Dead Zero (9 page)

“You can’t trust ’em,” said Bob.

“People do change. It happens. We worked this bird hard and we believe he’s genuine. I don’t know how he could fake something like that and get it through all the vetting we laid on him. So our new policy is: you
can
trust them. The future depends on it.”

“Maybe you’re seeing what you want to see.”

“Fear of that remote possibility shouldn’t preclude our making full use of this development,” she replied. “The trust has to start somewhere or your daughter Miko will be serving in Kabul.”

Bob grunted, signifying that he didn’t quite buy it. But then he moved on.

“So what does all this have to do with me?”

“As part of State’s initiative to upgrade Zarzi’s profile before the fall elections, he’s coming to DC in a couple of weeks. You might call it a sort of further test, see how he stands up to that kind of DC pressure. Lots of things have been laid on. Debriefings both at State and at the Agency, news conferences, speeches before the foreign policy Council, a big national talking heads broadcast, and finally a medal ceremony at the White House, where all the biggies will be in attendance. He’ll announce his candidacy for the presidency, and a big Mad Avenue firm will take over the election. He’s our man in Kabul.”

“And?”

“And Ray Cruz isn’t dead. He’s alive. He’s back. He’s all snipered up. And Ray Cruz has said he will finish his job. He will hit his target and complete Whiskey Two-Two’s mission. He’ll take Zarzi down.”

“How do you know all this?”

“He told us.”

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

RITZ HOTEL POOL DECK

MIAMI BEACH

1600 HOURS

Pablo trundled discreetly around the pool with a wireless telephone on his tray. He wore a tropical shirt, white shorts, and sunglasses. He was a good find. He’d also connected Mick with several high-end hookers, a very nice supply of blow, and every third drink off the hotel’s books. Behind him, the glass, turquoise, and alabaster crescent of the building itself formed a bulwark against the offshore Atlantic breezes, so that even the palms were still. The sun sparkled off the pool’s glossy blue waters. Many young women in bikinis the size of thumbprints were lounging about and most of them would sneak a peek at Mick once in a while. No surprise, since he had the hard body of an NFL linebacker—muscles without fat, all of them nicely bunched and protuberant—and the tattoos were all professional and elegant and military, not jailhouse shit with crude images of Jesus bleeding out on the cross or some chick named Esmeralda woven into hearts and violets. Mick took another sip of his Knob Creek on the rocks as Pablo reached him and presented the phone.

“Señor?”

“Can you throw it in the pool?” Mick asked.

“It would not be a good idea.”

“Agh,” said Mick. Who knew he was here? No one. That meant someone with the connex.

“Hello?” Mick said.

“Bogier. Enjoying the view?”

MacGyver. He thought he was done with that asshole. It played out as per, and indeed the agreed-upon large sum had been wired to Mick’s account. Mick had also decided it was time to quit Kabul, in case someone
caught on to something and marines came looking for him. So he awarded himself liberty. Maybe it would stop the ringing in his ears.

“I was until I heard from you.”

“Don’t be testy.”

“I’m on vacation. I’m whipped.”

“Vacation’s over. A detail has come loose.”

“And that would be?”

“The guy you were paid to handle? Well, chum, you didn’t handle him. He’s back.”

“Hey,” said Mick, “you guys cratered that hotel. He was there, I put him there for you, and you pushed the button and ka-boom, no more hotel. By the way, thanks for almost killing me too. However you did it, that sucker blew like a nuke. Man, that was a payload.”

Mick remembered. How could he forget? He was a little off the street with his screen of Izzies in the alleyway. He disconnected the phone, turned, and signaled the war party to fall back. Then a screaming came across the sky, and the det went. Jesus fucking Christ. He had been around explosions his entire professional life. He’d set them, he’d planned them, he’d been inside a couple, he’d been close enough to a couple to catch a ride through the air for twenty-five feet, he had a thousand pepper marks on his otherwise glorious body from supersonic debris. But nothing like this. Explosions have personalities and they express ideas, they are not all the same. This one carried the message of serious mega destruction. It wasn’t a warning or an exclamation point, it wasn’t witty, ironic, amusing, or earnest. It was the end of the world in a very small package and it literally evaporated the hotel in a single nanosecond with a percussion that seemed to drive the oxygen from the surface of the earth and in the next nanosecond deposited a rain of dust, wreckage, human and animal parts, chunks of iron and masonry, windowsills, curtain rods, shards of glass on everything for miles around. It knocked him down. What the fuck. That was a goddamned blast and a half.

“It was thermobaric. We warned you to take cover. Did you need an engraved invitation?”

“The timing was a little off. It came in ahead of sked and capped thirty-one pilgrims and almost buried yours truly under a pile of heads and arms.”

“Cry me a river why don’t you. That’s the suck, your chosen workplace. You’re in this particular operation, you’ll work it through to the end. Got it? We don’t have time to do a recruitment drive. We pick you and you don’t have the latitude here to say no, mister.”

Unsaid: whoever MacGyver was, his power in finding and reaching Mick here or in the Cat’s Eye cafe in Kabul where all the coyotes hung meant again: he had the connex. A phone call from him could bring major heat beaucoup fast on Mick’s ass.

“Not on the same bill,” said Mick. “That one’s over. This one’s starting up. Same fee structure. I don’t work cheap.”

“Corporate, aren’t we? ‘Fee structure,’ very Graywolf. Yes, of course, lots of money for you.”

“Okay,” said Mick, “come to think of it, I would like to fry this little bastard for good.”

“I’m sure he feels the same way about you. Can you reassemble your team?”

“Tony’s with me, Crackers went home to his wife and kids in Fayetteville. I can get him back, no problem. What’s the play?”

“This time, not only are you hunting this character, but so are the FBI and the CIA and just about everybody else. So you’ve got some competition. But to make it harder, they just want to stop the guy. You have to kill him, Mr. Mission Impossible.”

“That’s what I do.”

“Little evidence of that yet, friend, though I understand you’re hell on goats. He’s trying to finish the mission you stopped him from completing. He wants to put a bullet in Ibrahim Zarzi, the Afghan politician, who arrives in Washington for a high-profile visit in two weeks. This time, you stop him, permanently. He is under no circumstances to whack Zarzi or fall into police hands and go all Chatty Cathy on us.”

“Leads, you have leads?”

“The Bureau-Agency team handling this has gone to an old guy
named Swagger, a former marine sniper with a lot of experience in these games. He’s you with brains, talent, imagination, stamina, and guts. I’ve seen the file.”

“The Nailer. A classic oldie. I’ve heard of the guy.”

“I’ll bet you have. He makes Ray Cruz look like a kindergartener. Swagger has the best chance of nailing Cruz, so you’ll be given all sorts of little gadgets to make tracking Swagger something within your Neanderthalic reach.”

“If I get ’em together, I have the okay to dust ’em both? I don’t like the idea of pulling down on a knight of the round table, but there may not be another way.”

“Bogier, don’t go soft on me and start humming ‘Halls of Montezuma.’ Collateral’s part of the business. This one is about getting the job done by any means possible. Don’t fuck this up.”

“Get over it. I didn’t fuck up the last one. I delivered. Your thermobaric nuke didn’t quite do the job.”

“Bogier, this is unbelievably crucial. At your level you can’t possibly understand what’s at stake. But trust me: you must come through on this. No pussy, no blow, no uppers or downers, no new tattoos, no three hours in the gym every day. You get it done.”

“I have it.”

“We don’t like to use coyotes. But we have no choice. Show us we haven’t misjudged.”

“Roger, wilco.”

“And one more thing: no witnesses.”

CASCADE MEADOWS, IDAHO

32 MILES EAST OF BOISE

1635 HOURS

He told you?” Bob asked.

Nick reached into his briefcase and pulled out a file, reached into the file and pulled out a decrumpled piece of yellow paper now preserved in cellophane. It was a Marine Corps incoming radio communication form. Nick handed it over.

