The Kill Zone Read Online Free Page A

her like an ice queen in an unassailable palace. But all that was in the past. They’d finally shown each other their vulnerabilities.
    â€œFind anything good?” he asked, putting the drinks on the coffee table.
    She looked up and smiled. “You have your choice. Platoon or The French Lieutenant’s Woman. ”
    â€œAny other possibilities?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œCompromise? Flip a coin?”
    She laughed, the sound light and musical. “You should see your face.” She held up the disks. “What’ll it be?”
    â€œI’ve always been a sucker for a good love story.”
    She laughed again. “ Platoon it is.” She loaded the disk into the player. “What’d Otto want?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI think I passed him on Connecticut. Wasn’t he here?”
    â€œNot this morning,” McGarvey said, and for the life of him he didn’t know why he had lied to his wife.
    She gave him an odd look; one of patient understanding, like she knew that he was lying but she wasn’t going to ask him why, then came over and settled next to him on the couch.
    â€œHmm. Nice,” she said.

MONDAY

    TWO
    AN AIR OF MYSTERY HERE … A DARK, CATHEDRAL HUSH ONCE YOU WERE ADMITTED TO THE INNER SANCTUM SANCTORUM OF AMERICA’S INTELLIGENCE ESTABLISHMENT.
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    T he snow stopped sometime in the middle of the night. McGarvey got up twice to go to the bathroom and then take a turn around the house—checking doors, windows, the alarm system. As acting DCI he rated a full-time bodyguard, but he had refused for no other reason than he didn’t want the formality that went with a job he wasn’t sure that he was going to keep.
    Foolish, as were some of his other habits. He stood for a long time looking out the kitchen window across the golf course. It was two in the morning, and he wanted a cigarette for the first time since he had quit several months ago. The stars were ultrabright hard points in the moonless sky; cold and very distant.
    This time when McGarvey went back to bed he slept without dreams, as if he had been drugged; hammered into something like a deep coma. When he awoke a minute or two before the six o’clock alarm he felt more refreshed than he had for months, but the same
nagging whispers that something was about to go wrong were back in full force.
    Kathleen was already up, had the coffee on and was out for her 5-K run. He splashed some water on his face, then put on a tee shirt, a pair of shorts and gym shoes. He turned the television to CNN and started on the treadmill; slowly at first, with a moderate resistance, the machine automatically building to its maximum within a few minutes. It was a mindless physical routine that felt good. His body was even leaner and harder with more stamina than a few months ago when he still smoked, and he was tromping across the mountains in Afghanistan. But his mind wandered away from the television and he was back in the tunnels beneath the ruins of a sixteenth-century castle in Portugal. No lights, water running because the pumps had failed, explosive charges ready to go off, trapping him in a permanent coffin beneath millions of tons of rock. Somewhere in the blackness Arkady Kurshin was waiting to kill him. I won’t die here. Not now, not like this. Panic rising like a secret monster; jaws agape, claws coming to reach. Christ—
    He came back to the present, forty minutes later, his shirt plastered to his body, the muscles in his legs beginning to bunch up, his gut hollow.
    He switched the treadmill to the cool down mode and looked at the television. Nothing new happening. Still trouble in Afghanistan; an American tourist murdered in Havana; Pakistan reneging on its promises to hunt down al-Quaida terrorists, Iran, Iraq, North Korea.
    The treadmill was slowing down. Why had the business with the Russian assassin Arkady Kurshin come to mind now, of all times?