The Kill Zone km-9

by David Hagberg

  “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. “Since this afternoon, on Mr. Yemm’s orders, sir.” “We’ll see about that. In the meantime, where is Dr. Stenzel?”

  “He said that he was going downstairs to the cafeteria,” Janis Westlake said.

  “Don’t leave your post again,” Otto ordered, and he headed for the elevators. At the corner he looked back. Janis Westlake was gone, and the door to Mrs. M.“s room was open.

  Dr. Stenzel was seated alone in the nearly empty cafeteria, eating a cheeseburger and fries with a large Coke. Otto got a couple of cartons of milk and went over to him, “Mind if I join you?” Stenzel looked up and frowned. “As a matter of fact I do mind. I’d like to eat my lunch in peace.” Otto sat down anyway. “Listen, Doc, I’m sorry about being such an asshole the other day. It’s just that I’ve got a lot of shit going on.” He bobbed his head. “You know what’s been happening.

  Sooner or later they’re going to get really lucky, and it’ll be more than Liz’s baby that gets hurt.” Stenzel said nothing. He studied Rencke’s eyes. “Look, they’re like family to me, ya know. The only family I ever had. I’d do anything to protect them.” Otto shook his head. “Even if it means pissing you off.” Otto flashed his most charming, sincere smile. After a beat Stenzel’s expression softened.

  “You are an asshole,” he said. “But you’re a fascinating asshole.” He glanced at the cartons of milk. “Milk?” “They didn’t have any cream, and no Twinkies. This’ll have to do.” “What are you doing here?”

  Stenzel asked. “Your name has been taken off the visitor’s list, and Elizabeth already checked herself out and went home with her husband.”

  “Is she okay?” Otto asked, alarmed. “She was supposed to spend the night.” “She’ll be fine.” Otto searched Stenzel’s face for any sign that he was lying. But the psychiatrist was telling the truth. “I’ve got a question about Mrs. M.“s visitors.” “I don’t know why your name was taken off. You’ll have to talk to Security.” “No, I meant who’s been here to see her, besides us, and Mac and Liz. Has there been anyone else?” “Her doctors-” “No, I mean someone else. Someone not connected with the hospital or with the Company.”

  Stenzel thought for a moment, then started to shake his head, but stopped. “The priest.”

  “What priest?”

  “Vietski, or something like that. He’s the parish priest at Good Shepherd, where Kathleen attends. Mr. McGarvey said that he stopped by.”

  “Is his name on the list?”

  “According to the nurses he’s practically one of the staff. A lot of military and government employees go to Good Shepherd.”

  “Mac knows that he was here?” Otto asked. He wanted to make sure.

  Stenzel nodded.

  “Who else has been to see her?” Otto pressed. “Friends? Someone from one of her charities? Maybe the Red Cross? One of their neighbors?”

  “Nobody,” Stenzel said. “Security is keeping a tight watch on her.

  Nobody who isn’t supposed to be here has seen her.”

  Otto got up to leave, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “You’re wrong, Doc. I got in to see her.”

  Dick Yemm got off the elevator on the sixth floor and hurried past the nurses’ station to Janis Westlake, who jumped to her feet when she spotted him. “How is she?” he demanded. “Fine.” “Okay, what the hell is going on?” “One of the nurses said that there was a call from you. But there was nobody on the line.” “I didn’t call-” “No, sir. I think that it was Mr. Rencke. When I got back to my station he was coming out of Mrs. McGarvey’s room. I think that he made the call to get me away from the door.” Yemm was angry. This shouldn’t have happened. “You checked on her? Nothing’s wrong?” “She’s fine,” Janis Westlake assured him. “Did he say where he was going?” “He asked where Dr. Stenzel was, and I told him the cafeteria.” Dr. Stenzel came up the corridor, stopped in the nurses’ station for a moment, and emerged with a patient clipboard and chart. He looked up, seeing Yemm and Janis Westlake with concerned expressions on their faces. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “Have you seen Otto Rencke?” Yemm demanded.

  “In the cafeteria. He left just before I did.” “Did he tell you where he was going?” Stenzel shook his head. “No, but he told me that he managed to see Mrs. McGarvey.” Yemm shot Janis Westlake a dark look, then turned back to the psychiatrist. “What’d he talk to you about?”

  “He wanted to know who’d been here to see Mrs. McGarvey, other than us and the hospital staff. I told him that so far as I knew the only other person up here was the priest from her church.” “Yeah, he checks out, and there’s been no one else,” Yemm said. “What else did he want to know? Did he ask you why his name had been pulled from the list?”

  “No, but like I said, he admitted that he was able to see her anyway.”

