The Kill Zone Read online

  “When that was accomplished, the subjects were indoctrinated to our way of thinking, which we tested in steps seven and eight. First they had to appeal to their control officer for something, anything, it didn’t matter what. The right to use the toilet, maybe. Then for graduation the subjects would recite their personal testimonies. Who they had become, what their mission was.”

  Rencke understood that as smart as he thought he was, he had no answers now. No suggestions. He knew machines, not people. The killers could be anyone. Finding them could be impossible. “That’s horrible,” he murmured.

  “It’s worse than that,” Nikolayev said, his voice whisper-soft. “Monstrously worse, because the subject is never aware that they had been brainwashed.”

  “It could be me,” Rencke blurted. He tried to examine what was in his own mind. He’d been going crazy lately. His head throbbed, his legs were weak. Stenzel had looked into his brain and seen … what? He’d seen whatever Rencke wanted the psychiatrist to see. He’d been playing games with Stenzel; or had they not been games. Maybe they were something else. Preplanned. Implanted in his thoughts.

  But Louise knew him, and loved him, as Mac did. Wouldn’t they have seen something?

  “Yes, I considered that it could be the assassin coming here to kill me,” Nikolayev said. He partially withdrew a pistol from his trousers pocket. He’d purchased it a few days ago from a French mafiosa in Marseilles. “But you would already have tried to kill me, and I was ready.” He put the gun back in his pocket.

  “Did you find names in the files? Do you know who it is?”

  “All I got was the name of one target. Kirk McGarvey. There are others, but their names died with the general.”

  “How can we stop them, then?” Rencke asked, still examining his own inner feelings.

  “We’ll set a trap, just as you suggested,” Nikolayev said. “There is a weakness built into the process. There has to be a permanent pairing; an operative and the control officer. The effects of our brainwashing technique lasts only one week, maybe a few days longer, before it begins to fade. It has to be reinforced. If we can see them together, we might have a chance. We might recognize something.”

  “They’ll come to Mac. The killer and his control. We’ll arrange it,” Rencke said.

  “Nikolayev rubbed his chest. He looked a little pale.”Yes, we will. You and I, before it’s too late. And when they arrive, we’ll be there. If we’re careful, they’ll never know that it’s a trap.”

  “You’ll come back to Washington with me?”

  “Of course,” Nikolayev said. “It’s why I left Moscow in the first place. To see an end to this.” He pursed his lips. “You were right about something else, too. I am shaking in my boots. I would like to live out the remainder of my life in peace and some comfort.”

  “That’s all any of us want,” Rencke said, thinking about his father, and especially his mother. It’s all he ever wanted. Something else occurred to him. “Martyrs suddenly went active. Something triggered it. What?”

  “Money,” Nikolayev said. “All these years after Vasha’s death, payments were automatically made from Swiss banks directly to the control officers. They were the ones who had to reinforce the brainwashing every week.” Nikolayev shrugged. “It was steady money with the promise of even more money when the mission was accomplished.”

  “So what set it off?” Otto asked.

  “A team in the SVR has been looking down the old operation tracks for just those kinds of accounts. When they find them, they close the accounts and take the money. Somehow this control officer was warned or found out on his own that his funds were going to be cut off, so he went active, hoping for the big payoff anyway.”

  “Money,” Rencke said disparagingly.

  “Don’t underestimate its power,” Nikolayev said. “Money has always meant even more to a communist than it ever has to a capitalist.”

  TWO

  (McGARVEY) FELT IMPOTENT TO STOP THE THREAT TO HIS FAMILY, AND WHAT IT WAS DOING TO THEM ALL. YET HE COULD NOT BACK AWAY. HE COULDN’T RUN. NOT THIS TIME.

  CHEVY CHASE

  McGarvey stood at a bulletproof window in a front bedroom looking down at the cul-de-sac as a somber gray dawn arrived. He smoked a cigarette he’d bummed from one of his security people. Kathleen slept in the master bedroom, two female security officers in the room with her.

