from Baghdad. The murdered American in Havana hadn’t been a tourist, he was a military intelligence officer from Guantanamo Bay. McGarvey made a mental note to have his acting deputy director Dick Adkins find out what the hell was going on and why this joker had been in Havana in the first place.

  Mexico was being besieged by an independent group of wealthy businessmen to destabilize the peso in favor of the American dollar. Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Russian nuclear stockpiles, the rusting sub fleet in Vladivostok, another attempt on the Pope’s life in Rome and riots in Brazil, where a hardliner faction of military generals were again gaining power. A dozen other trouble spots around the world to absorb his thoughts so that by the time they arrived at CIA headquarters and drove around to the DCI’s private entrance, he was up to speed and ready for Monday morning, the nagging worries of the weekend gone now that he was in the middle of the real world.

  He had been coming to this place in the woods outside of Washington for a quarter century; he had seen a lot of changes, including the addition of the two annexes behind the main seven-story buildi
ng of glass and steel. An air of mystery here; of men and women scurrying about with dedicated purpose; rooftops bristling with antennae and satellite dishes; armed guards, closed-circuit lo-lux television monitors, infrared and motion detectors; metal detectors and watchful serious people on every floor; a dark, cathedral hush once you were admitted to the inner sanctum sanctorum of America’s intelligence establishment. He wanted to hate it, hate its necessity, but each time he came back something stirred in his blood. He glanced toward the main parking lot. It was already filling with a steady stream of traffic off the Parkway; by nine, a half hour from now, more than eight thousand people would be at work here. Monday morning. Some of them excited at the prospects for the new week; some hating it, but for most the same weary acceptance of a job that everyone felt.

  He and Yemm took the elevator up to the seventh floor, the broad corridor carpeted in soft gray, reasonably good art, including an eclectic mixture of Wyeth, Picasso and Warhol prints on the walls, his suite of offices straight ahead through double glass doors, the offices of the deputy directors of Intelligence and Operations in the corners. The guard at the main elevator down the corridor was on his feet. He’d seen them on the television monitor.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said.

  “Mornin’ Charlie.”

  “Will you be needing me this morning, boss?” Yemm asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll be in the ready room. We’re trying to straighten out the security schedules. You’re not making it any easier going it alone at the house, you know.”

  “I may not be working here next week.”

  Yemm’s eyes narrowed with good humor. “Right, I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  Yemm took the elevator back down, and McGarvey went into his office. His secretary Dahlia Swanfeld, had his safe opened and was laying out classified material on his desk, along with his schedule for the day and the remainder of the week, his telephone appointments, speeches, staff briefings and meetings, awards ceremonies for outstanding officers, visiting dignitaries and the heads of friendly foreign intelligence services, plus the new ambassador to India, who was coming in for his CIA briefing.

  A highly competent woman in her early sixties, Ms. Swanfeld had worked for the Agency longer than McGarvey had. Never married, no children, no siblings, no real life that anyone knew about beyond the job, everyone who met her for the first time fell immediately under her spell of good cheer and kindness. Her gray hair in a bun, her suits always proper, she came from another era; even her voice and diction were those of Miss Manners.

  “Good morning, Mr. Director,” she said. “I trust that you and Mrs. McGarvey spent a pleasant weekend.”

  “Relaxing. How about you?”

  “A very quiet weekend, thank you.” It was the same answer she always gave.

  She took his coat, and while he flipped through his schedules she went for his coffee. At nine the first meeting of the day with the top officers in the CIA was held in the main conference room. This morning’s agenda covered his Senate subcommittee hearings, a request by the NRO for increased funding to upgrade the present Jupiter satellite system that watched over India and Pakistan; a request by the Directorate of Science and Technology for an expansion of its system QK, which monitored every officer in the field from every foreign station on a twenty-four-hour-per-day basis, comparing each individual’s work with everyone else’s. They would also go over the draft of a brief that McGarvey was scheduled to give the National Security Council on the nuclear situation between Pakistan and India, a half-dozen requests from the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the television networks for interviews on his appointment as DCI, as well as requests for backgrounders on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Cuba and Chechnya.

  At ten he was to meet with the U.S. Intelligence Board, which consisted of the heads of all the U.S. military and civilian intelligence agencies, over the Pakistan issue. There was a possibility that Pakistan and India would soon be going thermonuclear. The President and his National Security Council were going to want a very tight estimate on the situation, and soon.

  At noon he was scheduled to award four medals to two of Dave Whittaker’s clandestine ops people for work they’d done in Tajikistan uncovering the links between four Russian officers who’d stolen a small nuclear device from a military depot in Dushanbe and Osama bin Laden. Afterward he was having lunch with four postdocs from Harvard who were working on research papers dealing with the economic impact that the CIA’s presence in some third world countries was having. His job was to help them as much as possible to find the right answers and point them in directions that would do the least harm to the Company.

