Dead Zero (42 page)

“Seattle,” said Neal. “They have set up a few remote relay points. Need a sec to trace them. But first, I’m going to put you on hold while I call the U.S. Attorneys’ Office in DC. They’ve been alerted. They will issue a numbered Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant that will enable us to legally trace the linkages and come to the destination phone.”

“Excellent,” said Nick, listening as the phone went dead. “See, Cruz, this stuff can happen pretty fast if you know what you’re doing.”

“Okay, I was wrong,” said Cruz.

“I’m glad you see the error of your ways and I don’t have to have Gunnery Sergeant Swagger kick your ass.”

“I may do it anyway, on general principles,” Swagger said. “Dumb bozo goes into that icebox unarmed to face a man paid to kill him.”

“What an idiot,” said Nick. “Oh, and by the way, that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a man do in my life. I’m betting Swagger thinks the same and I bet these guys do too.”

“Here, here,” said a number of the clustered special agents and SWAT pros.

“He’s got guts, he ain’t got no sense at all,” muttered Swagger.

“Somebody’s sure cranky tonight,” Nick said. It seemed true—all Swagger had said to Cruz on the way over was stuff like, “That was a really stupid decision. You risked your life for a hostage and endangered what we’re trying to do. You don’t own your life, Sergeant, the Marine Corps does. It’ll give you permission to die, and it hasn’t,” and the younger man merely shook his head, almost in comic disbelief.

Neal came back on. “Okay, I’ve got the warrant, my next call is to Frontier Communications in Seattle, and with the warrant, they’ll tell
me where we’re going. Give me a few minutes.”

It went to silence again, and then—

“Okay, Director Memphis, I’m finally through the bounces. It went from Seattle to Oklahoma City to Charleston before it arrived in Washington, DC.”

“Good work, Neal.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet. Now we have some real magic coming up.”

“Is he trying to get on the Comedy Network?” somebody asked.

“Typical IT guy,” Nick said. “Smarts off to everybody, sucks up to nobody.”

Neal came back.

“The phone number ties to an AT&T cell phone. Our FISC warrant means that we have full cooperation from AT&T and I have them working at level ten, the most dedicated and urgent level of compliance. Oh, I love it when a plan comes together. Now we’re going to use a special program developed by the former technical head of a British security company. We can turn on our bad guy’s cell from here in Quantico, going through AT&T. Once it’s surreptitiously on, it not only broadcasts its GPS location but also sends a unique signature that we can track. The tracked signal is actually more accurate here in DC than the GPS coordinates and updates more frequently. Next call: National Reconnaissance Office and ask them—tell them—to direct their satellites to this area to listen for the signal and start a multilateration calculation to pinpoint the cell phone. They’ll come back with a longitude-latitude that we can easily translate into an address. And there’s your boy. Total elapsed time, seventeen minutes, a new record.”

“Good work, Neal,” Nick said, then turned to the crew:

“All right, people. Let’s get convoyed up. We’re going to make a big bust.”

644 CEDARCROFT NW

NEAR BETHESDA

WASHINGTON, DC

2325 HOURS

It was a big house, the kind in which most American kids dreamed of growing up. Secluded among trees on one of DC’s most exclusive streets, it had turrets, gables, dormers, balconies, a screened-in front porch, a free-standing garage, a gazebo, a pool, formal gardens, the American dream.

“Security team, deploy,” Nick said, and from the dozen or so unlit federal vehicles arrayed down the street, SWAT teamers slipped out and began to slide off into the trees and bushes to surround and control the dwelling.

“Do you recognize it?” asked Bob, looking to Susan’s serene face as she took in the details of the house.

“Yes,” she said.

“So which guy is it?”

“It’s none of them.”

Nick said: “You three stay put. I’ll handle the arrest with my people. We’ll repair to the Hoover Building and begin the interrogation. We’ll go all night and through tomorrow if necessary. If he’s lawyered up, it may take a while.”

“I want to be there,” said Cruz.

“Me too,” said Swagger.

“I
have
to be there,” said Susan.

