The Kill Zone

by David Hagberg

  Kurek refused to take the disk or even look at it. “This is getting into an area that we must not go.”

  “Come on, Janos,” Yemm said. “I’m asking you as a friend.”

  Kurek’s shoulders sagged. He opened his laptop and booted it up. He took the disk. “What’s on this?”

  “It’s today’s access codes to the CIA’s mainframe, and a half-dozen of Otto’s most recent encryption busters.”

  Kurek studied Yemm’s face. “You want that I should go naked into the lion’s den? He’s set booby traps, fail-safes, probably viruses.”

  “That’s why I asked you to bring a laptop. If you’re compromised, you’ll burn one hard disk, nothing more.”

  “If he suspects it was me, do you know the kind of trouble he could make?” Kurek practically shouted.

  “Goddammit, this is important. Lives are at stake.”

  “Yeah, mine.” Kurek said. He inserted the floppy disk, brought up the screen, then linked with Yemm’s encrypted cell phone.

  As soon as the call went through, the CIA’s logo came up. Using prompts provided by the data on the floppy disk, Kurek got into the Agency’s mainframe, and then into the Special Operations territory that Rencke had staked out as his own.

  Zimmerman had prepared the disk for Yemm, and when he’d handed it over, he shook his head. “I don’t even want to know why you want this,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll deny having anything to do with it.”

  “Fair enough,” Yemm said.

  A skull and crossbones appeared on the screen against a lavender backdrop. The skull grinned and began to laugh.

  “You have ten seconds to get through the first barrier,” Yemm said,

  Kurek brought up the first series of encryption busters, his fingers flying over the keys as he tried one after the other. Lines of data flashed across the screen.

  The skull’s grin broadened, but suddenly fragmented and flew off the edges of the screen. As the Directorate of Operations, Special Operations, screen came up, a faint voice in the background whispered: “Ah, shit.”

  “We’re in,” Yemm said.

  “Not for sure, Richard. This could be a trap. I know Otto.”

  “We’re looking for an operation called Spotlight.”

  Kurek brought up a menu window, and under operations, entered: SPOTLIGHT.

  Nothing happened.

  Kurek tried to back out of the window, but none of his keys worked. However, the cursor was still flashing after the last T in SPOTLIGHT. He backtracked, and the letters began to disappear one at a time.

  His keyboard hung up again at the letter I. Nothing he tried worked.

  He said something in Polish that Yemm didn’t understand, and reached to break the phone link to the computer.

  Otto Rencke’s image came up on the screen first. “Bad dog,” he said, waving his finger. “Bad, bad dog.” He glanced at something off camera and smiled. “But I know who you—” The screen went blank, and Rencke’s voice cut off.

  Kurek sat back.

  “Were you too late?”

  Kurek shook his head. “I won’t know until he gets back.” His eyes narrowed. “You better talk to him, Richard.”

  “I’ll do that,” Yemm said. He held out his hand for the floppy disk, which Kurek retrieved from the computer.

  “You can throw it away,” he said. “I think that you will find it’s been completely erased.”

  As Yemm pulled out of the parking lot he got an urgent call from his office. The Aurora was inbound to Andrews Air Force Base and would touch down within the half hour. It was unknown if Rencke was aboard, but it was the same plane he’d commandeered to take him to France.

  He had to fight traffic four blocks over to the I-95 ramp, and then from there to the Beltway East, where he was able to make good time.

  Otto knew that someone would come snooping into in computer files, and he had been ready for it. Maybe McGarvey would finally see what a few people on the seventh floor—most notably Dick Adkins and the deputy director of Intelligence Tommy Doyle—had been trying to tell him all along. Otto was a wild card, impossible to control. With the simple flick of his fingers across his keyboard he could crash the CIA’s entire computer system. He had designed it that way. He had even bragged about it. But nobody took him seriously, or nobody cared, because the system worked. And, Otto was a personal friend of the boss’s.

