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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: The Kill Zone
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… TOO LATE TO STOP WHAT COULD WELL TURN OUT TO BE A BLOODBATH …
 
 
 
 
T
he director of archives, SVR Captain Aleksei Budakov was speaking to three junior grade clerks, all of them pretty young women from the country. He looked up through bottle-thick glass as Nikolayev came in and gave him a nod. Budakov said something to the girls and walked over.
“Finished with the interview so soon?” The KGB's old case files were open to the public like an old whore's thighs, and no one knew why he cared as much as he did, but he was almost always angry, and frightened. At least in the old days a man knew who his enemies were.
Nikolayev shook his head as he took a half-dozen request slips from the wooden tray on the counter. “There was no answer over there.” He had been perfectly open about his research to this point.
“Will you try again tomorrow?”
“I'm not going to waste my time,” Nikolayev said, filling out the request slips for six specific operational files from the Baranov days. “I
still have fifty thousand pages of reading to do, and perhaps five times that many to review.” He looked up and smiled tiredly. “I'm not getting any younger.” He pushed the slips across.
“None of us are,” Budakov replied snappishly. He scooped up the slips without looking. His mood was explosive, but Nikolayev politely pretended not to notice. “This may take a while unless I'm lucky and everything is in its place.”
Nikolayev shrugged. “I have the afternoon.” He offered a tentative smile. Budakov might know what was going on, but if he did Nikolayev couldn't see it in his eyes. No suspicion there—simple anger and boredom with a stupid job in a stupid place with nowhere for his career to go. This was a dead-end job in any army. But it was Russia, too, where almost every career was a dead end. The girls helped some, he supposed.
The reading room was large, with tall imperial ceilings, sturdy oak tables and broad uncomfortable chairs. Several historians like himself and a couple of well-dressed men who were probably Western journalists were at tables on opposite sides of the room. Nikolayev took his usual table near a side door to the bathrooms. He'd made no secret that he had bladder problems.
Russia was a dark, brooding nation of suspicions. Nikolayev had always felt eyes watching him. Legmen behind him; artists who could shake down a second-story man's apartment with such a light touch he'd never know that he'd been violated; opened mail, wiretaps; KGB psychiatrists so adept at reading facial expressions and body language that they could almost read a man's thoughts. Who better to watch a spy than another spy? So he had made his preparations. Who better to slip past a spy than another spy?
Network Martyrs. General Illen Baranov's final legacy. Delving into the files had been like descending into the dark realms of fantasy and insanity. But he'd been there himself; been a part of it thirty years ago when they experimented with LSD and a dozen other mind-altering drugs. Brainwashing brought to the peak of awful perfection so that the subject continuously teetered on the brink of insanity but could be made to do anything for their control officer. The ultimate kamikaze weapon. Baranov had gone forward with the experimental program even though he'd never formally applied for authorization. Zhuralev had been the chief of operations and he would have known the details then and now.
His death proved that Martyrs was still active.
“Who should care about this old news,” Budakov said twenty minutes later, wheeling a pushcart filled with thick files up to the table, a scowl on his chubby, pink baby face.
Nikolayev looked up. “It's a matter of history, Aleksei.”
“This lot will take the rest of the day.”
“Longer than that.” Nikolayev opened his battered leather briefcase and took out paper and pens. He picked the first thick file folder marked with four stars to designate highly sensitive, though not top secret, material and opened it to the promulgation page. It was titled: BUDGET PROPOSALS: UN OPERATIONS: FISCAL 1971–72. He looked up again, but Budakov had gone back to the adjacent computer center, a large glass window separating it from the reading room. He could see the back of the director of archives's head.
Nikolayev selected several other files, which he laid out on the table, before pulling out the folder marked with three diagonal red stripes from the bottom shelf of the cart. NETWORK MARTYRS: MOST SECRET, with a need-to-know list on the inside front cover that included only seven names; among them Baranov, Zhuralev, a couple of KGB generals, two ministers and Brezhnev himself. The file, which was contained in a buff gray accordion folder fifteen or sixteen centimeters thick, was bound with a heavy red ribbon. One of the other files he had pulled was just as thick, and contained in a buff-colored accordion folder, but this one was tied with a green ribbon and marked with only one star, meaning low-grade confidential material. Making sure that he wasn't being observed, Nikolayev switched files. When he was finished he got up, took the one star file now containing NETWORK MARTYRS and stepped out into the corridor to the bathrooms. He propped the door ajar with a chair as he usually did so that he would arouse no suspicions; so he could get back into the locked reading room without going all the way around to the front of the building.
