Authors: David Hagberg

The Kill Zone (43 page)

BOOK: The Kill Zone

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“What was the number?” It was a trick, though he didn't want it to be.

“I don't know, Mr. M., it was blocked from the intercept program, and it was encrypted,” Louise said. “Did you call someone in town?”

“Noâ” McGarvey said, when all the lights in the house went out.

Grassinger and the others ran as fast as they could, finally reaching the spot where the driveway emerged from the woods. He stopped and raised his binoculars in time to see McGarvey and Louise Horn facing each other on the porch when the lights in the house went out.

“Rencke's spotted her and shut off the lights,” he said.

Nikolayev stepped off to the side and held on to a tree for support, while he massaged his chest with his other hand. Even in the darkness they could see that he was in trouble.

“Go,” he croaked. “No time. Go.”

Grassinger looked again at the porch. McGarvey and Louise Horn were gone. The front door was open.

He and the others headed down the driveway at a dead run, leaving the Russian to look after himself. If McGarvey had allowed them to station a couple of their people near the house, they wouldn't be in this situation right now. When they wrote the after ops reports, Grassinger would make sure that that part got included.

McGarvey stood in the darkness of the stairhall listening with all of his senses for something; anything. Louise Horn stood behind him and to his right. The house was deathly still except for the crackling of the fire on the hearth.

“Liz?” he called softly.

“Here.” Her voice drifted out from the living room. The flickering light from the fireplace cast shadows on the ceilings and walls.

“Where's Otto?”

“He's here,” Elizabeth said.

“Who's missing?”

“No one.”

That made no sense. Unless someone had gotten through Blatnik's people in back, no one was here to cut the power. It could have been done from the highway, but Grassinger and his people were on the lookout up there. They would have spotted something.

“Someone is coming down the driveway,” Louise said softly. “Four â¦ no, five of them on foot. Running.”

McGarvey heard the noise. Soft, like a small animal mewling in pain.

It came from the darkness at the end of the corridor that led back to the kitchen. “Somebody find a flashlight,” he said. He transferred his pistol to his left hand and moved past the entry to the living room. Liz and Todd and the others were silhouetted by the flames in the fireplace. The whimpering was louder now. It wasn't coming from the kitchen. It was coming from the basement door under the stairs. Someone or something was just on the other side; perhaps crouched at the head of the stairs; frightened, in pain. The main breaker panel, where the electricity could have been turned off, was downstairs. But everyone was still in the living room, Louise had just arrived and no one could have come from the back. They wouldn't have gotten past Blatnik's people let alone defeat the sensors strung along the property line.

Just as he knew in his heart that the assassin was not Otto, he finally accepted who it was. Accepted the fact that he had known, or at least felt at some visceral level, who it was. Baranov's creation. The brainwashing had occurred over fifteen years ago. So long a time ago that it seemed to be in a
completely different era; a time when we were naive as compared to now; a time in which the battles were simple: It was us or them. Each side had its generals, and each side had its handmaidens.

The crying increased in intensity to a low growl; an animal warning its prey that it was on the verge of striking.

McGarvey knew exactly when and where the psychological conditioning had taken place. He knew why. And he knew the assassin's control officer. The call had been made to him on the cell phone in the stairhall. All the other phones in the house had been switched off.

An intense, deep sickness spread through his body. All of his life he had been afraid to trust anyone for fear of what their betrayal would do to him. He had blocked almost everyone he'd ever come in contact with from knowing who he really was. In time he'd even forgotten how to trust himself so that like everyone else he didn't know who he was. A part of him held itself aloof from his own inner thoughts and feelings. He had been living two separate existences. One in which he functioned on a day-to-day level; with friends and acquaintances, with lovers and family. And another in which he existed like a bear holed up in its den for the winter. Run. Run. Run. Hide. Don't let anyone get too close.

Despite all of that, people admired him. Respected him. Trusted his judgment. Trusted him to take care of them. They even loved him, some of them. Or at least they loved as much of him as they were allowed to access.