  Now the situation was totally out of hand. Kurek would be insulated because the call to the computer mainframe would be traced to Yemm’s cell phone. But what Otto was going to do when he found out that someone from inside the Company was messing with his computers was anyone’s guess.

  Which left the larger, more urgent problem that Yemm couldn’t get a handle on. It seemed as if there was something just at the back of his head that he should understand; some bit of information, a name or a place; something that would make the situation clear.

  Someone was trying to kill Kirk McGarvey, and Yemm felt as if he was running through glue in his effort to find the assassin or assassins.

  The only thing he knew for certain was that the killer was someone on the inside. Someone close to McGarvey. Very close.

  Yemm showed his identification at the main gate. He drove directly over to the 457th Air Wing, where military equipment and personnel used for special missions by the CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA and other government security agencies were staged.

  The sleek, all-black supersonic airplane was just taxiing over from the active runway, its canopy coming open when Yemm parked behind a line of start trucks and other maintenance vehicles in the lee of a hangar.

  The Aurora looked like a hybrid of the B2 bomber and the Concorde SST, with a drooped nose, canard wings and anechoic radar-absorbing skin.

  As soon as it pulled to a stop, ground crewmen checked the wheels, while others brought up the boarding ladder.

  Otto, wearing a dark blue flight suit, was first out. He scrambled down the ladder, peeled off the flight suit and got his small bag from a crewman, who’d retrieved it from a locker forward of the swept-back port wing. He no longer wore the sling on his arm.

  He gave the pilot a wave, then walked across the tarmac to a line of parked cars. He got into the passenger side of a light gray RAV4 SUV, which immediately backed out and headed to the main gate.

  Yemm caught a glimpse of Louise Horn in her air force uniform behind the wheel. She’d lied to them. She’d known where Otto had gone and when he would be returning. It’s why she hadn’t sounded all that shook-up about his disappearance.

  There was no real reason to follow them. Louise would either drive back to their apartment in Arlington first, or she would take Otto directly to Langley. Either way he’d show up out there sometime today.

  Yemm headed back to his office, even more depressed and confused than he had been earlier. Otto was a friend who might finally have gone around the bend. A lot of geniuses did.

  The problem Yemm was having the most trouble with was Louise Horn’s involvement. A woman would do anything for her man. But treason and murder?

  TEN

  ∇2∅ = 0

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  When Otto Rencke entered his office, Louise was immediately placed in a safe corner of his head. Sometimes during the day, when he was troubled, he would take her out, look at her beauty, think about how much he loved her, replay a favorite conversation they’d had, then put her back safe and sound. She had become his escape mechanism, a safety valve. He was back, and she had helped him with that much. He didn’t want to place her in any further danger.

  He laid the case with his laptop computer on the cluttered conference table and let his eyes roam around the room. Everything was as he had left it. No one had screwed with his things this time.

  It was a Baranov operation. Otto was sure of at least that much. First General Gennadi Zhuralev, who had been Department Viktor chief of operations in the seventies, had been killed in Moscow.

  Then Vladimir Trofimov was shot
to death in public in front of the Louvre just days ago. He had been Department Viktor chief of staff and Baranov’s personal assistant after Zhuralev had departed.

  And Dr. Anatoli Nikolayev, who had worked as a Department Viktor psychologist, left Moscow on the very day General Zhuralev was murdered, and was in France on the day Trofimov was gunned down.

  It made Nikolayev the key.

  But no one knew where he was, even though he’d left his calling cards in plain sight for anyone to see.

  Each spy had his or her particular style of tradecraft; how he ran, his preferred means of conveyance, his weapons, his methods for hiding money trails, his phone calls, letter drops, secret codes. All of his methods taken as a whole marked him as an amateur or a professional, and identified him as surely as his fingerprints or DNA record.

