The Kill Zone (28 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: The Kill Zone
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“Each of the little g's, eleven through forty-four are ten terms in four-dimensional space.” Otto put down the marker and turned around again. “You want to keep it simple, there it is.” He glanced at his work. “Tedious, maybe. But, oh boy it's pretty.”
Nobody said a thing. The approach wasn't particularly novel, and they probably would have gotten around to it sooner or later. But this was sooner. Rencke had pushed the fast-forward button for them.
“Oh boy,” Otto said darkly. He lowered his head and stalked back to his own office. He'd made a fool of himself again. The back of his neck was hot, and he could feel people looking at him. He could almost hear their whispers. Their laughter.
 
 
Somebody was waiting for him in his office. Coming around the corner, he spotted the pair of dark brown walking shoes and tan gabardines in front of one of his monitors.
“What do you think you're doing?” Otto demanded, his anger suddenly flaring. They wouldn't leave him alone.
Dick Yemm had been staring at the lavender tombstone display. He turned around, a Dutch uncle smile on his face. “Waiting for you. Where have you been?” He was here with bad news or more advice. Otto wanted neither.
“Next door. They were having a problem.”
Yemm nodded patiently, as if he knew that there was more, and he was willing to wait for it. He was like a cobra, swaying hypnotically, on the verge of striking at any second.
Otto never knew what to do with his hands when Yemm was around: stick them in his pockets, fold them over his chest, clasp them behind his back. Of all the people in the Company, Yemm was the most invulnerable now. He was tough, he was aloof and he had the ear of the boss. He was almost always right there at Mac's shoulder, watching everybody and everything, almost daring something to happen.
“It was an encryption problem. None of your business,” Otto said defensively.
Yemm shrugged. “You're probably right,” he said, in the same patient manner. “But that's not what I meant.”
“Then what? Oh boy, what the fuck do ya want with me?”
“Let's go for a walk. We can go downstairs to the gym. Nobody will disturb us.”
Otto looked at the monitor behind Yemm. The screen showed the lavender tombstone pattern. Yemm hadn't touched anything.
“It's about what's going on around here,” Yemm said. “I need a favor.”
“Okay,” Otto reluctantly agreed.
 
 
They took the elevator to the gym, where they sat on the raised platform leading to the showers and the pool. No one was here this afternoon; the Agency was on emergency footing, and everybody was too busy to come down.
“We've put together a special flying unit to find out who's after the boss,” Yemm said. Otto looked straight ahead. “We're beating the bushes for anything, and I mean anything, that'll help.”
“I'm working the problem too,” Otto said.
“We know that you are. We couldn't do without you,” Yemm said placatingly. “It's just that we don't completely understand what you're doing.”
“I'm gathering data—”
“On Nikolayev. The one the Russians are looking for. He was an old Baranov man. We've got that much. But then we don't know where you're taking it.” Yemm spread his hands. He was at his wit's end. “Do you think that he's the one gunning for the boss?”
“I don't know,” Otto mumbled. They were skirting what to him was the main issue; the
only
issue. He was scared to death that Yemm would stumble on to it.
“But he does have something to do with it?”
Otto nodded.
“Okay, that makes sense,” Yemm said. “At least we know why you went to France. Did you find him?”
Something flip-flopped inside Otto's gut. There was no way that he could let Yemm and his people get to Nikolayev first. There were too many questions that only the Russian had the answers for. Too much was at stake. “No. He might not even be in France.”
“He's there all right. Or at least the Russians are telling anybody who'll listen that they think he's there.”
“They're not so reliable anymore.”
“Maybe.”
“He could be anywhere by now.”
Yemm seem to consider this for a bit. But then he looked up. “Why'd you go to France, then? I mean if you didn't think that he was there?”
“I wanted to make sure.”
“Are you sure now, Otto?” Yemm asked. “I mean if you went there, and, as you say, you didn't find him, how can you be so sure that he's not there after all?” Yemm's eyes locked on Otto's.
Otto felt cornered. He was on the edge of panic. “It's just a feeling, ya know.”
“No traces of the man? Not so much as a whiff?”
“Nada.”
A startled expression came across Yemm's features. “You're not giving up, are you? Just because you didn't find him the first time out, doesn't mean that you have to quit.”