“Marine guys,” said Nick, “full frontal self-discipline. No anger, no unprofessionalism, no screaming, no punches thrown. I insult you by saying that, but I don’t want any trouble with this bust. Do you read me?”

Silence meant they did.

Then a message came into Nick’s earpiece, telling him the security
teams were holding in place.

“Okay,” said Nick, “now my people will make the pinch. Could you call him, Susan? Get him on the phone so he doesn’t notice us pulling up. I worry about suicide in cases like this, or suicide by cop or something.”

“This guy isn’t committing suicide,” said Susan.

Nick handed the phone over, got out of the vehicle, waving, as six agents from the car behind came out to flank him, and they headed up the walk.

Susan punched the button on the phone.

“Talk to me, talk to me,” came the voice. “Did you make it out clean? I hear sirens and the TV is full of craziness. Did you get him? Where are you?”

“Hello, Jared,” she said, “it’s Susan Okada. No, they didn’t make it out clean. They are in hell, actually. And no, they didn’t get him. And we are right outside with a warrant for your arrest. Jared, don’t do anything stupid. Get ahead of the prosecution and maybe somehow you can survive this.”

“How about lunch tomorrow?” he said.

FBI HQ

FBI INTERROGATION SUITE 101

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

0010–1900 HOURS

Who would have guessed? Jared Dixson was a stand-up guy. He wouldn’t budge. Handsome, diffident, supercilious in that annoying upper-class, so-Ivy way, heavily ironic; underneath, he was a steel ideologue. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He waived legal representation. He even went so far as to enjoy the claim that it was he who’d ordered the Pentameter shot using poor Jack Collins’s computer codes.

“Jack’s the jerk from World War Two,” he said. “I mean, he thinks he’s still a frogman. IQ, maybe thirty-five on a good day. Annapolis, old SEAL, all he-man Afghan Desk, straight out of the movies and Kipling before that. Hello, dummy! Wake up, smell the flowers. You need somebody with smarts, a view on strategy, a vision of what should be. Hmm, I think I described myself rather well there.”

He wasn’t bluffed by legal threats.

“Do whatever you want,” he said to Nick and his assistant Chandler, as Okada, Swagger, and Cruz watched on closed-circuit TV. “Bring any charges you want. Subpoena anybody you want. I don’t care. Some things are worth spending the rest of your life in prison for, and getting the guys out of Afghanistan is one of them. You can say: ‘He tried to murder a marine sniper team.’ I suppose it’s true and I’ll bet that marine sergeant would like to strangle me about now. Maybe that would be fair. But I would argue: national defense in the trenches is murky, bloody business. No way to recall the team. Nothing personal, but I could
not
stand by and watch our soon-to-be most valuable asset on the ground get taken out by a sergeant and a lance corporal.
Ugly decision? Hell, yes. Hello, it’s what we do. Ugly is our specialty. But consider this: since we had his unit’s commo tent bugged and the team on satellite, I could have set Whiskey Two-Two up for capture by the Taliban. That would have been the easy way for me but not for them: interrogation, torture, eventual beheading. Instead, I opted for mercs who would do the job cleanly. No pain, no torture, no degradation. Why, I should win the goddamned Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. My only mistake: who knew that marine kid was Sergeant Rock and Superman combined?”

He quickly worked the political angle.

“Now, do you want to run a huge case against me? Do you want the dirty laundry in the world press for months? Do you want the Agency, the Marine Corps, and the FBI in a pissing match for all to see? Maybe you do, but you have to also see that it does nobody any good. I know the Administration doesn’t want that, and I believe that by this time next week, once they’ve made their assessments, you will get orders to back off. I think you’ll find I’m too big to fail. Tell you what: here’s my offer. I will resign immediately and disappear even faster. You don’t have a piece of evidence against me except the fact that my phone number happened to be on some gun-crazy screwball’s satellite phone. How do we know I gave him that phone and all the equipment? You’ll never prove it because, after all, we
are
the CIA and rather nimble at hiding stuff like that. Then consider the following: I actually succeeded. I put such pressure on your security teams that even if we didn’t get Cruz, we made it impossible for anyone to get to Zarzi. Zarzi gets his medal”—he made a show of checking his watch to see the time—“in a few hours at the White House, which is impregnable, he’s out of here tomorrow, and I won my little gambit. And as a special parting gift, I’ll use my considerable influence to get Okada a promotion, though in my opinion she should be up on charges of treason. Her career will take off, she’ll even get my old job, under a new Afghan Desk. Her life will be fabulous, except, most sadly, she won’t be able to have that lunch with me, which would have been so much fun for her.”

