The Kill Zone km-9

by David Hagberg

  She raised a big Clock 17 nine millimeter pistol and fired four shots as fast as she could pull the trigger, straight ahead into the wall, blasting big chunks of plaster everywhere. “Mother!” Elizabeth screamed from the living room entry. Kathleen swiveled toward Elizabeth’s voice, bringing the pistol around in a tight arc, the muzzle ending up a few feet from her husband’s face. “Hello, Katy,”

  McGarvey said. His gun hand was at his side, the pistol pointed toward the floor. Kathleen started to shake the way she had at the house when she’d gone into convulsions. She tried to speak, but it came out as a low-throated growl. She was obviously going through an internal struggle that threatened to blow her into a million jagged pieces.

  McGarvey could sense that there were people behind him, but he didn’t take his eyes off Kathleen’s. He raised his free hand to her. “Give me your gun, sweetheart. Please.” Kathleen flinched. She took a half step forward, the pistol never wavering from the middle of her husband’s face. “No one’s going to hurt you, Katy,” McGarvey said gently. “We’re all here. All of your friends. Liz and Todd, too.

  We’ve come to help you, darling.” He tried to smile, but he could see Darby Yarnell using her. Baranov arranging for her training; holding her hand, telling her that she should go back to her husband, that she didn’t belong with them. All the while they were battering down her defenses; tearing apart the very attributes that made her human, that made her who she was. Once again he wanted to lash out at them. But they were both dead. And that they had died at his hands, even though the events had occurred more than a decade ago, gave him just the tiniest amount of satisfaction at this moment. They had gotten to his wife and damaged her, for no other reason than some insane plot to arrange for the murder of someone at some distant time and place. Now they were dead. Kathleen had been programmed to kill her husband if and when he was ever put up for Director of Central Intelligence. All these years her control officer had been Father Vietski; every week he had reinforced her training; built upon the artificial hate and fear and blind passion that they had mercilessly conditioned into her. He’d done it for nothing more than money. It must have been difficult, McGarvey thought, because by nature she was not a violent woman.

  Anything but. Stenzel would say that she fell apart mentally because she had an impossible time dealing with the contradictions that were tearing apart her soul. On the one hand she was programmed to assassinate her husband. And on the other, she loved her husband, and killing him was unthinkable. It’s why she had sabotaged Otto’s car, to force her husband into stepping down from the appointment. She’d also talked Otto into wearing his seat belt so that he wouldn’t be seriously injured. She couldn’t have sabotaged Liz’s skis. McGarvey was pretty sure that they would find out it was Father Vietski on one of his trips to the house. Vietski had supplied the Semtex and the fuses. The fact that her daughter had been so terribly hurt that she had lost the baby had sent Kathleen into an even deeper spiral toward insanity. It was exactly what Vietski wanted because it made her more pliable. He’d also supplied the Semtex and extra beach bag for the helicopter. The bomb was supposed to kill them. End it once and for all. But Kathleen had subconsciously worked it out so that she could warn them away at the last minute. All of the misdirections, even the symptoms of her illness were an effort by her subconscious to remove the reason for her programming. If her husband stepped down she would not have to kill him. It had come down to that simple choice in her mind. But McGarvey loved her as much as she loved him. He would give her another choice.

  “You don’t have to kill me, Katy,” he said. She flinched again. Her gun hand shook. At this distance it would be impossible for her to miss if she pulled the trigger. “Yes,” she said, the single word strangled in her throat. “No, Kathleen,” McGarvey said. He raised his pistol to his temple. “I won’t let you do this. You don’t have to kill me. I’ll do it.” “No!” Elizabeth screamed in anguish.

  Kathleen’s eyes were wild. A tic developed in her right cheek.

  Spittle drooled from a corner of her mouth. She had been given a new, terrible choice. She didn’t know what to do. She was overloading.

