Cold Barrel Zero (6 page)

“No. We…we thought we left something behind.”

He looked me over nervously. I was breathing fast through my nose like a bull. I'm sure I looked like a maniac, but I'd had it. Anger overpowered me as soon as Cruz picked up the phone.

“Listen. Don't think you can coerce me with this Gestapo bullshit. I told you everything I know. You flag me at the airports. You freeze my accounts. Enjoy it while you can. Because I'm going to destroy you. Wrongful arrest and imprisonment; I'm going to have your badge and make a belt buckle out of it. And tell these assholes following me that I don't—”

“Who's following you?”

“Don't play dumb.”

There was some muffled cross talk as he checked with someone. “Give me the phone,” I heard a voice say.

“Thomas. My name is George Hall. I'm an army major and I have been helping with this investigation.”

“Gray suit?”

“What? Yes…that was me. You are in danger. Where are you? Can you see the men? Are they armed?”

“I chased one and he ran. Tell me what's going on.”

“Get him as far away from innocent targets as possible,” said a voice behind Hall's.

I could see the manager talking to Kelly, pointing to the door, telling her to get out.

“I'll explain, Byrne,” Hall said. “But first, where are you?”

“La Jolla. La Valencia hotel.”

“Stay there. We're going to send some people.”

“I've been through that already. No, thanks.”

“We're not bringing you in. It's for your protection. Trust me. Whatever you do, do not approach or confront these guys. They are no joke, all right?”

In the background, someone asked Hall about the bomb squad.

“Stay by this phone.” He hung up.

The manager had overheard my tirade, and it hadn't helped matters. I spent a minute or two trying to calm him down. He disappeared and came back ten minutes later with two security guards.

“I'm calling the police,” he said.

Sirens filled the street.

“They're already here,” I said, and Kelly and I walked outside.

A black Chevy Tahoe parked in front of the hotel and a black Suburban pulled up behind it. Patrol cars cut across the two nearest intersections, lights flashing, and blocked them off. Traffic came to a halt.

Cruz stepped out of the Tahoe and started giving commands to the cops. They spread out, scanning the roofs of buildings and the streets.

The man in the gray suit, Hall, walked up to me. “You all right?” he asked.

“Never better,” I said. “Though it sounds like I have a decent risk of being detonated.”

“It could be worse, much worse. I'm sorry about the confusion and the incident back at the station. The local cops can get a little worked up when we come by. They like to show off. What did the man who was following you look like?”

“I'm not helping you. I have no idea what you idiots landed me in the middle of.” I had blood on my hands, but that was from years ago. It had nothing to do with whatever these cops were so afraid of right now.

“Tall?” Hall asked. “Well-built but lean, like a backpacker? Bearded, or maybe recently shaved, pale around here?” He indicated his chin.

That was the man who had crashed into me. “Is someone going to tell me what's going on?”

“During the truck ambush last night, a shipment related to national security was stolen. Based on military records, we thought you might possibly have links to the men who took it. And you were in the area. Those men may now be following you.”

“They're soldiers?”

“They were.”

“What do they want with me?”

He let out a breath. “That's what we're trying to find out.”

“What did they steal?”

“I can't talk about it here,” he said. “If you come with me, I can explain. There's someone you should meet. He can make things clear. And then we can get this travel mess sorted out.”

I looked to Kelly.

“You're not safe here,” Hall said.

“We were perfectly safe until you hauled us in,” Kelly said, and she turned to me. “You're really going to go with this man?”

I needed to get out of crisis mode, and I wanted answers above all.

“If I come, you unfreeze our accounts and let us go home.”

“I can help with that,” Hall said.

I walked toward his truck, then leaned in close to him. “She stays out of it. I'll need some money for her, for food and a place to stay so she can get squared away. You tell me what's going on. Then I'm out of here. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said. It was nice of him to act like we were on equal footing. The fact was, he and the police could have hauled me in at any moment with that warrant. I was already in checkmate, with no money and nowhere to go. What did I have that he wanted so badly?

He took some cash out of his wallet, then scrounged some more from the driver. I took the bills and folded them. “I'll pay you back as soon as you unlock my accounts.”

I walked over to Kelly and put the money in her hand. She spread it out. “And what do I say when people find out I traded my boyfriend for a hundred and thirty dollars?”

