Dead Zero (32 page)

Do me a favor,” said Nick, “the next time you get a bright idea about doing PR, let me in on it. That way, I get the credit, it helps my career. Helping your career doesn’t amount to much because you don’t have a career.”

“If you’d suggested it,” Bob said, as the elevator doors opened, “he’d have turned it down. He only said yes to annoy you, to punish you for bringing me into this again.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Anyway, I didn’t do it to help the Bureau with its Agency problems. That don’t matter spit to me. But one of those four guys pulled the trigger on Cruz. I want to see ’em, throw some business their way, and get a read.”

“Uh-oh. You’ve been reading Shakespeare again.”

“What?”

“
Hamlet.
‘The play’s the thing, in which to catch the conscience of the king.’ Old idea: if you put before the bad guy an image of his crime, he’ll in some way react and give himself away. Shakespeare believed it, but it’s bunk.”

“I ain’t never read
Hamlet
. Not in Polk County, Arkansas, in the fifties where I’s educated.”

“Whatever, it’s based on a folk concept of the mind. The image of their crime sparks some kind of overt response. But it’s bunk. We know now that people are complex, devious, sophisticated, practiced, and they don’t go ‘Boo!’ when manipulated into such a confrontation.”

“Still like to try.”

“I know you have all kinds of sniper voodoo and eighth and ninth senses, but these guys are much smarter than Hamlet’s uncle. These are all sophisticated, mentally tough, experienced, widely traveled, and brilliant men. You won’t see anything they don’t want you to see. If they’ve navigated their way through DC intelligence politics, plus survived in the field, they will have a little bit of smarts in how to handle an office meeting, even with the great Bob Lee Swagger.”

“Everybody has tells, from eye rolls to breathing patterns to body posture. Everybody’s his own landscape. And I will say this, if I have a skill it’s at reading landscape. So let me look over the landscape and we’ll see what I—”

They had emerged from the elevator, made it down the hall, and turned into the suite of working rooms that Task Force Zarzi occupied, and there to greet them was Starling, looking shaken.

“What’s up?”

“There’s been a huge shoot-out in Baltimore,” she said. “World War Three at a car wash. And it involves somebody you put an APB out on, somebody called Crackers the Clown.”

HOWARD STREET CAR WASH

HOWARD AND 25TH

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1215 HOURS TO 1656.38 HOURS

The glasses were the key.

Check the glasses,
he always told himself. Once every five minutes,
check the glasses.

Cruz had fallen into that rhythm. Here, he worked anonymously, one of twenty or so invisibles who scurried for tips by drying, sweeping, polishing the drippy wet vehicles that emerged from the tunnel of spray wax, steam, jetting soapy water, and rubber strips like jungle fronds that hung from a mechanically contrived tube structure and somehow magically undulated the road grime off the cars. It saved him from brooding, it brought in money, it kept him active. Nobody asked questions, nobody took roll, nobody made friends outside their ethnic groups; the pay, usually about $50 a day, was in change and small bills. He was faceless in this crowd of hustling shiners and polishers, and he was the only one who looked at the shape of the sunglasses, for a teardrop that spoke not of Jackie O and her husband Ari, but of the sandbox, the ’Stan, the global war on terrorism.

He saw them while the fellow was still in the glass building laying out his $15 for the super wash.

Tear shaped, dark, held in place not by two arms but by a stout elasticized strap as insurance against vigorous action, with insectoid, convex lenses under polyurethane frames, the curvature of the lenses extreme so that the polarized plastic, strong enough to stop buckshot, also protected the wearer’s peripheral vision, just the thing to pick up the approach of a fast-moving assaulter from three or nine o’clock. They were Wiley X’s, of the style called AirRage 697s, big in Tommy Tactical contractor culture.

Ray slipped low, between cars, not panicking, but breathing hard.
Then he had a spurt of rage.
How did the motherfuckers find me again?
There had to be a leak somewhere, goddamnit, and he swore that if he got out of this, he would brace up old man Swagger so hard he shook his dentures out. Every fucking time Swagger showed, these goddamn bastards were right behind him.

But he got his war mind back fast. He pretended to polish a wheel cover of an already shining BMW convertible, and slipped a quick recon glance at the dude just as he emerged from the building and sat under an umbrella on a kind of patio where the owners waited and watched as the towel boys worked over their cars.

