Cold Barrel Zero (14 page)

LATE THAT MORNING
, Caro and Riggs drove to a private residence on the western slopes of Mount San Jacinto. The meeting was the culmination of two years of planning and quiet politicking. The members of the small cadre in attendance held a variety of formal and informal roles in the defense establishment; the company included a former CIA director, a special assistant to the National Security Council, and an industrialist who financed political movements and small but influential journals. They were mandarins.

As the convoy carrying Riggs and Caro turned up the private drive, Riggs's phone rang. He glanced down. The incoming call was from 202-224-1700. The first six digits meant that it was a Senate office. The number looked familiar, but he couldn't place it.

He answered it.

“Hello, this is Carol Weigel. I'm a staff member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I'm calling because we were looking for an up-to-date phone number for your counsel.”

“Counsel?” Riggs asked. “What's going on?”

“It's for the task force investigation. The Cyrine Nazar testimony.”

“That was all resolved over a year ago.”

“Is there a good contact number for your lawyer?”

“Why?”

“No one has talked to you recently? From the committee?”

“No. Explain to me what is going on.” His stomach tightened. The investigation was closed. This couldn't be happening. Not now. Not at the worst possible moment.

“I'm sorry, sir.” He heard papers shuffling. “My mistake. Let me check with the director and have him give you a call.”

“Put him on the phone.”

“He's not here. We're out of session, though he might be back this evening. I think there's just been some mix-up.”

“What is Nazar's testimony? Is there new evidence?”

“I'm not sure, sir. I'm just updating all the information. I can see if there's anyone here who might know. Could you please hold?”

“What is your—hello? Hello?”

On the boat, Hayes ran his finger across his throat. Ward ended the call. “How was that?” she asked.

“Perfect. He must be scared out of his mind.”

Riggs called back, but the office was closed. The committee had blundered and tipped its hand. Nazar was going to leak the evidence.

The cars in the convoy pulled through the compound gate and came to a stop.

Riggs turned to Caro. “That was the Senate Intelligence Committee. They're reopening the investigation. I think Nazar is about to tell everyone what really happened.”

“No, she isn't,” Caro said. “Leave her to me. She is simply afraid. As long as we go after Hayes with everything we have, she'll be fine.”

Riggs put two fingers to his temple and looked out the window at the estate. The shipment was gone. The whole thing was crashing down on his head. He looked back to see Caro studying him. Riggs swallowed, dabbed the sweat from his brow, tried to hide his fear and anxiety.

“These are the most powerful men in America, and they're looking to you for guidance,” Caro said. “This is our one chance. These are the moments that turn history. Show these men the way.”

They didn't have time for doubt. They had to go inside and sell this plan. Everything was ready. They just needed the yes, and then they would pull the trigger.

Riggs straightened up and opened the door. He stepped onto the pavers, buttoned his jacket, and strode toward the house with a full colonel's bearing.

He walked through the front entrance and started shaking hands.

After five minutes of small talk in the parlor, the host, an immensity of a man wearing a navy-blue sack suit and a permanent scowl, raised his hand. The guests turned and gave him the floor.

“We're all busy, so indulge me in getting down to business.” Normally the chitchat, cocktails, and introductions stretched out for an hour—one of the sacred rituals of politics. “I've brought you here to consider the proposal that Colonel Riggs has suggested.

“You all know the problem we are facing. From North Africa to Central Asia, America has been bruised and bloodied in our war against terror. Fearsome enemies remain, but no one in DC has the stomach to risk American lives to destroy them. Our friend here is closer to the action than anyone, and what he has told us is troubling.”

Caro had caught rumblings of plots through his networks, and Riggs had passed them on to the host.

“There are foes determined to hit America, and we need a way to kill them without upsetting the politicians.”

Riggs looked over the faces of the listeners, considered the power assembled in that room. He knew Washington. His father had once been the acting CIA director, had been a perpetual second in command for most of his career. Riggs had spent his childhood playing at the feet of influential men.