  At one he would be returning phone calls and working on the draft of his opening statement to the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee on Intelligence. At two he would be meeting with the CIA’s general counsel, Carleton Paterson, about the hearings. At four he had a series of meetings with various department heads in the Directorates of Operations and Intelligence on specific issues and concerns, many of them about personnel, committee appointments, mission emphasis and, as usual, funding.

  Sometime after that he had to fit in the new ambassador to India. By six he would do his laps in the CIA’s basement swimming pool, and hopefully by seven he could leave for the day.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the snow-covered woods, and for a moment McGarvey stopped to think how many decisions had been made from this room—some of them good, even brilliant, others incredibly stupid—all of them affecting the lives of someone somewhere in the world. Now it was his turn if he wanted to run the gauntlet in the Senate. Something he still wasn’t sure that he wanted to do.

  There were a couple of Wyeth prints on the walls, bookcases along one, couch, leather chairs and a coffee table along another; a private bathroom and, directly off his office, a small private dining room that he often used for small conferences. A door connected directly with the office of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.

  Underlined in red was the meeting with Carleton Paterson. The patrician former New York corporate attorney had a respect for McGarvey that just bordered on the grudging, but he had done his best to pave the way for the hearings. “Hammond will try to embarrass you and the Agency at every possible turn,” Paterson kept warning. “His aim is to get you to withdraw of your own accord; short of that he’ll want to prejudice public opinion so badly against you that the President will be forced to pull your nomination. It’s happened before.”

  “Maybe Hammond is right,” McGarvey told him.

  “About you being the wrong man for the job?” Paterson asked. He shook his head, took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with his handkerchief. “The CIA has been run by political animals for too long.”

  McGarvey started to object, but Paterson held him off.

  “In the end the general became your friend, I understand your feelings. But Murphy was primarily a politician. Something you are not.” Paterson put his glasses back on. “When someone cuts open my chest I don’t want it to be the president of the hospital board. I want it to be the surgeon who’s gotten his hands bloody; someone who’s done a thousand heart transplants, the last dozen of which he did just last week.” He inclined his head. “You, my scholar with a gun, are just that man.” He chuckled. “The problem will be getting you confirmed. Hammond’s not your worst enemy. You are.”

  Ms. Swanfeld set his coffee down. “You’re free after lunch, the four professors from Harvard canceled, and the pool is yours at six.”

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “She and Mr. Van Buren are still at the Farm. They’re scheduled to come back later this morning.”

  McGarvey took off his jacket and loosened his tie. “Have Carleton up here at two sharp, I think I can give him two hours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dick Adkins, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence came from his adjoining office with a newspaper. “You’ll need every bit of
those two hours, and then some,” he said. He nodded to Miss Swanfeld.

  “Will that be all, sir?” she asked.

  “Let’s do letters after lunch.”

  “Yes, sir.” Miss Swanfeld turned and left the office, softly closing the door behind her.

  “She’s priceless.”

  “I’d be lost without her.”

  “Have you seen the Post?”

  “Not yet.”

  Adkins laid the Washington Post in front of McGarvey. “Apparently we tried to recruit the good senator right out of college in ‘69, but he couldn’t make it through the confidence course. He ended up getting himself drafted and sent to ’Nam.”

  The headline read: CIA WANNA-BE GUNNING FOR NATION’S TOP SPOOK.

  “Maybe this will quiet him down.”

  “Not likely. Nobody likes us right now, and Hammond didn’t dodge the draft. There’s talk about putting him up for President in three years.”

  McGarvey sat back. “We’ve survived worse.”

  “Name one,” Adkins shot back. He was a little irascible this morning, his eyes red. He was a short man, a little paunchy and usually diffident; this morning his cheeks were hollow, and he looked like he wanted to bite something.

  “Bad weekend?”

  “Ruth is sick again.” His eyes narrowed. “Every goddammed doctor we’ve taken her to says the same thing; it’s in her head. There’s nothing physically wrong with her.” His jaw tightened. “But they don’t have to hold her shoulders while she’s heaving her guts out in the toilet bowl at three in the morning—for the fifth time that night.”

  “What about a psychologist?”

  “She won’t see one,” he replied bitterly. He had changed over the past months. They had two girls, but they were away at school. It was for the best, but it left Dick alone to handle the tough situation.

  “Maybe you should get out of here for a couple of weeks,” McGarvey suggested. “Take her someplace warm. Hawaii.”