It went on like that. Meanwhile, Susan duly informed CIA, and a damage-assessment committee began to look into the charges, and
meetings were set up to deal with potential public relations problems, while at the same time, arguments were broached at the White House and the Justice Department in favor of covering up the operation after accepting Dixson’s resignation. The main worry appeared to be that some reporter would break the story, and then all havoc would come out to play.

“Sometimes I think these people lost all their goddamned moral bearings,” Swagger said. “To me it’s black and white, over and done with. The guy’s a murderer. He killed Skelton, thirty-one Afghans, Colonel Chambers, nine Filipinos, and four cops. Put him on the needle. End of story.”

“It’s not that easy,” said Nick. “In the Marine Corps it’s Us, Them. In Washington it’s Us, the Us who are with Us, the Us who are not sure about Us, and the many Us-es who don’t care. The other team, our mortal enemies, are also Us, it’s just that they happen to be against the Us that is Us; they’re the other Us, and they have other Us-es who are against Us, then their own huge numbers of people who don’t care one way or the other, and finally, between the two Us-es, there are thousands who aren’t sure yet and are waiting for a signal from the Administration, from the pundits, from the blogosphere, from party headquarters or the union or the Internet message boards about which Us is really their Us. I should add, each Us is always one hundred percent right and has never, ever acknowledged a mistake in judgment, interpretation, execution, or public relations. Dysfunctional as hell, but at least you can say this—it doesn’t work. Never has, never will. Bob, I told you this coming in. Sergeant Cruz, sorry to shock you, but political considerations will play a part. What I’m betting we get is a shake-up at the Agency—bye-bye Jack Collins and whoever was in his clique—and a compromise jail term on Dixson, maybe a soft five for conspiracy, which he’ll use to write a book making himself out to be the smartest guy in the room. That’s possible.”

“What about the scandal?” asked Bob.

“Uh, today’s press isn’t eager to discredit this president. They
backed him so hard they’re invested in him. And anyhow, are you going to blow the whistle to your good friend David Banjax? I didn’t think so. So it stays out of the papers and off the news.”

“May I say something?” asked Cruz.

“Go ahead.”

“Once again, it seems like you’re accepting this at face value. It is what it is, it’s a marginal triumph for the good guys, that is, what we’ve accomplished, there’s some justice for Two-Two in it, but that’s all it is, and now it’s over. But maybe it’s not over. Maybe it’s just starting.”

“Here we go again on the conspiracy merry-go-round,” said Susan.

“Ma’am, I know how Zarzi operated around Qalat. I’ve seen young marines blown to ribbons by IEDs his people planted and then they went and hid in his off-limits compound. I don’t see how he could have this ‘change’ that everybody says he had so fast.”

“Sergeant Cruz,” she said, “I have to tell you that our people went over Zarzi time after time, from all angles, using all technologies, from drugs to polygraphs to psychological evaluation to sleep deprivation. He volunteered, he got through it easily. If he’s holding something back, it’s beyond our science to detect it, which to me at least means he’s not holding something back.”

“Sergeant Cruz, you are an extraordinary man,” said Nick. “Brave, resilient, the only man I’ve ever seen who’s the equal of Sergeant Swagger here. But there’s not a shred of evidence that anything is set for tonight. If it were there, I’d act on it, believe me. But I—”

The phone rang.

Hmm, Nick had given instructions not to be interrupted.

He picked it up.

“Nick, is that you? Jesus, you’re hard to find.”

“Sorry, Jim. I’m really in the middle—”

“I’ve got something for you on this guy Zarzi.”

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