Dead Zero (25 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob. “But there may be secrets within secrets. Black ops so black records don’t exist. Skunk works shit, black bag shit, wet work, all that ugly crap that spy outfits been doing for four thousand years. It’s in the Bible, even. I’m no expert but maybe I can find something somehow, some way. Maybe you could too if you tried again.”

“You’re telling me I should start prying in locked drawers in Langley,” she said. “I should spy on the spies. I
am
a spy.”

Swagger was filled with doubts. Maybe this was all bullshit he’d dreamed up to engage her and from there make the leap to something else. It was how the cunning male-sex mind sometimes worked. Goddamned Asian women, he couldn’t get over them, and that brought up a long-dead, bourbon-soaked ache best not addressed now or ever. He
also knew he was still fundamentally exhausted, the confab with Cruz who’d caught him cold was upsetting to say the least, and this whole Washington game was more complex than he’d imagined. He’d been the lone gunman, the tall-grass crawler, and now he was exactly where he didn’t belong, in a soup of confusing loyalties, some of them even within his own mind.

So: when in doubt, press ahead blindly and pray for luck and God’s delight in the reckless.

“You know these people. You go to backyard barbecues with ’em. You could ask around.”

She shook her beautiful head.

“I don’t know anything. I never had this discussion, I don’t know a thing about anything.”

“But you won’t rat me out?”

Her silence meant that no, she wouldn’t rat him out, but it also meant that she hadn’t remembered until that moment what an asshole he truly could be.

BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON
INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

CELL PHONE PARKING LOT

1900 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

Vegas?” said Mick Bogier.

“Yep. Him and this chick. Pretty gal. Maybe the old coot has some Pez left in the dispenser after all. Off to Vegas for a weekend of whoopie. Been known to happen.”

It was Crackers the Clown who’d dogged Swagger, watching him check in with the young woman, head through security and on to a gate. Crackers had pulled a Baltimore police detective badge and gotten through security without a hassle from TSA and followed him all the way to the gate. Now he was on the cell to Mick and Tony Z.

“Unlikely,” said Mick, “this guy’s too duty-crazed.”

“I hate that kind,” said Crackers. “All work and no fun. What, he wants to be a saint?”

“Let me make a call.”

Even before he put the cell down, Tony handed him the Thuraya phone.

“This better be good news,” MacGyver said. “I’m about to make myself a martini.”

“We followed Swagger to the airport. He’s about to fly to Vegas with some young agent. I don’t know what it’s about.”

MacGyver considered.

“We could get the next flight out,” said Mick. “Then we pick up the signal in Vegas and we follow him there. But I don’t know what Cruz would be doing in Vegas or what Vegas would have to do with Cruz. Cruz is here, we know that.”

“I can find out,” MacGyver finally said. “But that’s going to take a
while. No, I’d stay in DC. I’d set up somewhere in the vicinity of the talk show studios this Sunday and get ready to roll if there’s an incident.”

“Sure, but that’s thin. This Sergeant Cruz is really good. I mean, he’s fucking big league all the way. The chance of us nailing him before he nails Zarzi without Swagger bird-dogging him first are somewhere between thin and negative one million. Since he’s riding the action curve and we’re trailing it, we’ll be lucky to get there when the smoke is still in the air. And don’t forget there’s going to be about ten thousand cops in the area, somewhat complicating things.”

“I understand,” said MacGyver. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m out of answers.”

“MacGyver, your show’s going to be canceled if you can’t do better than that.”

“Hey, asshole sergeant, if I’m canceled you’re canceled, so you better pray for me. Oh, and I make the smart comments, I get to do the sarcasm, get it? Don’t go all Mick Bogier on me. Cowboys are cheap in this world.”

Bogier enjoyed lighting up the asshole like that. He knew it was expected that he would now apologize and show contrition, but he would not do it. Fuck him and the horse he came in on.