“I'm not so sure—”
Yemm shook his head. “We know that whoever is trying to kill Mac is working on the inside. Or with some serious help from someone on the inside. Someone who knows his movements. Knows about his family. So if there is a connection to Nikolayev, then it might be more than a simple case of revenge.”
“How do you figure that?” Otto asked.
“They wouldn't have gone after the family, or you. They want Mac to step down, but it's not revenge. And I don't even think it's so simple as somebody not wanting Mac as DCI. I think there's more to it than that. Some plot, maybe political. I don't know. But if it was revenge, they'd just put a bullet in the back of his head. Or, since it's somebody inside the Company, maybe they have access to his complete file. If that got over to the Senate, they'd axe his nomination at the speed of light.”
“The Senate is giving him a hard time, and he was almost killed in the islands.”
“Hammond and Madden are just going through the motions because they don't have enough material to stop a presidential nomination, and they know it. And Hans Lollick was crude. Mrs. M. spotted it from the git-go because of the second bag.”
“So I'll keep looking,” Otto conceded. He wanted to be anyplace else except here.
“Nikolayev is the key for now,” Yemm said. “We need to talk to him. You need to help us find him.”
Otto nodded. “I'll do my best.”
“I know you will,” Yemm said. “We're all doing our best.”
“Mac is my friend too,” Otto flared. “I don't want any question about that, ya know.”
“No question,” Yemm said.
Otto stood up. “I never had a real family,” he said.
“Is that why you called Mrs. M. to tell her about Elizabeth's accident?”
Yemm's accusatory tone put a knife into Rencke's heart. “I didn't want her to hear it from anyone else,” he shot back defensively. “I knew that Liz was going to be okay.”
“Did you know that she had lost the baby?”
Otto hung his head, suddenly ashamed, and even more frightened than when Yemm had shown up in his office. “Yes.”
“Why'd you have to tell Mrs. M. about that?”
“She deserved the truth.”
“Yes, I guess she did. We all do.”
Yemm watched him leave. It was easy to tell when Otto was hiding something, but impossible to find out what it was. Or even in what direction he was heading. For all they knew Nikolayev and the trip to France could be totally unrelated to each other, and either or both could be smoke screens. False trails.
Back in his office Yemm phoned David Whittaker, who was the boss of Operations. Rencke had not requested authorization for the Aurora flight to France, nor had he checked in with the chief of Paris station when he'd arrived. In fact he'd slipped into France and got back out before anyone there had any idea something was happening.
“What was he doing over there?” Whittaker asked. “Did you get him to tell you?”
“He said he was looking for Anatoli Nikolayev, the one that the SVR has been looking for since August.”
“Did he find him?”
“I'm not sure,” Yemm said. “But I think that we should keep looking for him. Nikolayev just might have some answers.”
“To what?” Whittaker asked, and Yemm had no reply.
THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD; I SHALL NOT WANT. HE MAKETH ME TO LIE DOWN IN GREEN PASTURES: HE LEADETH ME BESIDE THE STILL WATERS.
 
HE RESTORETH MY SOUL: HE LEADETH ME IN THE PATHS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS FOR HIS NAME'S SAKE.
 
YEA, THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL; FOR THOU ART WITH ME; THY ROD AND THY STAFF THEY COMFORT ME.
OLIVET
T
he message left for him at all ten trigger points was the same.
Found the novel by B. that you are looking for
.
703-482-5555
. It was ten at night, and the weather had turned bitterly cold. Standing on the street corner making his calls to Paris he'd become
thoroughly chilled. Hurrying back to his room at the Hotel Le Rivage on the Loiret River, he didn't know if he'd ever be warm again.
He'd cocked the hammer and the gun had been fired. Not just once, but at every one of his markers. And so soon the speed took his breath away.
But the response was nothing more than he'd asked for. It was a U.S. number, and the area code was for Langley, Virginia. Presumably the CIA.
Alone, as he had been for several years, Nikolayev tried to sort out his mixed emotions. With no one to go to for advice, making up his mind seemed more difficult than it used to be. He was a Libra. The scales of justice. Sympathetic to both sides of every issue. Indecisive, his wife would have said.
The fact of the matter was that he had worked for General Baranov. He had been a Department Viktor boy.
Mokrie dela.
Wet affairs. The spilling of blood. But even though they'd all mouthed the patriotic slogans:
Long Live the Worker; Down with the Bourgeoisie; The Workers' Paradise Is at Hand
, no one believed such nonsense in their heart of hearts. Look around at the dull, gray, drab cities, if you wanted the proof. Look at the cheerless
kollectivs.
Think about their dreary existence. But Baranov had offered them a chance to escape. A chance to make a difference in the world. A
Russian
difference.
Thirty years later they were still picking up the pieces of Baranov's obsessions. Once started down any path the general could never be turned away.
Over too many vodkas one night he'd told a few friends that he was like the American writer Steinbeck's motivational donkey. The jackass with the carrot dangling in front of his nose. No matter how hard the donkey tries to reach the carrot he will never succeed. But in the trying the donkey will move the cart forward.
All the names on the Martyrs list were Baranov's carrots; his obsessions. Now, even after his death, the carrots still dangled, and the donkeys still moved forward.
In this case it was a deadly insanity.
 
 
Collectively, Department Viktor had been guilty of horrendous crimes against humanity. But individually each First Chief Directorate employee was guilty of nothing more than doing his or her job to the best of his or her ability. Come to work at seven to have a good breakfast for kopecks on the ruble in the Lubyanka cafeteria; work at a desk until noon when it was time for the second meal of the day downstairs; then back to work until five, when it was home to vodka.
Nikolayev stopped in the deeper shadows across the rue de la Reine-Blanche
from his hotel and studied the front entrance. The few cars that passed did not linger, nor did the two couples walking arm in arm entering the small hotel seem suspicious.
His messages had been found and responded to. But no one had come here. Yet.
Up in his small, but pleasantly furnished room he retrieved the first of the three CDs that he had prepared during the several months of his exile from Moscow. They, along with his laptop, a few items of clothing and his heart medicine, which was almost all gone, were all he'd taken from the farmhouse outside Montoire. After Paris it was too dangerous for him to stay there.
The concierge was off duty at this hour, but the night clerk phoned for a cab to take him to the nightclub L‘Empereur, a few kilometers away down in Orleáns. On the ground floor was the bar, one dining room and the dance floor. Upstairs was another, smaller, more intimate dining room, and in front overlooking the street were eight or ten tables, each with its own computer and Internet connection. The charm of the place, for Nikolayev's purposes, was that L'Empereur's Internet connections went through an anonymous remailer in the Czech Republic. You could chat to anyone about anything on-line and no one could tell where you were actually located. It was very private, very discreet.
He paid the deposit for the computer time, which amounted to the cost of the two-drink minimum, and within a couple of minutes was seated at one of the machines waiting for it to boot up while he stared down at the busy street. France was truly one of the last egalitarian nations. You could be anybody, hold any belief—religious or political—be of any sexual persuasion and still be welcome in France providing you broke no French laws and paid French taxes if you had an income.
The international reverse directory listed the telephone number as an “Information Blocked,” entry. It was about what Nikolayev expected if the number was a CIA listing.
He had the computer place the call. It was answered on the first ring by a machine-generated man's voice.
“You got my message and now you want to talk. First you need to verify your identity. You are in possession of data that is of interest to us. Send it now. You may follow up in twenty-four hours. If the information is not valid, this number will no longer be answered.”
The logo of the Central Intelligence Agency came up on the screen briefly, followed by Nikolayev's old KGB identification number.
The screen went blank, and a computer connection tone warbled from the speakers.
The fact of the matter was that they were all guilty of Baranov's crimes. They were all willing participants in his grand schemes. Now, after all these years, he wasn't going to be allowed his peaceful retirement. His wife was gone, and soon so would his own life be forfeit unless he did something. He was just a frightened old man, but he didn't want to leave this kind of legacy.
There'd been enough killing in his lifetime. Rivers of blood had been spilled. Enough was finally enough.
Nikolayev brought up the CD drive and pressed the enter key. The computers connected, and within thirty seconds the contents of his disk had been transferred.
He broke the connection, retrieved his disk and headed back to his hotel to wait, not at all sure where he was headed or what the outcome would be.
