Dead Zero (34 page)

That seemed to quiet Cruz.

“Listen, it’s time for you to come in. We took our suspicion and all our dope to the Big Man, and he got the Agency to acknowledge some things and pledge cooperation. It seems clear that there are some people over there who are overcommitted to this Zarzi. If laws have been broken—that is, if Agency people have targeted you or other marines—that will be dealt with. But it all turns on your coming in, giving your statements and your facts, working within a team structure, following the rules and so on and so forth. You can’t be rogue no more. The rogue shit makes these people scared as hell and when they feel fear, they respond with violence.”

“I come in and another mystery explosion craters a building.”

“Cruz, it won’t happen. I’m speaking for the Bureau. No, I ain’t their number one boy, but I have Nick Memphis on the team and the director was—”

“The director was bullshitting you. Don’t you recognize the signs? He was jiving you, man; get me in, and watch the promises disappear, along with me. And whatever the Zarzi people want to achieve, they do. Maybe it’s for the good, but nobody can guarantee it, because it’s a crap shoot. Maybe it’s not.”

“Think about it,” Bob said. It was important to him to get Cruz through this for some reason. He didn’t want to lose this guy. “Don’t do nothing. Move tomorrow to another location. Do you need money? I can get you money. I think I can work on them about the time and maybe you won’t have to do none. It doesn’t seem nobody’s linked you to the shoot-out in Baltimore because I never told them you were at that car wash and nobody else got hurt and it was clear self-defense, so I’m thinking you should be okay on that one. By the way, the sucker you busted was named Carl Crane, ex-Special Forces, ex-Graywolf. He hung with a crew led by another ex-forces guy, big, blond linebacker type—”

Cruz remembered: the big guy with the Barrett, ambling down the crest of the hill after they’d checked out the kill zone that held the two
parts of Billy Skelton. He remembered thinking:
I will hunt you cocksuckers down.

“—named Bogier, Mick Bogier, who all hung out at a joint called the Black Cat in Kabul. Gun-for-hire types.”

“There you go. CIA hires mercs for the dirty stuff and when the mercs can’t make it happen, they laser-paint the hotel for the smart bomb. When they learn they fail, the Agency people go to the same team, for obvious security reasons, using people already part of it. The contractors hunt me in America. The Agency keys on you, plants a bug so they can tail you by a bird in the sky, feeding info to the contractors. When you locate me, they move in for the kill. In Pikesville, they
thought
I was in the house so they raided hard and killed every dishwasher in the place. They followed you to me at the car wash. They’ll follow you to me if I turn myself in.”

“It won’t happen again. I got it busted now.”

“And you still don’t know why the fuck Zarzi is here.”

“Cruz, damnit, for the first time, I’m thinking we’re ahead of them. Tomorrow I go to a meeting. I will meet with the four guys who have the authority to deal a Paveway strike without raising no questions. I will eyeball them and see what I can see. I will report back to you tomorrow and we will see where we are. Think on coming over to us. Give it a fair shot. This rogue crap is just going to get you killed. Okay?”

Cruz said nothing.

“Get some sleep, Sergeant Cruz. I will bring you in, we will make this happen. I swear to you, sniper to sniper, it’ll work out.”

“I’ll take you at your word, because I’m a fool and a dreamer. But only one more time,” said Cruz, breaking the connection.

A & A THERAPY

ROUTE 40 WEST

CATONSVILLE, MARYLAND

0230 HOURS

Bogier hurt everywhere. His nipples hurt, his toes hurt, his watchband hurt, the elastic in his underpants hurt. His mind hurt. But his chest was the worst. It was lit like the Fourth of July if that holiday was celebrated in fireworks primarily of the blue-indigo-violet range. Each of Ray’s five shots had delivered about five hundred-foot pounds of energy to the Kevlar chest plate that prevented them from penetrating, but did nothing to halt the energy transaction that hammered his flesh like a drill bit driven by a sledge. A pink blood blister signified the actual point of the bullet strike and was itself the center of a radiant bloom of BIV swirls that unfurled like daisies in the summer sunshine. The wounds leaked interior blood as far as belly, biceps, and neck, so the flowers were as if displayed on a field of bluish velvet and wine stain. It hardly looked human.

