The Kill Zone Read online

  He uncovered his desk, found the telephone and called the night duty officer in the Directorate of Operations on the encrypted line. He had thought about this all the way home after seeing the logo on Otto’s computer.

  “Four-seven-eight-seven, Newby.”

  “This is McGarvey. How’re things shaping up?” It was after midnight, Greenwich Mean Time and the twenty-four-hour summaries were starting to arrive at Langley from the foreign stations and posts.

  “Good evening, Mr. McGarvey,” Jay Newby said. He was one of the old reliable hands who’d cut his teeth in Eastern Europe during the Cold War years. At one time he had been a hell-raiser. But he was on his third marriage now and he had become a stay-at-home, though he didn’t mind night duty. “Nothing significant.”

  “How about Moscow station?”

  “Nothing above a grade three,” Newby said. “I’m scanning. Are you looking for anything in particular, Mr. Director?”

  “Just fishing.”

  “The SVR is asking Interpol for some help,” Newby said. The SVR was the renamed and slightly reorganized foreign section of the old KGB. “Evidently they lost track of one of their people, and they want him back. Probably cleaned out someone’s bank account and skipped the country.”

  “Do we have a name?”

  “Nikolayev. Dr. Anatoli Nikolaevich. Would you like me to send his file over to you tonight?”

  “Not right now. But you can include it in the morning report. Anything else?”

  “Not from Moscow. The navy is asking for help in Havana, that just came over. And we’ve got the heads up on a possible operation in Mexico City. We’re passing both items to Mr. Whittaker right now.” Dave Whittaker was the DDO, and nothing escaped his attention.

  “Quiet night.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  McGarvey was about to hang up, but another thought struck him. “Have you already pulled Nikolayev’s file?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “Mr. Rencke asked for it yesterday.”

  “Thanks, Jay. Have a good one.” McGarvey hung up and stood there, lost in thought for a few moments. Nikolayev was a name he hadn’t heard in a lot of years. If he had to guess he would have thought that the old man was dead, along with just about the entire Baranov crowd. He had been the chief psychologist for Department Viktor. One of the handpicked few. A golden boy.

  Now he was missing, and Otto was looking for him.

  He went back to the kitchen as Kathleen was about to call him. She had put some soft jazz on the stereo, and they sat together at the counter. She’d always been an elegant woman but something of an indifferent cook. Once they hired a new housekeeper the woman would cover that task. In the meantime Katy’s cooking had improved, though he figured that if he told her as much she’d probably quit and they would end up eating out every night or making do with TV dinners. The other problem was that before they hired any house staff the CIA would first have to do a background check, and that could take time. Her old housekeeper had been a good cook, however, and the chili and corn bread were her recipes.

  “Just what the doctor ordered,” he said when he was finished. Katy got up to pour them coffee, and he thought that a cigarette would be good right now. A Company shrink had told him once that among other things he was an obsessive/compulsive.

  “Do you want anything else?” she asked.

  McGarvey looked up at her, and at that moment he thought that he had never been so lucky in all of his life that they had come back to each other. All the wasted, terrible years they had spent apart, mad at each other, could never be regained. But that didn’t matter as long as they had here and now.

  She gave him a quizzical look. “A penny.”

  “I was thinking how lucky we are.”

  She smiled but then looked away. “I’m getting worried about Elizabeth. I think that something might be wrong.”

  “Physically? Mentally?”

  “With her pregnancy. But she won’t tell me anything.”

  “She and Todd probably had a fight.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t think it’s that.”

  “I’ll talk to her in the morning—”

  “Tonight, Kirk. Please.”

  Kathleen refused his help with the cleanup so McGarvey took his coffee into the study to call their son-in-law. Van Buren had been a hand-to-hand and exotic weapons instructor at the CIA’s training facility outside Williamsburg when Elizabeth took the course. She was a few years younger than Todd, but every bit as stubborn and willful. They were madly in love with each other, but their relationship was complex and extremely competitive. No rookie field officer, especially not a woman, not even if she was the boss’s daughter, was going to tell him how to do his job. And no bullshit testosterone factory was going to hold doors and fight off the gremlins to protect the little woman tending the home fires for her.

  She had gotten pregnant last year, but lost the baby in the third month. The miscarriage devastated both of them until she got pregnant again. But more than that the ordeal had bonded them even closer than before. They were a single unit as flexible as a willow tree and yet as strong as bar titanium. But they still fought like cats and dogs.

  They lived down in Falls Church in a carriage house that belonged to the estate his parents owned. He answered after a couple of rings. It was an unsecured line so McGarvey’s number showed up on Van Buren’s caller ID.

  “Hi, Mac, you all set for tomorrow?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.” McGarvey pulled the cover off his chair and sat down. There was classical guitar music in the background, and Todd sounded relaxed, even mellow. “But at least it’ll be interesting.”

  Van Buren chuckled. “That it will be. Did you know that the pool is up to eight hundred bucks?”

  “I almost hate to ask: What pool?”

  “The exact hour and minute you take a shot at Hammond and he goes down in flames.”

