The Kill Zone

by David Hagberg

  He set up his laptop in one of the conference rooms, plugging into the system’s mainframe. He was assigned an electric golf cart so that he could get around the stacks. But he was not offered any assistance. The file clerks and computer custodians knew better. If Rencke needed something, he would find them. But when he had the bit in his teeth he wanted to be left alone.

  Rencke stopped in midstride and looked out the windows. They faced the broad main aisle that ran the entire length of the facility. The overhead lights disappeared in the distance. The last time he was here about two years ago he had looked down McGarvey’s past because of another difficult operation. Those had been sad days when he’d seen the Kansas Highway Patrol’s graphic accident scene photographs of Kirk’s parents. They’d been killed by the Russians, maybe even at General Baranov’s behest. Even then it was obvious in some circles what McGarvey would become. He’d shown his mettle in Vietnam. And he’d shown his nature at the CIA’s training facility, acing all of his courses, and in every case showing up even his instructors.

  Was that it after all? General Valentin Illen Baranov come back from the grave to carry out his revenge for not only what McGarvey had done, but for what he was about to become? Nikolayev’s initial message from Paris had hinted at as much. But then he disappeared. He was not answering Rencke’s queries. Maybe he had gotten frightened off. Or maybe the SVR had gotten to him and either taken him back to Moscow or killed him. But so far the death of a Russian man, other than Trofimov, in Paris or elsewhere in France, had not shown up on any of Rencke’s search engines. But that didn’t mean much. Maybe Nikolayev’s body had been hidden.

  Rencke focused on the aisle through the stacks. Nothing moved out there. But the answers, if they were anywhere on earth, were here. And he had a starting point; or rather he had two out of three legs of a triangle, with McGarvey at one point and Baranov at the second. The third was the assassin who had gone active under Network Martyrs. The three names were bound by the most intimate of relationships, that of the killers and their victim.

  He went back to his laptop, pulled up a search engine, and found and printed out a surprisingly short list of Baranov references. When the computer was finished, he took the cart out into the stacks, stopped at the address for each of the Baranov files, retrieved them from their bins, and moved on to the next. He was finished in less than twenty minutes and he took the eight files back to the conference room, where he spread them in chronological order on the long table.

  He began to read.

  Valentin Illen Baranov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, a true Cossack he was fond of telling his staff, during the Second World War, though his exact birth date and parents’ names were not known.

  He was not a particularly outstanding student, except that unlike the other boys he never fought or got into trouble. His talent had been to get the other boys to fight for him, even though they didn’t want to.

  Even then he was perfecting his leadership talent. The secret is easy, he confided to an intended victim whom McGarvey rescued, you simply have to believe in people. Make them believe in you. Make them believe in their heart of hearts that they can do absolutely anything so long as someone believes in them. In a way it was exactly like love, he said.

  After four years at the University of Moscow, where he studied international law and four languages—English, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic—he enlisted in the Missile Service where he was assigned to the GRU, Military Intelligence unit. This was during the era when the missile defense ring around Moscow was being constructed. Security on the massive project was so tight that the CIA files (see cross ref CKBANNER through CKOTIS) contained very little information of any real strategic value.

  Following four years in the service he was discharged as a major, when he went immediately to work for the NKGB, where his rise was even more spectacular than it had been in the military.

  He had the Midas touch. Every operation he became involved with turned out to be a gold seam, providing the Soviet Union with a wealth of information. He was rewarded with limos and drivers. He was given a brand-new, one-thousand-square-meter luxury apartment on Kusnetzki Prospekt in leadership row. He was given a dacha on the Istra River outside the city. He was given not only a free rein over the KGB’s Department Viktor, but he was awarded with a highly prized diplomatic passport. He had money and power and the freedom to travel anywhere in the world at any time he wanted to for any purpose that he desired. Presidents and prime ministers didn’t have that kind of power.

  Rencke tried to read between the lines. Had Baranov been seeking the ultimate challenge? A lot of men in his position couldn’t be satisfied with routine assignments.

  Had McGarvey become his Everest?

  Darby Yarnell had probably been one of Baranov’s unwitting pawns from the very beginning of Yarnell’s CIA career in Moscow. Darby was a man who had an overabundance of belief and confidence in himself. And his attitude manifested itself in the way he dressed, in the gourmet style he preferred to dine in, in the Jaguars and Aston-Martins he drove, and in the way he treated people.

  Yarnell had convinced himself that Staff Sergeant Barry Innes, a young crypto operator at the Moscow embassy was on the KGB’s payroll. He never explained how he knew this, he just did. Rather than simply find the proof, arrest the kid and send him home for trial, Yarnell came up with Operation Hellgate.

  The Russians had snatched one of our people, and Yarnell wanted to cause them as much grief as possible. He wanted to stick it to them. Quid pro quo. But it depended on pretending that we didn’t know Sergeant Innes had been turned. Innes was promoted to technical sergeant, placed in charge of CIA encrypted communications and was practically force-fed information that was so fantastic that the Russians slavered at the bit for more.

