Cold Barrel Zero (9 page)

CARO STOOD OUTSIDE
the school, with its gleaming glass facades and angular architecture. He was in Al Bateen, an affluent neighborhood of villas in Abu Dhabi that was popular with diplomats and the Western expats. He had chosen to live here in the Emirates' capital. It was more self-assured, in contrast to the flash, the transience, the arrogance of Dubai.

His Mercedes idled beside him, the driver at the wheel. Caro crouched beside his daughter, took a linen handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the corner of her mouth.

“What's that smell, Father?”

“I don't smell anything.”

“It's like chemicals.”

“They probably changed a filter in the car,” he said. “You're going to be late.” He ran his hand over her hair, gave her her backpack, and watched as she walked up the steps to the school.

He got back in the car, took off his Ray-Bans, and hung them from the pocket of his bespoke suit.

“Ready, sir?” the driver said, and he put the S550 in gear.

“No.”

He looked at the stragglers entering the school. His blue eyes scanned the windows as he watched the children climb the stairs and gather in the classrooms.

It was a beautiful winter morning. He sniffed his jacket. Yes. It was unmistakable: burned plastic. It had been a long day. He had flown back to the Emirates from Central Asia this morning and hadn't had a chance to shower after visiting the cells.

The whole trip had been a waste of time. He'd sat in as two men, trained by his deputy, entered the latter stages of interrogation in a detention facility they had set up in an abandoned refinery. They were in a basket-case former Soviet republic that offered complete freedom of operation for a price.

The subject had been tied to the table, mottled with blood and filth. The two questioners took turns. One gripped what was left of his hair and shouted questions while the other held a torch to an empty water bottle and let the molten plastic drip onto the skin. It would fall, burning, and fuse with the flesh.

“Where were you going?” one barked.

He said nothing. The scalding was the easy part.

The second man waited, let the plastic harden, then grabbed its edge.

“Who were you going to meet?”

He jerked it back, bringing the flesh with it. It was a favorite trick of Saddam's Mukhabarat. Now everyone used it.

The man began to sputter.

“What? What? Speak up!”

He broke. They asked the questions in a rapid-fire sequence. Names, dates, addresses; it all came in a torrent.

The two interrogators turned to Caro, the senior commander, though he held no official role. That would have circumscribed his freedom of movement, made him far too interesting to other intelligence agencies.

It was a common problem; the young men would try to impress him, go too far to prove their viciousness. It was amusing, in a way, because if they'd known whom he was working for, they would have executed him on the spot. They thought in black and white. They couldn't understand the nuances of the great game.

“You brought me here for this?” Caro asked.

One man stepped closer, the concern clear on his face.

“Just stop,” Caro said.

The man on the table mumbled what thanks he could.

“But he just told us.”

“He would have told you anything,” Caro said.

“Didn't you hear?”

Caro's temper broke through. He took the torch and held the flame to the bottle, then laid a line of burning plastic from the man's temple across his cheek to his neck, just below the jawline.

He ignored the screams, simply looked at the two interrogators, a patient teacher.

“Was Kyenge there?” Caro barked at the captive.

“Kyenge?” the man asked, desperate.

Caro tore the strip away in one clean stroke. Even the interrogators blanched at the damage.

The first screamed words were unintelligible, but then they became loud and clear: “Yes! Yes! Kyenge. He was there. I know him. I can show you where.”

Caro looked to the two juniors, who avoided his gaze with shame.

Kyenge had been dead for eight years. The man was lying.

Caro stood close to him, nearly whispering in his ear. “It's all right. It's all right. It's over now.”

“Please,” the man said. “Please—”

“It's okay,” Caro said. He took the man's jaw firmly in his left hand, then reached his right into the man's armpit and slid him up the table until his head just hung off the edge. He shoved the man's face straight down toward the floor. The head fell back and dangled at a strange angle.

The body shuddered and then relaxed completely, voiding on the table. The table's edge had dislocated his cervical vertebrae and severed his spinal cord. The dead man's member rose, taut, toward the ceiling; angel lust, a phenomenon that, even the hundredth time, never failed to unsettle Caro, though he gave no sign.

He was grateful to the man for supplying the lesson so many of the younger fighters forgot. Terror wasn't an end in itself, some pure expression of power or some innate evil, as the blacks and whites of the American outlook had it. It was a tactic, pure and simple. These boys had done too much killing and not enough reading—Qutb, Clausewitz, Robespierre. Terror was necessary, of course, but it had to be applied with care. Against a stronger man, it might have been appropriate, but this man was weak, and in the face of such pain, he crumbled. Fear was a means, a tool like any other. The ends were what mattered.