  She was up now. He could hear the shower running. One of the security officers came to the door with a cup of coffee for McGarvey.

  “Thought you could use this, Mr. Director,” she said.

  McGarvey took it. “Thanks. How’s my wife doing?”

  “She had a pretty good night, sir,” the young woman said. Her name was Gloria Sanchez. She was dressed in blue jeans and a sweater, and she looked like a high school sweetheart. Actually she was married with two children and was an expert on the firing and hand-to-hand combat ranges. She was an ex-navy SEAL.

  “How soon do we get out of here?”

  “About an hour to finish getting it organized, sir,” Gloria said. “Will you be wanting breakfast?”

  “No thanks.” McGarvey gave the street a last glance just as an older gray Chevy Suburban stopped at the checkpoint. The remnants of the van and limo had been removed, and a pair of Montgomery County sheriff’s cruisers blocked the entrance to the cul-de-sac. They were checking everyone. The Chevy probably belonged to one of the neighbors or their kids, though he didn’t recognize the car.

  He walked back to the master bedroom, and Chris Bartholomew, the other security officer, left. The shower had stopped. He knocked on the bathroom door. “It’s me.”

  “You can come in,” Kathleen said.

  She was drying herself. Her hair was wet and hung in strings. Her skin was red from the hot water. And she had no makeup on.

  “You look good this morning,” he told her, and he meant it. She was beautiful.

  She glanced at herself in a full-length mirror and smiled wryly. “You’re prejudiced.”

  “Yup,” McGarvey said. He took her in his arms and held her close. She relaxed into him.

  “I want this to be over with now, Kirk,” she said in a small voice.

  “Soon.”

  “I want our life back.”

  “Me too,” McGarvey said, and they kissed deeply. When they parted Kathleen shivered.

  “Tell me that it’s Sunday, we’re all alone in the house, and we’ve got the rest of the day together,” she said.

  He draped the towel around her shoulders and held her close again for a long time. “We’re going out to the safe house in Cropley this morning. The girls have packed up most of the things you’ll need. You’ll have to figure out what else you want to take.”

  She looked up and gave her husband a hard expression, her left eyebrow arched. She did not like people handling her things. “Nobody said anything to me.”

  “Last night was difficult, Katy.”

  Her attitude softened. She glanced away. “I’m sorry, I’m being selfish. Those poor people. Dick was a friend.” She looked back. “It has to end sometime, Kirk. We can’t go on like this indefinitely. I can’t breathe half the time. First the helicopter, then the hospital and now this. And Elizabeth and the baby.” She closed her eyes tightly. “Why? What do they want?”

  “They don’t want me to take the job.”

  “Then quit,” she shot back.

  “Not now, Katy. I can’t. Not like this.”

  “Men,” she said. She started to hum, as if she had been plugged into an electric circuit. Her muscles bunched up.

  McGarvey held her tighter. “Easy, Katy,” he soothed. “Security,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Here,” Gloria Sanchez said a couple of seconds later at the door.

  “Get Stenzel up here on the double.”

  He heard her talking into her lapel mic, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  Kathleen’s strength was increasing. She seemed to be on the verge of an epileptic
seizure. Her face was that of a stranger. Her eyes were dilated. Unfocused. Foamy spittle flecked the corners of her mouth.

  “Stick with me, sweetheart,” McGarvey told her. “Come on, it’s okay. You’re safe. No one is going to hurt you.”

  “Kirk … what’s happening to me?”

  “You’re having a reaction,” McGarvey said. “Honest to God, Katy, it’ll be okay. I promise you. Please. Come on, Katy, stay with me.”

  “Help me, for God’s sake, help me,” she shrieked. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, her entire body went rigid, and her grip on McGarvey’s arms was as strong as a weight lifter’s.

