Dead Zero (20 page)

“Not likely,” said Mick.

They had worked the following technique out well, having learned to keep Swagger in any car within a mile and a half, but not within a mile. Maybe a little closer during daylight, but now, late at night, Mick knew to keep his distance. Only when he verified that Swagger’s car
had hit the beltway did he go to his own headlights and approach the giant roadway superstructure at a modest pace. He went up the ramp, merged into a very thin traffic stream, and progressed at just under fifty as the faster vehicles buzzed by on his left.

“One exit,” said Z. “Well, two if you count 795 West, but one actual city exit. Reisterstown Road.”

Mick followed the directions, not really seeing the ratty neighborhood into which the ramp to Reisterstown Road deposited him but rather locked hard into the hunt.

“He’s turning right, third street past Old Court.”

They counted too. Mick doused his lights before the turn so that a psychic voodoo sniper mojo motherfucker like Swagger wouldn’t pick up on the sudden disappearance of light behind him, found Crenshaw, and turned. He followed the roadway through big, softly quiet houses, and eased to the curb two blocks behind the car in which Bob and whoever had parked.

“Now what the fuck is this?” Crackers asked.

“Maybe it’s your whorehouse. Maybe the great Bob Lee Swagger has a bone on, and he’s come down here to Chinatown to get it off. Clarifies the thinking.”

“I’ll take sloppy seconds, no problem,” said Crackers. He didn’t mean it as a joke.

“Okay,” said Mick, “Crackers, on the night vision, you stay low, you move ahead, you find solid cover, I’m guessing between cars, you set up and you keep them in surveillance.”

“Yo,” said Crackers, “action.”

He slipped out.

Mick watched the man, one of those scrawny, thin types with a lot of surprising strength in his narrow arms, slip down the road, low, under the cover of parked cars. A few minutes passed.

“Okay,” came the call over the radio, “I got him in the car, they’re just eyeballing this big corner house.”

“Can you get me an address?”

“Ah, let’s see, let’s see, yeah, 1216, 1216 Crenshaw.”

“What is it?”

“Big dark house, that’s all.”

“Great. Otherwise . . . ?”

“They’re eyeballing, they’re talking, that’s all.”

“Okay, hold tight.”

Mick picked up the satellite phone, sent the call out.

“This better be good, Bogier,” said a groggily irritated MacGyver.

“Don’t know why, but Swagger and an FBI guy are now parked outside a house in a town called, ah, Pikesville. Address is 1216 Crenshaw. But there’s no team here, it’s not a raid or even a real recon. They’re just, you know, studying on it.”

“Crenshaw, 1216. Okay, hang tight.”

“This has just developed, I don’t know how long they’ll be here.”

“I will get back as fast as the system allows,” said MacGyver, somewhat annoyed.

Mick sat back, thinking.

Has he found Cruz? Is Cruz in the house? Why would they be here? But if he’s here, why don’t they have a raid team? Why aren’t they pouring in?

“Whoa, now they’re pulling out. Starting up, heading out.”

“What do we do?” Tony asked.

“Fuck if I know,” said Mick. His head ached. He hadn’t been to the gym in a week. Z and Crackers were driving him nuts. He could feel his body melting along with his mind. He wanted it over. This was the worst shit. He didn’t sign up for this cop shit. He was Special Forces, cross-trained in sniper and demolitions, plus he knew a good bit about radio. He had worked all over the world and here he was sitting in—

“Miiiiccccckkkk,” said Tony, slowly.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t jerk, don’t move fast, but I got a guy across the street, walking toward the house. Or maybe to another house. But he’s an Asian guy, I think, thin, strong, looks sniper to me.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Mick, understanding in a flash why the feds hadn’t raided.

They didn’t know if he was in there either. And if he wasn’t but might be, and they raided now, they’d blow that deal. So they’d hit the place at dawn, figuring the stragglers might come into the house all night, whatever it was. The image of drunken college kids, from any of the six or so schools he’d been kicked out of, came to his mind. From there the connection was easy to Alabama, the big one. Number one recruit, best high school linebacker in history. Great six games, then Auburn, a legendary game, nine solo tackles. Got drunk. Mary Christian DeLaux, the only girl he’d ever loved. The yellow Corvette from Mr. Bevington, the Chevy dealer. Bevy’s Chevys, biggest outlet in town. How ’bout a ’Vette, Rhett? The crash. He tried to push it away. He thought it was gone. But it wasn’t. The word “dormitory” flashed to him from some file deep in his cerebellum.

He turned his head just a quarter of a degree, and a man, thirty-five feet away, directly across the street, walking forward briskly, came into view. In profile he was Asian with a thick bush of stiff hair, very muscular, maybe a little tall, in jeans and a sweatshirt. He gave no sign of noting two men sitting in an SUV across the street; he was intent on his progress, just churning ahead.

But, goddamn, Mick hadn’t gotten a good look at the face.

He picked up the radio unit.

“Guy coming, your five o’clock, on sidewalk, I need you to get a good visual on his face with night vision, but don’t give your position up. Move real slow.”

“Got it,” said Crackers.

They watched. The walker passed the end of the row of cars in the street, diverted across the lawn, opened the unlocked door of 1216, and disappeared. No light came on, he didn’t go to the kitchen for a beer, or kibbitz with his frat brothers in the TV room. There was no TV room, no frat brothers, just darkness.

Crackers appeared in his car window.

“You get him?”

“Yeah. Asian, thirties, muscular, tall, thick hair.”

“Could he be forties? Cruz is forty-two.”

“Hey, I’m no expert. They don’t age like we do. He could be thirty, he could be sixty.”

Mick rooted around, came up with a briefcase, pulled it open, and pulled out a xerox of a photo of a marine sergeant in dress blues in a formal promotion shot. But the duplication had eroded its subtleties and it flowed weirdly toward the generic.

“That him?”

“Hell, Mick,” said Crackers. “It could be. I couldn’t say for sure.”

“God, I wish I’d hear from that motherfucker MacGyver. Where is he when you need him? Look again, goddamnit, tell me it’s him.”

Crackers examined the flimsy photo first in the dark, then in a bright cone of illumination from his SureFire. “Mick, maybe. I suppose. You know, some of them have distinctive faces, round, square, fierce, dumb, fat, thin, whatever. This guy looks like all of ’em, with some white thrown in.”

“Mick, let’s roust ’em,” said Tony Z. “Do it fast. If he’s there, we pop him, we leave. They won’t know what hit them. The fucking door isn’t even locked.”

“That’ll never work,” said Crackers. “We don’t know how many there are, how do we control ’em, we don’t have cuffs or blindfolds, we don’t have balaclavas, we leave prints, man, that is all fucked up. Plus, even if we have him full frontal in the flashlight, how can we be sure it’s him? We just won’t know.”

“Okay, junior,” said Tony, too intensely, “what’s your bright idea?”

“Sit, wait, and see.”

“Negative,” said Mick. “The feds may raid at any second, and when that happens, if he’s there, we have failed, we are screwed, all hell breaks loose.”

Both the team boys were silent.

“I don’t like it either,” said Mick. “But I’m not here because I like it and neither are you. This is what we do. The hard thing. For the right reasons. It sucks, but there you have it. I am open to suggestions for the next five seconds.”

Silence.

“Look at it this way,” said Mick. “You call in artillery, you get a coordinate wrong, a shell lands in a village. Too bad. Our war, their village. You don’t feel good about it, but that’s the price of doing business. Collateral is to be expected. We’ve all seen it.”

“Mick, I don’t know if I can do it,” said Tony Z.

“Sure you can,” said Mick. “You’re a cowboy. You’re a trooper. You’re a one hundred percent life-taking, throat-slitting, mother-fucking rockin’, rollin’ operator, baddest of the bad, meanest of the mean. You’re Ming the Merciless, got it? How ’bout you, laughing boy? I know you’re in.”

“I don’t like it either, Mick.”

“It ain’t about liking,” said Mick. “It’s about doing. Give me the fucking night vision. I’m in the lead, I’m on the gun.”

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

1216 CRENSHAW

PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND

0415 HOURS

Nobody liked it. It wasn’t a thing a soldier would ever brag about. It involved no heroics at all, just suppressed pistols. Mick did all the killing. They slipped into the house, Crackers in the lead with the night vision monocular. Mick just behind, with an untraceable M9 Beretta and a Gemtech suppressor. No kicking in doors, no shouting, nothing. They crept to the first floor and began to edge down the hallway, coming to a bedroom. Crackers pushed the door in, Tony Z, also with a suppressed M9, covered the six o’clock. Mick stepped in, target acquired, and fired.

