The Kill Zone

FOUR

It 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 Francois-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 stair hall 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 clock maker 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 Katys 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 ODin 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 Hermes 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 stair hall 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? 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 Perignon 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.