The Kill Zone

by David Hagberg

  “After the hearings.” Adkins cracked a smile. “God only knows what I’d come back to if I left now.”

  “Seriously, Dick, there’s no job in the world worth your wife. Anytime you want to pull the pin, say the word and you’re out of here.”

  Adkins nodded tiredly. “I appreciate it. But for now she doesn’t seem to be getting any worse—same old same old. We’ll go after the hearings.”

  “I was thinking about that over the weekend.”

  “I know, I talked to Carleton on Friday. He’s worried that you’re going to tell the President no thanks, and hang on here only until someone else can be confirmed.”

  “It wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

  “True. But the general picked you for the job, and he’s a pretty good judge of character. At least stick it out for a couple of years. This place has never been run so well.”

  “Did you read the overnights? An idiot could do this job.”

  “And some have,” Adkins said. “Lots of grass fires out there, any one of which could start a forest fire.”

  “Haynes has other people he can name who’d get past Hammond without a problem.”

  “Need we say more?” Adkins asked. “This place would go back to being run like a Fortune 500 company, or worse, like a political constituency. I for one don’t think that would do the country any good. And I’m not alone in that opinion. But it’s your call. Take your own advice; if you want to pull the pin, just say the word. But don’t screw around, Mac. Don’t bullshit the troops. Either do the job, or get the hell out right now and save us all a lot of trouble.”

  Adkins was right, of course. Lead, follow or get out of the way. Harry Truman had a sign on his desk that said THE BUCK STOPS HERE. The sign on McGarvey’s desk could have read, THE BULLSHIT STOPS HERE. He had a hell of a staff; the right people at the right time; professionals who were willing, like Adkins was this morning, to tell the boss the way it really was without fear of repercussions. The CIA had not been run that way for years, if it ever had.

  He looked up. “I want to see the in-depths on the overnights, especially the India-Pakistan situation. I think it’s going to heat up even faster than anyone believes, and we’ll have to play catch up over there.”

  “I’ll set up an Intelligence Operations briefing this afternoon.”

  “Let’s put it on the nine o’clock agenda. I want something for USIB at ten. But first I want to see a file summary of everything we know.”

  “Will do.”

  “Now, what do we have on the situation in Havana? Do you know who the guy was?”

  “Navy lieutenant commander Paul Andersen, stationed at the Naval Intelligence unit at Guantanamo Bay. He flew up to Miami on Thursday, picked up a new identity, and Friday flew to Havana with a delegation of travel agents and cruise ship reps. He’d apparently set up a meeting with Hector Sanchez, the second-in-command in Cuban Military Intelligence Internal Affairs. Something is supposedly going on in Castro’s private security detail. Sanchez was going to talk to Andersen in trade for asylum and presumably a stack of cash.”

  “Was it a setup?”

  “Naval Intelligence is still working the problem. Havana police found his naked body in the alley behind his hotel. He’d been beaten up and then took a dive, or was thrown, out his tenth-floor window. That was about ten minutes after the prostitute he’d hired left the room.”

  “What about our people on the ground?”

  “They’re working on it. But they’ll have to burn a couple of assets to get anywhere.”

  “Do it,” McGarvey said.

  “All right,” Adkins replied. “No one is safe anymore. But that has to change.”

  “We’ll give it a try.”

  When Adkins was gone, McGarvey called Otto Rencke’s extension in the computer center on the third floor. Back like this he was having trouble with people depending on him. Part of the job. But trust gave him an odd feeling between his shoulder blades, as if someone with a high-power rifle was taking a bead on him.

  Otto answered on the first ring, his voice sharp, even shrill. “What do you want?”

  “Good morning, what’s eating your ass?”

  “I’m busy. What do you want?”

  “I want to know what you were doing at my house yesterday, and why you just sat in the driveway without ringing the bell.”

  “Somebody else.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody else. I wasn’t out there. Louise and I spent the entire weekend painting the apartment. And each other.” Otto’s tone of voice softened a little; more like his old self. “Maybe you oughta get security out there, ya know. Don’t want it purple. That’s the color for a shroud. Bad. Bad. Bad dog. Something might be gainin’ on you, ya know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Not ready yet,” Otto replied distantly, as if his mind had suddenly gone elsewhere. “Difficult, delicate. Still pastels, but I don’t know, can’t say. Just look up, Mac; we all gotta keep our eyes really open, ya know. All the time, not just in the night.”

  Rencke broke the connection, something chiming in the background noises of his office, and McGarvey was mystified. When Otto was in the middle of something he tended to go off to his own little world. But this was different. He had never had this harsh an edge before.

  THREE

  … HE HAD TO WONDER IF WHAT HE HAD ACCOMPLISHED HAD REALLY MATTERED AT ALL, OR IF HIS CAREER HAD BEEN NOTHING BUT A WASTED EFFORT.

  The U.S. Intelligence Board meeting ran ten minutes past the lunch hour, but nobody grumbled. There was a sense of accomplishment now that a new DCI was at the helm.

  McGarvey presented the distinguished service intelligence medals to Whittaker’s people, grabbed a quick sandwich at his desk while dictating letters to Ms. Swanfeld, then returned a few phone calls and did some work on the draft of his opening statement.

  He spent a couple of contentious hours with Carleton Paterson, who insisted on playing devil’s advocate; acting as he thought Senator Hammond might act, working at every turn to provoke McGarvey into making an angry outburst; say something impolitic. “If it gets too bad, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” McGarvey promised. “I might throttle the senator, but I won’t say a thing.”