  Every good spy had two ways in which he or she disappeared. The first was the most complete. One moment he was there, on a downtown street in front of an office complex in Moscow, and in the next moment he was gone. One day he maintained a household: telephone and credit card accounts, banks, book clubs, favorite restaurants and clubs, e-mails, favorite websites. The next day he disappeared right under everybody’s noses.

  The second method, more subtle in many ways, was when the spy wanted to be found, but found by the correct people. This disappearing act was like the magician’s lady and the tiger in a locked steamer trunk. The tiger went in, the curtain was raised, and when it was dropped seconds later the lady came out. Now you see it, now you don’t. Except if you had really been on the ball all the clues were there to see.

  It wasn’t magic, it was nothing more than legerdemain.

  Otto brought his monitors up. The screens showed the deepest shades of lavender so far. He started pulling up his primary search engines.

  Spies, like magicians, left clues. Calling cards. In Nikolayev’s case he’d all but taken an ad in a Paris newspaper that he was there. Trofimov’s residence was listed on police reports. His landlady, who was distrustful of cops but fond of money, described the older, white-haired gentleman asking about Trofimov. It cost Otto one hundred francs. She told him about the same book of Louvre tickets she’d told Nikolayev about on the very day that Trofimov had been shot to death in front of the museum.

  Nikolayev, using four different aliases, but fitting the same description, had reserved cars at four separate car hire firms, but never showed up.

  He’d bought tickets at Orly for a flight to Washington, and at Charles de Gaulle for New York. But no passenger manifest showed his name.

  He’d purchased train tickets to four destinations all over France, from the Gares du Nord, d l’Est, de Lyon and d’Austerlitz. But he’d been in a hurry by then. Instead of spreading out around the city as he might have done to muddy his trail, he’d picked pairs of stations that were within walking distance of each other. Four trips in the time of two.

  Nikolayev was in France, and he wanted to be found by the right people for some reason. People who by now had figured out that he was on the run from Moscow, but not from the West. But why?

  At each of the car rental offices, airline ticket counters and lost and founds in the train stations, Otto left the same message: Found the novel by B. that you are looking for. He included a secure telephone number. If the Russians or someone else picked up the message and made the call they would learn nothing except that someone else was interested in Nikolayev’s whereabouts.

  Each of Otto’s special search and analysis programs had its own wallpaper. When the programs were running, but not open for view, the background took on the color of the search, in this case lavender, with a pattern. For Operation Spotlight, his overall analytical program working the Nikolayev problem, the pattern was tombstones that moved in a counterclockwise helical figure.

  But the pattern was different now. Every fourth tombstone was flipped forty-five degrees out of alignment with the others.

  Someone had tried to get in.

  Otto brought up his capture program with shaking hands. Whoever had tried to get into the system had today’s CIA passwords, which allowed them to go from the opening menu all the way into the Directorate of Operations. Then they’d tried to enter SPOTLIGHT.

  Otto stared at the screen for a long time, trying to envision who knew about that specific operation. It had to be someone on the inside. Right here in the computer center.

  He glanced at the door. Someone in one of the research cells. But who were they working for?

  When the intruder had entered the Spotlight directory his search engine was frozen by Otto’s capture program. But they’d been smart enough to not only back out, but to break the link. The intrusion had been made from offsite, from a cell phone calling from outside the building. The in-house telltale was not tipped over. The prefix and first two numbers came up before the connection had been terminated.

  Otto brought up the one hundred possible numbers, which not surprisingly all belonged to the CIA. Currently, seventy-eight of them were assigned, the bulk of which were used by the Directorate of Science and Technology, which included Computer Services. The others were spread throughout the Agency’s other three directorates.

  Somebody in-house was checking on him. Like he couldn’t be trusted. Like he was a criminal. Like he was a suspect.

  “Oh boy, oh boy.” Otto jumped up and snapped his fingers as he paced the room. He was close. But he was frightened. And he thought that he might be going seriously crazy after all. Some of Stenzel’s tests had been terrifying. They’d been so close to cracking open something inside of him that his skin crawled thinking about it.