Caro thought of that lesson again as he looked at his daughter's school through the tinted windows of his Mercedes. Several buses rolled into the lot; today was a class trip. The children's faces lined the windows.

He watched them, their eyes wide open, inches from the glass.

He turned away, paused, then looked back.

The eyes. The glass.

He would have to double-check the details of the operation. There would be a show first, a distraction before the main event, to draw them to the windows, and the charge would be much smaller, because terror was a tactic, and it's far too easy to forget the dead. There are things worse than death. Knowing those things intimately was his specialty and his curse.

One more day.

“Sir, there is some traffic on the way to the airport.”

Caro looked away from the school. He had been in Abu Dhabi, the closest thing he had to a home, only long enough to see his daughter, swap out his suitcase, and pick up a different passport. He didn't like being home, with the strange smells and sounds of a hospital coming from the rear of the apartment.

“Let's go,” he said. He had to make his flight to Los Angeles. His associates now had the shipment inside the United States. He would have his hands on it soon, and in twenty-four hours he would pull the trigger.

THE BAG OVER
my head hung close, damp with my own breath. I smelled fried food and chlorine. I had been stripped naked and searched. They took my clothes and my wallet and cut them apart stitch by stitch with a fixed-blade knife.

My whole body was electric with fear, my skin goose-pimpled and my hair on end, but there was no panic. When things got bad, whether it was back in the navy or in surgery, it was always the same: I would slow down, grow quiet, focus.

They pulled the hood off. I'd been wearing it for the last ten minutes. I sat naked on a wooden dining chair.

My eyes focused on the stainless-steel shelves to my right and left. I was in a walk-in commercial freezer that wasn't running. The space was warm, the air stale. Craning my head, I could see through the open door into the restaurant's dining room. It looked long abandoned, and a sign that read
Mariscos
hung over some smiling Day of the Dead skulls.

In the part of the kitchen I could see, all the windows were blacked out with plywood, and four rucksacks leaned against the wall. One man rested on the concrete floor.

“No cell phone?” Hayes asked me.

“The police kept it.”

He handed me a pair of work pants and a long-sleeved gray shirt. I pulled them on.

“Hayes,” a woman called from somewhere out of sight.

He walked out of the freezer.

The man who had been sleeping approached the door, yawned, and then gave me a hard stare. He held his rifle ready, his finger just outside the trigger guard. No hoods or masks for him. That was a bad sign. I could identify him, if I lived.

“We've got to keep this batch on track. What's the temperature of the water bath?” I heard Hayes ask.

“Twenty-eight degrees.”

A chlorine smell wafted in and burned my nostrils slightly as I sniffed. I kept my head up but didn't lock eyes with the guard. In captivity, you need to strike a balance between keeping your pride (any cowering can invite a sadist) and being overly confrontational (which can also set one off). Hayes returned and took the man at the door aside. They spoke too quietly for me to hear the words, but I could tell that the man with the rifle was agitated. Hayes seemed to be reassuring him, talking him down, keeping him from violence. It could have been an act to gain my trust, a strategy to make Hayes more sympathetic, the good cop.

He walked into the freezer, and the movements of the air crinkled the plastic sheeting hanging from the wall behind me.

It was strange to see that much gray hair on a man so fit. It made him look much older than his years.

“How have you been, Hayes?” I asked. I was trying to build rapport, to get him to see me as a person, not an object. It's harder to kill someone you know, though from everything I had heard, that wouldn't present Hayes with any problems.

“I've been better, Byrne. You?”

“Likewise. Are we in Mexico?”

“More or less.”

The guard watched me through the door, still cradling his rifle. Hayes gave him a nod, then leaned toward me, raising his callused hand to my neck.

I pulled away, seized his wrist. He seemed more amused than annoyed. The guard shouldered his rifle, finger on the trigger, and stepped inside, the muscles in his jaw drawn tight. “Your neck,” Hayes said. “I'll have that cut stitched up for you if you want.”

I touched the skin. I'd thought it was just a scratch. Only then did I feel the crust of blood.

“I'm good.”

“Suit yourself, shipmate.”

I saw a woman walk past the door with a bottle marked
Concrete Etch
. Acid. Eats through organic material. I checked out the plastic sheeting again and shifted in my chair as the fear balled up my lower belly. “It's been a long time, Hayes. What's going on?”

He leaned against the shelf. “We are here to help you, Byrne. We have been watching Riggs and his men. We saw him take you in. We thought he might be setting you up. Or about to threaten or coerce you.”

“I'm only trying to get home,” I said. “I don't want anything to do with this.”

“We all want to go home. You spent a while with Riggs.”

“Let me walk away. I won't talk.”

“You're free to go. This isn't a kidnapping.”

I looked around. “You had me fooled.”

He smiled. “I can see how you might interpret it that way. We had to take a few precautions in case he was tracking you. Word to the wise: Don't play ball with Riggs. Once you're no longer useful, he'll throw you out. He was gunning for you, Byrne.”

I remembered the shot that nearly killed me as I ran toward the cliffs on the peninsula.

“What did he tell you about me?” Hayes asked. “Did it square with what you remember?”

It didn't. But there was another Hayes I'd only glimpsed. I remembered the first time we took contact close up. I had finished bandaging up one of our guys and saw Hayes walking away from an enemy KIA, wiping off his Ka-Bar. He'd driven it through the man's eye. I had to clean up a bite wound on Hayes's forearm.

“Let me guess. He took the false-humility route, brought out Nazar, and played the martyr. Did he talk about helping soldiers find jobs?”

“Something like that.”

“He runs a security-contracting company like a personal army, poaches the most experienced operators from their units after the U.S. spent millions training them, runs off-book logistics—ships, trucks, matériel—for the Pentagon, and charges three times the going rate to keep his mouth shut.” In the banquet room behind him, a man opened a trunk and start piling ammunition inside it.

On the way back from the peninsula, they had landed and swapped out the boat for late-model SUVs. They had all the gear you would need for amphibious direct action or an on-the-water interdiction. I didn't know who was helping them, but they had serious support.

“I know the scenery doesn't help. You've got no reason to believe me. That's fine. I was just trying to give you a heads-up. Check out what Riggs told you, though. Some of it's true. The truck ambush. That was us. The records office too. No one was injured beyond a few scrapes and bruises. At the point, we went in nonlethal. Riggs and his guys shot back. Think about it. Stay away from him, for your own sake.”

“That's a threat?”

“It's good advice.”

“I can walk out of here?”

“We'll need to make some arrangements. Give ourselves a head start. But, essentially, yes. I can't say what Riggs will do. If you walk out there, you're on your own.”

I had a feeling this was a ploy to test my loyalty, see whether I could be turned. If I left, I might get about twenty feet before they shot me in the back of the skull.

“If Riggs is lying, tell me the truth.”

“He's full of shit,” Hayes said. “But I can't read you in on the rest. The colonel's good at all that politician stem-winder business. We keep our mouths shut. Live by it. Trust has to be earned. I wish I could tell you more. I owe it to you to change your mind, but I can't. I swore. I'll just say this: We can protect you, keep you safe until this blows over. Or you can walk away. That's fine. You bailed before. I'll understand if you do it now.”

“I haven't seen you in over a decade. And after everything I've heard, you think I'll join you? That's…”

Hayes ran his hand back through his hair. “Insane. I agree. But that's the way it is. I can see the bind you're in, not knowing who to trust, Riggs or me.” The corner of his mouth ticked up. “I guess you could see which one of us kills you first, then go with the other guy.”

One of the women outside called for Hayes. He stood in the door. I took a step closer to hear.

“We've got company coming,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Riggs. Five, maybe ten minutes out.”

“Pack it up. Get those trucks out of here. I'll burn everything exploitable left behind.”

I stepped into the doorway and looked over at the rest of the kitchen. The guard had joined the others in loading out.

On the counter, a glass retort sat over a low flame. Red vapor rose through the sphere, gathered in the neck, and dripped down the long glass tube into a beaker. A soldier stacked thick sections of milled pipe in a trunk and then closed the lid.

I was in a bomb factory. Used filter paper coated in white crystals lay at the very end of the counter. I looked away, tried not to betray what I had seen and understood.

A hand gripped my shoulder. It was the guard. I had seen all their faces. I could identify them.

“What are you looking at?” he asked. “And how the hell did Riggs find us so fast?”

“You got the tag from his wallet, right?” Hayes said.

“Yeah.”

Hayes stood on the other side of me. “Anything you want to tell us, Byrne?”

The man at my shoulder pulled his sidearm. It was suppressed, good for an execution.

Hayes stepped a foot away from me and looked me over. Then he reached for the bandage on my head, grabbed the corner, and tore it off.

I winced from the sting as the laceration opened up again.

“Riggs is three minutes out!”

“This guy is fucking doubled,” the man Hayes had called Speed said. He pulled me closer and put the gun to the back of my head.

Hayes took his knife out and stood in front of me. He folded the bandage over the blade and cut through it. Silver filaments glinted in the light.

“Pretty good,” he said.

“They put that on me at the police station,” I said. “What is it?”

“Radar-responsive tag. We've been fielding them only over the last couple years. Flash radar at it and it bounces back a unique ID pattern from miles away.”

He passed it to Speed. “Flush that.” The man headed down a corridor. The rest of the crew was in motion, hauling gear toward the main doors.

Hayes faced me. “We've got to run. You're coming with us, Byrne. No time to sort this out now.”

“I get it.” I moved toward the open doors in the rear of the kitchen. There were too many of them for me to escape out the back. I needed a distraction. “Can I help load?”

“Sure.” He went along, tossing gear into duffels. I walked to the far wall, near the door, and rested my hand on the counter as I leaned over to lift a Pelican case. I pinched one of the pieces of filter paper as gently as I could and hid it in my palm. It smelled like bleach, which probably meant it was primary explosive. That could easily blow from friction, shock, heat, or nothing at all, and it would take my hand off. As I reached down for a second case, I slipped the packet into the jamb of the door leading from the kitchen to a storage room. Then I knocked the doorstop out. The door slowly started to swing closed.

A man and a woman rolled a heavy crate toward the banquet room, and as they forced it across a threshold, the moving blanket over it fell forward.

Arabic writing covered the side, and I couldn't help but think that whatever weapon had been stolen from that armored truck was sitting fifteen feet from me. I watched as the door closed the last few inches to the jamb and steeled myself for a sprint. The filter paper blew, barely a gram of explosive. Without a second's hesitation, Hayes's crew shouldered their weapons and ran toward the blast. I sprinted the other way, shoved the rear exit open, and ran into an alley behind the restaurant.

Cool, dry air enveloped me. The night was pitch-black, and after the explosion and the lights inside, I couldn't see anything. I stumbled over something, heard what sounded like a plastic bucket skitter off to my right. My eyes adjusted and I saw ten feet of concrete-block wall looming at the end of the alley ahead of me.

It was a dead end. I sped up, jumped, planted my foot, and got the tips of my fingers onto the top of the wall. The rough edge of the concrete cut into my skin. My shoes skidded as I tried to push myself up, but I managed only to push out and tear myself off the wall.

Footsteps came from behind me.

Silhouetted in the door of the restaurant, a gunman raised his rifle toward me. There was no cover, nowhere to run.

A crack broke through the quiet, echoed off the walls. With what they were firing, that meant the bullet was already here. My body tensed. But there was no pain. I looked back to see the truck pull away at the far end of the alley. It must have been the lift gate slamming down.

A second figure appeared in the doorway and leaned toward the gunman, who lowered his weapon.

“Good seeing you, Byrne.” It was Hayes's voice. “Be careful out there.”

I dragged a pallet over, propped it against the wall, and climbed the wooden slats like a ladder. I jumped off the top as it fell back and then hauled myself over the wall.

Hayes had called off the shot. I appreciated it, but it would take more than not killing me for him to earn my trust. Maybe he just couldn't afford to make that kind of noise and give away his position. Or maybe I was supposed to draw fire. I had to get to the colonel before he decided I was one of Hayes's men and before Hayes's crew had a chance to pick me up again.

The next alley was like a UN of garbage, with dumpsters for a Chinese restaurant, a taco shop, and a Thai place. Most signs were in English. I must have been just north of the Mexican border. What I thought was a shadow was a crowd of rats that flowed away like a parting sea as I passed through.

I ran for a few minutes until I found a pay-phone kiosk. As I came around, I saw it was empty except for a few burger wrappers. The phone had been ripped out. I was on a commercial drag of one-story buildings, all vacant or closed for the night. A car rolled by at the far end of the street. I stepped back into the alley and walked along the rear of the stores.

I looked through a high window and saw a phone in an office. The caulk around the glass was dried out, the frame rotting wood, the window single-glazed, about eighteen inches high and three feet wide.