The Kill Zone (5 page)

Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: The Kill Zone

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SCOUT'S HONOR â¦ THE WORDS WERE COMING BACK TO HAUNT HER.

H
e let himself in with his key, and his spirits lifted. It was good to be home, another Monday behind him. He entered the alarm code on the touchpad, put his briefcase on the hall table, hung his coat in the closet and went back to the kitchen. Kathleen was putting a pan in the oven, and something on the stove smelled wonderful.

“Hi, Katy, how was your day?”

She gave a sudden start and turned around. She was dressed in a sweatshirt and blue jeans, and wore a pair of his white socks. On her the clothes looked like something out of a fashion magazine.

“You startled me.” She looked like she had been pulled back from a millon miles away against her will, and she resented it. But then she shook her head ruefully. “Sorry, darling. I guess I was daydreaming.”

“I know the feeling.” He went around the counter and gave her a kiss. “Do I get to see what's cooking?”

“Don't push your luck, I don't do this for just anybody.” She gave him a stern look, but she couldn't hold it. She smiled. “Chili, corn bread and a salad. Down-home.”

“Sounds good,” McGarvey said. “So, how was your day?”

“Busy. How about you?”

“It was definitely a Monday.”

“Go change. I'll make you a drink.”

“You've got a deal,” he said, suddenly weary. He went upstairs, changed into a flannel shirt, jeans and moccasins. His eyes were bloodshot from the pool water, and his muscles were sore. Each year it seemed to get a little bit tougher to come back from a strong workout. He stopped and looked out the window. The wind had risen, and the snow had a definite slant. Bad night to be out. He shivered, for some reason thinking about bad nights like this one, and some a lot worse, when he'd been out; stalking his preyâsomeone unexpected, some monster coming out of the blizzard and darkness. What other monsters were lurking out there now, coming toward them? He couldn't shake the feeling of foreboding, of menace that had been hanging over him like a dark cloud for the past several days.

Time to get out, the thought once again flashed across his mind. Go. Run. Run. Run. Find a hole and jump in like he had done before. For the sake of Katy and Liz. Or for self-preservation? He'd never had the guts to ask himself that question. Maybe it was time to start. Self-doubt settled heavy on his shoulders, pushing him down; a nearly impossible burden to bear. He walked out of the bedroom and went downstairs, pushing those thoughts to the back of his mind, grasping for a lightness that he didn't feel because he owed it to his wife to try at least as hard as she was trying.

She had poured him a cognac neat, and she was laying out the place settings at the counter. “I thought we'd eat in here. That okay with you?” She had turned on the gas logs in the French fireplace that separated the kitchen from the family room.

McGarvey nodded. “How was your day, Katy?”

She shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Nothing unusual.”

“You look a little frazzled.”

She was on the other side of the counter, and she cocked her head as if she was listening for something. “The confirmation hearings start tomorrow, don't they?”

“Is that what's getting to you?”

“I saw the Post this morning. They think that you're going to have a bad time of it. Are they going to stop you?”

He was relieved that that's all that was bothering her. They'd not talked very much about the Senate hearings except that their lives, hers included, would be under a microscope for a week or two. It was an inevitable part of the process. Worse than running for elected office because you couldn't campaign. No one was supposed to want this job. If you did, you were automatically suspect. “They might. Would that bother you?”

She thought about it. “What if you are confirmed as DCI, Kirk? How long will you keep the job?”

“I don't know. Maybe I won't take it in the first place. Look, Katy, ifâ”

“I'm serious. Would you make a career of it like Roland did? Peggy told me that it almost killed him.” She was stressed out. “Now that we've come this far I want some time with you.”

“I'll call the President in the morning and tell him I'm out.”

“No,” Kathleen replied sharply.

“It's not worth it, what it's doing to you. I'll stick it out until they get someone else.”

She shook her head as he was talking. “That's not what I meant. I simply want to know how long you'll stay.”

McGarvey didn't know what to say. He felt that whatever answer he gave her would be the wrong one. “Three or four years,” he finally said. “I owe them that much.”

Kathleen stared wide-eyed at him for a moment or two, then nodded. “I can deal with that,” she said, simply.

“I haven't been confirmed yet.”

“You will be,” she said, her mood a lot lighter now. She laughed. “They'd be fools to let you go. You're what the Agency needs right now, and everybody knows it.”

“Is that the scuttlebutt in town?” McGarvey asked. Katy had always been well connected in Washington. She knew people, heard things, noticed things.

“What an ugly word,” she said, amused. “But that's the consensus.” She turned and got the plates and bowls from the cabinet. “I'm not going to watch on television. Hammond is a pompous ass, and he'll try to score points off you.” She got the silverware and napkins. “But if you push back, he'll quit. He's all bluster.”

“That's about what Carleton said,” McGarvey replied. “How long before dinner?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Right, I have to make a phone call.” McGarvey took his drink, got his
briefcase from the hall table and went into his study. The room was a mess. His desk and chair had been moved to the middle and covered with plastic, but the couch and everything else had been moved out somewhere. Sections of two walls had been stripped to the bare studs beneath the drywall, wires dangled loosely from a hole in the center of the ceiling, plaster dust and sawdust covered every surface, and the blinds had been removed from the big window. The carpenters had left their toolboxes and a portable radio in a corner.

