The Kill Zone (32 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: The Kill Zone
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The President came on. “You've certainly put a burr under Hammond's
saddle. If he could arrange for a firing squad, you'd be against the wall before sundown.”
“He has an inside source here at the Agency,” McGarvey told the President. “When we run him down, I'm going to nail Hammond publicly.”
“Not such a good idea,” the President disagreed. “You and I are in a tough spot right now. I have a vote on my armed forces modernization bill coming up that Hammond and Madden are going to pull out all the stops to oppose. And some nut with a grudge is out there gunning for you and your family.
“Now, I'm not willing to kiss Hammond's ass, just like you're not going to surround yourself with the National Guard. When you find your leak, you can hang him or her. They'll deserve it. But not publicly. We're going to give Hammond that round. In return he's going to give us your nomination, and he's going to roll over and play at least neutral if not dead on my bill. It's two for one. Not a bad return.”
“Until the next time—”
“Tom Hammond is an elected representative of the people. He's not going away anytime soon, and I wouldn't want him to. He serves a very useful purpose. He's part of the system, and we'll live with him. In the meantime, give me what I want, and Hammond will give us what we want, which should clear the way for you to find out who's after you.”
“No further hearings.”
“Not until you're in the clear.”
McGarvey could hear the deal maker in the President. Haynes was famous for it. Someone trying to harm the director of the Central Intelligence Agency was a big deal. But not as big a deal as arms limitation talks, or world trade agreements, or terrorist attacks in Washington and New York. Every event had its own perspective against the backdrop of the world's problems. One man, even one as important as a DCI, could not swing the balance of millions of lives in jeopardy. It was a fact of life. Reality.
“Have a good trip, Mr. President,” McGarvey said.
“You'll find out what's happening. You always do,” the President said. “But stay safe.”
Lawrence Haynes was the most popular president since Reagan because he was an honorable man with a squeaky clean past and a picture-perfect wife and daughter whom the American public had adopted from the beginning of his campaign in New Hampshire. But he had retained his popularity because he kept his administration simple.
Simplicity had become the White House watchword. The most complex
and perplexing problems were broken into their constituent parts, each much simpler and easier to deal with than the whole. His staff found the new way of thinking a breeze. And so did the public.
McGarvey got up and went to the windows that looked over the Virginia countryside toward the Potomac River. Snow was falling in delicate, almost weightless flakes. The whispering nagging was there at the back of his head, but he was beginning to understand the why of someone coming after him, and he felt that Nikolayev might have the answers to the how. It was something psychological.
Keep it simple. Always simple. When he had the answers to the first two elements—the why and the how—he would have two legs of an isosceles triangle, and the third would be a fait accompli.
“MY HUSBAND KILLED HIM, YOU KNOW. SHOT HIM RIGHT THROUGH THE OLD EYEBALL.”
BETHESDA
N
orman Stenzel tapped a Marlboro out of his pack and lit it, tossing the match in the ashtray on the long conference table.
His neurologist friend, Dr. Robert Love, sat across from him. They'd been going over Kathleen McGarvey's medical file and the results of her tests—or rather, the lack of results—for the past hour. As far as Stenzel was concerned he was no closer to understanding what was happening to the woman than he had been in the beginning. The joke among psychiatrists when they didn't know what was wrong with a patient was to simply say that they were nuts.
“There's nothing wrong with her, Norm,” Dr. Love said. He and Stenzel were opposites. Love was a precise man, in his manner, in his impeccable suits and hand-tailored shoes and two-hundred-dollar haircuts, in the twelve-cylinder Mercedes that he drove. Stenzel, on the other hand, was a dreamer, a speculator. He looked and acted shoddy; his hair was too long, his corduroy trousers were baggy and his eleven-year-old
Chevy Blazer was pockmarked by rust and dents as if it had been in a war zone. But they respected each other's professional abilities, and they were friends.
“Except that she's nuts,” Stenzel replied.
“There's nothing wrong inside her head. No lesions, normal EEG, nothing from the MRI, no tumors, no bleeders, no asymmetries. Nothing showed up from the lumbar tap, her sugar level was normal. Nothing obviously wrong with her blood chemistry. She has a slightly higher than optimal B/P, her cholesterol is at 190, her lipids and tryglicerides are just about what you'd expect for a woman of her age and lifestyle.” Dr. Love spread his hands. “She's as healthy as you or I.”
“Puts the ball back in my court,” Stenzel said. Which was about what he figured would be the case. Though it would have been easier had they found a small lesion or even a benign tumor somewhere on her temporal lobe. It would have made understanding and then treating her symptoms a lot simpler.