He moved slowly, nonchalantly, as if he didn't have a care in the world, though his heart was racing impossibly fast; the fluttering in his chest was very pronounced, his knees were weak and his stomach was sour. His jaw and left shoulder ached, and he tried to ignore it. The pain would go away, it usually did.
He passed the rest rooms and at the end of the corridor turned right past the guard, who looked up, smiled and waved, then went back to the television program he was watching.
Nikolayev went to his car and tossed the folder on the passenger seat. There was no guard at the front gate. No one to challenge him. In the old days it would not have been so easy. He drove directly to Komsomol Square, with its crowds of beggars and drunks and its three fantastic train stations: the Yaroslavl art noveau monstrosity, which was the start of the Trans-Siberian
line; the rather Asian-looking Kazan Station on the south side of the square, from which trains bound for central Asia and western Siberia departed; and the Leningrad Station, Moscow's oldest, with its grand soaring clock tower where trains started for St. Petersberg and beyond to Finland.
Later, on the Finnair flight from Helsinki to Paris, Nikolayev thought that by now his abandoned car would have either been stolen or certainly stripped to the bare chasis. It would make it more difficult for the SVR to pick up his trail when Budakov reported him missing. A lot would depend on how soon they discovered that he'd switched files, but in the meantime he was able to relax for the first time in days with a glass of good white wine, safe for the moment.
There had been no one to notice him parking his car two blocks from the Leningradsky vokzal, packing the file in his overnight bags in the trunk, destroying his old passport and papers after retrieving his new identity from a hollow behind a body panel and going the rest of the way on foot.
Just another old man on a journey; with a serious heart problem and the fear that he might be too late to stop what could well turn out to be a bloodbath from which no one would come out the winner; not the United States and certainly not Russia.
Everything depended on what was in the file—names, operational details, timetables. All that would have to wait until he reached Paris, and safety. But Martyrs had lain dormant for all these years, another day or two would not make a difference.
Hopefully.
PROMISES
The self-hatred that destroys is
the waste of unfulfilled promise.
—Moss Hart
BUT SOMETHING OR SOMEONE WAS COMING AGAIN.
CHEVY CHASE
I
t was the beginning of one of the coldest, snowiest winters in Washington, D.C.'s history. The house backing on the fifteenth fairway of the Chevy Chase Country Club was long, low; a modern colonial with a swimming pool, covered now, the patio snowbound; but with long lawns and bright flowers in hanging baskets from the broad eaves in the summer. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac of similar houses seven miles north of the capital. A few minutes before noon of a Sunday morning a stereo softly played Vivaldi's
Four Seasons.
Kirk Cullough McGarvey was seated at his desk in his study reading copies of some never-been-published letters of François-Marie Arouet—Voltaire—that an old friend at the Sorbonne in Paris had sent over on loan. Kathleen, his wife, was at church, and he was waiting for her to come home. As had happened several times in the past hour, his concentration was broken, and he looked up, his wide, honest, gray-green eyes narrowing in concentration. Had he heard something? He listened intently, but
there was nothing except for normal house sounds; the rush of warm air through the vents, the music. Falling snow blanketed sounds from outside. No one was sneaking up on them from across the golf course as had happened before. There was no reason for it this time.
He got up and went into the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee, his moccasins whisper soft on the tile floor. He looked out across the snow-covered fairway. No one there. No tire tracks or footprints. And nothing from the air; visibility was less than a few hundred feet. He was a tall, well-built man with the rugby player's physique, a thick shock of brown hair starting to go gray at the temples, and an air about him that when he was around everything would be okay. He exuded self-confidence, and the easy, relaxed manner of the consummate professional that he was, even dressed in faded jeans and a worn pullover sweater.
But sooner or later paranoia comes to all intelligence officers, even the pros. It was the old line. Awareness, heightened perceptions, hair trigger reflexes, an automatic processing of information as fast as it arrived to find the out-of-place bits and pieces that if you were not careful could suddenly rise up to kill you.
Sometimes he felt like a besieged king who was trying to make this place a fortress. A lot of Americans felt the same since the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. It had almost become a national obsession.
In the stairhall he looked up at the landing. The Russian clock he'd been given from a Typhoon class submarine kept perfect time except that its red second hand was permanently stuck at four. He'd not gotten around to taking it to a clockmaker.