  But the most clever part of Hellgate was the specific information given to Innes. Most of it was false, but not all of it. Yarnell argued that the Russians would have to be given something legitimate, from time to time. Something that they could verify as true, so that they would swallow the lies. And that’s exactly how headquarters approved it. In that way actual intelligence information was passed to the Russians.

  It had been the most perfect of Baranov’s schemes to that date. No one knew who was pulling the strings, not poor, dumb Sergeant Innes, who was spying for the money so that he could support his young wife and child living back home in San Diego. Not anyone from the embassy, or back in Langley. And most especially not Darby Yarnell himself, who in the very end was proven to be nothing but a dupe.

  Sergeant Innes got himself shot to death by Yarnell’s manipulations, the spy of ours whom the Russians had snatched was given back, and Hellgate was deemed a success. Yarnell was a rising star.

  McGarvey was not a part of that Moscow operation, but Darby Yarnell became the bridge that linked him to Baranov.

  After Moscow, and after a brief stint in Langley, first on the Russian desk and then, at Yarnell’s own request, on the Latin America desk, Yarnell was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. He was the logical man for the job. He had taught himself Spanish in eight months flat, he had worked the CIA’s Latin America desk, and with his Moscow background he could counter what was the largest KGB operations center out of Moscow, in the Soviet’s Mexico City embassy.

  Baranov was the star there as he had been in Moscow, running a pair of intelligence networks called CESTA and Banco del Sur, which collected information throughout Latin and South America.

  The game in those days, before the Bay of Pigs, was to infiltrate as many governments and government agencies as possible. The Soviets, and the Americans, did this by befriending various government employees in a variety of ways. The seductions very often involved honey traps, with beautiful young women imported from Moscow or Siberia, or from Atlanta or California. Exotic women to Latin Americans. Most often the schemes involved a lot of money: nice houses, luxury cars, televisions and stereos; anything that the average low-paid government employee could sc
arcely dream of, let alone possess.

  The Russians were winning the game because they were more ruthless than the Americans, until Darby Yarnell showed up. Within a couple of months he was throwing his own lavish parties all over Mexico City, and at a CIA-run house on the Pacific Coast. His target was Evita Perez, twenty and beautiful. Her mother was the third daughter of the governor of the state of Hidaglo, and her father was the assistant secretary of finance for the federal government. They were an old, prestigious Mexican family, with important contacts throughout the country.

  After their wedding and honeymoon, Yarnell surrounded himself with a crowd at their palatial home outside Mexico City and at other times at their mountain home, or at the seaside CIA house.

  Darby’s mob, as he called them, were mostly Mexican and Latin American high government officials, and the product he was sending back to Langley was nothing short of stellar.

  But Baranov’s, and therefore Yarnell’s, chief target (an operation that ruined the poor young Evita) was another rising star within the CIA. Donald Suthland Powers, who would later become the Director of Central Intelligence.

  Yarnell, under Baranov’s expert direction, set up a series of sophisticated honey traps for Powers, in which Powers would appear to be in Yarnell’s debt. The operation was a lengthy one, and extremely delicate. Powers, who trusted Yarnell until the very end, never suspected that he was being manipulated. But step by step he was placed in incriminating circumstances—showing up at a nightclub known to be a communist hangout; driving through a communist neighborhood at the young hours of the day, and too often, being photographed time and again in the vicinity of known KGB agents. All of it was staged, of course, and to Powers’s discredit, he never once bothered to take a good look around him.

  That operation did not come to fruition until years later, well after Yarnell quit the CIA, and even after he’d given up his Senate seat to become a lobbyist for a number of powerful multinational corporations and adviser to the President of the United States.

  The other shoe fell when Powers was appointed to run the CIA by a president who, like everyone else, had been dazzled by Yarnell.

  McGarvey was called out of retirement in Lausanne, Switzerland by a fantastic tale of betrayal supposedly leaked by Artime Basulto, a Cuban who had supported Batista until the revolution. Basulto, by then living in the States as a drug dealer, was, like everyone in the charade, being manipulated indirectly by Baranov. The target was Powers, of course, as well as the credibility of the entire Central Intelligence Agency. An incompetent president and an out-of-control Congress had hired Powers, supposedly a traitor to run the CIA. The weapons were Powers’s indiscretions in Mexico City and the dogged determination that McGarvey had shown in Vietnam and later in Chile and Germany.

  McGarvey was sent to investigate Yarnell, and in so doing unwittingly forced Yarnell into killing Powers, which in turned forced McGarvey to put a bullet into Yarnell’s brain.

  Neat and tidy. Except that in the end, Donald Powers, who was an innocent man and an outstanding DCI, was dead. Poor Evita, who had learned to believe in Baranov, shot herself to death. And as a bit of insurance, as a backstop against future events, Baranov arranged to make McGarvey witness Darby Yarnell’s seduction of McGarvey’s ex-wife.

