Dead Zero (28 page)

“The milieu. If you looked carefully—”

“I suppose I didn’t.”

“You saw a lot of tape strips. Meaning there were a lot of banners taped up in that op center that they took down. It had been sanitized, you know, like a toilet in a motel with a paper ribbon around it. I’m betting the banners said things like ‘Kill Towelheads!’ and ‘Go Git ’Em, Tigers.’ All that fighter pilot macho kill-the-bastards stuff. See,
that’s that colonel. He’s a fighter jock, he brings fighter jock mentality to the job, his thing is get in close and blow the bastards away. That’s the spirit of the room, not the hum of techies. All those kids, they was suppressing, they was holding it in. They’re young killers and they’re proud of it. And they compete. That’s why they have nicknames like New-D and Old-D and I bet the rest have ’em too, like Saxon Dog and Red Hawk and Bravo and Lion-heart. They don’t want us to see that but that’s how people who kill operate, because they have to stay close to their high so they’re together when the shit is in the air. I know. Three tours, ’Nam, one as a sniper.”

“I know you’ve done some killing.”

“Way too much.”

“So what does that tell us? That’s not—”

“No, but it sets up the climate of the place and it tells us it ain’t as ‘professional’ as it seems and in that kind of a joint, things are sloppier, wilder, crazier. The stars have latitude, the bossman wants his kids to perform, he doesn’t want to override them with ridiculous rules and bullshit, so he relaxes the regs. But he tightens it up for us and Jameson almost got with the program, but she couldn’t say no to her comfy flip-flops today and go with the short little heels the women officers wear with that duty uniform. She probably normally hunts in jeans and a T-shirt or a tank top, and she loves it and they love her for it, because right now she is at the top of her game. But what that tells me is: there’s room for something to slide by the Air Force monitors.”

“I’m listening.”

“Second thing: her battlefield manager, Captain Peoples. Remember him?”

“He was the dullest of the dull.”

“He did seem like an IRS agent, didn’t he? He is the key guy. He had to be in on it, and he probably reports directly to the Agency in certain circumstances. His console is so complex he could have all kinds of communications circuits the brass know nothing about.”

“That doesn’t prove—”

“I watched him extra hard. Remember when you asked him, ‘And there’s no other category of permissibility except Tango, Oscar, and Sierra?’ And he said, ‘No, ma’am, absolutely not’?”

“Sort of. I think I asked Colonel Nelson that.”

“You asked everyone that. But only Captain Peoples was interesting when he answered. You know why?”

“Obviously not.”

“Because unlike Colonel Nelson or any of the others, Captain Peoples leaned forward in his chair, fixed his eyes on yours, and did not blink. They all blinked, all through their chats, it’s human to blink. You don’t blink if you’re concentrating on controlling your eyes because you don’t want to give up the lying tell signs, the sideways or upper look to the script you’re trying to remember. He had been professionally coached on how to get through an interrogation, how to lie without no tells. They trained him too good and he overdid it.”

“Okay,” said Starling. “I missed that. You didn’t. Good work. It’s thin but it’s not without its compelling element. But you said you know what this program does.”

“Think about what Tango, Oscar, and Sierra
don’t
do. Think about the possibility they
don’t
cover.”

“Just tell me. I’m too tired to play games.”

“Tango is urgent, tactical. Oscar is longer in duration, involves hunting, obtaining permission, checking with legal. Sierra is longest in duration, requiring preengagement permission requests and acceptances. But suppose . . . suppose they get a big guy in their sights and they have to make up their minds fast. In minutes?”

“All right. I’m supposing.”