  “I’m doubling the guard,” Yemm said. “Might be a moot point. I’m going to be discharging her soon.” “I’m still doubling the guard, no matter where she is,” Yemm insisted. “Is she ready to go home?”

  “Probably not. But I can’t keep her here against her will. It’s just that going back to the house might not be the best thing for her so soon.” “We’re trying to get them to go to a safe house where they’d be easier to watch. Her and Elizabeth. But they’re stubborn.” Stenzel managed a faint smile. “Runs in the family,” he said. He pushed open the door and went into Kathleen’s room. The television was on and tuned to an episode of ER. She was propped up in bed, smiling. She had fixed her hair and put on a little makeup. She looked up. “Dr.

  Stenzel,” she said. “When can I go home?” “How are you feeling, Kathleen?” “Bored ” she said, and the door closed. “I’m sorry about the screw up, sir,” Janis Westlake said. “Don’t worry about it,” Yemm told her. “Rencke is a lot smarter than the rest of us. That’s why I’m calling for backup.” She was st
artled. “Sir, do you think that it’s him?” Yemm shrugged. “I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know anything now.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  STROKE; EVEN BRING DOWN ENTIRE ORGANIZATIONS. NOT ONLY KILL THE MAN, BUT KILL THE IDEA…

  FORT A.P. HILL, VIRGINIA

  Rencke crossed the river on 1-495, but instead of taking the George Washington Memorial Parkway back to the CIA, he continued to 1-95 and headed the fifty miles south to the Agency’s records storage facility outside of Fredericksburg. He wasn’t exactly a welcome figure at the underground installation, but his presence was tolerated because everyone there knew what he could do to the place with the proper computer virus. The records at A.P. Hill were old files, going all the way back to 1946, when the CIA was formed, and some even farther back to the WWII days of the OSS. They were paper documents, stored in file folders, classified by era, and cross-referenced by department, operation or finance track, and tucked away in bins stored on shelves stacked eighteen feet high, that ran row and tier for miles. All of it was eight hundred feet underground in what had been an old salt mine.

  Lighting had been installed, along with plumbing, tile floors, in some places walls and doors, and offices and conference rooms, along with a sophisticated air-handling system that kept the place at a dust-free constant temperature and humidity. But all of it was run by computer, using, almost exclusively, programs that Otto Rencke had designed and installed some years ago when he had done the freelance work of reorganizing the CIA’s computer system. No one knew more about A.P.

  Hill than Otto did. So he was never turned away when he came knocking at the door. He set up his laptop in one of the conference rooms, plugging into the system’s mainframe. He was assigned an electric golf cart so that he could get around the stacks. But he was not offered any assistance. The file clerks and computer custodians knew better.

  If Rencke needed something, he would find them. But when he had the bit in his teeth he wanted to be left alone. Rencke stopped in midstride and looked out the windows. They faced the broad main aisle that ran the entire length of the facility. The overhead lights disappeared in the distance. The last time he was here about two years ago he had looked down McGarvey’s past because of another difficult operation. Those had been sad days when he’d seen the Kansas Highway Patrol’s graphic accident scene photographs of Kirk’s parents. They’d been killed by the Russians, maybe even at General Baranov’s behest.

  Even then it was obvious in some circles what McGarvey would become.

  He’d shown his mettle in Vietnam. And he’d shown his nature at the CIA’s training facility, acing all of his courses, and in every case showing up even his instructors. Was that it after all? General Valentin Illen Baranov come back from the grave to carry out his revenge for not only what McGarvey had done, but for what he was about to become? Nikolayev’s initial message from Paris had hinted at as much. But then he disappeared. He was not answering Rencke’s queries.

  Maybe he had gotten frightened off. Or maybe the SVR had gotten to him and either taken him back to Moscow or killed him. But so far the death of a Russian man, other than Trofimov, in Paris or elsewhere in France, had not shown up on any of Rencke’s search engines. But that didn’t mean much. Maybe Nikolayev’s body had been hidden. Rencke focused on the aisle through the stacks. Nothing moved out there. But the answers, if they were anywhere on earth, were here. And he had a starting point; or rather he had two out of three legs of a triangle, with McGarvey at one point and Baranov at the second. The third was the assassin who had gone active under Network Martyrs. The three names were bound by the most intimate of relationships, that of the killers and their victim. He went back to his laptop, pulled up a search engine, and found and printed out a surprisingly short list of Baranov references. When the computer was finished, he took the cart out into the stacks, stopped at the address for each of the Baranov files, retrieved them from their bins, and moved on to the next. He was finished in less than twenty minutes and he took the eight files back to the conference room, where he spread them in chronological order on the long table. He began to read. Valentin Illen Baranov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, a true Cossack he was fond of telling his staff, during the Second World War, though his exact birth date and parents’ names were not known. He was not a particularly outstanding student, except that unlike the other boys he never fought or got into trouble. His talent had been to get the other boys to fight for him, even though they didn’t want to. Even then he was perfecting his leadership talent. The secret is easy, he confided to an intended victim whom McGarvey rescued, you simply have to believe in people.