From some points of view the world was a more dangerous place than it had ever been. Terrorists could strike anywhere. But as terrible as that had become, no country seemed to be on the verge of starting an all-out global thermonuclear war. Not North Korea or Iran, and not Pakistan or India. That's what the Cold War had been all about, he thought, staring at the Russian clock. We won, the bad guys lost.
But something was coming. He could feel and taste the menace on the air like smoke from a not-so-distant forest fire.
At fifty he had been appointed as the youngest director in the history of the Agency; a job that he was uneasily settling into since Roland Murphy had retired two months ago. His Senate confirmation hearings were scheduled to start on Tuesday, and he could not say which he dreaded most, being rejected or being confirmed.
He wanted out. After twenty-five years of service he wanted to go back to teaching Voltaire, even to bored young undergraduates who wouldn't recognize a line worth remembering if it came up and bit them on the ass. Good years, some of them, and very bad some of the others. In his mind's eye he could see the face of every man he'd ever killed in the line of duty. Bad men all of them, but just men for all that. They'd been in pain, surprised that the end had come; the looks haunted him every day of his life. Especially at night when he couldn't sleep; especially at this moment when he couldn't concentrate.
“I've seen things and done things that I'm not proud of,” he'd told Katy one late night when he'd awakened in a cold sweat. She'd been holding him in her arms like she would a troubled child. “Things that I can never take back.”
It was a sentiment that Minnesota senator Thomas Hammond, Jr., would agree with. Hammond, who was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was telling anyone who would listen that McGarvey was exactly the wrong sort of person to become DCI. “This is a job for a man of the very highest moral principles. A wild card is exactly the kind of person we do not want providing intelligence summaries to the leadership of this nation. He is a bad apple in an already suspect barrel. The CIA needs to be cleared of the thugs and criminals who have given this country a bad name.”
But something or someone was coming again. Goddammit, he knew it.
He went to the corridor and at the head of the stairs glanced toward the bedroom at the other end of the house where their daughter Elizabeth used to stay when she came over. Now she had a husband, and in a few months there would be a baby. After all the sadness in their lives, her pregnancy was an oasis for them all.
There'd been nothing in the directorate summaries over the past few weeks to indicate that trouble was brewing. Not so much as a hint.
McGarvey sincerely wanted to be happy with his life, optimistic about his future with Katy. But he couldn't be. Not yet. Something, some whisper of trouble nagged at the edge of his consciousness. Once a spy always a spy: Was it as simple as that? Sometimes in the field he would develop an almost preternatural awareness of his surroundings: a van with silvered windows; a car with too many antennae; the glint of binocular lenses on a rooftop; a window shade open when it was usually closed; a stranger in the crowd; something, an accumulation of things. Anomalies. The pieces that no longer seemed to fit the puzzle.
But there was nothing this time. Nothing but the falling snow outside and Vivaldi inside.
He'd been running away for the past fifteen years to protect Katy and Liz, and somehow to escape his own horrible past. Maybe Hammond was right. Maybe he
was
unfit for the job. It was something to be seriously considered, he told himself, and he went down to the kitchen, got his coffee and headed back to his study.
The upcoming hearings had affected Katy, too. She had carefully avoided the subject, but she was upset. Nothing was doing for the rest of the day, and they would have a relaxing afternoon together. They both needed it.
The letters were a series of essays that Voltaire had written in 1777, the year before his death, to Pope Pius VI. They'd never been meant to be actually sent to the Vatican; rather, they were to have been published in a public forum. But Voltaire's argument that a Bishop of Rome, by definition, could never get to heaven, but would have to go straight to hell, was so controversial even for him that they were never published. McGarvey had been on the trail of this material for nearly eight years. The end of a lot of detective work that he had somehow managed to do between assignments. It was right up his alley, finding things. But he could not keep his head on straight.
He looked up. This time he was sure that he heard a car revving up in the driveway. A diesel. Valves loose, exhaust loud.
Otto.
Annoyed now, he went to the front hall and looked out the window beside the door in time to see a battered old gray Mercedes diesel disappear in the snow toward Connecticut Avenue. He opened the door and stepped outside into the cold. Tire tracks led halfway up the driveway, but they were already beginning to fill in with snow, as was a small patch of black soot from the tailpipe.