  McGarvey cocked the pistol. “It’s okay, Katy,” he said. He began to pull the trigger. “Kirk!” Kathleen screamed. “My God, what have I done?” She lowered her hand and let the big gun drop to the carpet runner. “No,” she said softly. “No.” She stepped toward, tentatively, and then as McGarvey uncocked his pistol and lowered it, she came into his arms and began to cry. “Hello, Katy,” McGarvey said. “Welcome home.”

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERMATH

  Tell me not here, it needs not saying.

  What tune the enchantress plays

  In aftermaths of soft September

  Or under blanching Mays,

  For she and I were long acquainted

  And I knew all her ways.

  Alfred Edward Housman

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

  23rd Psalm

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, YOU MIGHT GET IT.

  WASHINGTON

  The cherry blossoms along West Basin Drive were in time for Easter.

  Kathleen watched from the backseat as the DCI’s limousine swept grandly toward the Ellipse and the White House beyond. She smiled with pleasure, her eyes clear, no longer troubled. It was as if she had finally awakened from a very long nightmare. The bright morning perfectly matched her light mood. “I’ve never seen them so pretty,”

  she said to her husband, seated beside her. He squeezed her hand, and she looked out the window again. “Kinda makes you feel like a Roman general off to get his reward from Caesar after the war, doesn’t it?”

  “Sorta,” McGarvey told her. All of them had awakened from a long nightmare. The past three months had been all the more difficult because they had to pick up a lot of pieces; tie up a lot of loose ends; heal a lot of wounds. And for him personally, he’d had to deal with the apologies for suspecting his friends and treating them the way he had. They understood. Or at least they said that they understood.

  But he’d seen the odd glance from Dick Adkins, felt the momentary distances from Otto, and even saw the occasional hesitation in his own son-in-law’s eyes. Kathleen’s initial recovery had come quickly once she was free from the weekly reinforcement by her control officer. She didn’t remember a lot of what happened, though she had dreams that when she awoke she could not remember. An Internal Affairs investigation co directed by Whittaker and Stenzel with representation from the FBI and Secret Service Office of White House Security, cleared Kathleen of any responsibility for the deaths of the helicopter pilot in the USVI, and of Dick Yemm and the four security officers in front of the house. It had been she, of course. But the investigators concluded that her mind and therefore her actions had been controlled by outside forces. The deaths were listed as: by person or persons unknown. Unofficially it was given to understand that the murders were directed and carried out by the Russian mafia for as yet unknown reasons. But the real healing would be a long time in coming, McGarvey thought. It was one of the reasons he’d decided to stay on at the CIA to make everything right, so far as that was possible. And, because Kathleen would not let him simply walk away from a job that was, in her words, “tailor-made” for him. He would give the Agency three more years, then he would pull the pin for good. It was a time period both he and Katy could live with, and it corresponded with what remained of the President’s term of office. Adkins had agreed to stay on as McGarvey’s deputy director, as did the others on his staff: David Whittaker, Jared Kraus, Tommy Doyle and Otto. Especially Otto. McGarvey did not want to lose his old friend, who had gone through his own terrors of the damned over the past few months. The eighth name on Otto’s list; the one that he had trouble admitting even to himself, was Kathleen’s. Otto had put it together before anyone else had: the business with Baranov and Darby Yarnell; even the possibility
that Janis Vietski was her control officer. That night he’d stationed Louise Horn on the road with a telephone intercept device to listen for a call to Vietski. If the priest couldn’t come to the house, then he and Kathleen would talk on the phone. Which is exactly what happened. And which was why Otto had placed his own name on the list so that when the trap was sprung he and Louise would be there to give whatever help they could give. They passed the John Paul Jones Memorial and headed north on Seventeenth, the Washington Monument rose grandly on their right. McGarvey did feel like a Roman general, he supposed, heading to the palace for his reward. He just wasn’t so sure that swearing him in as DCI was such a reward after all. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

  Kathleen turned. She straightened his tie and brushed a loose strand of hair from his forehead. “Otto and Louise are riding over with Todd and Elizabeth.” She smiled. “I’m proud of you, Kirk. We all are.”