“Okay, here’s what you do,” said MacGyver. “Monitor the Four Seasons and the Afghan embassy. You guys have seen Cruz in action, you know his walk, his moves, you know what he’d have to wear to conceal a weapon. You may pick him up on a scouting mission, a recon, just from the way he moves. Ask around, see if anybody’s suddenly started showing up at those places. Meanwhile, I’ll find out what Swagger is doing in Vegas and when he’s due back. He’s still our best bet. After all, he’s found Cruz twice and nobody else is even in the game.”

U.S. 95 NORTH

BETWEEN VEGAS AND INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

1330 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

Which was stonier, the desert landscape or Agent Chandler’s remote personality? The desert was desolate, rocky, filled with crusted hills, ugly spiny things that appeared to be vegetable in origin, lit by a merciless sun and drifting off to a horizon that was a forever away. She was extremely attractive, eyes beaming with intelligence, but face held in disciplined dullness and disinterest. She drove. She was the special agent. He was a consultant with the rank of brevet investigator. She called the shots. She commanded, in silence and concentration on the road. He sat there, in his off-the-rack suit, hoping for something a little more cooperative, but finding it not forthcoming. He knew she was a Nick mentee, one of the talented young ones Nick liked to work under him, that she was married to a CIA guy, that she had a reputation for “creativity,” whatever that was, and that she’d been a big player and winner in the Tom Constable dust-up of a few years back. He knew her nickname was “Starling” because she reminded people of a movie star who’d played a memorable FBI agent.

They’d eaten lunch separately and were headed out for a two o’clock with Colonel Christopher Nelson, USAF, CO of the 143rd Expeditionary Air Wing (UAV), which is to say the Air Force CIA headhunter outfit at a desert air base called Creech, whose ugly name foretold the ugliness of the installation.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Talk to me. I’m open for business.”

“Ma’am, I follow your lead. You just tell me what you want to know and I’ll answer straight up.”

“I know you’re a gunfighter, an action guy. I know you dusted some very bad people in your time. I like that, I get that. But this is different.
It’s interrogation. It demands suppleness, intellectual agility, concentration, patience, a deeply fraudulent charm. Can someone as direct as you work at indirection?”

“Don’t know about indirection, but I do know about fraud. Ma’am, I am a completely fraudulent individual. Too many people think I’m a hero when I’m a total coward. All the brave men died in the war, only us lucky yellow rats made it out alive.”

“Utter bullshit from a man who took down a pro hitter with a subgun at close range, time of engagement three seconds.”

“More like four. He wasn’t as pro as he thought.”

“I guess not. Okay, I will take the lead. We agree on cover up- front. You are looking for signs of weakness, for twitches that indicate untruthfulness, for signs of prevarication and mendacity. Do you know what they are?”

“Eyes mainly. He’ll look up or away if he’s lying, because he’s reading a script in his head. He’ll swallow a bit hard if he’s lying. His lips will dry. He’s foursquare military, he ain’t used to lying because their system is about no bullshit. If he’s got this big command, he must be an up-and-coming guy in the new robot Air Force. He’ll be nervous because the last thing he wants is to screw up his career chances. He’ll pause before answering. He knows the best lie is only a few degrees from the truth.”

“You cannot do anything extralegal. You cannot peek, disappear, misrepresent. All the time you have to be thinking and noticing. Are you capable of that?”

“I’ll sure try,” he said.

“Cool,” she said. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

“I do look dumb, don’t I?”

“My dad was head of the state police in Arizona. You look like any oldish, unpromotable trooper sergeant, tough as hell, good man in a gunfight, steady, and hopelessly obsolete. My poor dad had to get rid of a bunch of those guys, though he loved them all.”

“Never said I wasn’t no dinosaur,” said Bob. “And I thank you for
indulging me against your better instincts.”

They reached Indian Springs, not that they really noticed. It was a trailer park, a convenience store/gas station, and a one-room casino in a glade of barely green scrub trees. The town abutted the base, which looked more like a prison complex than an airfield. A motley collection of brown corrugated-metal buildings, it spread across a desert basin, the same color of dry heat as everything else the sun bleached. It lay behind a barbwire fence and the two security gates were like Cold War border crossings. It was large and flat, disappearing over a ridge at least a mile or so out. In the far distance, on one of the short runways, some kind of white aircraft could be seen, something of a cross between a Piper Cub and a kite, and Bob realized that it was either the Predator itself or its killer progeny, the Reaper, which patrolled the skies of Afghanistan, looking for something to kill.