  Was it happening again, Rencke wondered, sitting back and closing his eyes. Baranov had guessed that someday Powers would rise to head the CIA, so he had sown the seeds of the man’s destruction years earlier. Had he also seen McGarvey’s rise and sown the seeds of his destruction?

  All the clues were there. Everything that he needed to know in order to unravel the problem was in front of him, and yet he was blind.

  He got up and began hopping from foot to foot, the rhythmic motion keeping time with his thoughts.

  Putting a bullet into Powers’s head in Mexico City in the early days would not have been the Baranov style. The Russian had never been interested in merely bringing down a single individual, because he understood that when one man fell there was usually another to take his place. Instead, Baranov chose to bring down as many people as possible with one stroke, even bring down entire organizations. Not only kill the man, but kill the idea, kill the confidence in the institution.

  That would help explain all the targets this time: Kathleen and Yemm in the USVI, Elizabeth in Vail, and even himself on the Parkway.

  But he couldn’t see it. He could not see the whole picture.

  Something was missing. Something vastly important. Something that he should know.

  Otto stopped. Christ. Goddamn hell. Most of the people Baranov manipulated did not know that they were being managed. They had no idea. They were never allowed to see the whole picture.

  Network Martyrs was at least twenty years old. Its trigger point was probably the same kind of trigger that had led to Donald Powers’s downfall. McGarvey had been appointed to head the CIA, that was the opening bell. It was something that Baranov could not allow, and he would stop, even from the grave.

  Still, that was only a part of the structure. Who was the Darby Yarnell this time? Who was the catalyst? Who would actually hold the gun to McGarvey’s head and fire the shot?

  Nikolayev? An old Russian Department Viktor psychiatrist?

  Possibly.

  He went back to his laptop and restarted his search, this time widening the base to include all of Baranov’s Department Viktor personnel and activities.

  FIVE

  HE KEPT COMING BACK TO THE SAME CONUNDRUM: WHO CAN A SPY TRUST? WHO CAN HE BELIEVE IN?

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  McGarvey walked back to his office after the five o’clock staff meeting, the tall, ascetic DDO David Whittaker beside him.

  Since Adkins’s forced leave of absence, Whittaker had agreed to temporarily fill in as acting Deputy DCI. He had shown his abilities at the meeting. His was a steady hand, and being number two wasn’t such a huge leap from being boss of Operations, which was the CIA’s largest directorate.

  But he wasn’t happy with the promotion. Adkins was a friend. “I didn’t know that Ruth was that sick. It’s got to be hitting him pretty hard.”

  “He didn’t call you?” McGarvey asked, walking into his office. Ms. Swanfeld handed him several phone messages.

  “No. When did he leave?”

  “Earlier this afternoon. I had to practically call Security to drag him out of his office.” McGarvey took a critical look at Whittaker. “His wife’s in the hospital, but he didn’t want to be with her. Does that make any sense to you, Dave?”

  “The girls are here.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  They went into McGarvey’s private office and Whittaker closed the door. He seemed sheepish. “You probably don’t know Dick’s situation. At home. He loves Ruth, there’s no doubt about that. And she loves him. But they’re not really friends, like Sandy and me. Since the girls were old enough to go shopping it was Ruth and them in one camp, and Dick in the other. They treat him like gold when he’s home. But to them he’s more like a … guest in his own house.”

  “I see,” McGarvey said. It explained Adkins’s reluctance to leave. He had more friends here than at home. And his wife would find more comfort with her daughters than with her husband. “Sometimes the world’s a bitch.”

  “The arrangement worked for him,” Whittaker said. “Until now.”

  McGarvey felt sorry for Adkins. It was one more bit of bleak news. “Does Security know about his home life?”

  “No, and it’s none of their business.”

  “Bullshit,” McGarvey shot back. “Does he have a girlfriend, David? An outside interest? If his home life is so cold, who could blame him? You know the drill. It happens all the time.”

  “It’s not like that, Mr. Director.”

  McGarvey studied his new DDCI for a beat. “It’s not like that because you don’t want it to be, or because you don’t know?”

  “Dick is an honorable man.”

  McGarvey had heard that
term before. He was no closer now to believing that such a noble passion existed than he had been as a young man before Vietnam. “I’m sure he is,” he said. “But he’s out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s not coming back until Security and the FBI can run another full background check on him.”

  “You can’t do that to him, not now,” Whittaker argued.

  “Yes, now,” McGarvey replied. “For the good of the CIA.”

  “You sonofabitch,” Whittaker blurted.

  McGarvey nodded. “I am indeed,” he replied mildly. “But we have a job to do, and as long as I’m sitting behind this desk I won’t allow anyone to get in my way.” Who to trust? He had asked that question all of his adult life without a satisfactory answer. But Adkins was out there alone, on an emotional limb. It made him vulnerable. And vulnerable men were almost always the first to fall.