Cold Barrel Zero (7 page)

HALL AND I
rode in the back of the Tahoe while his driver navigated to the end of the peninsula then pulled up to a security checkpoint. The guard spoke with the driver, then waved us onto the base. There was a second chain-link fence after thirty feet. As we passed through the inner gate, I could see the red-tile roof of the main house through a break in the fog. We rolled down the driveway.

A lighthouse stood in the distance to our left, and beside us was a storage yard full of rusting model ships, a whole fleet of carriers, destroyers, and frigates, dozens of them, four to twelve feet long.

We parked in front of a Spanish-style mansion at land's end. Hall led me to the front door as two members of his security team followed behind me. I paused on the stoop and took a look around but could see only the stucco facade and faint lights glowing through the fog in the distance. The guards behind me stiffened.

“What is this place?” I asked Hall.

“A safe house,” said a voice behind me. A man stood, silhouetted in the door frame, then stepped into the glow of the porch light. “The E Ring decided we need to be babysat until we can round up the soldiers who came after you today.”

“Thomas, this is Colonel Riggs,” Hall said.

He was solidly built, a bear, though it seemed middle age had softened him a little around the jaw. He had deep creases beside his eyes and a look so direct it made me want to take a step back.

“Tom Byrne.” I reached my hand out toward his right.

“Doesn't work,” he said and offered his left. I took it and felt the embarrassment showing in my face.

“Sorry.”

“Don't be. I'm used to it. Come in.” He entered the house, limping slightly on his right leg, before I could say another word. I turned and watched the fog pull back along the twin fences high on the hill above us. I thought I saw movement.

“What's up?” Hall asked.

I looked again. “Nothing.” I followed them inside.

“You want water or coffee or anything?” Hall asked.

“Coffee.” It would cover up my hunger for a while.

The interior looked like an officers' club from the early twentieth century: wood paneling, a model ship on the mantel. Most of the furniture was covered in drop cloths. The three of us walked past an open window toward a dining room. The drawn blinds moved in the breeze.

“We have instant. Still getting settled.” Riggs stepped into the kitchen and leaned against a sideboard. “They have us going to the mattresses here. It seems like overkill, but I've underestimated the people who are after you before.”

He pointed to his disabled hand. A scar that looked like the result of a gunshot wound covered the back of it. “This was their work.”

Hall started a kettle and poured a foil packet of coffee crystals into a Fort Campbell mug.

“Colonel,” I said. “I don't have anything to do with any armored truck or any of these men you're after. My bank accounts are frozen. I can't fly. Could you tell me what's going on?”

“Standard procedure when we find someone with a nexus to terrorism.”

Hall poured the water and set the mug on a wooden table beside me. “Sit down.”

I took a chair. “Terrorism? Come on. This is obviously a mistake. If you keep coming after me with this stuff, you're only going to hurt your own career—”

“My career is already over, Dr. Byrne. So you can save the threats. They're pretty weak anyway. I'm retired, though DOD calls me in to consult fairly often. Most of my time is spent on a project I have that provides employment opportunities to warriors after their service. I wish I were done with the Pentagon, but they can't seem to let me go.”

“I had nothing to do with this.”

He lifted a stack of papers on the side table and let them fall. “You seem to check out.”

“What is that?”

“Your past.”

“Good. I'm cleared. So I can go home.”

“That's out of my hands. And besides, these papers could be the dog that didn't bark.”

“Whose hands is it in? Because I'd like to talk to them instead of wasting my time here.”

Riggs stepped next to me, put his face close to mine. “No more bullshit. Did you help him attack that truck?”

“I told you, no. I don't even know who you're talking about.”

“Come off it. You know who he is. You're helping him. You're in over your head. Come clean now and save yourself the pain.”

I took a deep breath. “Baiting me isn't going to work. I don't know anything.”

He let the aggression drop, deflated slightly. I gathered it had been his last stab at me, and he seemed to accept the truth of what I was saying. “So you really were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You poor bastard.” He shook his head. “Well, whether you make it home depends entirely on the soldiers hunting you.”

“Who are they?”

“You saw one today, tailing you at the hotel. Their leader sometimes goes by the name John Hayes.”

I looked down and put my hand to my forehead, trying to make sense of it. I hadn't heard that name in more than a decade. Hayes had been my sergeant when I was attached to a Marine squad. I could see Riggs trying to read something into my look of recognition.

“I served under him when I was a corpsman. But I haven't seen him or talked to him in years. Why would Hayes ambush a truck inside the U.S.?”

“Revenge,” Riggs said. “That's the least worrisome motive.” He pulled a chair out and sat next to me.

“Let me tell you what we're up against here. Captain Hayes was the leader of a task force under my command. We were deployed overseas; doesn't matter where. He and his team came from Joint Special Operations Command's special missions units. Those are all classified, black.

“We train them to go behind enemy lines, to disappear, to survive indefinitely with no support, to fight, to hunt, and to kill. We take them to the edge. Sometimes they go over.

“While coming out of a denied area, Hayes and his team committed grave crimes against innocent civilians. Rather than face punishment for their actions, they fled. Now they're in the U.S., and they're on the warpath. We don't know their ultimate target or their motives. It could be revenge or an attempt to eliminate the people who can testify against them.”

He opened a folder and slid a photo to me: a bombed-out armored truck surrounded by burned scrub and torn metal. It looked like news footage from Afghanistan.

“The truck attack. They did that in less than three minutes.”

I looked at the scorched metal where the doors had been sheared off. It was a surgical hit.

“What did they steal?”

“Something very dangerous. This is the latest in an escalating pattern of strikes. And now they seem to be after you.”

“But why?”

“You tell me.”

“No clue. I don't know why you or the police would think I have anything to do with Hayes.”