CREECH AFB

COLONEL NELSON’S OFFICE

HQ 143RD AIR EXPEDITIONARY WING (UAV)

INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

1430 HOURS

I’ve directed my people to cooperate fully,” said the colonel, a solid linebacker guy with one of those square jaws and short, all-biz haircuts the upper-field grades favored. “And I will open any documents or records you require. I just have to tell you up front that a) we
are
very busy here fighting a war, and b) this matter was previously investigated by an Agency officer and she found no traces of anything handled incorrectly. But you say it’s a criminal matter, not a national security matter.”

The three, plus the Wing Executive Officer and a secretary, were sitting in the commanding officer’s office, a well-lit room decorated with pictures of himself in various stages of his career, standing proudly before beautiful pieces of stainless steel sculpture that also happened to be supersonic jet fighters, all F-somethings, sleek and dangerous looking, like machined raptors hungry for a kill. In a few, as armored as a medieval knight, he sat in a cockpit under a raised plastic bubble with a winner’s wide grin while holding up a thumb as if to say “Mission accomplished” or even “Bogie downed.”

“No, sir,” said Chandler, “we are not alleging criminal misconduct. We only say that it’s a possible criminal matter and that as a neutral agency, we have been asked to look at the data points again. You know the basics. On a certain date seven months ago, a hotel in Afghanistan was obliterated, possibly, but not certainly, by a missile. We have no forensics on the case because it was in tribal territory at the time, meaning an area full of bad guys. Subsequently, the site has been razed. There was a cursory investigation by Dutch security forces repping the UN, mainly photos. It tells us almost nothing except that something
made a big hole in the earth. The reason we are here is that of the thirty-one Afghani nationals killed, one was an informant for the DEA. His loss set back one of their infiltration programs a great deal and that is a heavy poppy-growth area, and it ships product that shows up on the streets of, well, Indian Springs, for one, and Vegas, where I’m sure most of your staff and pilots live, for another. DEA says that other informants in the area claim the hotel was detonated by a missile. These reports are persistent, and it’s only a matter of time before they show up in an American newspaper. It would be a black eye if someone accidentally whacked a civilian structure, though of course it happens, and it would be an even bigger black eye if a DEA informant was among the killed, and the worst thing of all—I make no accusations here, but simply state fact—if it turned out a cover-up tried to obscure some second lieutenant’s honest mistake in the heat of battle. We have to be ahead on this one, not behind it, sir. And that is why we are here.”

“Fine. By the way, does the guy who looks like Clint Eastwood ever talk?”

“No, sir,” said Bob, “not since I shot Dillinger.”

Everybody laughed, letting a little tension out.

“All right. Here’s what I’ve set up for you. In the next room, you’ll find our complete documentation of air activities for that eight-hour duty shift. You’ll find a TV monitor and all our fire missions from that shift on tape, and you can look at them. We took sixteen shots that time, at all levels of permissibility. You’ll learn what a ‘level of permissibility’ is shortly. I have my battle manager from that shift on hand, and he can go over each mission separately with you if you need to do so. I also have seven pilots, that is, seven operators who fly, and I mean literally fly, the drones from our op center here at Creech. They’re the real heroes, and I’d hate to get any of them in trouble. They took the sixteen shots among them. I have one missing, First Lieutenant Wanda Dombrowski, whose term of service expired last month and who opted to end her commitment to the Air Force. She was great and I’m sorry to see her go. Anyhow, I have her next address and phone number, and if
you feel it necessary to contact her, then you’re of course free to do so.”

“All right,” said Starling. “Then let’s get to work.”

“But first, just so you understand the situation we deal with in our duties, I want to walk you through our op center. I want to take you into the heart of combat, even if you’re in an underground room in a Nevada desert. Either of you have any combat experience?”

“He’s been in a gunfight or two,” Starling said.