Dead Zero (16 page)

“He was there all right. You got that part right. His prints were all over the place.”

“Christ,” said Bogier.

“That’s the bad news. The good news: you also didn’t get Swagger. You conked him hard on the head, and he’s out like a light in some hick hospital, but expected to recover. You did, however, blow a hole the size of a football through Colonel Norman Chambers, USMC, retired. Congratulations: you managed to kill the one man in the room who had nothing to do with this shit.”

“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke,” said Bogier. “Collateral damage.”

“Yeah, well, be careful you don’t ‘collateral damage’ your way into the gas chamber, sparky.”

“It’s war. It happens. Nothing personal. You go for an objective and a shell lands in downtown Shitbrick City, population, people seventy-five, chickens two hundred forty. Sorry little brown people, but important personages put our nation’s values over Shitbrick City.”

“I forgot. You’re a patriot.”

“You forgot. You okayed the hit. You’re pretending like I went rogue.”

“Bogier, your job isn’t to outsmart me in debate. Remember, you never got higher than master sergeant. I’m the guy in the officer’s tuxedo eating pheasant at the post club. If I want, I can arrange a nice duty detail for you—stables to be mucked out, garbage cans to be scrubbed, grout on latrine floors to be scraped out with toothbrushes. Your job is to outsmart Cruz, another sergeant. You’re both mud crawlers, sentry knifers, bridge blowers, laser painters, macho action jocks, so you ought to be up to that, or at least I’m betting you think you are. So let’s concentrate on what’s what.”

In Bogier’s mind: an image of this ponce, with a goatee and a cigarette holder, wire-frame glasses, an ascot, as he crushed his head in
his bare hands, spurting gray matter out of the ears and nose before the eyes popped like Ping-Pong balls from a toy gun.

“Good idea,” said Mick, grinding his teeth.

“Okay, what we have to worry about now is whether they shit-can Swagger.”

“Why would they?”

“Duh, went in without backup or informing HQ. If he were a special agent, his ass would be grass. Maybe they let him slide but keep him on a tight leash because he’s fundamentally an amateur who happens to know a lot about the bang bang.”

“Don’t forget, that ‘amateur’ found Cruz in twelve hours his first day on the case while everyone else was jerking off.”

“He’s a smart guy, no lie. That’s why we have to hope they keep him aboard. Assuming he hasn’t found the magic credit card in his back pocket. So let’s assume next they still want to use his brain in scoping out the sniper. So they move him to DC, does that make sense?”

“We’re on our way.”

“My guess is, you’ll pick up that RFID response at the FBI building on Pennsylvania. You stay on it. He’ll figure out where Cruz is sooner or later. Maybe you can get a hit on Cruz that saves Zarzi’s life and be a big hero. Mick Bogier, the new Bob Lee Swagger. Then you and your new best friend Bobby Lee can go on dry-drunk rages together.”

MacGyver insulted Mick for another few minutes and then let him go. Mick checked the Suunto and headed toward the bar to drive out the image of MacGyver roasting in flames to the laughter of all the fellows in the grog-and-wench shop called Sergeants’ Valhalla. Tonight would be a big night for getting drunk. Tomorrow: Washington, D fucking C.

INTENSIVE CARE UNIT

BRIGHTON COUNTY GENERAL HOSPITAL

HOPKINS, SOUTH CAROLINA

1642 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

The first time he awoke was when some doctor was pulling up his eyelids and shining a flashlight into his eyeballs. That hurt. The second time, someone had given him a shot. That hurt. The third time it was Nick Memphis, poking him. That really hurt.

His eyes came open. It felt as though a camel had been licking his face for a month. His limbs were dead, his fingers dead, his legs and feet dead. Consciousness was a thick sludge, and he fought his way through it, struggling for focus and breath.

“Oh, shit,” he said, his voice evidently not dead.

“He’s coming out of it,” Nick said, and the next person who leaned in was Susan Okada, beautiful and untouchable—why had she come back, damnit?—and looking at him as, say, the shogun’s executioner might look at someone whose neck he would in the next second split.

“Hello,” she said uncheerily, “anybody home?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied and found that his body did move, he wasn’t quadded out. He had a headache that only a dozen Jacks in an hour would justify, and the right half of his face was swaddled in bandages, the eye occluded by pouches of something—his swelling, he guessed—pressing against it from all sides.

