The Kill Zone (3 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: The Kill Zone
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He looked up and caught his reflection in the sliding door to the patio. He was a bit too rugged-looking, too craggy to be considered handsome; but Katy thought that he cleaned up good, and she was in love with his graying hair. “Dress you in a tuxedo, put a glass of Dom Pérignon in your
hand and let you speak a little French; there's not a woman I know who wouldn't come running.” But he'd ruined almost everyone he'd ever come in contact with; like a moth to a flame. And on Tuesday Senator Hammond was going to point out his faults—all of them, detail by painful detail. Maybe he would save them the trouble and resign. He brought the Bloody Marys into the large, comfortable family room off the kitchen.
Katy was hunched in front of the shelves below the television looking through their videotapes and disks. She was dressed in CIA sweats and fuzzy slippers which made her seem smaller, younger, defenseless. McGarvey stopped and looked at her. She was working very hard to make their marriage work this time against terrible odds. Memories of bad men coming after her and Elizabeth, trying to kill them; memories of her husband living with other women, two of whom had been killed because they had gotten too close to him; memories of what he'd done for the past twenty-five years and what he was still capable of doing. Memories, even, of her own past indiscretions; the haughtiness and aloofness that had isolated her like an ice queen in an unassailable palace. But all that was in the past. They'd finally shown each other their vulnerabilities.
“Find anything good?” he asked, putting the drinks on the coffee table.
She looked up and smiled. “You have your choice.
Platoon
or
The French Lieutenant's Woman.
”
“Any other possibilities?”
“No.”
“Compromise? Flip a coin?”
She laughed, the sound light and musical. “You should see your face.” She held up the disks. “What'll it be?”
“I've always been a sucker for a good love story.”
She laughed again. “
Platoon
it is.” She loaded the disk into the player. “What'd Otto want?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I passed him on Connecticut. Wasn't he here?”
“Not this morning,” McGarvey said, and for the life of him he didn't know why he had lied to his wife.
She gave him an odd look; one of patient understanding, like she knew that he was lying but she wasn't going to ask him why, then came over and settled next to him on the couch.
“Hmm. Nice,” she said.
AN AIR OF MYSTERY HERE … A DARK, CATHEDRAL HUSH ONCE YOU WERE ADMITTED TO THE INNER SANCTUM SANCTORUM OF AMERICA'S INTELLIGENCE ESTABLISHMENT.
 
 
 
 
T
he snow stopped sometime in the middle of the night. McGarvey got up twice to go to the bathroom and then take a turn around the house—checking doors, windows, the alarm system. As acting DCI he rated a full-time bodyguard, but he had refused for no other reason than he didn't want the formality that went with a job he wasn't sure that he was going to keep.
Foolish, as were some of his other habits. He stood for a long time looking out the kitchen window across the golf course. It was two in the morning, and he wanted a cigarette for the first time since he had quit several months ago. The stars were ultrabright hard points in the moonless sky; cold and very distant.
This time when McGarvey went back to bed he slept without dreams, as if he had been drugged; hammered into something like a deep coma. When he awoke a minute or two before the six o'clock alarm he felt more refreshed than he had for months, but the same
nagging whispers that something was about to go wrong were back in full force.
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 building 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.

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