Dead Zero (46 page)

MARRIOTT RESIDENCE HOTEL

WILSON BOULEVARD

ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA

1108 HOURS

TWO DAYS LATER

He awoke in a stupor. Brain foggy, memory shot, limbs in pain. Only one dream, obvious. Handsome Prince tries to save the world but forgets to save the Beautiful Princess. Part of Prince, fool of fools, played by Bob Lee Swagger. Princess played by Susan Okada, St. Louis, daughter of oncologist; Yale University; career CIA; best, brightest, most beautiful; thirty-eight years old now and forever. What was the point of saving the world if there was no Susan Okada in it?

Fuck,
he thought.
If I had to do it again, I’d trade her life for all those guys in suits who think they’re so important. The generals, the admirals, the president, his cabinet officers. Let the devil have them all for an eternity of punishment and take me along for good measure, torture me, it’s fine, if it could spare Susan Okada’s life. Fuck ’em,
he thought.
Fuck ’em all to hell forever, and me too, fuck me, just fuck me to hell.

God, how it sucked hard and long. He wished he could sink back into dreamless nothingness. If only one of the thousands of shots taken in his direction over the years had been better aimed or untouched by wind he would not have this nearly unendurable thing festering in his brain. He just lay there for a long, long time, hoping to die, but death seemed to be off duty. Where was it when you needed it?
Come on, motherfucker, take me, not her. Okay. Me, I’m the one you want, the one you been trying to nab all these years.
But death didn’t answer.

Finally, he looked around the hotel room, remembered the debriefing, the statement, the medical check, remembered that Ray and Nick were somewhere else. He wasn’t sure what time it was or what time
he’d gotten back, but he’d crashed hard and slept straight through after something like seventy-two on his feet. A message light blinked on the phone, and he picked it up, had twenty-six of them, dumped through them fast until Nick came on, saying, “We’re going to debrief again in the director’s office at one thirty today. Let me know you got this.”

He tried to figure out the coffee machine, finally got it going. He looked at his watch. It was 11:17 on the first day of a rest of his life he did not want. He went to the door, opened it, and found a
Washington Post
.

He glanced at it. About three-quarters of the front page seemed to be bullshit: spin, counterspin, counter-counterspin, blame, recrimination, disavowal, analysis long term, analysis short term. What the Administration said, what the opposition said, what the English and the French said, what Al-Jazeerah said. Where the fuck were the facts? One story seemed to be the update, and he pressed through it.

Six dead, the rest contusions, sprains, a few broken bones, a few heart emergencies, and some feeling very hurt. No big guys had gone down.
Sing hallelujah. Decorate the tree. Hide the painted eggs. Get out the funny masks. Fuck all suits, uniforms, and the men who thought they deserved them. Theirs, ours, it was all the same.

As far as the launch team at Iwo: the two dead-by-police scientists were Khalid Biswa, who worked guidance in the Indian rocket program, though he was a Muslim. Indian Secret Service suspected him of passing secrets to the Pakistanis, and he had disappeared about three years ago. The other guy was Dr. Faisal Ben-Abuljami, University of Alexandria, computer sciences, consultant for years to various bad apple groups who wanted to take their jihad into cyberspace. And the final guy, the one who survived, a real world-class Palestinian operator named Bilal Ayubi, a thousand ops, wanted all over Europe and especially by the Israelis. Evidently the sort of guy you wouldn’t want to mix with on a dark night.

The phone rang.

It was Cruz.

“Hey, spotter,” he said. “How’s the old guy?”

“I feel like shit.”

“I’m sorry about Okada, Gunny. I know she was special to you.”

“You lose people. It’s wrong, it’s sad, it’s the cruelty of the goddamn process, but it ain’t ever going away. You lose people. I’ll go to the funeral, I’ll get over it, or at least figure out how to keep going. Anyway, hell of a shot you made.”

“That was Whiskey Two-Two’s shot. It’s the one I was born to make. It’s the one Billy Skelton died to get done. In the end, it was easy. Some old dog ranged it for me. I was just the triggerman.”

