The Kill Zone

by David Hagberg

He eased the ski glove off her right hand and held her fingers.

  “Liz, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” He looked down at her unmoving fingers. Tiny, narrow, delicate, lifeless. “Oh, God, Liz, please,” Todd said close to her ear. “Just a little squeeze. I’ll feel it.”

  She was on her knees, almost as if she were praying. Her ski goggles were askew on her face, the right lens shattered and covered with blood. He wanted to take them off, but he didn’t dare.

  He looked back the way she had come, then up toward the chairlift tower at the top of the ridge. He could make out two figures starting down the slope into the bowl. Even from this distance he could see that they were pulling a stretcher sled and were clad in the orange jackets of the ski patrol.

  “Help is on the way, Liz,” he told his wife. “Hang on, sweetheart, they’re coming.” He shifted so that he could look up into her face. There was a lot of blood from a big gash low on her forehead, but it wasn’t arterial, and because of the cold air the bleeding was already slowing down.

  There was blood in the snow between her legs. At first he thought that it was from her head wounds, but then he realized that the front of her ski suit was soaked with blood.

  He fell back, a moan involuntarily escaping from his throat. The baby. Not again. Please, dear God, not again.

  The ski patrol was moving fast down the slope. Todd looked up and desperately waved to them. They waved back.

  “Just a couple of minutes now, Liz,” he said to her. “I swear to God.” He didn’t know how he could face Mac and Mrs. M. This was all his fault. He should have been an asshole and canceled the ski trip. He’d known better. The doctor, who’d been somewhat skeptical, would have sided with him.

  If he had been strong enough. Responsible.

  He glanced at the ski patrol rescuers, who were getting closer, then turned the other way, hardly able to contain himself. He felt helpless.

  His eyes lit on one of Elizabeth’s skis. It had gotten tangled in the lower branches of a couple of small pines a few feet away.

  Elizabeth’s condition didn’t seem to be getting any worse. She was starting to breathe a little easier, and there was nothing he could do for her.

  He wanted to scream. To lash out at someone, at anyone.

  He crawled over to the lone ski and pulled it out of the branches. He brushed the snow from what was left of the bindings. The rear mechanism had shattered. Nothing remained attached to the base of the ski except for some jagged pieces of metal.

  He stared at the mechanism. It hadn’t broken apart. The metal hadn’t simply failed because of work fatigue. The binding had shattered.

  As if it had been blown apart, from the inside out.

  He bent forward and sniffed the binding, then reared back. He knew the smell. He should. He’d smelled it often enough during training at the Farm.

  It was Semtex. A Polish-made plastic explosive. Very stable, very powerful, very easy to get on the open market.

  The ski patrol was a little more than one hundred yards out now. Van Buren buried the ski, then scrambled back to Elizabeth. She was still unconscious, and although she was pale, he couldn’t see anything catastrophic.

  He unzippered her belt pouch and took out her wallet. He removed her CIA identification card, driver’s license, and two credit cards under her real name and pocketed them. The ski patrol was coming on quickly, but they were still too far away to make out what he was doing.

  He took a small, plastic-wrapped package from a back compartment in Elizabeth’s wallet and extracted a Minnesota driver’s license, social security card, bank debit card, and University of Minnesota student ID and medical insurance card all in the name of Doris Sampson, and distributed them in her wallet.

  Somebody had tried to kill her. It was important that he and Liz drop out of public view right now until he could call for help. His cell phone was at the hotel.

  Van Buren replaced Elizabeth’s wallet in her pouch. “It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. I promise, nobody’s going to hurt you again.”

  Van Buren stood up, glanced at the ski patrol rescuers, then scanned the ridgelines. Either the plastique had been set on a fuse, possibly by someone back at the chalet, or it had been remotely detonated by someone up here. Someone who was watching them, someone who had followed them.

  But there was no one around. The bowl was empty.

  The ski patrol arrived, secured the sled and stepped out of their skis.