“Schizophrenia?”
“That was my first thought, but I've gotten a lot of contradictory test results.” Stenzel frowned. “Something else is happening. It's as if something's pushing at her. Something that she's terrified of.”
Dr. Love closed the folders he'd been reading from. They'd met at the hospital rather than at their offices for convenience sake. “Well, from what you've told me about her situation, it's a wonder she's not a raving lunatic.”
“That's precisely the problem, Bob. She isn't raving. At least she's only lost control the one time, so far as we know. But the life she's had, and especially what's been going on over the past week or so, should have forced her into nervous collapse.”
“She's tough. She'd have to be, to be married to someone in her husband's position.”
Stenzel shook his head. “That's the other part of the problem. Her position. She's carrying around a load of guilt issues, just like the rest of us. Most of them are crap. But she's taken on the problems of a half-dozen charities, including her church, as if they were her own. The things they're saying in her husband's Senate confirmation hearings are depressing her. And she's gone through her daughter's pregnancy and miscarriage as if she had been carrying the baby herself.”
“She sounds like the typical Beltway wife. But, look, I'll run the tests again. Maybe we missed something.”
“No, I don't think so. If you thought it was necessary to redo the tests,
you would go ahead and do it.” Stenzel looked away for a moment, resigned. Dr. Love got up. “We'll see you and Marie Saturday night, then?”
Stenzel nodded. “Yeah. Thanks for your help, Bob.”
When Dr. Love left, Stenzel remained seated at the table to finish his cigarette. He was down to a half a pack a day now. But it was hard.
He'd seen other cases like Kathleen's before. The CIA was tough on its employees and their families. The sometimes long absences, the constant pressure to “get it right,” because lives were on the line, the almost constant harping and criticism of the CIA in the media. In polite company admitting that you worked for the CIA was worse than admitting that you worked for the
National Enquirer.
You got no respect. It took its toll.
And yet Kathleen McGarvey's case was different. One day she seemed fine, and the next her test scores were off the charts. Nothing made sense.
There was a deepening of all of her emotions. She was madly, almost maniacally, in love with her husband, wanting to lash out and crush whoever was trying to do him the slightest harm. Yet a few hours later, sometimes only a few minutes later, she talked with complete candor about why she had left him twenty years ago, and how the pressures of his position since his return were driving her to distraction again.
One day she talked about raising even more millions for the Red Cross and for Good Shepherd Church. Twist a few arms, dress the President down, if need be. Hell, pick pockets, if it came to that. She'd do it gladly. The next day she wondered aloud why anyone would give her so much as a dime. She was a nudge; pushy, brassy, always with her hand out. She claimed to have no friends except those who could help her causes.
Some of her tests, including the Rorschach, indicated a suicidal tendency one morning, but by that afternoon her reaction to the inkblots was completely normal. At times she was so irritable that the slightest noise in the corridor would set her off; she would scream obscenities and threats to “kill the next cocksucker” who walked through the door.
At times she was deeply paranoid, yet minutes later she was normal. But her mood swings did not seem to be getting worse, as if her disease were progressing. Instead, they were steady. They followed the beat of some metronome inside her brain.
There was an underlying hate there, too. One that was concealed much of the time. It was the pattern of guilt-hate that she was going through that Stenzel was having a tough time unraveling. The simple answer was that she hated the CIA for what it had done to her and her family. But there was something else going on inside her head; something deeper that she was not
consciously aware of. Maybe something out of her past. Some guilty secret, just like the ones every one of us carried around in our heads. But it was a secret that bubbled to the surface whenever she was under extreme stress.
Stenzel bundled up his files and stopped off at Kathleen's room. He wanted to talk to her for a few minutes to see if it was feasible to release her in the morning as he had promised McGarvey. But she was sleeping, and he didn't want to wake her, so he headed down to the cafeteria, his stomach rumbling. He had forgotten to eat lunch.
 
 
Otto Rencke stood in the stairhall looking out the narrow window in the fire door as Dr. Stenzel disappeared down the corridor. Janis Westlake sat on a folding chair outside Mrs. M.'s door. She was dressed in a stylish dark suit, and she was armed. Her job was to protect Mrs. M. and limit visitors to those on the list. Otto had learned this afternoon that his name had been removed.
He used his cell phone to connect with one of his computer programs, which searched for and dialed the direct number to the nurses' station on this floor. It rang twice.
“Gale Moulton.”
“This is Dick Yemm. I need to talk to Ms. Westlake on guard duty at six-eleven. Something's wrong with her phone. Could you get her for me?”