  He stopped at the end of the table and stared at the door. “Oh boy.” He suddenly stopped snapping his fingers and looked down at his hands.

  He saw blood. Gallons of blood. He stepped back and tried to wipe his hands on his shirt, but still the blood flowed like a river. Over his feet. Above his knees, his waist, his chest. He was drowning in his own blood.

  Otto charged out of his office, raced down the aisle between machines and burst into the Office of Computer Security Research. The permanent study research group had been his idea, but it was independent of him now. A half-dozen men and two women were lounging around the large dayroom. They were arguing about a series of complex equations that filled several white marker boards attached to the walls.

  The room was a mess. They were the Company’s eggheads, who, like Otto, lived in their own worlds. Conventions such as regular mealtimes, cleaned and pressed clothing, haircuts and the like were meaningless distractions. For them the chase for the most perfect encryption program was life.

  Even Otto’s encryption programs could be broken sooner or later. He’d formed the group to come up with ever increasingly complex arrangments. All we can do is stay one step ahead of the bad guys until we come up with something really nifty, he’d told them.

  Now they had turned on him. They had become spies.

  “Who’s been fucking with my computers?” he demanded from the doorway.

  The windowless dayroom was furnished with a couple of long tables, a broken-down leather couch, several raggedy easy chairs, a coffee machine and a couple of soft-drink-vending machines. One of them had been filled with beer.

  The team looked up in mild amusement. Just lately Otto had been throwing a lot of tantrums. His outbursts were becoming routine.

  “What are you talking about?” Ann McKenna asked, grinning. She was dressed in jeans, a loose sweater and sneakers. Her long hair was up in a bun, strands flying out everywhere. She looked twenty years older than she was.

  “Somebody messed with one of my personal programs. Who was it?”

  “Did they get very far?” John Trembly asked, curious. He was the head mathematician in the group.

  “Far enough,” Otto mumbled. It wasn’t anyone here. He could see that now. These kind of people just didn’t know how to dissemble. But it was somebody like them. Somebody smart.

  “Interesting proposition,” An
n McKenna said. “Maybe we could backtrack. Set a trap. Even now.”

  Otto’s attention strayed to the equations on the blackboard. He stood looking at them, following the logic. But something was wrong. It was sloppy.

  “We’re trying something new,” Trembly said.

  “Keep it simple, that’s the game,” the other woman, Sarah Loeffler, said. She’d got her Ph.D. in chaos mathematics from Harvard two years ago when she was nineteen. She still had pimples on her round, chubby baby face.

  “Stupid, stupid,” Otto said. He went to the first board, picked up a marker and before anyone could stop him, began checking off the correct expressions in the equations, and crossing out and fixing the wrong ones.

  0 is a function such that

  Otto glanced over his shoulder, then wrote:

  ∇ 22 = 0

  “Does anybody recognize this?” he asked.

  “The Laplace equations,” Trembly said irritated. “That’s what we’re working on here. We’re looking for an approach to the three-body problem. Gravitational potential. Might be an avenue to explore as an encryption model. Three-body, then four, then N bodies?”

  “If you want to keep it simple then watch your stupid mistakes,” Otto said. “And why fuck with the field equations you’re deriving from Newtonian mechanics? Go to the source, man. Einstein.”

  He turned, erased all the work from one of the boards and started writing very fast.

  x′ = xcos wt–sinwt–

  w(sinwt + ycoswt) t

  y′ = sin wt + cos wt +

  w(xcos wt–y sin wt) t

  “That’s for two events in a homogenous space,” Otto said. “Come on, guys, basic physics. You can work it from there. But it’ll come to Einstein’s tensor equations for the separation of two bodies. You should be able to use the same mechanism for three bodies or more, if that’s where you want to go with it.”

  He turned back to the board: