The Kill Zone Read Online Free

him about it.
    â€œI just got back from France,” McGarvey said, apologetically. He got up and they embraced. He followed her into the stairhall, where he helped her
with her coat and hung it in the closet. She wore a cream white pantsuit and soft half boots. “How was church?”
    â€œSafe.” She gave her husband a sudden, shy glance, as if she had made a poor choice of words and wanted to see if he was going to laugh. “Father Vietski is always good,” she said. She chuckled. “Anyway, what’s doing this afternoon? Want to go to a movie?”
    â€œNot unless you want to. How’re the roads?”
    â€œA little slippery. Not bad.”
    â€œWhy don’t we stay in? We can watch an old movie on TV, say the hell with a big dinner and just snack all day.”
    Her smile was warm. “I was hoping you would say something like that.” She looked into his eyes and touched his face with her right hand as if she was seeing him for the first time in many years. “I love you.”
    He took her into his arms, and they kissed deeply and for a long time. At fifty her figure had matured, but she was still on the slender side, the price of which she admitted to only a few friends was a very careful diet and a regimen of hard exercise almost as strict as Kirk’s. She wasn’t chasing after her lost youth, but she was hanging on to every year in any way she knew how.
    When they parted she was a little breathless. “We’re definitely staying home.”
    â€œBloody Marys?”
    â€œI’ll change first.”
    â€œDon’t be long.” McGarvey watched her walk upstairs, admiring the line of her back, especially the back of her neck, and then went into the kitchen to fix their drinks. They were married at the beginning of his career with the CIA. But shortly after Elizabeth’s birth she gave him an ultimatum; her or the Company. He chose the Company, and they were divorced. They loved each other, there was never any question about that, but she couldn’t stay married to a spy, and he wanted to distance himself from his wife and child in case someone with a grudge came gunning for him. Of course you don’t protect the ones you love by abandoning them. It was something that took both of them a very long and painful time to realize. They were remarried a few months ago, and to this point their lives had settled into a wonderful routine; comfortable, warm, fulfilling. It’s what he wanted, wasn’t it?
    He looked up and caught his reflection in the sliding door to the patio. He was a bit too rugged-looking, too craggy to be considered handsome; but Katy thought that he cleaned up good, and she was in love with his graying hair. “Dress you in a tuxedo, put a glass of Dom Pérignon in your
hand and let you speak a little French; there’s not a woman I know who wouldn’t come running.” But he’d ruined almost everyone he’d ever come in contact with; like a moth to a flame. And on Tuesday Senator Hammond was going to point out his faults—all of them, detail by painful detail. Maybe he would save them the trouble and resign. He brought the Bloody Marys into the large, comfortable family room off the kitchen.
    Katy was hunched in front of the shelves below the television looking through their videotapes and disks. She was dressed in CIA sweats and fuzzy slippers which made her seem smaller, younger, defenseless. McGarvey stopped and looked at her. She was working very hard to make their marriage work this time against terrible odds. Memories of bad men coming after her and Elizabeth, trying to kill them; memories of her husband living with other women, two of whom had been killed because they had gotten too close to him; memories of what he’d done for the past twenty-five years and what he was still capable of doing. Memories, even, of her own past indiscretions; the haughtiness and aloofness that had isolated