The Kill Zone

by David Hagberg

  The stuff of government was done here by men and women—some of them average, some of them dedicated and brilliant; a few others saints or crooks, and still others so dim that they weren’t qualified to write a grocery list let alone a law. Average Americans. But the system worked, McGarvey thought.

  The crowd of journalists in front of the Hart Senate Office Building was larger than Thursday. Yemm had stayed behind to help direct the investigation into Rencke’s background. The replacement driver and bodyguard hustled McGarvey and Paterson up the stairs through the mob.

  “Mr. McGarvey, is it true that you’re withdrawing your nomination?” one of the reporters shouted.

  McGarvey didn’t look up at that or any of the other similar questions thrown at him until they were safely inside the building. “That was Hammond’s doing.”

  Paterson nodded. “You’re learning. Whatever he has, he thinks it’s good.”

  “Do you think that he and Madden are sleeping together?”

  Paterson was startled. “I seriously doubt it, but I wouldn’t be surprised.” He looked closer at McGarvey. “Have you heard something?”

  McGarvey shook his head. “No. Just wondering.”

  There were only a handful of onlookers in the hearing room, mostly assistants to the committee members, when McGarvey and Paterson came in and took their places. When the doors were closed, the clerk called the hearings to order and the six senators filed in. Hammond and Madden were beaming. The others seemed only mildly interested. Clawson gave McGarvey a sympathetic look, as if to say: Hear you’re having some trouble, sorry about dragging you here today.

  Hammond reminded McGarvey that he was still under oath.

  “Yes, I understand, Senator,” McGarvey replied.

  “Good. Then let’s proceed.” He opened a file folder, read for a moment, then looked up. “A number of disturbing items were brought to my attention over the weekend. When we go over this new material I think that we’ll all agree that Mr. McGarvey should withdraw his nomination.”

  “I was asked that question by the media on the way in,” McGarvey said. “Evidently everyone knows what’s going on except for me.”

  A few people in the room sniggered.

  “Is it true, Mr. McGarvey, that one of your top aides”—Hammond consulted his file—“a man by the name of Otto Rencke, has been missing for the past thirty-six hours and possibly longer?”

  “Where did you get that information, Senator?” It had to be someone inside the Agency. Either that, or Louise Horn had told them, though for the life of him he couldn’t imagine her having any contact with Hammond.

  “This committee’s sources are not the issue,” Hammond shot back. “Is it true that Otto Rencke is missing?”

  “No, it’s not true,” McGarvey responded.

  Hammond glanced at Madden. “You are under oath, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “Mr. Rencke is in France at the moment on a matter of some importance to the CIA. I can’t say anything more than that because it concerns an ongoing operation that’s important to national security.”

  Hammond didn’t miss a beat. “But isn’t it true that you placed Mr. Rencke on administrative leave after he underwent a psychological evaluation by an in-house psychologist?”

  Paterson sat forward. “Senators, that is information from the personnel files of a CIA officer. It has nothing to do with the purpose of these proceedings, which are meant solely to determine Mr. McGarvey’s qualifications to continue leading the Agency as its director.”

  Hammond smiled faintly. “I’m glad that we agree on at least that much,” he said. “I brought up Mr. Rencke’s name because he is a close personal friend of Mr. McGarvey’s, and he was involved in a near-fatal automobile accident recently.” Hammond looked directly at McGarvey. “If it was an accident.”

  “The accident is under investigation by us and by the Virginia Highway Patrol.”

  “But in light of subsequent developments the current thinking at the CIA is that the incident with Mr. Rencke was probably not an accident. It fits with the assassination attempt against yourself, your wife and your bodyguard in the Virgin Islands over the weekend, and the nearly fatal attack on your daughter and her husband at Vail, Colorado. Isn’t that so, Mr. McGarvey?”

  Paterson put a hand over the microphone and leaned toward McGarvey. “Where is he getting his information?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “A few people in the building know the whole story. Fred Rudolph knows most of it.”