One or two stirred when Mick hit them. The impacts puffed up little supertime geysers of fabric debris, maybe some blood misting into spray in the force of the considerable subsonic velocity. Mick shot for midbody. Nobody screamed. There were no scenes. Room to room to room. Crackers cupped his hand right at the breech of the weapon, so that each ejected casing struck his palm and was deflected downward. After the shooting in that chamber was finished, he scooped them all up. He also counted rounds. And he handed Mick a new mag. Room to room, floor to floor. The smell of men living together, of showers used a lot, of cigarette smoke. The sound of the heavy breathing in sleep.

One man looked up and Mick shot him in the face. He got to see the details, though not in Technicolor but in the muted tones of ambient light, by which the blood that coursed voluminously from the hole in the cheekbone was dead black.

•   •   •

It didn’t take long.

“You get ’em all?” Mick asked.

“You fired twenty-two times. I have twenty-two shell casings,” said Crackers.

“Okay, let’s extract.”

They left the house and walked to the car. Across the street, a smear of dawn was beginning to ooze across the sky. The air outside smelled fresh and clean.

“You drive,” Mick told Crackers.

“Got it, boss.”

“I feel like shit,” said Tony Z.

“Guess what, nobody cares what you feel like,” said Mick. “You did your job. That’s the important thing.”

CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION

1216 CRENSHAW

PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND

1115 HOURS

Most of the drama was over, though forensic technicians from both the Bureau and the Maryland State Police were still working inside the house. The bodies, ID’d and photographed in situ, had been moved to the morgue. Nick had released most of his team to change, chill, and then move to duty stations in Mount Vernon for that 2
P.M
. to 5
P.M
. ordeal. The convoy from DC into Baltimore was about to leave, but its trek from one city to the other was in Secret Service’s bailiwick, so Nick hadn’t yet begun to focus on the real business of the day.

He leaned against his sedan fender, across the street from 1216, numbly watching the action at the big house, whose lawn was jammed with law enforcement vehicles and clots of Baltimore county detectives smoking, joking, joshing as they broke it down. Meanwhile everything seemed draped with yellow crime scene tape, like a Christmas celebration. The press was cordoned off down the block and there was more activity there, with all the on-the-scene standups going on, than here.

Next to him, Swagger also leaned, a dull look on his face. He had the thousand-yard stare of the man who’d seen too much.

An agent came up to Nick.

“The last ID came through,” he said.

“And?”

“Dionysus Agbuya, thirty-nine, born in Samar, the Philippines. Employed at Johnny Yang’s Chinese Delight in Columbia, dishwasher, never missed a day of work. That’s it.”

“No Ray Cruz?”

“Not on the prelims. Maybe there’s a fake ID in there, but I don’t think so, Nick. One guy maybe looks—looked—a little like him.
Maybe they made that one and thought they had a go.”

“Or maybe one of them hadn’t paid off the Manila syndicate that got him into the country. And this was a message it was sending to its other clients. You pay us first, then your family.”

“Maybe, Nick.”

“Thanks, Charlie. Didn’t mean to snap.”

“It’s okay, Nick. It’s been a long night for all of us.”

Nick took a sip of coffee, found it had cooled beyond the drinkable stage, and flung it out on the pavement.

Swagger said, “This is all wrong.”

“Murder is always wrong.”

“No, I mean the way this is happening. There’s a leak. In your outfit, in Susan’s, somewhere in the Bureau. These assholes keep showing up on us.”

“We don’t know that. It looks that way, but we don’t
know
it.”

“Come on, Nick. Everywhere I go, they’re there, either ahead or a little after. They’re pros. Barrett .50s, suppressed 9s, someone even has the thought to collect the brass.”

“Maybe they were using revolvers.”

“You can’t suppress a revolver. All the shooting, no noise complaints, had to be suppressed fire. And you wouldn’t do a job like this if you had to fumble through revolver reloads in the dark. This was a kill team. They’d done it before, they knew what they were doing, and they were trying to put down Ray Cruz. They were the same boys who blew up the Steel Brigade Armory offices in Danielstown, South Carolina. And then as now they had a fucking tip-off. We weren’t followed, not through dark city streets at night with no other traffic on the road. We’d have seen it, just as I’d have seen it on dark country roads ten days ago.”