“What happen, baby?” asked Kay. “You been in fight?”

Kay, wrapped in a flower-print strapless dress that showed what appeared to be cleavage to end all cleavage and a butt to end all butts, had a fifties sex-goddess vibration that was undeniable; she could have played bad girls in B pictures for a decade. Her doll’s face was symmetrical but not quite approaching beauty in its flatness, her eyes were not without empathy but helpfully unencumbered by curiosity. The question was strictly pro forma.

“You should see the other guy,” Mick said, the point of the joke being that it wasn’t funny at all, and its lack of humor perfectly matched his black mood.

“You lie there. Kay take care.”

“I can’t shower myself,” he said. “I tried, I hurt too much. You have
to do it for me. Leave the backside alone, just do the front, under the arms. I stink of sweat. Go easy, stupid white guy is hurting bad.”

She laughed in a way learned from cartoons. “Ha,” followed by another “ha.” Then she said, “You funny, honey.”

“I’m a regular talk show host,” he said.

She took his towel off, and if she was impressed with the MCGA equipage down there she said nothing. In her job she’d seen more dicks than a urologist, so nothing would surprise her. He lay on the table in a pool of hot water and she sprayed him three or four times, then smeared soap all over him—that is,
all
over him—and used her strong but gentle hands to knead some pleasure into his body. She was very good, the hands knowing and not shy, her concentration highly professional, up, down, around, slip-slop, squish-whish, in, out, here and finally there.

“Ah,” he said, “that felt good.”

“You big,” she did say, finally.

“Big but dumb. That’s how it goes.”

“You come now.”

She wrapped the towel around him and led him, quietly padding barefoot through the surprisingly clean hallways, to the room where the episode had begun. The place was dim, almost religious, but smelled of locker room disinfectants. Other dramas played out behind curtains sealing off rooms like the bland one into which she led him with its $8-a-night motel room art and lava lamp. There, she pulled off his towel, patted him down, and was surprised to find he was all ready to go again.

“Wow,” she said, “what a strong fella.”

“Strong but dumb.”

He lay on his back. She turned the lights down, peeled out of her print dress to reveal that beneath the hypnotic cleavage lay two wondrous
Playboy
-quality breasts. She touched them for him because he could not touch them himself and discovering an avid audience for the exhibition, she continued with the touching theme in various private areas and in various unusual postures until he got very interested.

She rushed to him at that point, and with a mighty bolt, he emptied himself. Then she crawled up next to him and snuggled. He was not a snuggler, but tonight, her softness and warmth and uncritical if professional adoration were welcome.

“You sad, baby?”

“A good friend went away today,” he said. “That’s never fun, you know?”

“In same fight?”

“The very same. Can’t be helped, it’s the business we chose, but it’s sad.”

At that point something that couldn’t have been a phone started to make a noise that couldn’t be a ring, and he rolled from the massage table, went to his dumped clothes on the floor, and pulled out the big satellite communicator.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He punched the button.

“Nice of you to answer,” MacGyver said.

“I’m not in the mood to take any shit,” he said. “From you or anybody.”

“What happened? Three on one, he kills Crane, and you guys run like hell. Hardly up to Black Cat standards, much less Graywolf or Fifth Special Forces.”

“What happened was, he outfought us. He read a tell, knew who we were, and jumped us instead of us jumping him. His first five went point blank into my chest. Goddamn lucky I was wearing a vest. The prick is world class, I’ll give that to him. Any man who could take down Carl Crane is a hell of a man.”

“They made Crane fast off prints from DOD. The FBI has a circular out for his pals Mick Bogier and Tony Zemke.”

“You want us out of here? Are we too hot? You want your money back? I don’t feel like calling Tony’s mother like I had to call Carl’s wife. Carl left her and three kids, he was a great dad, and he did what he did to keep them comfortable and because you told us it was for the good of our uncle.”

“I wish I could afford to cut you loose. But it’s too late now, I can’t bring new people in. And since Cruz got out clean and nobody up there seems to have connected this with him, you still have to finish.”

“Will do,” said Mick.