  “How about the White House?”

  “Not all of it,” McGarvey said.

  “Mr. McGarvey?” Hammond prompted. He’d gotten the attention of the rest of the committee.

  “What was the question?”

  “Was an attempt made on your life over the weekend?”

  “We’re still investigating the incident. But, yes, it appears that someone tried to kill me.”

  “What about your daughter and her husband?”

  “We’re also investigating that incident. But it appears that someone tried to kill my daughter.”

  One of the Senate aides got up and started for the doors.

  “Stop right there, Mark, and sit down,” Senator Clawson ordered. The aide looked at Hammond, but then sat down. “No one is leaving these chambers until we get some rules straight.”

  “You’re out of order,” Hammond said. He was enjoying himself.

  “We’re talking here about the safety of a very loyal and dedicated American, as well as the safety of his family,” Clawson shot back. “I don’t know who your sources are, and I doubt if you’d tell me if I asked, but you’re overstepping your bounds. Not to mention common decency—”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Hammond responded sharply. “If you’ll hear me out I was about to make a valid and important point.”

  “Everyone will have his or her say, John,” Brenda Madden broke in.

  Clawson was frustrated. None of the other committee members were offering their support. Most of them owed political favors to Hammond and Madden, or were too junior to protest. “I intend bringing up the conduct of this hearing to the full Senate.”

  “That certainly is your prerogative,” Hammond said benignly. He turned back to McGarvey. “I understand that your ordeal over the weekend, along with the news of the attack on your daughter, caused such a strain for your wife that she was—”

  McGarvey raised his hand and pointed a finger at Hammond. “That’s enough, you sonofabitch!”

  Brenda Madden said something as an aside, Paterson put a restraining hand on McGarvey’s arm, and Hammond sat back smiling.

  “You will leave my wife out of this,” McGarvey said, barely in control of himself.

  “Or what, Mr. McGarvey?”

  “Or I will withdraw my nomination, which would make me a private citizen,” McGarvey said, steadying down somewhat. “That’s something you don’t want, Senator. Not that way.”

  “See here—”Brenda Madden shouted, but Hammond held up a hand for her to be silent.

  “Is it a fact, Mr. McGarvey, that at a recent staff meeting the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a career intelligence officer who has time and again demonstrated a steady hand on the helm while you were off shooting up the countryside—his name is Richard Adkins—suggested that you step down as director? Not only that, but take your family to a safe place until the real professionals at the CIA and the FBI find out who is trying to harm you, your family and your friends? Is that true?”

  “Yes, that is true,” McGarvey said, settling down. He knew what he was fighting now. And for whom. It was as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes. “At that highly classified staff meeting we also decided that running away would do us no good. I’m needed to help find out what’s going on. If I go into hiding, then the person or persons who are after me will simply hunker down and wait for me to come out of hiding.”

  McGarvey pushed the microphone away and got to his feet.

&nb
sp; “We’re not finished here,” Hammond blustered.

  “We’ll find out who your source is inside the Agency,” McGarvey promised. “When we do, he or she will be prosecuted under the National Secrets Act, which carries with it a sentence of life imprisonment.”

  “You will sit down, McGarvey,” Hammond shouted.

  “Sorry, Senators, but I have work to do,” McGarvey told them. He turned, and with Paterson right behind him, left the hearing chamber. Hammond was banging his gavel, and Madden was shouting something in her nasal voice.

  NINE

  LIVING THE LIE FOR JUST ONE DAY MEANT HE COULD NEVER GO BACK.

  SPRINGFIELD, VIRGINIA

  Dick Yemm had felt terrible all month. The weekend’s events, and his meeting with McGarvey this morning had done nothing to dispel his gloomy mood. Sitting in his personal car, a pearl white Mercedes SUV, in the Springfield Mall, watching the shoppers and traffic on this busy Monday afternoon, his mood deepened. Most people only had to worry about keeping the kids out of trouble, paying the mortgage and kissing enough booty during the workweek to remain employed.