  “What happened, sir?” one of them asked. His name tag read LARSEN.

  “She hit a tree,” Todd said. It was difficult to keep on track. He wanted to fight back.

  The second ski patrol volunteer whose name tag read WILLET, brought a big first-aid kit over to Elizabeth, took off his gloves and knelt beside her to start his preliminary examination. “What’s her name?”

  “Doris,” Todd told him.

  “Okay, Doris, how are we doing this afternoon?” Willet said, taking her pulse at the side of her neck.

  Larsen pulled out a neck brace and backboard, which he brought over to where Elizabeth was crumpled.

  “Breathing is labored, but breath sounds are equal and symmetrical. Her heartbeat is fast, but strong,” Willet said. “Some trauma to the forehead and right temple, some bleeding but not heavy.”

  They’d worked as a team before. Their moves were quick and professional. They knew what they were doing; they’d been here many times before.

  Larsen took out a wireless comms unit a little larger than an average cell phone. “Base, this is Ranger Three in Pete’s Bowl beneath Earl’s Express.”

  “Stand by, Ranger Three.”

  “Are you the husband, sir?” he asked Todd.

  “No. I’m her brother. She’s four months pregnant.”

  Larsen’s lips compressed, and he nodded. “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “General health?”

  “Very good—”

  “Ranger Three, go ahead.”

  “We have a white female, twenty-five, with blunt trauma to the head, chest and abdomen. Some blood loss, but she’s wearing a helmet.”

  “Okay, pulse is one fifteen; regular and strong.” Willet called out. “BP one hundred over fifty. Patient is unresponsive, but her pupils are equal and reactive to light.”

  Larsen relayed the information to the clinic at the base of the slopes down in Vail Village. “The patient’s brother is with her. He says that she is four months pregnant. There is evidence of some bleeding around the perineum of her ski suit.”

  “Stand by,” the on-call doctor ordered.

  “Is she going to make it?” Van Buren asked. He had to keep it together, but it was hard.

  Larsen nodded. “She was wearing a helmet. Probably saved her life.” He glanced over at Elizabeth. Willet was taking off her helmet, careful not to move her head. “Where’s her husband?”

  “She’s a widow,” Todd said. “That’s why she wanted me to come skiing with her.”

  “Tough luck. She’s a good-looking girl.”

  “She is,” Todd said, his nerves jumping.

  “Ranger Three, give her 500 ccs of normal saline and start her on O2. The medevac chopper is en route. We’ll transport her to Denver General when you have her ready to move.”

  “Hang in there, Doris,” Larsen said. He and Willet attached the neck brace, their movements very gentle, very precise.

  Todd could only stand by and watch. But already he was working out the steps he would have to take in the next twenty-four hours to protect his wife and child. They were priority one; everything else was secondary.

  SUNDAY

  FOUR

  IF THE CIA HAD DEFINED (McGARVEY’S) CAREER, THEN KGB GENERAL VALENTIN ILLEN BARANOV HAD DEFINED (HIS) LIFE WITHIN THE COMPANY.

  CIA HEADOUARTERS

  If it hadn’t been for Elizabeth’s hero worship of her father, Rencke would not have begun his quest, as he thought of it.

  He stood on one leg just insi
de his office in the computer center, staring at his monitors. The lavender displayed as wallpaper on the screens had darkened since the last time he’d checked. His programs were chewing on data, and what they were finding was being evaluated as ominous.

  The swing shift operators knew that he was here, but no one had stopped by to say hello. He had no friends here. Only the McGarveys.

  “A friend of mine. His name is Otto Rencke. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

  Mac had said that to him, and Otto could feel his presence. He wished that Mac were here now. He wished that he could talk to Mac, tell him what was so bothersome. But Otto didn’t know what the problem was himself, except that the walls seemed to be closing in on all of them. It was lavender, and the color was getting stronger.

  He took off his jacket and sat down at one of his monitors. Louise hadn’t wanted him to leave. But she understood the necessity for him.