  Suddenly she went limp and urinated down her legs in a soft stream that puddled on the tile floor. The mask of agony and terror melted from her face, and she blinked as if she were coming out of a daze.

  McGarvey picked her up and took her into the shower. He turned on the warm water with one hand, and gently soaped her body, cleaning her. She could only hold on to his arm for support, almost completely incapable of helping herself.

  When he was finished, Gloria was there with a towel. Together they got Kathleen dried off. McGarvey picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, where Gloria threw back the covers. He got her into the bed and pulled the covers up. Kathleen was shivering again, but she wasn’t convulsing.

  Stenzel appeared in the doorway, took one look, then came over and brushed them aside. He checked Kathleen’s pupils and took her pulse.

  “What the hell is happening to her?” McGarvey demanded.

  “It’s a delayed reaction from last night,” the psychiatrist said. “She’s gone into overload.” He prepared a syringe with twenty-five milligrams of Librium, swabbed Kathleen’s right arm, and administered the drug. She watched everything he did, but she didn’t fight him.

  “We can’t take her back to Bethesda,” McGarvey said.

  “No, but I’m going with her,” Stenzel replied. He checked her pupils and pulse again, and grunted in satisfaction. “How are you doing, Kathleen?”

  She smiled wanly. “Better now,” she answered. She looked over at her husband and at Gloria Sanchez, and gave them a smile. “Sorry. I’m not as strong yet as I thought I was.”

  “You’ll be okay now,” Stenzel told her. He tucked her bare arm under the covers. “I want you to relax for a little while.”

  “But I’m not tired,” she objected.

  “I know. But I want you to take it easy. Just for a half hour or so. Will you do that for me?”

  She nodded. “Sure.” She closed her eyes. She was asleep almost immediately.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can keep her on track,” Stenzel told McGarvey out in the hall. “She needs to be hospitalized. In a clinic somewhere where she can get some proper rest.”

  Chris Bartholomew got a towel from the guest bathroom down the hall and gave it to McGarvey. “Thanks,” he told her.

  She nodded and went into the bedroom to help with Kathleen and help clean up.

  “We have to get past this first,” McGarvey said. He felt impotent to stop the threat to his family and what it was doing to them all. Yet he could not back away. He couldn’t run. Not this time.

  “I know. But the sooner that’s done, the sooner I can start to help your wife.”

  “What’s wrong with her, Doc?”

  A troubled, pensive expression came over the psychiatrist’s face. “She’s—” He shook his head. “I don’t know. She has the classic symptoms of a half-dozen psychoses, but not all the symptoms of any one of them. Deepened emotions, grandiosity, depression, bouts of violence and abnormal muscle strength, irritability, hallucinations, seizures, paranoid suspicions, loss of libido followed by hypersexuality.” Stenzel spread his hands. “I don’t know.”

  “Will she be able to travel in an hour?”

  “She’ll be sedated. Not out of it, but calmed down. The move shouldn’t disturb her.”

  Gloria Sanchez came out of the bedroom. Kathleen was already up. She had put on a robe and stood in the middle of the room looking at them. She was smiling timidly.

  “Tony has a priest at the front door, says he would like to see Mrs. McGarvey. His name is Janis Vietski of Good Shepherd Church here in Chevy Chase. He checks out.”

  “I know him,” McGarvey said. “Tell him that we appreciate his coming over, but not now.”

  “Yes, Kirk,” Kathleen said. “Please. It would mean a lot to me before we leave.”

  McGarvey looked to Stenzel for an opinion. The doctor shrugged. “Can’t hurt,” he replied in a soft voice that wouldn’t carry. “Might even help calm her down.”

  “Would you like to get dressed first?” McGarvey asked his wife.

  “No. I’d like to talk to Father for just a minute, then I’ll get ready, and we can leave.” She seemed to be brittle and withdrawn. But that was to be expected.

  McGarvey gave Gloria the nod. “Have him come up.”