“Water, please,” he said.

She poured it for him from a bottle.

“Our hero returns from vacation,” she said.

“How do you feel?” Nick said.

“Like shit.”

“Funny, that’s what you look like,” said Susan.

“Oh, Christ, what happened?”

“You were smashed in the head by a flying desk. You have a concussion. Your cheekbone for some reason refused to break, but it took thirty-one stitches to close up the slice beneath your eye. The swelling will go down in November. You look like an abused grapefruit.”

“Agh,” he coughed. “And what about, um, that colonel, and Cruz.”

“The colonel’s dead, Cruz is gone. Total catastrophe.”

Bob swallowed the water. Goddamn, his head hurt. The news about the colonel hit him hard. The guy was just—

But what was the point?

“Tell me what happened.”

“Sure. Then you tell us what happened.”

Nick explained: ten .50-caliber slugs through the wall of Steel Brigade Armory, a fluke of ballistics that the first one hit and spun the desk through midair instead of blasting Bob into particles, another one zeroing in on Colonel Chambers—“You don’t want to see the crime scene pictures”—and the others generally ripping the hell out of the place. Cruz’s prints were all over, but the lack of blood samples suggested he’d gotten to the floor in time to just miss getting jellified, then slipped out the back after the shooters pulled away. There were no forensics on the shooters except a partial tire track near the edge of the road that pointed the way to sixteen million Goodyear Wrangler P245 tires.

“Oh, hell,” said Bob.

“Now, your turn. Excuse me for asking the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, but what the hell were you doing in a conversation with the object of a federal manhunt and why oh why oh why didn’t you call for backup, for guidance, for anything?”

“Oh, that,” said Bob, and he searched feebly for a joke, almost saying, “Backup is for pussies.” But he didn’t. Nobody seemed much interested in his sense of humor.

He told it as simply as he could. He explained it, then justified it.

“I just went out there to get the lay of the land. I knew I’d be back the next day, I didn’t want to go in cold. A recon, that’s all. When I seen, excuse me,
saw
the light on, I figured, what the hell? I thought it was going to be another old geezer who probably knew who I was and
I could get more out of him on my own, man to man, than if I was part of a goddamned invasion force. I didn’t know Cruz was there. I had no idea someone was going to start blasting with a fifty. I didn’t plan on taking a ten-thousand-caliber desk in the head.”

Nick was silent.

Susan said, “Tell us exactly what Cruz said. Can you remember?”

Swagger tried to re-create the conversation in his own head.

“‘Nobody’s been where I am now. And nobody can get me out but me.’ That’s the line I remember. He had an idea people were trying to kill him. Seems like he was right on that one, or maybe these stitches on my face came from my imagination. But he’s a serious man hell-bent on a course. He’s burned bad because of the death of his spotter. He thinks he’s the only one who can figure it out because all of us are in ‘the system’ and can’t be trusted or are being manipulated by shadowy forces. Wasn’t interested in coming in. I played that line hard, but he wasn’t having none of it, any of it.”

Nick let a melancholy ton of air escape his lungs.

“So, basically, we’re nowhere.”

“We do know it’s him. And we know that somebody wants to kill him. We do know that,” said Bob.

“We don’t,” said Susan. “Excuse me, but this colonel knew a lot of snipers, he ran courses for snipers, and among them are sure to be some unstable people. Maybe one had a grudge against him. You just can’t jump to the conclusion that it was an attempt on Cruz’s life without a thorough professional investigation. Maybe he was in a love affair, a business crisis, a lawsuit, any one of a dozen mundane reasons—”

“They’d go for him with a Barrett? His wife’s boyfriend goes for him with a—”

“Barretts are civilian legal,” said Nick. “If you wanted a safe way to kill a guy who was known to work very late in an aluminum building, a Barrett semi would be number one on your wish list, especially if you knew a little about guns, as anyone who knew the colonel probably did.”

“So you’re not going to—”

“Go on a witch hunt, no,” said Susan. “I know how conveniently the Agency fits all manner of paranoid fantasies, justifies any interpretation, satisfies any mandate of evil or conspiracy. We will not use this as an excuse to probe in areas that are off-limits unless we develop hard evidence, and I mean hard, that suggests Agency personnel were involved. Unknown gunmen shooting up a building in the night in rural South Carolina doesn’t cut it.”