  One step at a time.

  Ten months ago Elizabeth had begun a biography of her father. It was obvious even then that he would be named DCI. She and Otto both thought that an accouting was important. She decided to begin with his career in the CIA because it was the definition of his life. She would go back later and find out about his life in Kansas, and about her grandparents, whom she’d never known, and about her aunt and nephews in Utah, whom she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl.

  If the CIA had defined her father’s career, then KGB general Valentin Illen Baranov had defined her father’s life within the Company.

  It was at Otto’s suggestion that she had begun there. He had showed her how to enter the CIA’s computerized archives, and then how to get into the underground caverns at Fort A.P. Hill, south of Washington in the Virginia countryside, where the old paper records were stored.

  He showed her how to read between the lines by paying special attention to the promulgation pages and budget lines in each classified file. The first was a list of everybody who had a need-to-know in the operation, and the second was a detailed summary of where the money to pay for it came.

  He who holds the purse strings as well as the operational strings is the actual power to be reckoned with.

  He showed her how to cross-reference personnel files with operational files to look for the anomalies. John Lyman Trotter, Jr., for instance. He’d become DDO and a friend to Mac. But he turned out to be a traitor, lured into General Baranov’s circle. In hindsight the signs had been there. Trotter had spent more money than he’d earned. His name was on more promulgation pages than his early positions should have allowed for. As an operations omcer—this was before he’d become DDO—he had personally signed off on too many budgetary requests.

  But the old KGB general had been a master of the game. Starting in the days after Korea and through the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crises, he had developed and run CESTA and Banco del Sur, the most fabulously successful intellgence networks anywhere at anytime in history. They’d been administered from the Soviet Union’s embassy in Mexico City, which was cover for the largest KGB operational unit in the world outside of Moscow. Through a vast network of field agents and governmental connections, General Baranov knew just about everything that went on in the entire western hemisphere during those years. From Buenos Aires to Toronto, and from Santiago to Washington, he had his ear to the most important doors.

  Insiders like Trotter were the frosting on the very rich cake. By feeding Trotter accurate information that sometimes was actually damaging to the Soviet Union, in exchange for even more important details about the inner workings of America’s intelligence establishment, Baranov made his prize mole a hero on the Beltway. By making sure that key operations Trotter had backed succeeded as if they were planned by angels, his mole’s stock rose to astronomical levels.

  All that could have been seen, should have been seen, from the almost reckless abandon with which Trotter flitted from one desk to the next; from one supersuccess to another. Never mind the occasional star agent who was burned while a dozen not-so-hot field officers succeeded. Never mind that Trotter’s rise through the ranks was at the expense of some very capable, even brilliant men and women. If they became disenchanted with a system that seemed to reward ass kissing and apparent legerdemain over good, solid and imaginative intelligence work, then all the better for Baranov’s plans.

  The general was a great success, until in the end Kirk McGarvey had unraveled the entire house of cards. When it was over, Baranov lay shot to death in a KGB safe house outside of East Berlin, and Trotter lay dead in a CIA safe house in West Berlin.

  Both assassinations were carried out by McGarvey. And that was the end of the story. A lesson to be learned. The field officer who developed a peripheral awareness, a skill necessary in order to preserve his life, should not lose the skill once he was recalled to a desk assignment.

  No place was safe. Hadn’t they learned that lesson before?

  Rencke focused on the monitor in front of him. Streams of data crossed the screen so fast it was impossible to focus on any one item. They were telephone intercepts that the National Security Agency was supplying him from the Moscow exchange over the past six months.

  So far his program had come up with a few bits and pieces, each item deepening the lavender.

  In August Dr. Anatoli Nikolayev disappeared from Moscow after stealing sensitive, though unnamed, files from the KGB’s paper archives at Lefortovo. Nikolayev had worked in the KGB’s Department Viktor during the Baranov years.

  Around that same time, retired general Gennadi Zhuralev had been found a suicide in his Moscow apartment. Zhuralev had worked as deputy operations officer for General Baranov.