“They don’t have time to go through committees and permission protocols or to haul a junior partner in from legal. So there’s got to be an ultra-override program where somebody of senior judgment and experience can make a fast read on intel and authorize an immediate shot. You get a good ground Joe who reliably sights Osama in a tent in some province. He calls it in to his Agency case officer, and that officer trusts him, sees the shot, and he calls Langley to get a fast, fast-shoot
permission. It’s built on speed, no time for arguments, assessments, ramification surveys, tallying the yeps and the nopes, nothing like that. He goes to a big guy. This guy, whoever he is, he gets to say shoot or don’t shoot. He says it, the code word is sent to Creech, not to Colonel Nelson or the XO or whoever, but directly to the battle manager who goes to his best shooter and speaks the code word, delivers up the grid location, and she puts a big, smart bomb on it ASAP. From first sighting to delivery of ordnance, probably less than three minutes. And who knows? The shooter, for one. The battle manager, who immediately erases the tape and makes no document entry, for another. And then some Air Force crew at the fly-off base in Afghanistan who maybe notice Bird Twelve done come back shy one of its two Paveways. It don’t go no further, because the point is, in certain instances they will miss and they don’t want to answer no questions in case they take out that school or a hotel with thirty-one traveling salesmen in the bar. It’s self-sealing. It’s deniable. In the instant it happens it ceases to exist.”

“There’s no proof.”

“There will be tomorrow. When we see Dombrowski.”

“I’ll tell DC, we’ll get her service records and bio. You run the interrogation.”

“I will.”

“But if she stonewalls, I don’t know where we’ll be.”

“I have the key to unlock her. Susan Okada left a message on my phone. She found out there is just such a program and she found out the name. It’s called Pentameter.”

FBI HQ

TASK FORCE ZARZI WORKING ROOM

FOURTH FLOOR

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1750 HOURS

Doris in records must have worked overnight, and she was very good. By late the next afternoon, she’d come up with a list of possibilities, based on the investigation into Graywolf run by the Bureau some years back on the issue of illegal shootings during security operations in Baghdad. That shook out seventeen names. Of the seventeen, she ran down and accounted for fifteen; it was the last two who seemed to have disappeared and she’d run each for known accomplices, and cross-referenced those to come up with a third. She researched them all, made the calls, put the packages together, and got it to him fast.

He thanked her, and retreated to his office while outside agents ran down Ray tips or just relaxed after the stress of playing security guard while Zarzi was doing his fabulous TV bits. Nick didn’t want it known what he was looking into, because people talked to people who talked to people. He opened the files.

Faces. One of the great mysteries of law enforcement: what do faces tell you? Do people look like their characters or look unlike their characters? Nick tried to read the faces. But the faces, so common to men of high vitality and action orientation, were blunt, mute, almost flat. Zemke, Anthony, was feral and quick, but well muscled, an ex-Ranger with combat in the Raq, a street cop in Sausalito, California, after his time in the service finished. Four years with Graywolf, three in Baghdad as a security specialist, cashiered over certain irregularities in expense accounts. Last know address “c/o Black Cat Cafe, Kabul,”
evidently the spot where the mercs hung and drank and looked for odd pickups from the town’s many intelligence shops.

Then there was Crane, Carl, twelve years U.S. Army, Airborne Ranger, Fifth Special Forces, demo, commo, and first aid, aka “Crackers the Clown” for his stony, humorless demeanor, just a medium-size guy with enough combat in his background to have won a war, any war, single-handed. Silver Star, DFC, Bronze with two combat valor indicators, CIB, three tours in the Raq, one in ’Stan. It came apart on allegations of rape, him married, with two kids and a loving wife in Jupiter, Florida. The next three years were Graywolf, then again a whiff of scandal and separation. He was interviewed twice, deemed uncooperative on the issue of indiscriminate shootings while commanding a Graywolf security unit but, as he pointed out, none of his principals ever got his hair mussed.