CIA HEADQUARTERS
Hurrying down the aisle between the machines to his office, Otto felt like the French mime Marcel Marceau. He was caught in an invisible box. He could feel the walls and ceiling with his hands, even though he couldn't see them. And then the box began to shrink. At first he had room to move, but inexorably the collapsing walls began to restrict his movements, making it nearly impossible to do anything, even breathe. In the end he was pressed into a tight little ball of arms and legs, his wide eyes looking out at the world from a cage that was killing him.
Someone was in his office looking at the displays on his monitors. He was wearing a gray suit. His broad back was to the door.
“Now who the hell are you?” Otto demanded. “And what the fuck are you doing here?”
The man turned around. He wasn't anyone Otto knew. He was big, like a football player, but he was smiling pleasantly. “Sorry to barge in on you like this, Mr. Rencke. But we need just a few minutes of your time downstairs. If you don't mind.”
“I do mind,” Otto shot back. “Downstairs where? Who are you?”
“Roger Hartley, sir. Internal Affairs. It's about the air force. They're usually slow on the uptake, but they've sent us a bill. For the Aurora flight.” Hartley shook his head in amazement.
“What's that got to do with me?”
“You authorized the flight, sir,” Hartley said sternly.
“Have Finance pay it.”
“How shall we log it? The flight has to be tagged to a current operation. And there was supposed to be a second signature—”
“Special Operation Spotlight,” Otto practically shouted. These kinds of things were never handled this way. They went through channels. He wanted to turn and run away. His ability to control someone was inversely proportional to that person's IQ. He was frightened of the goons.
“We weren't given the heads-up. Nobody has heard of such an operation.”
“Well, it's under the DCI's personal imprimatur, so if you want to know anything else, you'll have to take it up with him.”
“If we could just have a file reference, it would help—”
“Get out of here,” Otto shrieked. He hopped up and down from one foot to the other. “Oh, man, get the fuck outta here now. I mean it.”
Hartley stepped back in alarm. “Okay, take it easy, Mr. Rencke. We don't need that information right this instant.”
Otto moved away from the door, keeping the big table between himself and the IA officer. “Just get out of here. I've got work to do, man. No shit, Sherlock. No happy crappy. I shit you not.”
Hartley turned and walked out of the office, leaving Otto vibrating like an off-key tuning fork.
A telephone chirped somewhere, and someone slammed a file drawer or cabinet door. His eyes strayed to his search engine monitors. They were all varying shades of lavender, but on one of them locusts were jumping all over the place.
Nikolayev had found his message and had sent a reply. Already. Bingo.
BETHESDA
Alone with his thoughts, McGarvey stood at the tall windows at the end of the busy hospital corridor from Katy's room. She had drifted off to sleep again, which, according to Stenzel, was the best thing for her. It was her brain's way of protecting itself so that it could heal. Her subconscious was sorting out her conflicting emotions. Or at least the process was beginning. He wished that he could do the same; drop out, turn around and run away, bury himself in some remote European town, set himself up as an eccentric academic. It was a role that he had played to the hilt in Lausanne when the
Swiss Federal Police had sent Marta Fredricks to fall in love with him.
Who watches the watchdog? It was a fundamental problem that every intelligence organization faced. And one that every intelligence officer had to grapple with at his own personal level. The business got to some good people —burned them out, ruined them, so that when they retired they were no longer fit to stay in the service; nor were they equipped to step so easily into civilian life.
“If you don't have someone you can trust, you have nothing,” his father had advised him when he was having his troubles in high school. “Don't give in to the Philistines, but don't close your heart.”
He'd mistaken his father's meaning for years, thinking that the old man had meant that he should find a woman to fall in love with and make a life. He'd tried in college and again in the military, but until Kathleen every woman he'd gotten close to finally repelled him. Either they were idiots, figuring that they could catch a man by playing dumb, or they made it their life's ambition to transform him into something he wasn't; into what their ideal man was supposed to act like, dress like, talk like. When he met Katy all that changed. The first time he saw her, his chest popped open, and his heart fell out onto the floor. She was good-looking, and she was smart. A bit arrogant, somewhat self-centered and opinionated, but so was he all those things, and she was all the more interesting for those traits. In the end, though, after Elizabeth was born, and after his first few years with the CIA and the unexplained long absences and finally Santiago, she had finally tried to change him, mold him to her own ideal image. She gave him the ultimatum: Quit the CIA or leave. He left. His father had been wrong.