Guy was wearing a black baseball cap without insignia and some kind of bulky raincoat as if it was cold out and of course it wasn’t. You could hide a lot under that coat. Cruz continued to steal seconds of examination, noting next that the Tommy Tactical made an obvious show of disinterest in the cars before him, not hunting for any particular one, not noticing his own car—it must have been that Dodge Charger, just coming out of the steam, its wet skin glinting in the sunlight—but adapting a quick posture of lassitude and sloth as he flopped casually in a plastic chair and began to examine his nails.

Cruz shot a glance at the man’s shoes: Danner assault boots, though unbloused, the crumple of the sloppy hems denoting that they had been smartly tucked commando style until just a few minutes ago.

“Hey, guy, are you trying to win the Nobel Prize for that tire or what?” someone said, and it was the car’s owner, impatiently leaning across the trunk to hurry the pitiful illegal onward.

Ray smiled obsequiously and backed off, waving the man onward.

As he turned to work on another vehicle, he let himself look down the one-way course of Howard Street and saw another guy whose face, though far off, appeared obscured by the tactical shape of the ultracool combat shades and that guy was coming along, and would be here in a minute or two.

Run? He could pretend to mosey backward, hit and roll over the wall, and head down the alley to—but he didn’t know what was down the alley and cursed himself for the operator’s most basic mistake: he
hadn’t had the energy to learn all the back streets, all the fast exits, the fallbacks, the shortcuts, the near invisible secret passages.

Besides, the guy on the street was drawing closer, ever closer, and now it was too late to make a sudden break. He saw how it had to go; they would wait a few more seconds, until the walker got right up to the courtyard, then he and the sitter would go to guns fast with whatever big mean black toys their coats concealed, and converge, catching him between fire from two angles, with nowhere to go but down.

He had a Glock 19 concealed in a Galco horizontal shoulder rig under his beat-to-hell Harvard hoodie and long-sleeved T-shirt, and two extra fifteen-rounders on the off-side, giving him forty-five rounds of 147-grain Federal hollow point. He turned his O’s cap backward on his head, so its bill wouldn’t protrude into the top zone of his sight picture. He reached inside the outerwear, unsnapped the Galco, felt the small, heavy automatic pistol slide into his hand and, under these circumstances, he took joy from its touch. It was found money, getting laid on the first date, all black on the range, a nice word from the colonel.

Okay, motherfuckers,
he told himself with another deep, calming breath, going hard into his war mind,
you want me, you come and get me
.

Taking care not to directly confront or track his target, Mick Bogier eased into one of the plastic chairs sloppily, arms and legs all over the place, and tried to be a guy with no particular place to go getting it cleaned up real nice while sitting in the sun. As he oriented himself, he could see Crackers moving down the street, not rushing, not tactical, but—Crackers had a lot of combat and a lot of ops behind him—totally selling the pic of another innocent stroller shuffling along, maybe to the liquor store for a six of Bud and a lottery ticket, maybe to the library for a new thriller, maybe to the Mickey D’s down the street for a Big Mac with fries and a Diet Coke. Crackers just walked along.

A plug ran from Mick’s ear to a throat mike dangling just alongside
his chin before the cord disappeared inside his jacket and linked to his cell.

“You got him?” he asked, trying not to speak loudly or even look like he was speaking.

“I saw him duck. Yellow baseball cap, maroon sweatshirt, he’s behind that brown Galaxy, working the tires. Seems to be a tire guy, that’s his specialty.”

“How’s he moving? I’m too close to look directly.”

“Like any shine boy. A little monkey. He hasn’t made us yet, he’s trying to get the shine on that Galaxy wheel.”

“When you get to the entrance, you slide into the lot and index on me. At that point, I’ll head out there like I’m reclaiming the car, swing behind the Galaxy, yank the five and give him a mag. When I fire, you dump a mag high into the glass of that building. That should scatter the fuckin’ ducks. Then we roll the wall and Z picks us up. You got that, Z?”

“Am pulling into street now,” said Z, from his spot a block away.

“I am watching you, you are watching him, any movement?”

“No, now that I’m close I can see him really scrubbing on that—oh, now he’s moved to the front tire, other side from you. Still ain’t made us, snoozing the day away. This is going to be easy.”

Crackers veered in from the roadway sidewalk, slid on the oblique through the wide entrance in the brick wall which the customers pulled into as they edged their way to the payment booths and the vacuum station up ahead.

Close enough to make eye contact now, Mick nodded through his dark lenses at Crackers as the other man unbuttoned his coat with his left hand, slipped his right hand through the slashed pocket to grip the cocked-and-not-locked MP5, a dandy little subgun from Heckler und Koch that had delighted the spec ops boys for three decades now, and Mick said, “Fast and total. He’s good, don’t forget. Okay, peanut gallery, let’s rock.”

He stood, his jacket already unbuttoned, and with a smile and a nod to the phantom fellow who’d just finished drying his car, he beelined
to the Galaxy, circled behind it, shivered to shrug the cloaking of the coat over his own German dandy gun, felt his hand grip it expertly—he shot well enough to fire one-handed—and raised it to discover his target had spun and was a split second ahead of him on the action curve.

Ray shot him five times in the chest.

That gunfire ignited screams, panic, crazed evacuation, a whole festival of human behavior at the furthest extreme of escape frenzy. People blew every which way, some to the wall to clumsy attempts to climb over it, some back toward the glass building as if it offered cover, some racing into the mouth of the torrential downpour that was currently frothing up an Escalade in the tunnel. For a brief moment, that perfect world of equality so longed for in some imaginations actually existed on earth as Salvadoran illegal and Baltimore hedge fund manager and energy executive’s well-turned-out wife and Sid the cabbie fled outward with equal passion, though never quite ruthless disregard for the other. The good behavior and fundamental politeness of the typical Baltimorean was in play on the war field as much as the adrenaline-powered survival instinct.

Crackers was not concerned with surviving, however, but with killing. He had that rare gift of natural aggression that made him a god in battle, funnily unfunny with his buddies, and a nasty prick everywhere else. He just believed: if you weren’t war, you weren’t nothing. He rotated right, seeing Mick go down, looking for his target who was clearly among the abandoned cars gleaming and dripping in the sun. Bracing the gun against his shoulder via its stubby, compacted telescoping stock, he fired a short burst into the cars, seeing glass spider-web and metal puncture and dust and water fly, while the gun roared, the spent shells cascading free in a brass-glinting spurt like flung pebbles across a lake. Great special effects but to no seeming result.

His urge was to run to Mick, but he saw that Mick had spun, low-crawled out, and was now rising on this side of the Galaxy, reacquiring his German machine pistol, though moving stiffly from the bruising
hits on his Kevlar.

“Converge, converge!” Mick was screaming. “Z, get your ass in here, goddamnit, and come over the wall on him, he is hot, live, and still moving.”

Saying that, Mick raised the subgun above his head, angled it down, and squirted a long burst into the space where he thought the sniper Cruz should be, mostly tearing up dust and asphalt debris from the deck. Then he rammed through a superfast mag change, tossing the empty box—God, was Mick smooth!—seating the new one, throwing the bolt, and began to move through the corridors between the now bullet-dinged automobiles. At the same time, Z had arrived, slalomed off the road and up to the other side of the brick wall, only with a pistol though, and he too hunted for the sniper. They had him three on one, with no place to go . . . but where the fuck was he?

It’s better to be lucky than smart, rich than poor, smart than dumb, but in a gunfight, best of all is to be smart and skinny. That was Ray, who had gone to earth after putting the five hard ones into the big guy from nine feet and slithered across the ground to, er, nowhere, and then, being quite agile, actually wiggle-waggled sideways under the dripping-wet pickup truck next to him. He came up in another aisle between cars, rolled, and popped up like a Whack-a-Mole game in a Toyland, two hands on the gun, oriented, as it turned out, slightly toward the oncomer, not the original assaulter.

In the naturally firm isosceles, triangles within triangles for structural solidarity, his hunched, tensed muscles controlling the pistol between his crushing grip, Ray shot that guy twice, high left-side chest, knocking him back and off stride, even as he was now catching on to the concept of
body armor
not in words but in an image that decoded instantly into all he needed to know. He felt things in the air nearby and cranked down, realizing that the other shooter, seeing him fire, had vectored on to him instantly and put a burst into him, but that between the
two of them, unseen in the intense focus of advanced extreme pathological war-fighting Zeitgeist, neither had realized that the cab of a Honda Civic lay between them and so while that burst chewed the crap out of the windows, splintering, shivering, fragmenting them, the passage through two glass barriers also skewed the bullets mightily and they rushed off at one remove from their target. By the time that shooter realized and came around for an unimpeded shot, Ray was to ground again, crawling like a muskrat under the cars.