  Make them believe in you. Make them believe in their heart of hearts that they can do absolutely anything so long as someone believes in them. In a way it was exactly like love, he said. After four years at the University of Moscow, where he studied international law and four languages English, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic he enlisted in the Missile Service where he was assigned to the GRU, Military Intelligence unit. This was during the era when the missile defense ring around Moscow was being constructed. Security on the massive project was so tight that the CIA files (see cross ref CKBANNER through CKOTIS) contained very little information of any real strategic value.

  Following four years in the service he was discharged as a major, when he went immediately to work for the NKGB, where his rise was even more spectacular than it had been in the military. He had the Midas touch.

  Every operation he became involved with turned out to be a gold seam, providing the Soviet Union with a wealth of information. He was rewarded with limos and drivers. He was given a brand-new, one-thousand-square-meter luxury apartment on Kusnetzki Prospekt in leadership row. He was given a dacha on the Istra River outside the city. He was given not only a free rein over the KGB’s Department Viktor, but he was awarded with a highly prized diplomatic passport. He had money and power and the freedom to travel anywhere in the world at any time he wanted to for any purpose that he desired. Presidents and prime ministers didn’t have that kind of power.

  Rencke tried to read between the lines. Had Baranov been seeking the ultimate challenge? A lot of men in his position couldn’t be satisfied with routine assignments. Had McGarvey become his Everest? Darby Yarnell had probably been one of Baranov’s unwitting pawns from the very beginning of Yarnell’s CIA career in Moscow. Darby was a man who had an overabundance of belief and confidence in himself. And his attitude manifested itself in the way he dressed, in the gourmet style he preferred to dine in, in the Jaguars and Aston-Martins he drove, and in the way he treated people. Yarnell had convinced himself that Staff Sergeant Barry Innes, a young crypto operator at the Moscow embassy was on the KGB’s payroll. He never explained how he knew this, he just did. Rather than simply find the proof, arrest the kid and send him home for trial, Yarnell came up with Operation Hellgate. The Russians had snatched one of our people, and Yarnell wanted to cause them as much grief as possible. He wanted to stick it to them. Quid pro quo.

  But it depended on pretending that we didn’t know Sergeant Innes had been turned. Innes was promoted to technical sergeant, placed in charge of CIA encrypted communications and was practically force-fed information that was so fantastic that the Russians slavered at the bit for more. But the most clever part of Hellgate was the specific information given to Innes. Most of it was false, but not all of it.

  Yarnell argued that the Russians would have to be given something legitimate, from time to time. Something that they could verify as true, so that they would swallow the lies. And that’s exactly how headquarters approved it. In that way actual intelligence information was passed to the Russians. It had been the most perfect of Baranov’s schemes to that date. No one knew who was pulling the strings, not poor, dumb Sergeant Innes, who was spying for the money so that he could support his young wife and child living back home in San Diego.

  Not anyone from the embassy, or back in Langley. And most especially not Darby Yarnell himself, who in the very end w
as proven to be nothing but a dupe. Sergeant Innes got himself shot to death by Yarnell’s manipulations, the spy of ours whom the Russians had snatched was given back, and Hellgate was deemed a success. Yarnell was a rising star.

  McGarvey was not a part of that Moscow operation, but Darby Yarnell became the bridge that linked him to Baranov. After Moscow, and after a brief stint in Langley, first on the Russian — —desk and then, at Yarnell’s own request, on the Latin America desk, Yarnell was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. He was the logical man for the job. He had taught himself Spanish in eight months flat, he had worked the CIA’s Latin America desk, and with his Moscow background he could counter what was the largest KGB operations center out of Moscow, in the Soviet’s Mexico City embassy. Baranov was the star there as he had been in Moscow, running a pair of intelligence networks called CESTA and Banco del Sur, which collected information throughout Latin and South America. The game in those days, before the Bay of Pigs, was to infiltrate as many governments and government agencies as possible. The Soviets, and the Americans, did this by befriending various government employees in a variety i of ways. The seductions very often involved honey traps, with beautiful | young women imported from Moscow or Siberia, or from Atlanta or California Exotic women to Latin Americans. Most often the schemes involved a lot of money: nice houses, luxury cars, televisions and stereos; anything that the average low-paid government employee could scarcely dream of, let alone possess. The Russians were winning the game because they were more ruthless than the Americans, until Darby Yarnell showed up.