“Ray, let me just say it: you’re the goddamn best. Nobody ever pays the IOUs that guys like you—”

“And guys like you—”

“And Susan Okada. Whatever. Nobody pays the IOUs that guys like you and she rack up, so you end up doing it for free, for nothing. They even forget to say, hey, thanks, you saved the world, or at least a little neighborhood of it. But you and her, you saw what nobody else saw and you figured out what nobody else figured out and had the guts to move on it. Because of the two of you we’re going to live in one kind of a place instead of another.”

“She was the best. As for me, I just had a big charge of vitamin DNA.”

“Will I see you at this meet? Ray, we ought to get to know each other, hang out. I hope you’ll come and meet your sisters and step-mom. I hope—”

“Gunny, I’m calling from Lejeune. I turned myself in to shore patrol today. We’ll let the corps straighten out what’s to be done with me. I’ll get back as soon as I know and we’ll set something up.”

“Can’t wait,” said Bob, knowing he would make it happen.

FBI HQ

DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1350 HOURS

Nobody said much. They were in the suite, not the office proper, a perk that came with being heroes. They sat in beautiful leather chairs, so English clubby, around a coffee table, and the director ran the show, assisted by Walter Troy, repping the Agency, head of the damage-assessment team.

“So it’s a victory but nobody’s happy. It cost a lot, maybe too much. We all feel the pain of the loss. But we have to go on. That’s all anyone can say.”

“I don’t want anything happening to Cruz,” said Swagger. “Losing Okada hurt enough but that would really screw the pooch.”

“I’ve been making arrangements, and as you might imagine, the White House is dead on board,” said the director. “He should get a stripe out of this or take the damned commission they’ve been trying to force on him for years. We managed to get the Baltimore prosecutor’s office to drop its interest in him, in exchange for the DNA samples that put Bogier in the Filipino house.”

“That’s good to know,” said Swagger. “I’m sure the corps will treat him fairly.”

“If it doesn’t, I’ll indict it,” said Nick.

“As for you, Mr. Swagger, I’m not sure what we can pay you. Money? I doubt you’d cash the check. Peace and quiet? That’s the only coinage you’d respond to. Or do you want more medals?”

“I’m fine,” said Swagger. “Cruz is okay and you’ll get Okada some kind of medal for her folks. Let’s change the subject.”

“I’m a little unclear on Arlington,” said Nick. “Couldn’t make much sense of it in the papers. How come the tough guy survived and
the others didn’t?”

“Warrior’s luck. He shot it out with the Arlington police. Hit three times, too tough to die. He’s in the hospital, under heavy guard, expected to recover. Won’t say a word, hard to the end. The others were ordered to surrender and simply walked into the guns. The cops had no choice. They must have been good friends. They went to paradise together, holding hands.”

“Anything else?” Troy asked.

Bob said, “Have you arrested Hollister yet?”

“That’s the bad news. He dumped the SUV two blocks from the White House and disappeared. We figure he was going to a meet when you picked him up, and once he broke free, he disappeared. He called them, they came and got him. It had to be pro. They disappeared him well. I’m betting it was Pakistani intelligence. They’re all over this.”

“Motherfucker,” said Bob. “Excuse my English.”

“How did you know it was him? If you hadn’t figured it out, we’d be sitting here with a dead national leadership cadre and a confidence crisis beyond the imagination.”

“It was just something that set peculiar with me. When we all met in the Agency, he told everybody about the rifle I captured that’s on display in your museum, right?”

“That’s right,” said Nick.

“Well, that
is
the rifle and I
was
the boy who captured it, no doubt about it. But that night, we had a big celebration at the firebase, steaks and beer, all the stuff that’s bad for you. And the CIA guy running the operation calls me aside afterward and tells me I got ‘talent.’ The Agency, he says, is always looking for ‘talent.’ Did I want a job? He could get me in real high, make a lot more than I could as a marine. No, I said, I’d stay with the corps. See, I had it in my head I wanted to retire as the command sergeant major of the Marine Corps. I thought that’d make my dad proud. I didn’t know I was going to lose my spotter and get my hip busted in another couple of weeks. So the guy says, ‘Sure, but I’ll write you up big in my reports and if you change your mind, you just tell ’em and they can look ’em up and that’ll get you in.’
And I said, ‘Can you do me a favor? I know Marine Corps politics, and if it’s out I’m connected up with you people, that could hurt me. They don’t like that dual-allegiance thing in the Marine Corps. So the best thing you could do is not mention me by name at all.’ He says, ‘You sure, Gunny?’ I says I’m sure. My name ain’t in no file on that rifle. So if Ted Hollister says he heard about it in Saigon as a way of browning me up, he’s lying. My file with the Agency begins six thousand quarts of bourbon later. So how’s Ted know? Ted could only know from the Russians. They kept a file on that SVD case and he’d seen it. So if he’s seeing Russian files on American marines, he’s up to something nobody knows about. Got it?”