He couldn't say why he was that way; perhaps it was because his parents were too old to have children when they did. His sister in Utah was cold and aloof. There'd been love in the family, growing up, but no closeness. He knew that his father loved him, but his father never once told him so. And neither had his mother. It had left an empty spot in his soul, one that for most people was filled with the emotion of belonging.

That's what he had missed all of his life. A feeling that people could love him for
who
he was, not for
what
he was.

McGarvey flattened himself against the wall next to the basement door and reached over with his free hand to turn the knob. The flickering reflection of the firelight was surreal.

The growling stopped.

McGarvey closed his eyes for a moment, trying to blot out the horror of this, then pulled the door open and stepped back.

Kathleen, her narrow, pretty face screwed up in a mask of rage and hate and venom, her lips curled back from her teeth in a feral snarl, her eyes wide and insane burst through the doorway. She raised a big Glock 17 nine millimeter
pistol and fired four shots as fast as she could pull the trigger, straight ahead into the wall, blasting big chunks of plaster everywhere.

“Mother!” Elizabeth screamed from the living room entry.

Kathleen swiveled toward Elizabeth's voice, bringing the pistol around in a tight arc, the muzzle ending up a few feet from her husband's face.

“Hello, Katy,” McGarvey said. His gun hand was at his side, the pistol pointed toward the floor.

Kathleen started to shake the way she had at the house when she'd gone into convulsions. She tried to speak, but it came out as a low-throated growl. She was obviously going through an internal struggle that threatened to blow her into a million jagged pieces.

McGarvey could sense that there were people behind him, but he didn't take his eyes off Kathleen's. He raised his free hand to her. “Give me your gun, sweetheart. Please.”

Kathleen flinched. She took a half step forward, the pistol never wavering from the middle of her husband's face.

“No one's going to hurt you, Katy,” McGarvey said gently. “We're all here. All of your friends. Liz and Todd, too. We've come to help you, darling.”

He tried to smile, but he could see Darby Yarnell using her. Baranov arranging for her training; holding her hand, telling her that she should go back to her husband, that she didn't belong with them. All the while they were battering down her defenses; tearing apart the very attributes that made her human, that made her who she was.

Once again he wanted to lash out at them. But they were both dead. And that they had died at his hands, even though the events had occurred more than a decade ago, gave him just the tiniest amount of satisfaction at this moment. They had gotten to his wife and damaged her, for no other reason than some insane plot to arrange for the murder of someone at some distant time and place. Now they were dead.

Kathleen had been programmed to kill her husband if and when he was ever put up for Director of Central Intelligence. All these years her control officer had been Father Vietski; every week he had reinforced her training; built upon the artificial hate and fear and blind passion that they had mercilessly conditioned into her. He'd done it for nothing more than money.

It must have been difficult, McGarvey thought, because by nature she was not a violent woman. Anything but. Stenzel would say that she fell apart mentally because she had an impossible time dealing with the contradictions that were tearing apart her soul. On the one hand she was programmed to
assassinate her husband. And on the other, she loved her husband, and killing him was unthinkable. It's why she had sabotaged Otto's car, to force her husband into stepping down from the appointment. She'd also talked Otto into wearing his seat belt so that he wouldn't be seriously injured.

She couldn't have sabotaged Liz's skis. McGarvey was pretty sure that they would find out it was Father Vietski on one of his trips to the house. Vietski had supplied the Semtex and the fuses. The fact that her daughter had been so terribly hurt that she had lost the baby had sent Kathleen into an even deeper spiral toward insanity. It was exactly what Vietski wanted because it made her more pliable.

He'd also supplied the Semtex and extra beach bag for the helicopter. The bomb was supposed to kill them. End it once and for all. But Kathleen had subconsciously worked it out so that she could warn them away at the last minute.

All of the misdirections, even the symptoms of her illness were an effort by her subconscious to remove the reason for her programming. If her husband stepped down she would not have to kill him.

It had come down to that simple choice in her mind.

But McGarvey loved her as much as she loved him. He would give her another choice.