  By October the SVR, with help from Interpol, thought it had found Nikolayev in Paris. But then the leads dried up. Nikolayev knew the city very well. He’d spent a lot of time there working for Baranov.

  The fact that one old man could not be found by the combined efforts of the Russian SVR, Interpol and presumably the French intelligence service, or at the very least, the French police, meant that Nikolayev had not simply wandered off. The old spy had gone to ground, using his tradecraft skills.

  Rencke had become a skeptic under McGarvey’s tutelage. He did not believe in coincidences.

  McGarvey was hired as interim DCI until his Senate confirmation hearings. His daughter went looking down his history to write his biography, focusing her energies on General Baranov. And things suddenly began to happen.

  An old Baranov man goes walkabout after snatching some files that make the SVR nervous. Another old Baranov man turns up dead. Now the Senate hearings were dredging up ancient history, opening old wounds, exposing old cesspools, revealing desperate Cold War battles that were best left undisturbed.

  Rencke had started to look over his shoulder as soon as his programs began to shift to lavender. A dead man was seeking revenge. It was spooky.

  The accident with his car had been no accident. He’d done no work on his front wheels, as he told Security. Someone had tried to kill him, and he wanted to give them room to try again.

  Neither had the helicopter explosion in the VI been an accident.

  Rencke drew a triangle on a sheet of paper. McGarvey’s name was at one of the points, Baranov’s at the second and Nikolayev’s at the third.

  Mac was on his way back from the Virgin Islands with Mrs. M. and Dick Yemm.

  Baranov was long dead.

  Which left Nikolayev.

  Rencke felt a sudden stab of fear. He dialed up the CIA’s Office of Security’s locator service and found out where Todd and Liz were staying at in Vail. He got an outside line and called the number. It was a little after five o’clock there.

  “The Lodge at Vail, how may I direct your call?”

  “I want to talk to one of your guests. Todd Van Buren.”

  “One moment, please,” the operator said. She was back a minute later. “I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Van Buren does not answer.”

  “This is an emergency.”

  “I
’m sorry, sir. Would you care to leave a message on his voice mail?”

  Rencke broke the connection. He was starting to sweat.

  He composed himself, then called the OD in Operations. This evening it was Chris Walker. Rencke vaguely knew the young man; his impression was that Walker was earnest.

  “Operations.”

  “This is Rencke in the DCI’s office. I want to talk to Todd Van Buren.”

  “We have a team en route, sir. Have you tried their hotel? They’re staying at the Lodge at Vail.”

  “I tried their room, but the hotel operator said there was no answer.” Flashes were going off inside Rencke’s head. It was like the Fourth of July, only more intense. “Call hotel security, I want someone to check their room right now. And where the hell is our team, and where’s the FBI?”

  Walker hesitated. “Is there a problem, sir?”

  “I don’t know,” Rencke said, calming himself. Nothing happened to them. They were still on the slopes or in the ski lodge having a drink. “Have them paged if they’re not in their room. Then call me back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Otto stared at his computer monitor. Nikolayev was the key, of course. It was possible that he had murdered General Zhuralev in Moscow, then disappeared. It was also possible that Nikolayev had arranged for the assassination attempt on Mac.

  But why, after all these years? General Baranov was long dead. Surely there weren’t any vendettas after all this time. Something like that would be beyond all reason. It would be … insane.

  It was equally obvious that someone did not want Mac to become the DCI and was out to stop him. But could a dead man be behind it?

  Chris Walker called back ten minutes later. “They’re not there, Mr. Rencke. It looks like they weren’t there all day. And they don’t answer their page.”

  Rencke’s fear solidified as if his heart had been flash-frozen. “I want them found within the hour. Whatever it takes, find them.”

  “Yes, sir,” the OD responded. “We’re on it.”

  FIVE

  PEOPLE REMEMBERED LIES MUCH LONGER THAN THEY REMEMBERED THE TRUTH.