He stood at ease while the crowd examined him. The guests were hard to impress, but the three-car security detail for Riggs, unusual for anyone below cabinet level, did draw their attention. They knew there had just been an attempt on his life, that he was in the fight.

“Colonel,” the host said, and held his hand out. Riggs stepped forward. He didn't have to say it. They all knew; since 9/11, they had won every battle and lost every war. A new strategy was needed.

“It's a simple proposal,” he said. “Fight the enemy as they fight us. We need deniable direct action, provocations, proxies. All I ask is unofficial sanction and room to maneuver.”

He didn't need to go into details. All of that had been discussed already, developed for years at gatherings like this through face-to-face conversations that were never recorded on any official schedule.

He outlined the plan. It would be a dirty war, with no fingerprints. Riggs would be the indispensable man for this new strategy, combining the best elements of contractors and Special Operations with none of the inefficiencies of the big army. He had the means and the expertise. The money and operations could be taken care of off the books through his private force and Caro's connections in the region. It was exactly the kind of unscrupulous tactics that the nation's enemies had used to outplay the U.S. for years, and now the U.S. could play the same game through its proxies. Caro was the fearsome son of a bitch they needed downrange to get it done.

Riggs finished. “Are there any questions?”

They returned only silence. These were shrewd men and women, and they knew that ignorance was often a smart move. In the past, a plan like this would have involved false-flag attacks. But certain questions are best left unanswered. Deniability was crucial. There were still men who specialized in such operations—who made bombs that couldn't be traced—but of course, America didn't engage in those types of tactics anymore. They didn't ask. The specifics would remain with the colonel, as would the risks. There were countless qualified O-5s waiting for promotion. Colonels were expendable, easily replaced.

This was simply a last face-to-face meeting, a gut check.

“How long will it take to arrange?” the host asked.

“We're ready now.” All Riggs needed was the green light.

He looked around the room once more, waiting on a verdict.

A bell chimed in the anteroom.

“Lunch is served,” the host said. As they walked out, he took Riggs aside.

“We'll have your answer after we all eat.”

There was a four-course meal on the terrace, with the snow-covered peaks of San Jacinto towering over. Any questions came now, in whispered asides. They tested him, judged him more by his demeanor than by anything he said. You reached this level in politics only through instinct.

They asked about the attack on the safe house on the peninsula. “Sound and fury,” Riggs said. “We'll roll up Hayes any moment.” He dropped a few humble reminders of his actions after the massacre.

That day, when he'd faced off against Hayes alone, had made him a hero, had earned him his promotion to full bird. Today he was cashing in on that bullet.

Caro helped sell the plan, looking utterly relaxed, with no tie and his sunglasses hanging from the chest pocket of his suit. He was their dream made real, a blue-eyed campaigner, the guy who had seen flies crawling on dead men's eyes, their man in the Middle East. They gathered around him, eager for stories from the real war. Riggs noticed that there was a quiet confidence about him that conveyed a sense of history being in the room, like de Gaulle in London for the Free French. They were building a new resistance for a new age, on a far grander scale.

By the time coffee was served, Riggs was calm, felt his old self again, gruff and wry. These proud men and women were eating out of the palm of his hand.

“You'll excuse us, Colonel?” the host asked.

“Of course.”

The host joined the rest of the assembly at the table, and an assistant led Riggs and Caro back to the entryway. It was time for a decision. It took only ten minutes. The host joined them and put his arm around Riggs's shoulders. He leaned in close enough that Riggs could smell his stale breath.

“You have the green light. Go ahead, Colonel, and Godspeed.”

Caro and Riggs took their leave, made apologies for their haste, and walked back to their vehicles.

“The green light,” Riggs said as if in disbelief. “But we don't have the shipment.” The whole plan rested on the crate Hayes had stolen.

“We'll find it.”

Cox, the lead investigator from the Department of Defense, was also on the hunt for Hayes and his team. He was keeping Riggs updated on his progress, and Riggs dutifully passed everything on to Caro, including the last location where the police had seen Hayes.

“But how?” Riggs asked.

“Leave that to me. It's time for more severe methods. I'll find Hayes, and I'll finish this.”