  The security officer said something into her lapel mic. A minute later Father Vietski, looking something like a shaggy bear with longish dark hair and beard, a stained black jacket and clerical collar, and unbuckled winter boots appeared at the head of the stairs.

  He laid his topcoat and hat on a chair and shambled over, a look of sympathy on his pleasantly broad Slavic peasant’s face. He didn’t appear to notice that McGarvey was wet.

  “Mr. Director, I came right over the moment I heard the terrible news,” the priest said, shaking McGarvey’s hand. His voice was rich and warm, concerned. “God bless us all that you and Mrs. McGarvey were not injured.”

  “Thank you,” McGarvey said. He’d never really examined his faith, although he knew that he sided with Voltaire in his distrust of organized religion. But Katy got comfort from the Church. At this point that meant a lot to him. And Vietski seemed to have a genuine regard for her.

  The priest noticed Kathleen standing in her robe in the bedroom. “My dear sweet Kathleen, what has happened to you?” he said warmly. With eyes for no one else but her, he entered the bedroom, waited until the security officer got out, then closed the door.

  “Five minutes, then I want him out of here,” McGarvey told the security people.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When he’s gone, I’d like you to help her get ready to travel,” McGarvey said.

  “I’m staying with her,” Stenzel said.

  “Good,” McGarvey replied. “Now, where’s Jim?” Jim Grassinger had taken over as head of McGarvey’s security detail.

  “He’s in the dining room. You need to get out of those wet clothes, sir,” Gloria Sanchez said.

  “I will,” McGarvey said. He gave her a smile. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  McGarvey changed clothes, then went downstairs. He stopped in the front hall. Everything was unraveling around him. Katy’s disintegration and seizure. Liz and the baby. And last night Dick Yemm’s death. That part should not have happened. The security team in the van was too good to let someone in an unknown car get that close to them. And Yemm should have known better than to barge into the van the way he had without backup. The Bureau had found no trace of the blue Mercedes that Kathleen had seen from the window. But when they did finally run it down it would help clear up some of the mystery.

  Grassinger was in the dining room with three other security officers. Detailed maps of the Washington area, including the small town of Cropley a few miles up the Potomac from the capital, were spread out on the table. Grassinger, a tall, square-shouldered, serious man was on the encrypted phone to Operations at Langley. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. He broke the connection.

  “Gloria tells me that we can get out of here within the hour,” McGarvey said. “What’s the drill?”

  “We’re driving you and Mrs. McGarvey out to Cropley in the spare limo. The long way.”

  “Norm Stenzel will be riding with us.”

  “Okay, Dr. Stenzel, too, plus two security people and your driver,” Grassinger a
greed. “We’ll do a number of switchbacks and feints, which will give our chase cars room to make sure that we get out clean. We’ll have two helicopters in the air, at a distance, to help cover our tail as well. But everything is going to be discreet. Nothing will appear to be out of the ordinary.”

  “What if there’s trouble?”

  “We call for backup and head to whichever is closer at that moment, Langley or Cropley.”

  “How about Todd and Elizabeth?”

  “Nearly the same drill, Mr. Director, except that Van Buren will drive his own SUV out to Cropley, using a number of switchbacks. There won’t be any security in the car with him and your daughter, but there will be chase cars and a helicopter aloft to make sure they run into no trouble. They’ll arrive at Cropley thirty minutes ahead of us.”

  “Any reason for that?”

  “Sir, Todd wants to make a quick sweep of the property himself before you and Mrs. McGarvey get out there.”

  “That’s fine,” McGarvey said. “I want your people to remain out of sight. This is going to be as low-key a move as we can make it.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s what we figured. There’s no use advertising what we’re doing.”

  McGarvey had always taken a hand in his own safety. But now in his position he had to rely on others to make sure the job got done right. He didn’t like it.

  One of the security officers was on the phone. He touched the mute button. “Mr. Director, the President would like to speak to you.”