“It’s worth it. We’re trying to find a way out and Zarzi’s our best route. If this works, there won’t be any more young kids dying in that shithole. Cruz, his spotter, the thirty-one salesmen, the Filipinos, whoever, they will have died for a noble cause, which is stopping the pointless slaughter of our people for no advantage whatsoever. You get that? Basically, we’re trying to end the war and put you out of business.”

“There’ll never be an end to war, Nietzsche,” said Mick.

“He was right, but maybe we can get ourselves a little downtime before the next one.”

“Friday night. Georgetown?”

“That would be so nice. I may be able to get you security dispositions. Evidently this Swagger has some weird gift for figuring out where another sniper will shoot from. You don’t have to be near Georgetown; with that Barrett you can be a mile away.”

“A mile with ranging shots. No ranging shots. One shot, one kill, cold bore, twelve hundred yards would be the max. Then, Belize, here I come.”

“Bogier, tough about your friend Crane. But don’t stay depressed. Get this thing done, cover yourself with glory and honor and the thanks of a grateful nation. Save the sum of things for pay. What better epitaph could a mercenary want or get? Plus, all that dough.”

“You get me the intel. More is better. And I will finally nail this little sucker, for Carl if for no other reason.”

He turned, put the phone down. Kay was sitting naked on the table. Her eyes demonstrated her utter innocence as to the talk she had overheard. Her flesh was luminous, piles and piles of it. For some strange reason, unlike so many Korean women, she had permed her hair so it was frothy with curls. Her face was a happy pie. Her eyes were happy and shallow. He discovered himself tumescent and could tell that pleased her as much as him.

CIA HQ

FIFTH FLOOR MEETING ROOM

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

1100 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

There were four of them, and various coffee- and briefcase-bearing assistants. They were serious men, pinkish, well dressed, in suits, though one outlier had a tweedy professional look to him in a sports coat and bow tie; he was the one without the assistant and he carried his own briefcase. Their faces, out of long discipline, expressed personality but little else, as if otherwise all nuances had been mastered and controlled. One looked fierce, two bureaucratic, the last one—the academic—kindly.

Swagger watched them come into the bland green meeting room. He could almost ID them by Susan’s descriptions.

Walter E. Troy, “the Assistant,” assistant director, longtime spook, thirty years at the Agency, specialist in counterterror, a mover and a shaker who was said to be disappointed that he didn’t get the big boy job that instead went to an ex-congressman with big connections.

Jackson Collins, “Afghan Desk,” the fierce one, ex-Navy SEAL, radiating hostility, face too red, hair too brusque, all mil-spec in body language, tiny pig eyes, a squid, and thus on Swagger’s instantaneous must-fight list. Looked like trouble.

Arthur Rossiter, “Plans,” head of clandestine operations, the guy who coordinated and produced all the actual dirty tricks, guileful, willful, yet almost faceless and without any personal eccentricities, no color at all, could have sold encyclopedias, collected child porn, written novels, painted bad pictures.

And finally Ted Hollister, the only outside-the-agency presence, the National Intelligence director, technically the boss and coordinator of them all, but also a man in a job that didn’t exist until recently, so that
no one had quite figured out what he could or couldn’t do and whether they had to return his calls or not. Hollister had clearly been chosen to succeed a less successful NID because of his very inside-Washingtonness, his charm, tact, discretion, a creature totally of the foreign policy/intelligence/Washington circuit where he’d thrived for years, when he wasn’t teaching at some prestigious university. Worked at the Agency for ten years, moved on to State, did Princeton, Yale, and Hopkins, then State again, well-known op-ed scribe for the
Post
and the
Times,
and now in the big job as the president’s number one whisperer. In the movies, his kindliness would instantly make him suspect number one.

Yet they all had their finger on the trigger. Any one of them had the power to go to a computer terminal, a cell phone, enter a code number, say a code word or whatever the mechanism was, and order a hit halfway around the world, without justification, explanation, recrimination. A word from them and somewhere far away a First Lieutenant Wanda Dombrowski sent five hundred pounds of thermobaric HE into someone’s back pocket and cratered a building, a mansion, a village, a hangar, a cave, even exploding the air around it. They were the real snipers.