“You don't have to kill me, Katy,” he said.

She flinched again. Her gun hand shook. At this distance it would be impossible for her to miss if she pulled the trigger. “Yes,” she said, the single word strangled in her throat.

“No, Kathleen,” McGarvey said. He raised his pistol to his temple. “I won't let you do this. You don't have to kill me. I'll do it.”

“No!” Elizabeth screamed in anguish.

Kathleen's eyes were wild. A tic developed in her right cheek. Spittle drooled from a corner of her mouth. She had been given a new, terrible choice. She didn't know what to do. She was overloading.

McGarvey cocked the pistol. “It's okay, Katy,” he said. He began to pull the trigger.

“Kirk!” Kathleen screamed. “My God, what have I done?” She lowered her hand and let the big gun drop to the carpet runner. “No,” she said softly. “No.”

She stepped foward, tentatively, and then as McGarvey uncocked his pistol and lowered it, she came into his arms and began to cry.

“Hello, Katy,” McGarvey said. “Welcome home.”

EPILOGUE

AFTERMATH

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching Mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.

âAlfred Edward Housman

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

â23rd Psalm

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, YOU MIGHT GET IT.

WASHINGTON

T
he cherry blossoms along West Basin Drive were in time for Easter. Kathleen watched from the backseat as the DCI's limousine swept grandly toward the Ellipse and the White House beyond. She smiled with pleasure, her eyes clear, no longer troubled. It was as if she had finally awakened from a very long nightmare. The bright morning perfectly matched her light mood.

“I've never seen them so pretty,” she said to her husband, seated beside her. He squeezed her hand, and she looked out the window again. “Kinda makes you feel like a Roman general off to get his reward from Caesar after the war, doesn't it?”

“Sorta,” McGarvey told her.

All of them had awakened from a long nightmare. The past three months had been all the more difficult because they had to pick up a lot of pieces; tie up a lot of loose ends; heal a lot of wounds. And for him personally, he'd had to deal with the apologies for suspecting his
friends and treating them the way he had. They understood. Or at least they said that they understood. But he'd seen the odd glance from Dick Adkins, felt the momentary distances from Otto, and even saw the occasional hesitation in his own son-in-law's eyes.

Kathleen's initial recovery had come quickly once she was free from the weekly reinforcement by her control officer. She didn't remember a lot of what happened, though she had dreams that when she awoke she could not remember.

An Internal Affairs investigation codirected by Whittaker and Stenzel with representation from the FBI and Secret Service Office of White House Security, cleared Kathleen of any responsibility for the deaths of the helicopter pilot in the USVI, and of Dick Yemm and the four security officers in front of the house.

It had been she, of course. But the investigators concluded that her mind and therefore her actions had been controlled by outside forces. The deaths were listed as: by person or persons unknown. Unofficially it was given to understand that the murders were directed and carried out by the Russian mafia for as yet unknown reasons.

But the real healing would be a long time in coming, McGarvey thought. It was one of the reasons he'd decided to stay on at the CIAâto make everything right, so far as that was possible. And, because Kathleen would not let him simply walk away from a job that was, in her words, “tailor-made” for him.

He would give the Agency three more years, then he would pull the pin for good. It was a time period both he and Katy could live with, and it corresponded with what remained of the President's term of office.

Adkins had agreed to stay on as McGarvey's deputy director, as did the others on his staff: David Whittaker, Jared Kraus, Tommy Doyle and Otto.

Especially Otto. McGarvey did not want to lose his old friend, who had gone through his own terrors of the damned over the past few months. The eighth name on Otto's list; the one that he had trouble admitting even to himself, was Kathleen's. Otto had put it together before anyone else had: the business with Baranov and Darby Yarnell; even the possibility that Janis Vietski was her control officer. That night he'd stationed Louise Horn on the road with a telephone intercept device to listen for a call to Vietski. If the priest couldn't come to the house, then he and Kathleen would talk on the phone.

Which is exactly what happened. And which was why Otto had placed
his own name on the list so that when the trap was sprung he and Louise would be there to give whatever help they could give.