Riggs nodded. Caro still had his knife; he understood what was about to happen. That was why their partnership worked so well. War was ugly, and the West had lost its nerve for ugliness. Caro filled that gap and gave Riggs cover.

“Whatever it takes,” Riggs said.

“And the call?”

“Make it.”

It was time to pull the trigger.

Caro took a separate car. Riggs was left alone and couldn't stop thinking about the call he had received as he'd arrived at the meeting, about Nazar and the possibility of the evidence going out. His mind raced through the awful consequences of the truth emerging, of the committee reopening the investigation.

But the success at the estate steeled him. Whenever he was around Caro, he felt stronger, felt like the man he projected to the world. He would take care of Nazar himself, put the fear into her. If worst came to worst, he had options. There was a place he could take her and silence her once and for all.

He lifted his phone.

CARO PARKED HIS
Mercedes in the underground garage, killed the engine, then looked at himself in the rearview. It was faint, but he could see it: his pulse beating in the hollow of his throat. Fear; he knew it intimately as a tool but didn't often get to see it in a mirror. Decades of work rested on this moment.

He stepped out of the car, walked up a level, and found his second vehicle, a compact SUV, completely unremarkable.

He needed to be in two places at once, to take down Hayes and make the call that would start everything.

To be two people.

The security around Riggs made that much harder than it needed to be. It took Caro nearly an hour to finish his surveillance-detection routine, an hour of driving with his eyes fixed on the mirrors, surrounded by threats real and imagined.

Another hour's drive brought him to a public library near Riverside. There were no security cameras, and the staff had plenty to keep them occupied. The libraries in this country were the de facto homeless shelters during the day.

As Caro walked through the parking lot, he felt the recordable CD in his pocket. His secure computer was air-gapped; he had never connected it to the Internet, never exposed it to the NSA's channels. Files went in and out on CDs, which made it much harder for malware to sneak onto his machine or data to sneak off.

The wind piled the desert sand against the curb. The lot was empty.

He saw his courier, a plain young Indonesian woman with her hair up, as he walked in but gave no sign that he recognized her. He went to the Natural Sciences section, scanned the shelves, and found it.
On the Origin of Species.
Every library had a copy. No one ever read it. He pulled it out.

Behind it was a small black phone. He slipped it into his pocket, flipped a few pages in the book, and then put it back and walked away down the aisle. The smell of decaying paper made him nostalgic.

He stopped in Classics, found the copy of Aeschylus's plays, and slipped his CD in among the pages of
The Persians.
A group of children sat on the carpet along the far wall, listening to a volunteer read a story. He circled around them, passing his courier on the way.

Their eyes never met. The decades of tradecraft, the endless hours of training, were all to prepare for moments like this, deep inside an enemy nation where the slightest mistake meant death and, worse, the foiling of his one chance to bend the arc of history.

She now had the CD, his final orders to the bomb maker. Caro had lit the fuse.

He had been building up to this operation his entire life. The skin and blue eyes that let him slip unseen into the West, his blessing, had once been his curse, a target on his back marking him as a child of the infidel.

He had run off at twelve and found the first real home he knew, a mud-walled hut full of sixteen fighters. They would paint his face, and he would dance for them, and the grizzled old chieftain would take him to one side of the room after the lanterns went out and there would be the smell of olive oil, and the old man would be on top of him, grunting, gripping Caro's shoulders with his right hand, the one with the two fingers missing.

The other beardless boys always teased and wheedled their masters for chocolates or money or sweet-smelling scents—it was astonishing the power an object of sex could hold over a warlord whom whole regions feared—but Caro wanted only one thing.

He would whisper in the old man's ear as he eased back and wiped himself off:
Teach me to kill.

The chieftain brought him a gift, one of the Kalashnikov rifles, the kind the fighters referred to simply as “the Russian,” and while the boy worked the action, the man leaned down, looking into the kohl-rimmed eyes, and kissed his smiling bow of a mouth.

