Cold Barrel Zero (15 page)

WE SWAYED BACK
and forth in the cabin of the
Odessa
as the boat crossed the coastal waters. Speed checked the batteries in his optics, then dangled a line of tobacco spit into an empty Rip It can. Muted heavy metal leaked from Cook's headphones. I recognized the song, though I couldn't remember the title; it had been popular when I was with the Marines. Cook loaded a thirty-round magazine from a stripper clip, then slapped the mag against his palm.

The precombat inspections went quietly, with none of the pumping up or slamming helmets together I saw in movies. There was some small talk—old video games, the foods they missed—but mostly they focused on making sure their gear was ready. The point was to stay loose. Once in action, the training would take care of the rest.

“What do you miss most, Moret?” Speed asked.

“Close air support,” she said, then went back to jury-rigging a rifle sling with paracord.

Riggs was hunting us, but he wouldn't have to look hard. We were headed for the coast, for a safe port, and then we were going straight at him and Samael.

Moret handed me a Beretta M9 and an empty magazine. I cleared it and started running the function check: slide forward, mag in, slide back, drop mag. The motions came automatically, drilled into my muscles years ago. Safe, double-action, single; I cycled through each, working the slide, pulling and releasing the trigger, watching the hammer fall.

The gun was ready. I didn't know if I was.

Cook tossed a tourniquet to me.

“Thanks.”

Kelly was still in the head, cleaning herself up from when she took down the man at the hotel.

“Fifteen minutes!” Foley shouted from the deck.

We were closing in on our target. I needed to talk to Hayes, to decide what I believed. I stepped into the forward cabin. Dust swirled through a shaft of light from the porthole.

Hayes was alone. He swallowed a pill dry, then slipped the packet back into his bag. He sat in front of a laptop and a map covered in pencil marks: choke points, police and military bases, terrain and demographics. A Bible lay near his elbow.

It was an AO—area of operations—map. I'd seen them only for the front lines in Afghanistan.

 “Any word from Riggs?”

“He's inland, the deserts. We'll connect with the other cell, and then it's fix and finish.”

“Kill him?”

“Not necessarily. He's the means to get to Samael. Samael is the main objective.”

“And Nazar? What about getting the evidence?”

He put his pencil down and looked straight at me.

“It's her lifeline. You heard her. There are ways, but we don't have time. We could take her and interrogate her,” he said. “An ugly option, and coercion often yields unreliable information. We don't know enough specifics to make it a priority.”

“So you take Samael out and it's over?”

“We'll try to take him alive. You kill a man, you never know what plots he's left ticking.”

“Even after everything he's done?”

“I can't let this be about revenge.” He glanced down at the Bible. “‘Recompense to no man evil for evil,'” Hayes said. “‘Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place to wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.'”

“You ever think of helping Him along?”

“The thought's crossed my mind.”

“What about clearing your name?”

“This isn't fantasy,” Hayes said. “I can't let my personal concerns cloud my judgment. Samael is the threat. If going after him marks me as a terrorist, so be it.” He let a breath out, stared down at the table. “It's all I have left, Byrne. That duty, the promise I made. They took everything else.”

“Your faith?”

He hesitated.

His pupils were dilated. I guessed he was taking dextroamphetamine, a go-pill that pilots and Special Operations Forces occasionally used so they could stay awake for days.

“I lost sight of God a long time ago.”

The Hayes I knew was an all-business sergeant, never spoke a word of doubt or expressed anything but eagerness and determination that we would come out fine. You would be running with your unit, starving and wet, near delirious from hypothermia, and if you stumbled, he would jog alongside you, not a word of censure.
You've got this, Byrne. Come on.
Even on the worst days with the squad, he could turn morale around just through his example. It's why it killed me to see him like this.

“What about your wife?”

Hayes looked straight at me with a face so cold I thought he was going to kill me right there.

“I have nothing to go back to,” he said, and he kept his eyes on me for a long moment. I looked away, to a hanging locker full of mildewed orange life jackets.

“Since we're asking questions—why'd you really quit the navy, Byrne?”

My eyes kept moving, over the sleeping berths, but all I could see was her lying there, the life going out of those green eyes, the blood on my hands. I looked down at my hands on the table.

“It was my time.” I pointed to the Bible. Hayes slid it to me.

The book was open. I don't know what I expected to find. It was Revelation, and the ink was slightly smeared, as if someone had run a finger along the passage countless times:

His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.