Finally, Adonis. Or maybe Hercules. This one was really interesting. Michael C. “Mick” Bogier, considered his senior year the number one or two high school linebacker in America. Heavily recruited, he settled on the football factory at Alabama as the straightest road to the pros, but six games into a stellar freshman year he got drunk at a fraternity party, took his high school girlfriend on a ride in the yellow ’Vette some alumni “loaned” him, wrapped it, himself, and her around a tree. Neither the car nor the girl survived, the tree was also totaled, and Mick left school. He tried juco, Divisions II and III, Canada, played some pickup ball, got into drugs and partying in L.A. while trying to become “an actor,” and finally enlisted after 9/11. For a while he’d found his niche: fast-tracked to Special Forces, he was sniper qualified, demo and commo cross-trained, a natural combat leader, a real Sergeant Rock. Decorations up the wazoo and it seemed he’d stay Green Beret for his twenty and morph into security consulting. But then along came Graywolf and their $200,000 sign-up bonus and Mick, who’d never been rich, and thought the NFL would make him so and was thus bitter about vanished chances, couldn’t say no. He should be running the joint now, the poster boy contractor with the lean face, the thick burr of blond hair butch-waxed to crew cut attention, the god’s body, the smarts, the guts. But he too had let his shooters go wild on the streets
of Baghdad protecting various bigs. He was quietly let go, though with a bonus, and stayed in the Green Zone, where he acquired a reputation. He was suspected of a number of things, selling drugs and guns, trying to export dope (interviewed twice by DEA in Baghdad); that town finally got too hot for him and he took the picture show to Kabul, became a go-to guy for a number of drug lords with security problems, supposedly banked $4 or $5 mil in Switzerland, knew everybody and everything, and if you absolutely positively needed it done in Kabul by Tuesday, Mick Bogier was your guy.

Why did they bail on Kabul? War was their business and business was good. The three had entered the U.S. five months ago, via Miami International after taking the soft way home via Istanbul, then England, then the hop to Florida. State noticed and flagged, DEA noticed and flagged, and now and then Miami Vice checked up on them but just found three rich bruisers having fun getting drunk and laid. They disappeared from Miami just about the time . . . the Zarzi thing started up.

These were guys who could blow the shit out of a building or cut down nine unknown men, not for fun but because that was their job, they were being paid nicely for it. But who would hire them? They worked an exclusive world, mostly servicing intelligence agencies, international criminal entities, the odd billionaire who could buy his way in and needed some dirty deed done dirt quick and to hell with the expense.

Question of the day: who are they working for?

Wouldn’t it be nice to talk to these gentlemen and see what they’ve been up to?
he thought, and tried to figure out how to do it. What tales they could tell . . .

But he had nothing, except some vague confirmation of Swagger’s claim of “contractors.” He didn’t have enough to book them, he didn’t have enough to APB them, he really didn’t even have enough to look for them. But he could put out a low-priority law enforcement request for any and all information regarding them to be forwarded to this headquarters, and maybe that would turn something up on the three stooges of death.

HENDERSON, NEVADA

13255 MAGNOLIA

HOME

0915 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

It was a small house, with gravel for a lawn and a cactus for a bush. One story, flat roofed, one of dozens like itself in a huge subdivision of Henderson, itself a subdivision of Vegas, laying out under a baking, bleaching sun. A Honda Civic was parked in the driveway and a half-scraped-off
AF AND SOAR!
sticker curled off the bumper, which, intact, had presumably declared
JOIN THE USAF AND SOAR!

They knocked, and a young woman in a pair of gym shorts and a tank top answered the door in a bit, a pair of recently removed earpieces hanging around her neck from an iPod clipped to her shorts. Her hair was cropped short, naturally blond, and her skin beautiful, although, unfortunately, she was not. But she was certainly pleasant and looked kind without the intimidating beauty that scared so many off.

“Ms. Dombrowski?” Chandler asked, flashing her badge.

Badges are always bad news, even when they’re not. Dombrowski stepped back as if hit, blinked, lost all confidence, and said, “Uh, yes?”

“I’m Special Agent Chandler and this is Investigator Swagger. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’re looking into events in the 143rd Expeditionary Wing ops center at Creech a few months back. May we speak with you for a bit, please?”

Chandler had the warm but no-bullshit, no-refusal part of police-work down pat, and the young woman, her face closing off even more darkly, stepped back to admit them.

“I’m sorry I’m sweaty,” she said, “I was on the bike.” Then she launched into a pointless explanation of how she was due at Borders at eleven, then at the Center at eight, and she didn’t have time to exercise
except in the morning except it was getting harder and harder and . . . but she didn’t really care and neither did they.

They sat, she in a chair, the two interlocutors on the sofa. Coffee? No. Juice, water, any sort of liquid, no. Now what was this all about? And finally, “Do I need a lawyer?”