“Tell them you got a great deal. Get a hotel and something to eat.”

“I'll call the bank and start reaching out to people who might know what's going on.”

“Good. Leave me a voice mail. I can check it without my cell. Tell me where you are. I'll be back in a couple hours.”

“You know what you're doing?”

“No clue.”

I kissed her and then joined Hall by the Tahoe. The guard opened the back door, and I climbed inside.

“Don't worry,” Hall said as we pulled away. “You'll be safe with us.”

HAYES SAT IN
the driver's seat of a Chevy S-10 pickup parked in a pay lot down the street from La Valencia. He watched Byrne talking with the police outside the hotel. His squad had swapped out the vehicles from the armored-truck ambush.

On the bench seat beside him, Ward and Cook kept up the good-natured argument they'd been having for the past four years over who would win in a fight between Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal. Cook was the youngest of the group by six years and still eager to prove himself to the more experienced operators.

As Byrne climbed into the black Tahoe, Ward worked the keys of a computer on her lap. A wire ran from it out the window to a small probe about the size of a pencil that had been fixed with a magnet to the windshield pillar of the truck.

There was a graph on the computer screen with a red line bright against the edges.

“The calibration must be off.”

“Do you have it? They're on the move,” Hayes said. The Tahoe inched ahead in the traffic going toward the 5.

She adjusted the settings. “Wait. Where is Speed?”

“Under the cap.” Hayes tilted his head toward the bed of the truck.

“I'm overloaded. He's glowing with the stuff.” She opened the small window that looked onto the truck bed.

“Did you wear a glove when you painted Byrne?” she asked.

“It would have looked pretty weird to be wearing a surgical glove, wouldn't it?”

“Wash your hand off with this.” She gave him a small plastic bottle. “Then get back to the other car before you completely drown out the scent.”

Speed crawled out and walked to the Toyota 4Runner parked on the street, the squad's second vehicle. Ward watched the colors change as the chemicals dissipated. When Speed had bumped into Byrne at the entrance to the hotel, he'd tagged him with a perfluorocarbon tracer, a near-perfect tracking chemical. PFTs don't exist in nature, and they are detectable down to one part tracer to one quadrillion parts air—one followed by fifteen zeros. They penetrate closed buildings, locked doors, and sealed luggage. They last for weeks. The existence of a real-time portable sensor to track PFTs was still classified top secret in a special-access program.

“Working now?” Hayes asked as the Tahoe disappeared over the hill.

“Yes,” Ward said.

Hayes put the truck in gear. Ward watched the colors shift on her screen and glanced up at the road and the coming intersections.

“Straight ahead.”

It was a long, difficult process. They would lose the trail and double back to pick it up again where the target had turned. The PFTs lingered in the air behind Byrne and Hall. Hayes closed in on them but never approached, never moved within sight of his quarry or the police. The trail snaked through the dark, visible only to Ward's spectrometer.

It led the two trucks on a route parallel to the coast, then departed the main highways and wound along a rough access road. The land narrowed, and ahead they could see an isolated point banked in fog. The tracers drew them on. The terrain fell sharply away on both sides, desert plants on the south, lush green on the shaded north.

They tracked the scent to a small collection of buildings set at the very end of the point, almost surrounded by the ocean. There was a utility building that bristled with microwave and radar antennas, a decommissioned lighthouse, and a white stucco house with a red-tile roof. Hayes drew the Chevy as close to the fences as he could get without being spotted and got out. He looked over the target building. It would be easy to cut off by land.

Speed stepped out of the Toyota and surveyed the perimeter barriers. Two parallel chain-link fences, set thirty feet apart, cut across the peninsula to protect the base.

“What do you think?” Hayes asked.

“Stacked microwave along the face of the fence. Good construction. Climbing's out. Bridging will be tough.” The hill they stood on ran down toward the fences. “The topography will help out.”

“Power?”

Speed traced the electric lines. “The transformers are over there. Should be easy to black out.”

“And once we're past the fences?”

“Hard to say. My guess would be infrared.”

“Ugh,” Hayes muttered. “Bring the silicone spray and the shields.”

They took a few minutes to unload the gear out of the trucks, then started hiking. They stayed low, crouching along the back of a knoll, until they were about twenty feet from the fence.