I flipped back to the rider on the pale horse, Death, with hell following after, to the sun black as sackcloth and the moon like blood.

I glanced up to see Hayes working his jaw slightly. Definitely amphetamines. I looked from berth to berth, wondering if the shipment he had stolen from the armored truck was here on the boat.

“How long have you been awake?” I asked.

“Thirty, forty hours. I'll crash when we're done. You worry about yourself. Just let me know if you want to come with us or run.”

He must have seen me looking around.

“It's not here.”

“What?” I asked.

“The box. It's safe. Don't sweat it. Worry about yourself. We're landing in a few minutes.”

My eyes returned to the page: seven seals opened, seven trumpets sounded, hail and fire mingled with blood, a third of mankind dead by plague.
Don't sweat it.
Easier said than done.

“I—”

Ward stepped in.

“Hayes,” she said. “You've got to see this. We have something on Nazar. The bluff worked.”

Samael sat on a white cooler on a floating dock, leaned back on one arm, and watched a formation of Marine Super Cobra helicopters fly low over the Pacific.

The fixer that Hayes and his team had been using to aid their port calls was a bad liar. Once Samael set to work with the knife, it didn't take long for the man, who went by the name Ferrante, to give up what he knew about the
Odessa
and where it would be landing.

As the pain started, the man had tried to buy Samael off, confessed there was four thousand dollars in hundreds in a Ziploc at the bottom of the cooler. Samael took the money after the knife work was done and then was certain it had come from Hayes. They were hundred-dollar bills fresh from the currency strap.

The fixer's body was now in seven pieces inside the cooler. Fog crawled over the water toward the dock. Hayes's ship would be here any moment.

At the ambush on the way back from Hayes's infiltration mission, Hayes had managed to escape, and he had only impressed Samael more since then, surviving the American manhunt, finding the shipment, and taking the armored truck.

A fog bank approached from the south. Samael leaned forward and peered into the mist, excited to meet Hayes face-to-face at last and finish what had been started years before on that barren plain.

HAYES HUDDLED OVER
the laptop with Ward. As I left the forward cabin I saw Kelly near the entrance to the galley, finishing the check on a Glock pistol. I started toward her, but Moret stepped in front of me.

“Did you talk to Hayes about his family?”

“I mentioned it.”

She shook her head. “Don't. He and his wife separated before his last deployment. Her idea, not his. It may have been before she knew she was pregnant. There's a daughter he's never seen. I don't need him in some screwed-up head space.”

“Got it.”

“Good,” she said, and then she joined the others at the galley table, sitting around the laptop. I watched them for a moment. All of them had their own ghosts, the friends who had been killed, the families that had been taken from them during their exile.

Ward glared at me. “Can I help you?”

“I'm good.” I leaned against the bulkhead as she played the audio recording. It was another phone call, Nazar's voice.

“What now?” Nazar said.

“What the fuck are you pulling?” It was Riggs, with an anger in his voice like I hadn't heard before.

“What are you talking about?”

“I know what you're doing. If you talk, you cease to be useful to me, and you know what that means.”

“I haven't done anything. If you recall, our deal was that you would get me asylum here and protect me. I don't feel protected right now. So why don't you get those animals who came after us under control?”

“Don't tell me what to do. If you let that evidence go public, I'll kill you myself.”

“You're a coward,” Nazar said. “Now calm down. I haven't spoken with anyone. The phones are not safe.”

“If you talk, you die. Do you understand?”

“Use the BlackBerry next time. It's encrypted. I don't want to hear your voice. Let me know when you have my money.”

The line went dead.

“Who ended the call?” Hayes asked.

“Riggs.”

Our plan to frighten him into overreacting had worked. “They're at each other's throats,” said Hayes. “Riggs made the threat. This could work.”

The swells died down. I looked out the window. We had left the open ocean and entered a channel between two jetties.

The rest of the team looked to Hayes.

“Change of plans. We go after Nazar first,” he said. “Ward, you have the keys for Riggs's BlackBerry. Can you spoof Riggs's phone so it seems like the messages we send to Nazar are coming from him?”

“Yes.”

“Set up a meeting with Nazar.” He leaned over the map and read out an address. “It's good terrain. What were Riggs and his crew driving?”

“Suburbans.”

“That's good. We can get a couple on short notice.”

I heard the squeak of rubber on fiberglass as the boat came alongside the dock.