  “That’d be about three minutes before Carleton Paterson has a heart attack.”

  “Two for one,” Van Burean said. “How’s Mrs. M.?”

  “She’s a little worried about Liz,” McGarvey told him. “Is everything okay?”

  “If you mean her pregnancy, she’s healthy as a horse. She saw the doctor this afternoon and he gave her the thumbs-up. But I think that she’s going crazy on me.”

  “Pickles and ice cream?”

  “I wish it was that easy. She’s into conspiracies. It’s bad enough when a civilian goes looking for monsters under the bed, but it’s ten times worse when a CIA field officer does it, especially a pregnant one.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “She’s got Otto convinced. They’ve been working on something for the past week or two. I can’t get it out of her, maybe you can.”

  McGarvey tried to decide how he should be taking this. His daughter was a trained CIA field officer, who, along with her husband, worked special projects for the Directorate of Operations. If she was working on a legitimate operation, there were certain procedures she was required to follow that would eventually come to his attention. He’d seen or heard nothing until now. On the other hand, McGarvey encouraged all of his people to take the initiative. Nobody would get cut off at the knees for following up on a hunch even if it led nowhere.

  “Keep an eye on her, Todd. I don’t want her going too crazy on us. But don’t tell her I said so.”

  Van Buren chuckled again. “I’m just her husband. What am I supposed to do if her own father is afraid of her? Do you want to talk to her? She’s in the shower now, but when she gets out I’ll have her call.”

  “Tell her to call her mother.”

  “Will do,” Van Buren said. “Good luck tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.” McGarvey put the phone down and sat for a long time staring at the bare studs in the wall, but not really seeing them. The same nagging at the back of his consciousness had started again; like someone or something gently scratching at
the back door in the middle of the night.

  He went back to the kitchen to get more coffee. Kathleen was just finishing up. She gave him an expectant look.

  “Liz was in the shower. Todd’s going to have her call when she gets out.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “She saw the doctor this afternoon. Everything’s fine.”

  Kathleen was relieved, yet she looked like a startled deer caught in the flash of headlights, frozen in place but wanting desperately to run.

  McGarvey took her in his arms and held her. “It’s going to be okay. Not like the last time.”

  She looked up at him. “Promise?”

  He smiled. “Scout’s honor.”

  Kathleen had a strong sense of social order and traditions and proper behavior. For her they were the distinguishing marks of civilization. She’d always felt that way in part because she was her father’s daughter. Walter Fairchild, until he killed himself, had been the CEO of a major Richmond investments and mortgage banking company. He’d been a Southern gentleman of the oldest tradition—proud, arrogant, even vain. When his wife took off with another man, Kathleen was left in his care.

  She’d been twelve. For a long time she hated her mother and idolized her father. But those emotions had changed with time, and with her father’s death, left her with an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong; truth and lies; responsibility and commitment, fair play.

  But then she met Mac at a navy commander’s ball in Washington, D.C. He was a spy working for the Central Intelligence Agency. He was ruggedly handsome. He looked dangerous; there was even a hint of cruelty in his green eyes that she found devastatingly attractive, He was the opposite of the men she’d known in Richmond, the boys she’d dated in college and the men she worked for in the Smith Barney Washington office.

  In a week they were sleeping together. In a couple of months they were married. And in the first year Elizabeth was born.

  It was shortly after that when Mac began disappearing without explanation. Sometimes he was gone overnight; sometimes for days; and a couple of times for several weeks.

  He would not give her a straight answer, except that it had something to do with the CIA. He would make vague hints that it wouldn’t do for them to develop any close friends. It was nobody’s business what he did for a living. To avoid the lies, you avoided people.

  She was infuriated. How dare her husband isolate her and keep things from her. It was like her parents’ marriage, only in reverse. Her husband was secretive, just like her mother had been. He was frequently gone, just like her mother had been. And she was certain that he would leave one day and never come back, just like her mother had.

  She was well enough connected in Washington because of her father and because of her own work at Smith Barney that she began getting discreet answers to discreet questions. Her husband worked for the CIA. He worked in something called Clandestine Operations. And it was possible that he was a black operations officer.

  That meant he did things. Spying in Russia and Germany. Sabotage. Blackmail. Maybe even murder.

  The Santiago trip had been the last straw, though at the time she had no idea where he had gotten himself off to. When he came home, however, she could tell just by looking at him that he had done something that was over the top even for him.

  “That’s it,” she’d told him. “No more. I want your word on it. Scout’s honor.”

  “I can’t,” he’d told her.

  “Then it’s going to be either Elizabeth and me, or the CIA. Your choice.”

  He’d turned without a word and walked out.

  Scout’s honor, she thought now. The words were coming back to haunt her.

  FIVE

  “WE’RE IN KIND OF A GEOPOLITICAL ROAD RAGE THAT’S HARD TO FIGHT AND ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO PREDICT.”

  McGarvey took the half-dozen situation reports he’d brought home with him from his briefcase, piled them on the corner of his desk and opened the first one. It was titled: Afghanistan: Probable Escalation.