  They didn’t have to deal with murder, treason or insanity. And all of that against a backdrop of an increasingly hostile world. India-Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa, Greece, Mexico, Brazil; on and on, seemingly ad infinitum. Piss on one fire, and a dozen others sprang up around you. Finger one terrorist cell, and two dozen others came into existence as if from thin air. Unravel one alliance, and three dozen others emerged to threaten another 9–11.

  Yemm was just the DCI’s driver/bodyguard, and number two in the Office of Security. But he saw things, he heard things that he sometimes had trouble dealing with. Troubles that his wife used to be able to help him with. But she was dead. On some days he was reconciled to her absence. The accident had happened ten years ago. But on other days, like now, he felt a deep ache that he could not salve. She was gone, and he missed her because she would listen and then she would give her advice. “The way I see it, Dick …” she would invariably begin. And invariably she was right.

  He made a cell phone call to Annandale, just off the Beltway five miles north.

  “Hello,” a recorded woman’s voice answered. “Thank you for calling Aldebaran Projects. If you know the extension for the person you wish to reach, you may enter it now …”

  He entered 562. The call was transferred to the direct line of Janos Kurek the founder and president of the computer systems design company.

  “This is Kurek.” Janos was a former Polish intelligence officer under the old regime. It had been fifteen years since he’d gotten out, but his accent was still strong.

  “Janos, I want to talk to you,” Yemm said. “Bring a laptop, I have a secure phone.”

  In the aftermath and confusion of the Soviet Union’s breakup, a lot of men in Kurek’s position did not survive the witch-hunts. Even though he’d worked as a double, selling information to the U.S., he was a marked man by the new democrats, who mistrusted men like him because they had no loyalties to Poland, and by the old hard-line communists, who hated him for his betrayals.

  It was in the spring, April, if Yemm remembered correctly, though some of his recollections of the operation were a little fuzzy. He was assigned to the U.S. consulate in West Berlin, where he made forays into the east zone at least once a month to organize escapes over the wall. Otto Rencke, who was the whiz kid reorganizing the CIA’s computer system, came over to Berlin in person and took Yemm out to dinner and drinks at a sleazy night-blub on the Ku’damm. He had a friend stuck in Gdánsk who needed help getting out. Name was Janos Kurek, and there was an arrest warrant out for him already, so there was no time to mount a proper operation. Besides, Otto had worked with Kurek for the past couple of years on some back channel exchanges of information. It was technical means that got Otto access to the old regime’s computer systems. He and Kurek had developed a secret pipeline all the way back to KGB headquarters in Moscow. But the only way the arrangement would continue to work was for it to be kept an absolute secret. The more people who knew about the pipeline, the less likely that became.

  “I’m putting our lives in your hands,” Otto said earnestly. “If the KGB finds out, Janos will be a dead man, and they’ll come after me.” He shook his head. “But, oh, wow, I read your file. Green Beret. ‘Nam. Man, you been there, done that. Cool. And you know Mac. He thinks you’re good people.”

  “He’s a good man,” Yemm said. He had worked briefly with McGarvey in Saigon, and he’d been impressed. McGarvey was steady.

  “The very best, ya know,” Otto said solemnly. “You gonna help?”

  “I’m taking all the risks. What do I get out of it?” Yemm asked. “If I get caught I’m going to jail, at the very least.”

  “Favors,” Otto said. “Beaucoup favors, kimo sabe. You want something, Otto and Janos will come running.” Otto looked a little sheepish. “Anyway, if you want to stay in this business, favors are a good thing to have in the bank, ya know.”

  The operation was set up for three days at midweek, starting on a Tuesday. Yemm was to make his regular run across the border, but instead of making his rendezvous in East Berlin he was to change identities with papers that Otto provided and take the train directly to the Polish shipbuilding capital. Later Yemm could claim that he had got the rendezvous place mixed up, and could make the run to East Berlin again the following week. Things like that happened from time to time.