“Time to go,” Foley barked. Without a word, the team moved onto the deck and started loading out the boat calmly but with startling speed.

“Wait,” I said as Ward stepped through the companionway with the last trunk on her shoulder. “What's going on?”

She turned to me. “New objective. We're going to hit Nazar. Now she thinks Riggs may be trying to kill her. And you heard her. She has the evidence set up as insurance. The truth of what happened during the massacre will go public if she dies.”

“So what are we doing?”

Speed threw me a black duffel and smiled. “Killing,” he said. “Finally.”

THE
ODESSA
SLICED
through the thick fog. Foley turned after the last channel marker, pulled up to a dock, backed the engines with a growl, and stopped perfectly parallel two inches from the bumpers. He jumped onto the wood decking and tied off the lines. “Ferrante,” he called. “Ferrante!”

Foley had dropped Hayes and the team off at a port a few miles north and was supposed to meet the fixer here. He ducked his head into a small office to his right. It was empty except for a white marine cooler.

He walked up the gangway to the top of the seawall. “Ferrante?”

He stopped, then turned. Something was wrong. He scanned the dock ahead and behind him. A seagull with a gnarled foot landed on top of a piling. No one was here.

He stepped back on board, started the engines, and pulled away. The diesels churned and set a foot-high wake through the marina. Once he was past the mouth of the bay, he put the engine on idle and stepped down into the companionway.

“Quinn,” he said, and clicked his tongue. “Quinn.”

The cat never ventured far from his side. He'd found it half starved with no tags cowering under a VW Westfalia in Bellingham. With his thick beard and perpetual squint, Foley looked tough, but he'd always had a soft spot for strays.

He stepped into the cabin. It was darker there, and he had trouble seeing. Something moved at the end of the passageway, near the forward cabin.

“Quinn?” he said. Then he heard a hissing sound.

“There you are, buddy.” He stepped forward.

The blow came from nowhere. The pain flared from his temple. His vision flashed white and he heard his glasses skitter along the fiberglass flooring.

He was blind without them.

The engine died. The boat drifted in open water, rising and falling, creaking with the swells. He got to his knees, one at a time, with a groan, and started crawling, feeling along the floor for his glasses.

A shadow crossed the white floor in front of him. “Quinn?” he said. He looked up and could barely make out the unfocused contours.

“Who the hell are you?”

He reached for his knife, but the sheath was empty. A kick. The world spun. He hit the ground hard. As he staggered to his knees, he felt the cold blade against his skin, and his arm was wrenched up behind his back.

Music often filled Samael's mind at moments like this, but this time it was an image, a fresco by Michelangelo called
The Last Judgment
that adorns the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Dozens of characters stand before God at the End of Days, rising to heaven or descending to hell. In the lower right-hand corner, you can see Saint Bartholomew, who was martyred, flayed alive. He is carrying his own skin, and a knife. And if you look closely at the loose skin he carries, you can see that its face is Michelangelo's, a hidden self-portrait.

Foley came to. His arms were bound with wire, looped to an overhead bar. A saline lock had been inserted in a vein in his arm.

“Welcome back,” Samael said.

The knife moved closer to his face. It had a wide, curved blade. There were plenty of fillet knives on the boat, but this one was different; it was for gutting and skinning bucks.

There were other people in the cabin, but he couldn't make out their faces.

“I want you to know that although you might feel very weak right now, you are in command of this situation. Do you understand?”

“I don't understand what's happening. Who are you? Do you want money? The boat?”

Samael moved close to Foley, almost nose to nose, then reached up and, with an index finger, caressed the meat at the base of Foley's right thumb. There was a hard patch of skin and some scarring: a shooter's callus down to the bone. It takes firing thousands of rounds a day for weeks, years on end to build it. It was a product of the kill houses, the ineradicable mark of a former operator.

Samael smiled.

“You've been trained. You know that everyone breaks. Everyone. So save yourself the pain.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Samael picked up the tube leading to the saline lock, screwed in a syringe, and pressed the plunger. Near their feet was a wooden board. It normally covered the bilge, the area under the cabin sole where water collects and can be pumped overboard, but it had been pushed aside.

Foley's pupils dilated. The lights burned huge and white in the cabin. Whatever was in that syringe, it was fast-acting.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“Don't,” Samael said, then pressed the point of the knife into soft flesh just below Foley's ribs and jerked it down. The blade sliced through his belt, his pants, and his underwear. They sloughed onto the floor. A faint red line was the only sign on the skin that the razor's edge had passed so close.