“What on earth motivated him?” asked Nick. “He doesn’t seem like the Ames or Aldrich type.”

“He left a statement on his hard drive. Crazy bullshit, I don’t even know how to describe it. What do they say? ‘The kind of nonsense only an intellectual could believe.’ That sort of thing. And we’re not going to release the news on him. It makes the Administration look too bad, and for now, they’re the ones signing the checks that we all cash.”

“So,” said Nick, “basically this guy masterminds a plot to kill the president and the top leadership of the country by maneuvering Ibrahim Zarzi into the Rose Garden with a miniaturized FM transmitter. He uses Dixson to hire contractors to stop a marine sniper team, killing one marine and wounding another. He pursues the surviving sniper across America, kills a guy in South Carolina, kills nine Filipino immigrants in Baltimore, kills four cops in DC, kills six innocent bystanders at the White House, and . . . he gets away with it.”

“It’s not my decision. It’s politics. But it’s also reality. As I said, someone thoroughly professional got him out. As I said, maybe the Pakis. They’re very good, and there are elements of their ISI that we think are jihad sympathizers.”

“It’s a big world out there. We’ll try hard, but look how long we’ve been going after Osama,” said the director.

“You forgot one thing,” said Bob.

They looked back at Swagger. He had one of those drawn-in cowboy faces, now much cut with the wrinkles that sixty-four years of gunfights will engrave in a man’s flesh.

“You forgot
me,
” he said. “My name is Bob the Nailer. I kill people.”

THEODORE R. HOLLISTER

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

“AN ACCOUNT OF MOTIVE”

HARD DRIVE

NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICE IBM

C:\MY FILES\ACCOUNT.1.WPD

I am no Lee Harvey Oswald, surly and bitter and luxuriating in his own self-imposed bitterness. I am no John Wilkes Booth, full of grandiloquence, theatrical self-dramatization, narcissism, and insanity. I am no Leon Czolgosz, an idiot.

I’m just a man who sees the future, understands what it must be, and humbly aspires to facilitate it as mercifully and swiftly as possible. I did what I did because the West is no longer worth defending. It has been destroyed by the people it was built to protect: its women.

The West lasted from
AD
732, when Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours, until 1960, where it fell without a battle. In 1960, the birth control pill became widely available. Many think of it as heaven, sexual nirvana, the route to self-expression, wish fulfillment, and liberation for millions of women. I think of it as Auschwitz in a bottle. It was and is genocide, as, using it, the women of my generation happily traded off 1,200 years of unparalleled growth, wealth, security, stability, scientific and ethical progress for a second BMW in the garage. The West ceased producing at a sustainable rate, while Islam continued to populate the world. You may look elsewhere for the demographics. This fact cannot be avoided: we Westerners currently may be analogized to upper-class Brits on the deck of the
Titanic,
April 12, 1912. My, my, why is the great ship tilting a bit? Why, dear, it’s probably some minor malfunction that the handsome young men will soon fix. Meanwhile, may I have another aperitif, steward?

But not only did the pill doom the West from without by limiting population, it destroyed the culture from within by destroying the gyroscope
of civilization—that is, the balance between the sexes. The sexes had existed for that glorious 1,200-year span in a kind of brilliant equipoise: men provided and protected, women nourished and nurtured. It was a sublimely efficient system, if harsh. The result was generation after generation of bold, intelligent, hardy risk takers, driven by their fathers’ sense of duty but made compassionate by their mothers’ mercy. They were afraid of nothing, committed to a larger thing than themselves, all united in their confident sense of destiny. The men did what they had to do, the women did what they had to do. Together, they built a thing called civilization. In all realms, from the scientific to the industrial to the aesthetic to the military to the intellectual and the medical, Western thought and culture prevailed. It was extraordinary and it seems even now absurd that we threw it away in a single generation.