“Pizza cutters,” Speed said. The easiest way to bypass a perimeter is to simply place a long board up against it and bridge over. Outside corners often form dead spots in the sensors, but these had circular blades set at the top of each one.

Speed took out a twenty-meter rope and tied a hook at the end.

“You sure there's no vibration?” Hayes asked.

He surveyed the fence one more time, looking for the telltale black boxes.

“Yes. Ready?”

“Wait,” Hayes said. He watched the sky. A minute passed, then two. The moon was setting. He watched as a thick layer of fog rolled in, blocking the pinpoint white glow of Jupiter.

“Go.”

Speed spun the hook and flung it over the top of the fence. He dragged it to the left until it set securely against a post, then looped his end around the base of a short tree, gnarled and pruned by salt water on its ocean-facing side. He and Moret pulled it tight and tied it off in a wireman's knot.

“Is there enough room to land?” Hayes asked.

Speed looked again. Every fifty feet or so, a small black rod stood out from the gravel between the two fences: reference markers. That was a mistake. It indicated that there were two microwave sensor paths running down the middle of the no-man's-land, but there was room to move just inside either fence.

“If we drop straight down,” he said.

One by one, each lay on the rope and hooked a foot around it. They crawled over on their bellies on top of the line, picked their way over the barbed wire, then dropped to the gravel.

“You see the markers?”

“Yeah,” Hayes said. He dropped to his hands and knees on the stones.

“Closer,” Speed said. Hayes crawled toward the beam.

“There.”

The others lined up twenty feet down the fence. One at a time, they sprinted at Hayes, planted a boot on his ass, and vaulted high over the microwave beams that ran between the fences. Cook, all two hundred and forty pounds of him, went last, and Hayes could barely stifle a groan. Hayes stood, leaned over to stretch the sore area on his behind, then sprinted, cut, and dive-rolled over the path of the sensors.

He stood with the squad beside the inner fence.

“Huh,” Speed said, looking back.

“What?” Hayes asked.

“Deer.”

“So?”

“Well, with wildlife, they usually have a speed cutoff on the microwaves. To avoid false positives. So we probably could have just sprinted across.”

Hayes rubbed his lower back. He tilted his head and gave Speed a dead look.

“Probably not, though.”

Hayes climbed up the inner fence and dropped to the other side. The others followed. They were inside the base, but motion detectors peered down at them from the corners of the buildings.

“Passive system?” Hayes asked.

“No,” Speed said. He took an IR laser pointer from his chest pocket and adjusted his night-vision goggles. The detector's field would refract the light. “Follow me,” Speed said. “Stay close.”

They moved in a tight file. The beam of Speed's laser wavered at the edge of the detectors' range. He led them in a staggered pattern like a lightning bolt. They took cover beside a storage shed with a view of the main house.

Hayes surveyed the buildings. He switched his goggles over from infrared to thermal. The night went from a world of green contours to a full rainbow of heat signatures. “Transformer at two o'clock. One hundred meters,” he said, then turned his attention to the main building.

The blinds were down, but he caught three ghosts as they passed in front of an open window on the first floor of the house. He counted off the sentries posted at the main doors, on the roof, at each corner. He saw six. Best to assume a dozen, and six to eight more in the building based on the number of vehicles outside.

As Moret readied a charge, Hayes scanned again. He saw a faint red patch in his goggles, next to what looked like a diesel tank, a hundred and fifty or two hundred meters to their left. It was either the largest hot-water heater ever made or a generator. Backup power. “We have to get the genny too.” He lit it with his IR laser.

Speed navigated the detectors and led Moret to the transformer. She planted a small charge against the bushings around the main wires to the compound. The detonator was on an RF switch. Speed's light glowed through their goggles as he traced the invisible maze to the generator, and Moret planted a second explosive.

They returned to the squad.

“Are we going to wait for the guards to go off?” Moret asked.

“No,” Hayes said. “We can't risk any more time here. We'll just have to hit hard. Ready to black them out?” Moret armed the detonator remote and handed it to him.

They all crouched, prepared to sprint.

“What's your boy's name again?” Speed asked.

“Tom Byrne,” Hayes said.

“Will he give us any trouble?”

Hayes remembered Byrne stabbing him in the chest, picking up an M249 machine gun, and vaulting over a wall toward enemy fire.

“Maybe,” Hayes said, and he put his thumb on the detonator. “He was never very good about taking orders.”