Foley hung there, naked from the waist down, the tail of his flannel shirt draped over his buttocks. He looked around the cabin. The bulkheads were out of focus. They seemed to breathe. His mind raced, far too fast. Every sensation in his body felt amplified a thousand times: the cold against his bare skin, the wire cutting into his wrists. He could see the pain from whatever Samael had given him. It arced and danced across his vision like licks of fire.

“I want the safety signal.” It was the sign that would indicate to Hayes that it was safe to meet.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Samael lifted the blade so Foley's penis draped over the razor-sharp edge.

“Okay, okay. It's an orange peel next to a trash can.”

“Good. Now I know the danger sign. What is the safe signal?”

Foley licked his lips. His mouth was parched. The drug had taken full effect. The interrogator hung an IV bag from the railing and attached it to tubing in his arm.

“You won't die. I can replace the fluids. I have days.”

Samael stepped behind Foley and placed the blade at the small of his back, almost flat against the skin; the edge dug in at the smallest angle.

“Have you been to the Sistine Chapel?”

“What?”

“In the Vatican?”

“What?” Foley gasped. “No.”

“That's a shame.”

The knife pressed in, sliced through the skin.

The pain was beyond anything he'd ever felt, a wash of stinging fire, tearing him apart from bottom to top. He screamed and wrenched his body away. He felt the slightest give. The screws at the railing had pulled out of the old, waterlogged plywood. He stood as best he could, then seated them back in the hole.

Foley tried to catch his breath as he felt the blood drip down.

“You want the box?” he asked.

“I want everything,” Samael said, and readied the knife for another stroke.

Foley had been trained, and he held on as best he could. It was true. Everyone breaks. The idea was to begin with the least valuable information you had and hope that by the time the interrogator got what really mattered from you, it would no longer be of any use.

But whenever Foley tried to lie, Samael sensed it and brought the knife back, and the world was on fire again. The drugs clouded his mind, made it impossible to be consistent with the lies and concealments, and soon Foley wasn't sure what truths he had given away during all the torments.

He screamed, long and loud, and the noise died in the wind as the boat drifted and rocked with the swells on the open ocean.

Foley turned and squinted at a photo tucked into the nav station: a young mother and child. He could barely make it out, but it still brought him comfort.

The pain retreated.

He was an old man. He had had a good life. He was glad he could die doing something worthwhile instead of rotting away in an assisted-living facility, sucking down everything he'd saved through a ventilator. Better he go now. It would be a good death.

Foley turned and saw Samael looking in the same direction. The cutting stopped. Samael plucked the photo off the station and walked to the other end of the cabin to examine it in better light.

It brought a smile to the monster's face. As much as he tried, Foley couldn't hide his hate.

That confirmed it.

“The wife and daughter,” Samael said. “Where are they?”

Foley couldn't fool himself. The interrogator was an expert who now knew about Hayes's child.
You old ass. You lost the day with your sentimentality.
It would all come out eventually. That's one thing he knew. Everyone breaks.

Samael studied the picture, taking note of the background, of identifying marks.

Foley looked at the handrail along the companionway. It was metal, about three-eighths of an inch in diameter. The last six inches pointed up in the air. He usually hung his hat on it.

He jumped up, and with what strength remained, he pulled with his arms as he fell, wrenching the handrail free.

Samael turned back at the sound of screws tearing against the plywood. The act of resistance seemed almost amusing in its futility, a desperate move by an unarmed man short of blood. Foley threw himself at the handrail, eyes wide open. He felt peace and a certain satisfaction, as he was sure Samael realized what was happening. He couldn't hurt his interrogator, but he could hurt himself.

He thought of the wife and child as he fell, and he was happy. He was protecting them. He had done his best. He hadn't given them away. A good death. The old man was glad to be of use.

Samael lunged to stop him, but it was too late. The IV pulled out, dripped against the fiberglass. From the flutter of Foley's feet, Samael knew he was dead.

Foley hadn't brought his arms forward, had faced death square and unflinching. Samael couldn't help but admire the old soldier.

He had held up for a long time and given up far less than Samael had expected. But still, it should be enough.

A trail of blood ran along the sole and drained into the bilge. The pump whirred below them.

“Get the gas cans and head back to land.”