  “Hammond’s not a bad man like Joe McCarthy was,” Paterson said seriously. “He really believes that what he is doing is for the good of the country.”

  “I know, and I won’t actually choke him to death,” McGarvey said, smiling. “Not unless I snap.”

  Paterson gathered his papers and stuffed them into his attaché case. “I used to wonder if there was anything behind that superefficient, cool, macho exterior of yours. Like maybe a sense of humor.” He shook his head. “I guess I just found out. I suggest you don’t take your wry wit into the hearing chambers. You won’t have a lot of understanding friends there.”

  “No DCI has.”

  “True.”

  After his directorate meetings and his talk with the ambassador to India, he went down to the competition-size pool in the basement gym to do his laps. It was 6:00 P.M. Yemm swam with him, as usual. DCIs were not allowed to drown themselves, even accidentally, especially not on Yemm’s watch. And anyway, Yemm needed the exercise, too. The act of swimming was mindless, just like the treadmill in the mornings, freeing McGarvey’s mind to drift to Otto Rencke, who, despite his eccentricities, or perhaps because of them, was possibly the most valuable man in the Agency. He was able to see things that no one else could. He’d once explained to McGarvey that he had worked on the problem of describing color to a blind Indian mathematician. “Toughest thing I ever did, ya know. Oh, wow, but it was cool.” Using a complicated series of tensor calculus matrices, he was able to first establish neutrality—white. Then he separated the equations into their constituent parts; the way white light separates into a rainbow of colors through a prism. “The eighth-order equations were my prism, and in the end Ravi kissed me, and said, ‘I see. Thank you very much.’”
The same concept in reverse, representing very difficult mathematics by colors, was Otto’s breakthrough. He’d already quantified millions of pieces of seemingly random data and intelligence information into the form of mathematical equations, so now he could reduce the complicated decisions that an intelligence officer had to make into colors. Pastels were at the edge of his understanding; not strong, not clear. But lavender, and especially purple stood for very bad situations—acts of terrorism, assassinations, even wars. To this point Rencke had never been wrong, not once. When a color showed up he could predict what was coming.

  They got dressed at seven. On the way down to the car they stopped at the third-floor computer center. This was where Otto usually worked, in the midst of the Agency’s mainframe and three interconnected Cray supercomputers. The huge, dimly lit blue room was kept cooler than the rest of the building. It smelled strongly of electronic equipment, and no one ever wanted to speak above a whisper. Mysterious forces beyond human ken were in operation here. The computer was like the tabernacle that held the host on a Catholic Church altar; holy of holies. There were niches and alcoves scattered throughout the room, nestled amidst the equipment, where the human operators worked. They hadn’t seen Otto for most of the afternoon, though no one could say exactly when he had left. It was like that down here; he was an elusive figure, like the shadows beneath a shifting pattern of clouds. The niche where he usually worked was a filthy mess of computer printouts, paper cups, milk cartons and McDonald’s wrappers strewn on the floor and on a long worktable; wastepaper baskets overflowing, shredder baskets filled, classified satellite downloads lying everywhere. The infrared and visible light images appeared to be mostly of Eastern Europe and Russia. McGarvey recognized the Baltic coastlines of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia up to Finland, and then the cities of Helsinki, Leningrad and as far east as Moscow. One of the monitors displayed the sword-and-shield logo of the old KGB against a pastel pink background. McGarvey touched enter, and the screen immediately went blank.

  “Doesn’t look like he wants anyone snooping around,” Yemm said.

  “Apparently not,” McGarvey replied absently. He stared at the blank screen. He was concerned. There was nothing currently on the front burner about the KGB. But Otto was in the middle of something. What?

  Time to talk to the Company shrink? He looked at the piles of classified photographs littering the area. He didn’t want to lose Otto. Or even worse, he didn’t want Otto to run amok; the entire CIA could suffer. The damage could ultimately be worse than what Aldrich Ames had done to them.

  He telephoned the computer center night duty supervisor and asked him to clean up the monitor area that Rencke had been using and secure any classified documents he found.

  “He won’t be happy, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  On the way home he stared at the heavy traffic on the Parkway, suddenly depressed. It was dark already, and it was supposed to snow again. He shivered even though it was warm in the car.

  “Do you ever think about getting out of the business, Dick?” he asked.

  “Every day, boss,” Yemm replied. “Every day.”

  The answer seemed particularly bitter to McGarvey. But then everyone was in a screwed-up mood lately. It had to be the weather. And for him it had to be that he had no real idea why he had accepted the President’s appointment.

  Time to step down. He’d done his bit. He’d fought the wars, though very often he had to wonder if what he had accomplished had really mattered at all, or if his career had been nothing but a wasted effort. And here he was now at the helm. It was a job he’d never wanted. Yet almost every DCI whom he’d served under had been in his estimation primarily a politician. Not a career intelligence officer, like in Britain.

  The CIA was falling apart. Had been for years. The Agency had become nothing more than a glorified extension of the White House; DCIs told the administration nothing more than it wanted to hear, when it wanted to hear it.

  Time for the truth. Trouble was that McGarvey didn’t know if he was up to the job.

  FOUR

  SCOUT’S HONOR … THE WORDS WERE COMING BACK TO HAUNT HER.

  He 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 prey—someone 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. May
be I won’t take it in the first place. Look, Katy, if—”

  “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.