“High-level gunmen. You could tell because he fired so fast and he kept his shots tight. He’d ridden that recoil before in dusty places full of guys with tablecloths on their heads and daggers between their teeth. Do I need to point out that it was almost certainly a Barrett that the guys in Afghanistan used on Whiskey Two-Two? Coincidence? Sure, the world’s full of them. Anyhow”—Swagger coughed, in the grasp of a phlegm-throated oxygen debt—“who are they, what are they doing here? What’s their interest in Ray?”

“Nothing ties them to Ray,” said Nick. “Sorry, but Okada is right. Without hard evidence we have no license to poke our way into Agency business. No one at the Bureau wants that. This temporary truce is something everybody wants and I can’t endanger it on the evidence of nothing.”

“You people and your rules,” said Bob. “It’s like dealing with kindergarteners at a goddamn ice-cream party. ‘I want the ice cream!’ ‘No, no, it’s
my
ice cream.’ How do you stand it?”

“The system is the system, Swagger,” said Susan. “Look, there is indeed a schism in the Agency: those who believe in Zarzi, those who don’t. The disbelievers have been exiled because the Administration also wants to believe in Zarzi.”

“Is it possible some of the pro-Zarzis have gone overboard in their protection of him?” Bob said. “They want the Zarzi ice cream, they’re crazy for the ice cream, and so they’ve gone around the bend to make sure it don’t melt?”

“These are professional people. They don’t go around bends. I will make certain delicate inquiries, but my accessibility itself has been threatened by this episode. They’ll all know we had a shot at Cruz and
whiffed. That doesn’t help, Swagger.”

Delicacy! Swagger wanted to say: Are you here for them or for us? Is your job the truth or is it to protect your bosses? But he couldn’t. She had stood hard for him and gone into battle with swords for him. She had brought him the rest of his life in the form of his daughter, Miko. She had nothing to prove to him.

“Susan, I will obey any policy you say. I’m sorry if I suggested otherwise. You can count on me not to betray you or disobey you.”

She nodded. Then she said to Nick, “Look, let me talk to him alone.”

“Sure, but no necking on company time.”

“Ha-ha,” said Susan, “count on the Bureau for laugh riots.”

But she turned to Bob once they were alone.

Her gaze was steady, as it always was, her face annoyingly perfect. Her hair looked a little mussed, and of course that made her seven or possibly nine times more attractive.

“Look, this isn’t easy,” she said. “I am well aware that they put me here because we worked together before and I get a sense, once in a while, that you seem to like me a little. They know that, they’re using that, just as they’re manipulating me through the fact that I never met a cowboy with brains before until I met the old dog. Cowboys are cheap, but the smart ones are one in a million. So don’t think I don’t feel whatever it is we’re not supposed to talk about. But, Bob, I have to cover for the Agency. I married it, it’s my husband, everything I ever got I got from it. It’s my Marine Corps. I know its follies, its pretensions, its weaknesses, how many of its people are self-infatuated fools. But it is necessary and it is the only one we’ve got, so no matter how many times I remember when Samurai Swagger kicked in the door and faced off with that creepy Yak and sent his head in the direction of Sevastopol, I have to pull back to my loyalty to the Agency. Okay? You have your code, Semper Ho and Gung Fi and all that, and I have mine.”

“I’m hearing you, Okada-san. You were a hell of a case officer.”

“Get some sleep, cowboy. We need you on two legs and a horse.”

He smiled—a little—through cracked lips.

Nick stepped back in.

“Okay,” he said, “old friends’ time officially over. Bob, we will forward any info we develop to the state police detectives—they’re waiting for your statement, by the way—who have to solve this case. In the meantime, we will continue our pursuit of Ray Cruz. We need you in Washington to read the possible shooting sites. Be on our team, be our friend, okay? As Ms. Okada says, rest a few days, wait till the ringing stops and you only look like a tomato and not a grapefruit, and come back to work. Is that clear?”

Bob said yes, knowing secretly that he would never leave this case till the end, if it killed him—or anybody else.

He had to find out: who was trying to kill Ray Cruz?

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

THE 600 BLOCK OF NORTH CHARLES STREET