Only his father hadn't been wrong. A few years later, when John Lyman Trotter called him back from an uneasy retirement to unravel a problem at the highest levels within the CIA, he found out the hard way that without trust, without honor, there was nothing. In the aftermath of those difficult times the best DCI ever to sit on the seventh floor was dead, the victim of a General Baranov Department Viktor plot; Kathleen's onetime lover, Darby Yarnell a former spy himself and a former U.S. senator, lay shot to death in front of the DCI's house, and ultimately, John Trotter, one of the few men McGarvey had ever trusted, was dead as well at McGarvey's hands. Trotter had been the ultimate spy within the CIA, the deeply placed mole that Jim Angleton had nearly brought down the Agency trying to catch.
His father had been right after all. If you have no one to trust, then you have nothing. That was his life for a lot of years until he came back. Until he and Kathleen remarried, until their daughter came back into his life, until
he brought Otto in from the cold, until he surrounded himself with good people. Yemm, Adkins, Dave Whittaker, Carleton Paterson.
“Trust,” he said to himself, unable finally to hold back his fears. He couldn't trust any of them. And yet for his own salvation he had no other choice.
He turned as a very large man in a dark suit and clerical collar emerged from the elevator and shambled like a bear up the corridor to the nurses' station. He wore old-fashioned galoshes, unbuckled, but no overcoat. There was something vaguely familiar about the man, though McGarvey was certain they'd never met. Peggy Vaccaro got to her feet, and McGarvey walked back to her.
“Are we expecting anyone?” he asked.
“Someone called from Mrs. M.'s church a couple of hours ago, asking about her.”
A nurse came out of the station and brought the cleric back. “This is Father Vietski from Good Shepherd Church. He asked if I would verify who he was.” She was grinning. “He's okay, as long as you don't let him get started telling jokes about the Lutherans and Baptists.”
“Next time I have a story about evil nurses,” Vietski said. His voice was rich and deep, with maybe a hint of a New York accent.
“I don't want to hear it,” the nurse said laughing, and she left.
The priest gave Peggy a warm smile, then turned his gaze to McGarvey, a little sadness at the corners of his mouth. “I'm Kathleen's parish priest. You must be Kirk McGarvey.”
“I don't think we've ever met,” McGarvey said. “But you look familiar.”
“I have one of those faces,” he said. “And maybe you saw one of our church bulletins. Kathleen has been helping out in the office whenever she can.” He glanced at the door. “Will she be all right?”
“We hope so,” McGarvey said.
“The poor woman has been driving herself unmercifully lately. Trying to be all things for everyone. She can't go on.”
“What do you mean?” McGarvey asked, careful to keep his tone neutral. This was something new, something he didn't know anything about.
“The church,” Vietski replied. He shook his head. “Good Shepherd is falling apart. We need eleven million dollars to rebuild, and dear Kathleen has taken it upon herself to raise the money. All of it.”
“I'm sorry, she hasn't said anything to me about it,” McGarvey admitted. “We've had some family problems—”
Vietski reached out and touched McGarvey's arm. “No need to explain,”
he said. “All of us have our trials. And I think at times she might be a little ashamed of her faith, if you know what I mean.”
It seemed to McGarvey that the priest was reaching out for his own assurances. It was as if he was trying to
draw
strength instead of give it. “I don't think that my wife would have remained with something she didn't believe in.”
Vietski smiled and nodded. “May I go in for just a few minutes?”
“Maybe later, she's sleeping now.”
“I won't wake her, I promise,” Vietski said earnestly. “But just a few minutes. I'd like to sit with her and say a little prayer. I think it would mean something to her.”
McGarvey glanced at Peggy, who raised her eyebrows. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
Vietski went into Kathleen's room, closing the door softly behind him.
“He's a troubled man,” McGarvey said.
“But he seems to care,” Peggy Vaccaro replied. “That's something.”
 
 
The blinds were shut and the room was dark. Kathleen was asleep. Vietski moved to her side and made a sign of the cross over her head and began to pray, his voice soft, but filled with emotion.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me …”

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