  In Gdánsk he was to meet with Kurek at a fish restaurant called Kashubska. There were three times: noon for lunch, four-fifteen for cocktails, and eight for dinner, with a fallback at a park one block away. Kurek would be wearing a lime green sports coat and would have a bandage on his left cheek where he’d cut himself shaving.

  From there, Yemm who would be traveling as an American tourist driving a rental car from the train station, would take Kurek to the Baltic coast town of Swinourjscie right on the German border where Kurek would take the ferry to Copenhagen using the papers that Yemm was bringing him.

  From there Yemm was to return to East Berlin and make his way back to the west zone as usual.

  It had worked exactly as planned until the very end. Kurek was in the park at four-fifteen and they drove like crazy, making the 8:30 P.M. ferry. During the four hours they were together Kurek poured out his entire life story to Yemm, and by the time he was boarding the boat for Copenhagen and safety they were best of friends. “I will never forget you, Richard,” Kurek said. “You have saved my life here.”

  The next morning, back in East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie, Yemm was arrested by the Stasi and held for ten days. Nothing was asked about his trip to Poland; evidently the Stasi knew nothing about it. They were only interested in his activities in East Berlin over the past year and a half.

  Eventually he was released, not too much the worse for wear, except that some of the interrogation methods they’d used on him at the Horst Wessel Center left his head a little fuzzy. He never had all the dates and times straight in his head afterward except that he’d been released on a prisoner exchange. He’d evidently been grabbed solely for that reason.

  He was immediately flown to the air force hospital at Ramstein for a checkup, and from there back to Langley, where his debriefing lasted the better part of two weeks.

  After that he was given a thirty-day leave, and then reported back to duty, this time in Madrid.

  The CIA never asked him about his trip to Poland. They, too, were evidently unaware of his extracurricular activities, and he never volunteered the information. By then he had been in the business long enough to understand that oftentimes the best and most useful alliances were the ones kept closest to the vest. Living the lie for just one day meant that he could never go back, but neither could Janos, who within the year was in Washington, where he’d created a highly successful Beltway computer company.

  Otto was out of the CIA again. But true to his word, he and Janos did lend Yemm a helping hand from time to time, mo
stly in the form of information.

  “Right now?” Janos asked. “Right this minute, Richard?”

  “At the fallback,” Yemm said. “It has to do with Otto.”

  Kurek arrived ten minutes later, as flashy as usual, driving his bright red Mercedes E430. He was dressed in an Armani suit and hand-sewn Brazilian loafers. His shoes got soaked in the slush when he left his car and came over to Yemm’s. He’d brought a laptop computer that looked like a musical instrument in his long, delicate, well-manicured hands. He had the appearance of a magazine fashion model; whip-thin, stylish blond hair combed straight back and brilliant blue eyes.

  “How is our friend?” Kurek asked. “He must be staying out of trouble now that Kirk is becoming director.”

  “He’s working on something that has us scratching our heads,” Yemm said. “Frankly, we don’t know what to make of it.”

  Kurek laughed. His voice was baritone, like an opera singer’s. “Since I’ve known Otto he’s been working on things to make heads spin. But I’ll advise you now. Ask him about it. He trusts you.”

  “He went to France yesterday, but no one knows for sure why, or even when he’ll be back,” Yemm continued. “But we think that his trip has something to do with an old Department Viktor psychologist. Anatoli Nikolayev. He disappeared from Moscow, and the Russians asked Interpol and the French police to help find him.”

  “How long ago?”

  “August.”

  “Otto has gone after him, you think?”

  “It’s possible.” Yemm hesitated. “There are some other things going on here, Janos, that make it important that we find out what Otto’s up to.”

  Kurek held up a bony hand. He wore a two-carat diamond ring in a platinum setting on his pinky finger. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  Yemm took a floppy disk out of his jacket pocket. “I need your help.”