  The Directorate of Intelligence produced the reports on a weekly basis for every hot spot. They were classified so they were not supposed to leave the building, but that was a rule that McGarvey and a lot of DCIs before him broke. The workload was simply too great to get it all done at Langley.

  This report was bound in a gray cover with orange diagonal stripes, which meant fighting was going on right now. It had only been a year since he had returned from Afghanistan himself. They had been fighting then, and they were still fighting amongst themselves even though the Taliban had been defeated and bin Laden’s al-Quaida terrorists were all dead, in captivity or on the run. A stupid waste of lives, he thought. Yet for the Afghanis there really wasn’t much in the way of other options. He had seen the apathy in the eyes of the mujahedeen fighters: the hunger, the lack of education, the fear and suspicion of outsiders, especially of the modern world, the West. Even now.

  McGarvey took his cup into the kitchen, got some coffee and then looked in on Kathleen at the computer in the next room. She was engrossed with her work on the Beaux Arts Ball, the second most important social event of any Washington season behind the presidential inaugural balls. She had raised millions for the Red Cross and for the Special Olympics. A lot of people, including three presidents, had a lot of respect for her. She was something, he thought.

  He went back to the study with his coffee and picked up his reading.

  The DDI’s Situation Reports, some running to five hundred pages with maps, graphs, photographs, satellite and NSA electronic information as well as on-the-ground eyewitness reports, came out every Monday. They were distributed to the top officials in the U.S. intelligence establishment; the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, the Pentagon and the State Department. The reports were digested, rewritten and updated so that every Thursday a National Intelligence Estimate and Watch Report could be generated. The NIE gave information on everything going on in the world that had a potential to threaten the security of the U.S. The Watch Report was a heads up on situations where fighting was going on or could be about to start. Both reports were sent to the President and his National Security Council, who set policy.

  It was up to the Director of Central Intelligence to oversee the process and to be called to account on Fridays. Then, on Mondays, like now, it started all over again. But he was having a hard time keeping on track tonight. Something was whispering in the wind around the eaves; in the sighing of the tree branches on the fifteenth fairway behind the house; in the nasty rumor-filled crackle of the plastic pool cover burdened with snow and ice. The pool water had not frozen. It was a death trap, the thought came to his mind. Fall in by accident, become entangled in the blue waffle cover and drown or suffocate.

  He telephoned Jay Newby on the night desk again. For some reason Mondays almost always seemed to be quiet. It was as if the bad guys had stopped after the hectic weekend to catch their breath. The night duty staff usually played pinochle at a buck a point. It was a ruthless game, and they hated to be interrupted.

  “Four-seven-eight-seven,” Newby answered sharply.

  “Did the Russians mention when Nikolayev went missing?” McGarvey asked.

  “Ah, Mr. McGarvey, we were just about to call you, but just a minute and I’ll pull up the Moscow station file,” he said, shifting gears.

  McGarvey could hear several computer printers in action, someone talking and music in the background.

  “Mid to late August,” Newby said. “But they don’t say who reported him missing, or why the urgency to find him. But they do want him back.”

  “Okay, now what were you going to call me about?”

  “The operation in Mexico City. Tony wants a green light. We expected to pass this to Mr. Whittaker, but he asked not to be disturbed for anything below a grade two.” Antonio Lanzas was the Mexico City COS.

  “He’s at his daughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner.”

  “Yes, sir. And Mr.
Adkins is at Columbia with his wife.”

  McGarvey had been expecting it. “Any word from the hospital?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Keep me posted,” McGarvey said.

  “Yes, sir. Dick Yemm is coming out with the operational order for your signature.”

  “Very well.” The CIA hadn’t been run with such a tight rein since the forties and fifties in the days of Allen Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan, who insisted on knowing everything that was going on. Such close control was impossible now because there was far too much information streaming into Langley twenty-fours hours a day for any one man to handle. But McGarvey insisted on knowing the details of any action that had the potential to threaten lives or embarrass the U.S.

  The operation called NightStar was the brainstorm of George Daedo, one of Tony’s field officers. Six months ago he’d gone to a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, alone for once, although he had the reputation of being a ladies’ man. At the first intermission he went to the smoking courtyard where he stumbled on a terrific argument between Fulvio Martinez, who was a vice counsel in the Mexican Intelligence Service, and his horse-faced wife, Idalia. As far as Daedo was concerned it was a gold seam; an opportunity not to be missed. Over the signature of his COS, Daedo began his careful and very delicate seduction of the intelligence officer’s unhappy wife.

  The affair had caused some heated discussion in the DO which was headed by a very moral David Whittaker, who thought that such operations were fundamentally wrong. McGarvey agreed with his DDO in principle. But in the real world the righteous way wasn’t always the right way. Even though he had been overridden, Whittaker insisted on being included in the loop every step of the way. The entire DO had taken an interest in the case; in fact; it had become like a soap opera. Will she or won’t she? What was at stake was nothing less than the inside track to Mexican intelligence. At risk, of course, was the acute embarrassment to the U.S., as well as the final destruction of a troubled marriage, but a marriage for all of that.