David Hagberg
The Kill Zone
This book is for Lorrel and for our son, Kevin, whose imagination is second only to his kindness.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Special thanks to Dr. Michael Mattice for his kind and patient help.
The mistakes are all mine. Soul Mate
We share a single soul…
fates soft embrace
a tale many times told
then usually laid to waste.
Looking towards touch
the steadfast mediator
we steep in it much
only to drown in it later.
An age-old rhyme
we all but actually hear
cutting swiftly through time
to covet what is near.
What barbaric thought
propelling one’s self
from what is sought
to unequivocal hell.
It is inside the stillness
warmth permeates the being
inside the willingness
one truly begins seeing.
Remember the soul…
it knows our name
gives us all we need to know
and how it is we became
PROLOGUE
THE LEGATEES
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Let us alone. Time drive them onward fast.
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
ONE
IT HAD BEEN MADE TO LOOK AS IF HE HAD SHOT HIMSELF IN THE TEMPLE WITH THE GUN.
Dr. Anatoli Nikolayev was an old man, and the summer heat was oppressive to him as he hauled his thin body up the dark narrow stairs.
He wasn’t sure that he wanted the answers that he had come here to find. Yet with everything that he’d learned so far he couldn’t simply turn his back like an old lover who’d found out he’d been betrayed.
His research was almost finished. He had ground his way through a million pages of old records, starting in 1917 with the Soviet Union’s first secret intelligence service, the Cheka, until the breakup under Gorbachev and the dismantling of the KGB in 1991; the kidnappings and terrorism and sabotage; poisons, electric guns, honey traps, brain washings intimidation of countless thousands of officials and diplomats from nearly every country in the world. And assassination. The ultimate act of the state other than war. Bodies stretching back almost ninety years; piled to the rafters; more bodies than even Hitler had been credited with, making him wonder why the Soviet Union hadn’t been as reviled as the Nazis were. His honey, blue-veined left hand trailed along the cracked plaster wall, and he could smell the terror in the stifling air like last night’s cabbage dinner; urine and shit from the overflowing communal toilets; the accumulated filth of ninety years of neglect. When the KGB came it was almost always easier to commit suicide the moment the knock came on the door than to endure what would come next. But all of that was finally coming to an end.
The money to operate the vast worldwide spy network was drying up.
Sleeper agents in place for years, some of them for thirty years or more, were being cut free from funds. Forgotten about. Their original missions no longer valid. They were the unmentionables. No one at the Kremlin wanted to know about them, let alone speak their names. That meant trouble was coming. Agents cut off with no way out became desperate men. And desperate men sometimes did horrible things. He stopped on the third floor