He uncovered his desk, found the telephone and called the night duty officer in the Directorate of Operations on the encrypted line. He had thought about this all the way home after seeing the logo on Otto's computer.

“Four-seven-eight-seven, Newby.”

“This is McGarvey. How're things shaping up?” It was after midnight, Greenwich Mean Time and the twenty-four-hour summaries were starting to arrive at Langley from the foreign stations and posts.

“Good evening, Mr. McGarvey,” Jay Newby said. He was one of the old reliable hands who'd cut his teeth in Eastern Europe during the Cold War years. At one time he had been a hell-raiser. But he was on his third marriage now and he had become a stay-at-home, though he didn't mind night duty. “Nothing significant.”

“How about Moscow station?”

“Nothing above a grade three,” Newby said. “I'm scanning. Are you looking for anything in particular, Mr. Director?”

“Just fishing.”

“The SVR is asking Interpol for some help,” Newby said. The SVR was the renamed and slightly reorganized foreign section of the old KGB. “Evidently they lost track of one of their people, and they want him back. Probably cleaned out someone's bank account and skipped the country.”

“Do we have a name?”

“Nikolayev. Dr. Anatoli Nikolaevich. Would you like me to send his file over to you tonight?”

“Not right now. But you can include it in the morning report. Anything else?”

“Not from Moscow. The navy is asking for help in Havana, that just came over. And we've got the heads up on a possible operation in Mexico City. We're passing both items to Mr. Whittaker right now.” Dave Whittaker was the DDO, and nothing escaped his attention.

“Quiet night.”

“Yes, sir.”

McGarvey was about to hang up, but another thought struck him. “Have you already pulled Nikolayev's file?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Rencke asked for it yesterday.”

“Thanks, Jay. Have a good one.” McGarvey hung up and stood there, lost in thought for a few moments. Nikolayev was a name he hadn't heard in a lot of years. If he had to guess he would have thought that the old man was dead, along with just about the entire Baranov crowd. He had been the chief psychologist for Department Viktor. One of the handpicked few. A golden boy.

Now he was missing, and Otto was looking for him.

He went back to the kitchen as Kathleen was about to call him. She had put some soft jazz on the stereo, and they sat together at the counter. She'd always been an elegant woman but something of an indifferent cook. Once they hired a new housekeeper the woman would cover that task. In the meantime Katy's cooking had improved, though he figured that if he told her as much she'd probably quit and they would end up eating out every night or making do with TV dinners. The other problem was that before they hired any house staff the CIA would first have to do a background check, and that could take time. Her old housekeeper had been a good cook, however, and the chili and corn bread were her recipes.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” he said when he was finished. Katy got up to pour them coffee, and he thought that a cigarette would be good right now. A Company shrink had told him once that among other things he was an obsessive/compulsive.

“Do you want anything else?” she asked.

McGarvey looked up at her, and at that moment he thought that he had never been so lucky in all of his life that they had come back to each other. All the wasted, terrible years they had spent apart, mad at each other, could never be regained. But that didn't matter as long as they had here and now.

She gave him a quizzical look. “A penny.”

“I was thinking how lucky we are.”

She smiled but then looked away. “I'm getting worried about Elizabeth. I think that something might be wrong.”

“Physically? Mentally?”

“With her pregnancy. But she won't tell me anything.”

“She and Todd probably had a fight.”

Kathleen shook her head. “I don't think it's that.”

“I'll talk to her in the morningâ”

“Tonight, Kirk. Please.”

Kathleen refused his help with the cleanup so McGarvey took his coffee into the study to call their son-in-law. Van Buren had been a hand-to-hand and exotic weapons instructor at the CIA's training facility outside Williamsburg when Elizabeth took the course. She was a few years younger than Todd, but every bit as stubborn and willful. They were madly in love with each other, but their relationship was complex and extremely competitive. No rookie field officer, especially not a woman, not even if she was the boss's daughter, was going to tell him how to do his job. And no bullshit testosterone factory was going to hold doors and fight off the gremlins to protect the little woman tending the home fires for her.

She had gotten pregnant last year, but lost the baby in the third month. The miscarriage devastated both of them until she got pregnant again. But more than that the ordeal had bonded them even closer than before. They were a single unit as flexible as a willow tree and yet as strong as bar titanium. But they still fought like cats and dogs.

They lived down in Falls Church in a carriage house that belonged to the estate his parents owned. He answered after a couple of rings. It was an unsecured line so McGarvey's number showed up on Van Buren's caller ID.

“Hi, Mac, you all set for tomorrow?”

“As ready as I'll ever be, I guess.” McGarvey pulled the cover off his chair and sat down. There was classical guitar music in the background, and Todd sounded relaxed, even mellow. “But at least it'll be interesting.”

Van Buren chuckled. “That it will be. Did you know that the pool is up to eight hundred bucks?”

“I almost hate to ask: What pool?”

“The exact hour and minute you take a shot at Hammond and he goes down in flames.”

“That'd be about three minutes before Carleton Paterson has a heart attack.”

“Two for one,” Van Burean said. “How's Mrs. M.?”

“She's a little worried about Liz,” McGarvey told him. “Is everything okay?”