“Does she know you, sir?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Just a moment, please.”
Otto watched from the stairhall as the nurse came down the hall. She said something to Janis Westlake, who got up and followed her back down the corridor. He broke the connection, pocketed his cell phone, stepped out into the corridor, and, keeping his eye on the backs of the retreating women, hurried down the corridor and slipped into Mrs. M.'s room.
She was sleeping, but the IV drip of sedatives had been removed from her arm. The room was in semidarkness. Otto jammed the chair under the door handle so that it could not be opened from the outside, then approached the head of the bed.
His eyes welled with tears, and it became difficult for him to catch his breath. His heart felt as if it were fibrillating in his chest, and his knees threatened to buckle at any second.
“Oh, wow,” he muttered under his breath. God forgive him for what he was about to do. He knew no other way to get the information he needed
to save their lives. But it was like raping your own mother.
He took out a mesh-covered ampule about the size of a cigarette filter, broke it in two, and held it under Kathleen's nose.
She reared back, as if she had received an electric shock, but then the combination of amyl nitrate and sodium pentothal hit her bloodstream, and she opened her eyes.
“Hello, Otto,” she said sweetly. “What are you doing here?” She looked as if she had awakened from a very good dream.
“Hiya, Mrs. M. I thought I would stop by to see how you were doing.”
“My mouth's a little dry.” She smacked her lips. Otto got the glass of water from the tray and held it for her. When she had taken a drink he put it back. She smiled. Her eyes seemed a little wild. “Thanks, that was peachy.”
“I have to ask you something,” Otto started.
“Can I go home now?”
“Pretty soon. But I want to know if you remember Darby Yarnell?”
“Oh, sure. He was a peachy guy. My husband killed him, you know. Shot him right through the old eyeball.” She made a pistol of her fingers and fired off a shot. “Bang, bang, el dedo. That's Spanish for verrrry dead.”
Otto was sick at his stomach. “Did Darby ever mention the general to you?”
Kathleen's face darkened for a moment, but then she grinned. “Oh, sure. He said that Illen had gone too far this time.”
“Was he talking about General Baranov?”
Kathleen held a finger to her lips. “Shhh. We're not supposed to mention that name. Never. Never.”
“About Dr. Nikolayev? Did you ever hear that name?”
Her face screwed up in concentration. At any other time she would have looked comical. She shook her head. “Nope.” She suddenly looked sly. “Darby and I had sex, you know. He was pretty good, but not as good as my husband.”
Otto felt terrible. He didn't want to hear this. But it was important. “Did you ever go to Mexico with Darby?”
“Nope.”
“How about Russia? Did you ever go to Moscow?”
“Nope.”
“Did you ever leave Washington with him?”
“Nope. I'm practically a hometown girl. I've never been anywhere except with my husband.” She glanced at the door. “I want to go home now. I'm fucking well tired of this shithole.”
Otto closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, Kathleen was staring at him. “Did you ever meet General Baranov?”
For several seconds it didn't seem as if she was going to answer the question. But she nodded. “He came to Darby's house one night.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“He said that I was beautiful.” Kathleen drifted off, her eyes losing their focus for a little bit.
“What else did he tell you?”
“I don't remember,” she mumbled.
“Please, Mrs. M., I have to know.”
She whimpered. “He told me to go away. I didn't belong there.”
“What else?”
“He told me to stop playing games and go back to my husband. My husband needed me.”
It wasn't what Otto had expected to hear. Yet coming into this he didn't think that he had a real idea what she would tell him. He was on a mission of exploration. “Did you stay the rest of the night anyway?”
“Nope. I went home, and Darby got shot in the eyeball. Poor, beautiful Darby.” She closed her eyes. “He had everything. But it wasn't enough. Not nearly … enough.”
Otto watched her face for a minute or two, his heart breaking. She'd had an indiscretion. She was human after all, not the flawless woman he'd imagined she was. In the end he'd been disappointed in, or at the very least angered by, every woman he'd ever known, especially his mother. But he wasn't angry with Mrs. M. He was sad for her, and he wished that he had the magical power to erase some of her past. She was sleeping now.
He turned away from the bed and removed the chair from the latch. Liz was cool. And he still had Louise.
He girded himself, then opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. A startled Janis Westlake jumped up.
“Where were you?” Otto demanded before she could say anything. “This room was left unguarded. Thank God nothing happened to Mrs. M. Where were you?”
“I was taking a phone call,” she said. “Sir, you're not supposed to be here.”
“Since when?” Otto demanded.

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