“We've been over your file. You two nearly died together at K Thirty-Eight. You're going to tell me you're not close?”

“I haven't seen him since then.”

“Hayes's first target inside the U.S. was an office building in North Carolina,” Riggs said. “It's an annex of the Defense Cover Program that handles classified-unit personnel records. It is as secure a building as we know how to make, and they went through it like a breeze.

“He and his team destroyed their personnel files, the information we would need to find them and their aliases, associates, and family members. Pentagon investigators are attempting to reconstruct those records.”

“You didn't know him well?”

“Few did. He was in the field for most of the time I commanded the task force. Your name surfaced when we canvassed past teammates and associates of Hayes. That's why the FBI picked you up when they found out how close you were to the assault on the truck.”

“Jesus.” I lifted the photo and shook my head. “You thought I would help him do that? I'm a doctor now.”

“He can assume identities with ease. Some people thought you
were
Hayes. We know better, now that he's following you. He may try to contact you or coerce you into helping him. It's one of his strengths. Don't let him lure you in. He's done it to many people, and it's a fatal mistake.”

“I'm nothing to him.”

“That can't be true. You saved his life.”

“I was just doing the job.” I took a sip of coffee, then leaned back in the chair. “How about this: Is it possible Hayes is watching you, hunting you?”

Riggs looked around the safe house. “Certainly.”

“He probably saw the police and Hall drag me in. And now he and his team are checking me out. It's pretty simple.”

“Help us find him, and we'll protect you and sort out your travel and financial issues.”

I clamped both hands around the mug and took a long breath. I was innocent, but they were going to keep treating me like a terrorist unless I made myself a target for the real bad guys. I would suffer for an obvious mistake made high above me that no one could be bothered to correct. Boy, I missed the military.

“I don't want anything to do with this.”

“I imagine Hayes's crew are already none too happy with you. Why else would they be following you? And now that they've seen you talk to the police and us, I don't think they'll consider your jawing over coffee with me any worse than what you've already done. They can't kill you twice.”

I muttered a curse. This was insane. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn't help you because I don't know anything. Unless you want to use me as chum to draw them out.”

Riggs gave me a disingenuous look:
Heaven forbid.

“This is extortion,” I said.

“You can do some good here.”

“No.”

Riggs stood suddenly. His chair skittered back. He tripped with his weak leg, stumbled, and then caught himself. Hall went to help him, and Riggs shoved him away.

“Hayes,” Riggs growled. “Blood on his hands, and still you people line up to help him. He's the goddamn pied piper.” He turned to Hall. “Give it to me.”

Hall handed him a folder.

“Do you have a clearance?” Riggs asked me.

“No.”

“I could go to prison for showing you this,” he said, then shrugged. “To hell with it.”

He laid a photo in front of me. It looked like doll parts at first, then I made out a shipping container in the background and got a sense of scale. It took me a second to understand what I was seeing. It was a pile of bodies, many dozens, heaped like trash in a landfill—men, women, children, some two or three years old, all of them torn apart by gunfire, massacred. I knew I would never be able to unsee it. Those bodies would mingle with my own ghosts, making themselves at home.

I pushed it to the side.

“That's more of their handiwork,” Riggs said. “Hayes and his team are in the late stages of an operation. You are a target, individually and as an innocent citizen. Everyone you know and love is at risk. I am here to stop them. I am here to save you. So have some basic human decency and help me. Because that”—he tapped the photo—“is a warm-up. Will you help us stop him?”

I looked back at the eight-by-ten, at the bodies. I had enough blood on my hands and I wasn't going to get Kelly involved in this. I finally had someone to lose. “I can't. I'm sorry.”

Riggs straightened up. “Get Nazar,” he snapped to Hall.

“What's going on?”

“There's someone you need to meet.”

Hall stepped away and opened a sliding door. I looked around the room. There were guards at both exits. I didn't like the setup. I peered through the door after him, expecting some enforcer to emerge. But in the slanting light, all I could see was an older woman leaning over a table in a sunroom. He beckoned me in, and I stepped through the door.

Windows filled most of the two far walls, looking out over a courtyard. The patchy fog pressed against them, condensed on the glass, and streaked down. I could hear waves crashing.

Hall said something to her, and she looked up from her work. She had been writing in a slanting script, filling a page of letter paper. I looked at the book on the table in front of her.

“The Odyssey?”
I asked. I didn't recognize the language she was writing in, but it was clearly verse. She was translating it.

She pushed back her chair and stood. She wore a flowing printed dress and had gray hair up in a loose bun. As she turned, I could see scars beside her eye.

“Tom Byrne,” Riggs said. “This is Nazar. Nazar, Tom Byrne.”

We shook hands. She gave me a kind smile, though there was something sad about it. She was tall and thin and carried herself in a manner that struck me as old-fashioned, European.

“Nazar is your last name?” I asked. It felt impolite to call her by her first.

She began to speak, but Riggs interrupted. “Let's just stick with Nazar for now.”

He stepped closer, between us. He wanted to protect her.

“Nazar was one of our interpreters—no, much more than that, a fixer, my trusted local guide. She worked with Hayes occasionally.”

“Just a translator, really,” she said, laughing quietly. “The colonel makes me sound like Gunga Din. I'd rather be hiding out among these books.”

I pointed to the open volume. “I remember a part where he goes down into the underworld, and he meets all these people he knew who died.”

“The shades. The shadows of the dead. The Greek is
skia,
the Latin
umbra.
Dante used similar language.”

Her English had a faint British accent. Something else too—a trace of a hard burr I couldn't place. I took another look at the scars, then caught myself.

“It's okay, Tom,” Riggs said. “We're the bang-and-dent section. And we're the lucky ones. I understand your reluctance. You'd be an idiot if you didn't try to avoid these men. So don't ask any questions. Just listen.”