They passed the John Paul Jones Memorial and headed north on Seventeenth, the Washington Monument rose grandly on their right.

McGarvey did feel like a Roman general, he supposed, heading to the palace for his reward. He just wasn't so sure that swearing him in as DCI was such a reward after all.

Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

Kathleen turned. She straightened his tie and brushed a loose strand of hair from his forehead. “Otto and Louise are riding over with Todd and Elizabeth.” She smiled. “I'm proud of you, Kirk. We all are.”

“It'll be a busy three years, but I'll keep a lid on it, I promise you, Katy. Not too much traveling. I can promise you at least that much. I might work late, but I'll stay in town most of the time.”

She laughed out loud. The sound was musical. “Tell me another story, sailor.”

Grassinger was driving. He'd taken over Dick Yemm's position. He glanced in the rearview mirror and grinned. He had pitched his bitch in the post ops debriefings, but the director had not shot him down. He had agreed with his security people. And that made McGarvey not only the boss, in Grassinger's mind, but a sharp operator to boot.

“I won't bullshit the troops,” McGarvey told his people. “Nor do I expect you to bullshit me. I want to hear it like it is: Do you read me?”

Loud and clear, Grassinger thought. Loud and clear. It was getting to be a real pleasure getting up and going to work in the mornings. That was something new.

“It won't be like before,” McGarvey told his wife. He was apologizing too much, but his family had paid a horrible price for what he was. Over the past months Katy would stop in the middle of something and look up at him, a sudden terror in her eyes. She had been brainwashed into killing her husband. She didn't want to do it, of course. Such an act ran counter to everything she stood for. At the very end McGarvey had come to that understanding, so he had given her another choice. An impossible choice, actually. She did not have to kill him because he was going to commit suicide. But she could not let him destroy himself. That was
not
a part of her brainwashing. She no longer had to carry out her prime instruction, and therefore she was able to act on her own to save her husband's life.

Kathleen smiled patiently, as if she had waited for him to work all that
out in his head. “Don't you know, darling, that nothing stays the same.” She shook her head. “We can never go back, thank goodness, even if we wanted to.”

Constitution Avenue was busy this morning. Life was back to normal in the capital city. The terrorism here and in New York City last year, and the terrorism within the CIA over the winter, was behind them. McGarvey had done some thinking about the next three years, but he had given even more thought to what would come after.

Kathleen, Liz and Todd and the children they planned to adopt, and finally the book about Voltaire that he'd been working on for ten years. Maybe he'd even smoke a pipe and wear tweed jackets with elbow patches.

Nikolayev was dead. They'd found his body slumped next to a tree beside the driveway above the safe house that night. He'd had a long-term heart condition. All the excitement and the physical exertion had finally killed him.

Father Vietski disappeared that night from Good Shepherd and no one had heard from him since. Otto's best guess was that the Russian mafia, which had apparently been contracted by the Kremlin to clean up the mess that Baranov left, had killed him and buried his body somewhere. They had killed Zhuralev in Moscow and Trofimov in Paris. They were thorough. Vietski's body would probably never be found.

As the President had promised, Senators Hammond and Madden had come around, finally seeing the merits of hiring an intelligence professional to run the CIA. Bob Johnson had cooperated with Internal Affairs, admitting that he had supplied information to Senator Hammond's staff almost from the day that he had started working for the Company. What wasn't clear was why; except that both Hammond and Johnson were from Minnesota.

Johnson was allowed to resign with the understanding that he would never work in any sensitive government job. Ironically, even Senator Hammond refused to hire him.

“A penny,” Kathleen said. “You were a million miles away just then.”

McGarvey came back. “Roland and Peggy had their boat moved to the Bahamas. They want us to take a week off and go sailing with them. What do you think, Kathleen?”

They came to the west entrance to the White House grounds on New York Avenue. Grassinger pulled up at the guard house.

“Katy,” she corrected. She nodded. “I'll be happy to go anywhere, as long as it's with you.”

BOOK: The Kill Zone

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