  “It’ll be a busy three years, but I’ll keep a lid on it, I promise you, Katy. Not too much traveling. I can promise you at least that much. I might work late, but I’ll stay in town most of the time.” She laughed out loud. The sound was musical. “Tell me another story, sailor.”

  Grassinger was driving. He’d taken over Dick Yemm’s position. He glanced in the rearview mirror and grinned. He had pitched his bitch in the post ops debriefings, but the director had not shot him down. He had agreed with his security people. And that made McGarvey not only the boss, in Grassinger’s mind, but a sharp operator to boot. “I won’t bullshit the troops,” McGarvey told his people. “Nor do I expect you to bullshit me. I want to hear it like it is. Do you read me?” Loud and clear, Grassinger thought. Loud and clear. It was getting to be a real pleasure getting up and going to work in the mornings. That was something new. “It won’t be like before,” McGarvey told his wife. He was apologizing too much, but his family had paid a horrible price for what he was. Over the past months Katy would stop in the middle of something and look up at him, a sudden terror in her eyes. She had been brainwashed into killing her husband. She didn’t want to do it, of course. Such an act ran counter to everything she stood for. At the very end McGarvey had come to that understanding, so he had given her another choice. An impossible choice, actually. She did not have to kill him because he was going to commit suicide. But she could not let him destroy himself. That was not a part of her brainwashing. She no longer had to carry out her prime instruction, and therefore she was able to act on her own to save her husband’s life. Kathleen smiled patiently, as if she had waited for him to work all that out in his head. “Don’t you know, darling, that nothing stays the same.” She shook her head. “We can never go back, thank goodness, even if we wanted to.” Constitution Avenue was busy this morning. Life was back to normal in the capital city. The terrorism here and in New York City last year, and the terrorism within the CIA over the winter, was behind them. McGarvey had done some thinking about the next three years, but he had given even more thought to what would come after. Kathleen, Liz and Todd and the children they planned to adopt, and finally the book about Voltaire that he’d been working on for ten years. Maybe he’d even smoke a pipe and wear tweed jackets with elbow patches. Nikolayev was dead. They’d found his body slumped next to a tree beside the driveway above the safe house that night. He’d had a long-term heart condition. All the excitement and the physical exertion had finally killed him. Father Vietski disappeared that night from Good Shepherd and no one had heard from him since. Otto’s best guess was that the Russian mafia, which had apparently been contracted by the Kremlin to clean up the mess that Baranov left, had killed him and buried his body somewhere. They had killed Zhuralev in Moscow and Trofimov in Paris.

  They were thorough. Vietski’s body would probably never be found. As the President had promised, Senators Hammond and Madden had come around, finally seeing the merits of hiring an intelligence professional to run the CIA. Bob Johnson had cooperated with Internal Affairs, admitting that he had supplied information to Senator Hammond’s staff almost from the day that he had started working for the Company. What wasn’t clear was why; except that both Hammond and Johnson were from Minnesota. Johnson was allowed to resign with the understanding that he would never work in any sensitive government job.

  Ironically, even Senator Hammond refused to hire him. “A penny,”

  Kathleen said. “You were a million miles away just then.” McGarvey came back. “Roland and Peggy had their boat moved to the Bahamas. They want us to take a week off and go sailing with them. What do you think, Kathleen?” They came to the west entrance to the White House grounds on New York Avenue. Grassinger pulled up at the guard house.

  “Katy,” she corrected. She nodded. “I’ll be happy to go anywhere, as long as it’s with you.”

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAVID HAGBERG is a former Air Force cryptographer who has traveled extensively in Europe, the Arctic, and the Caribbean, and has spoken at CIA functions. He has published more than twenty novels of suspense, including High Flight, Assassin, and Joshua’s Hammer. He makes his home in Florida.

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