But that wasn't enough. Caro proved himself hunting mountain goats, riding straight across the cliffs behind the hounds, careless of death, driving the prey into snowbanks and killing them one after another with unerring shots. When the others tried to seize his prize, he shoved them back, picked up his knife, and began taking the skin off the animal in long, clean cuts.

They brought him to the next firefight. The old man was jealous of this rare treasure, a fair blue-eyed boy, but in the end Caro grew stronger, and he refused to stay back. So the chieftain taught him how to survive the war, how to kill.

He had never seen a student like Caro, so cool when death was in the air. Caro exerted a strange control over the old man, who would do anything to please his young lover.

But all Caro wanted to do was fight, to shed the blood of the foreigners that had dishonored his family, the blood that ran through him and marked him as an outsider. The chieftain knew about Caro's background, and when the first hairs began to appear on the boy's upper lip, he told him that he too had once been a
haliq,
and he brought him a gift.

He took him into a room in the mud-walled hut, and there was his present: a handsome foreigner with blue eyes, bound, on his knees, a man who could stand in for Caro's father, for the man who had cursed Caro as a pariah among his own people.

The chieftain handed Caro a knife and told him not to worry; it was just like skinning an animal at the end of the hunt. And Caro saw the fear in the captive's eyes and listened to the pathetic begging he couldn't understand. He felt the rush of power and stepped forward with the blade.

Caro's orders and the data from the CD did not go from the courier directly to their final destination. They would be sent first to an intermediary, transferred by hand to a new device, and re-sent through a network of couriers using a different location each time—a
mirror system,
in the trade.

His commands bounced from the U.S. to an agent in Algeria and then to Sudan before finally reaching his explosives man.

He was known by the nom de guerre the Mechanic. His phone buzzed on the crowded but obsessively neat workbench as he leaned over it and poured a white powder from a spatula into a beaker. It bloomed red in the water like diluted blood, and then the crimson smoke billowed past him as the reaction accelerated, on the brink of going out of control.

He wore terry wristbands on both forearms to absorb the sweat. He had been selected for his skill in improvised explosives. The job required a certain heedlessness of danger and a mastery of organic and inorganic chemistry in order to synthesize controlled chemicals that would have attracted the authorities' attention if purchased on the open market.

The green glove on his right hand fit strangely. Missing fingers and facial scars were the price of his profession.

He added his mixture to cool water, and the RDX crystals precipitated out. He filtered them, washed them down, then removed his respirator and checked his telephone.

When he was young and known by a different name, he had been at the top of his class and wanted to be a pharmacist, or even a drug researcher, but his father couldn't afford the bribes necessary for him to sit the exams, and besides, his family worshipped the wrong prophet.

He dissolved the plasticizer from glue rat traps and combined it with the RDX to form a stable plastic explosive.

The ingredients he had used—acetic acid from a camera shop, fertilizer, formaldehyde—were readily available. In the end, the cost came to about four dollars a pound, and the result was equal in power to the C-4 used by the U.S. military. Three pounds of it would destroy a truck. He rolled the casing of a 7.62 mm NATO bullet between his finger and thumb; packed with gunpowder, it would serve as a blasting cap.

He formed the RDX putty into bars and placed them in a weight vest from a sporting-goods store. Four caps went into the charges on the vest. Normally a second layer of ball bearings or other shrapnel would be used, but not in this case.

The glass of the school would serve that purpose, because the point was to maim, not kill. As always in such operations, the strategic goal wasn't the death of the victims but the reaction of those who witnessed the blast and its aftermath.

And that was Caro's genius. The Mechanic lifted the vest. Such a small thing. This tactic had been used thousands of times before. The body count would be minimal, a rounding error compared to the wars the West forgot. But the simplest thing at the right place and the right time—like a box cutter on an airplane—could alter the course of nations.

He paused. The muezzin called the faithful to prayer over the loudspeaker of a nearby mosque. He ignored it. He wasn't religious.

He went to his phone and downloaded all the data he had received to its main memory, then pulled the SIM card, dropped it in a jar, and watched it disintegrate and cloud the acid.

The orders had come from Caro.

It's time.