Okay, that explained he wasn't going crazy. He
had
heard something earlier. He closed the door and went back to his desk. Something was up. Otto Rencke, his special assistant for research, had been acting strangely the past few weeks. When he was in the middle of some project he became even more squirrely than he usually was, and did odd things: sit cross-legged on top of his desk; eat nothing but Twinkies and drink heavy cream for days on end; not bathe for weeks. Once, security found him wandering around the seventh floor at Langley at 2:00 A.M. completely naked. “Looking for one of Diogenes' honest men,” he told them with a stupid smile. He was stoned.
They put up with his eccentricities because he was a genius. He probably knew more about computers and what they were capable of doing than any
other person in the world. He had brought the CIA and most of the rest of the U.S. intelligence establishment into the twenty-first century. And he was an unofficial member of the McGarvey family; he had saved Katy's and Liz's lives.
McGarvey tried to reach him on his cell phone, but he wasn't answering or his phone was switched off. He tried through the Agency's automatic locator system without success which meant that no one was at his apartment, and finally he called the OD in Operations who had no luck either.
“Is there a problem, sir?” the OD asked. “Should I alert Security?”
“No. I just wanted to chat.”
“Yes, sir. If he checks in, I'll have him call you.”
He had probably driven over, forgotten why he was here, and when he couldn't remember, driven off embarrassed. It was like Otto.
McGarvey went back to his reading, more at ease now that he had found an explanation for his jumpiness, but after a minute he heard the garage door open. Kathleen was home from church.
He touched the words on the page as if he could absorb Voltaire's thoughts through the tips of his fingers like a blind man understanding braille. For just an instant he was back in the late 1700s, where even in France life for most of the people was short, dirty, brutish and dominated by superstitions; fears, black magic and withchcraft, the devil, and the bad vapors to be found in the night air; an all-consuming reliance on religion to show them a way to a much better life.
“I'm home,” Kathleen called from the kitchen.
McGarvey looked up, his breath catching in his throat, his hand giving an involuntary start as he came back two hundred plus years.
“In here,” he answered. For another moment he sat staring at the letter, feeling how it must have been. Open sewers in the streets; disease and illnesses; dirty drinking water; an uncertain food supply; and in the nights, darkness. A modern man going back would be dead in a week.
“I was going to ask if you missed me. Apparently you did not.”
Kathleen still wore her dark brown butter-soft leather coat, but she'd taken off her Hermès scarf and stood in the doorway fluffing her medium-length blond hair where it had been flattened. She looked like royalty—high cheekbones, finely defined eyebrows, oval face, flawless complexion and full lips—but her deep green eyes were almost too bright, as if she had just done something exciting and she couldn't wait to tell him about it.
“I just got back from France,” McGarvey said, apologetically. He got up and they embraced. He followed her into the stairhall, where he helped her
with her coat and hung it in the closet. She wore a cream white pantsuit and soft half boots. “How was church?”
“Safe.” She gave her husband a sudden, shy glance, as if she had made a poor choice of words and wanted to see if he was going to laugh. “Father Vietski is always good,” she said. She chuckled. “Anyway, what's doing this afternoon? Want to go to a movie?”
“Not unless you want to. How're the roads?”
“A little slippery. Not bad.”
“Why don't we stay in? We can watch an old movie on TV, say the hell with a big dinner and just snack all day.”
Her smile was warm. “I was hoping you would say something like that.” She looked into his eyes and touched his face with her right hand as if she was seeing him for the first time in many years. “I love you.”
He took her into his arms, and they kissed deeply and for a long time. At fifty her figure had matured, but she was still on the slender side, the price of which she admitted to only a few friends was a very careful diet and a regimen of hard exercise almost as strict as Kirk's. She wasn't chasing after her lost youth, but she was hanging on to every year in any way she knew how.
When they parted she was a little breathless. “We're definitely staying home.”
“Bloody Marys?”
“I'll change first.”
“Don't be long.” McGarvey watched her walk upstairs, admiring the line of her back, especially the back of her neck, and then went into the kitchen to fix their drinks. They were married at the beginning of his career with the CIA. But shortly after Elizabeth's birth she gave him an ultimatum; her or the Company. He chose the Company, and they were divorced. They loved each other, there was never any question about that, but she couldn't stay married to a spy, and he wanted to distance himself from his wife and child in case someone with a grudge came gunning for him. Of course you don't protect the ones you love by abandoning them. It was something that took both of them a very long and painful time to realize. They were remarried a few months ago, and to this point their lives had settled into a wonderful routine; comfortable, warm, fulfilling. It's what he wanted, wasn't it?

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