Bob saw the operator’s name, the unit designation “2-2 Recon” and the date, sometime last week, and the time, 0455. He read the message:

“‘Whiskey Six, this is Whiskey Two-Two. Authentification Olympic downhill. I say again, Olympic downhill.” There was an asterisk scribbled in pencil next to the transmission, and at the bottom, after the footnote style, next to the parallel asterisk the operator had written, “No record of ‘Olympic downhill’ as verifier.”

Unrecorded was the radio operator’s response, which must have been something like, “Codes and verifier invalid, who are you, Two-Two, over, what is your situation, why are you in communication with this unit?”

Ray just bulled ahead, and the young man had written down:

“Whiskey Two-Two is on-site and will proceed with operation as planned. Target will be destroyed sometime next two to four weeks. Hunting is good, morale is high. Semper Fi. Out.”

“The kid thought it was some kind of joke, but it went into the log and the next day, the CO’s looking at the log. He used to be the exec and he remembered Two-Two. He got on the phone to division and on to marine headquarters at Henderson and then to us.”

“So the thinking is,” Bob said, “Cruz survived the blast and didn’t limp back to his FOB but instead went AWOL big time as a way of going rogue. Somehow, he got out of Afghanistan and found a way back. Now he’s pissed at what he has decided is some kind of betrayal
that killed his spotter and thirty-one Afghans. Maybe he’s a little nuts. So he’s going to whack this politician anyway, just out of spite.”

“Something like that.”

“Come on. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Especially now that the Afghan is on our side, publicly and loudly. So Ray is now betraying his country and his service. It’s like he’s working for
them
. He couldn’t have been captured and turned?”

“Seems unlikely, but there are cases like it.”

“That’s not Ray,” said Swagger, who now believed he knew Ray or at least could feel the way his mind operated. “No, he’s got some other, deeper game in play. He’s got another objective, and we’re not smart enough to see it yet.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t worry about motive at this point,” said Susan. “Maybe we should just deal with what we have and figure out how to stop it.”

“So my part in this is to be your sniper consultant,” Swagger said, looking as if each of his sixty-four years had cost him a thousand dollars’ worth of grief.

“You’re with us every step of the way. We want you to eyeball the possible shooting sites and tell us where he’d shoot from, what he’d see that we wouldn’t. We want you to analyze his ingress and escape routes, his fallbacks, his hides, all the things that even our best experts might miss. We want you to be him when we game out possibilities or permutations. We need your intuitive access to his heart and mind over the next few weeks.”

“So you can kill him.”

“If it comes to that,” said Susan, whose specialty, now as then, was delivering the hard truth. “Nobody wants it, but there are other issues at stake. We have to stop him, Bob. Do you have any idea how humiliating it would be to this country internationally if an Afghan politician under our sponsorship was publicly assassinated by a marine sniper?”

Nick outlined the deal. Bob would actually carry an FBI badge and be legally entitled to represent himself as an “FBI investigator,” though not an “agent” or a “special agent.” The consultancy fee would be substantial,
not that it was about money. Under certain circumstances, with written authorization, he would be permitted to carry a firearm and make arrests. He would be granted all authority and respect within the federal system and the military in accordance with his police powers. He would report directly to Nick and Susan. He would have an unlimited travel budget.

“My heart is with the sniper,” he said. “You have to know that going in. I want to get him out of this fix, get it straightened out. I don’t want to kill him.”

“We know that. We need that. We’re buying that.”

“Then my first move is to Camp Lejeune. I want to talk to his CO, his peers, and get a sense of him.”

“We’ll make the phone calls,” said Nick. “Oh, and raise your right hand.”

Bob complied, mumbled the appropriate yeses, and, cranky and old and ever so tired, realized he was back to taking the king’s gold, which meant he might have to do the king’s killing.

U.S.-MEXICO BORDER

27 MILES WEST OF NOGALES, ARIZONA

0356 HOURS

THE NEXT MORNING

The van was dirty and spotted and squalid, a ’92 Ford Econoline with Arizona plates. It smelled of unwashed bodies, long nights, junk food, and urine. But its suspension was sound and its engine tuned. It looked like any van from a coyote outfit, and it looked like it had made many journeys to and from el Norte.

Now it prowled dusty trails, switchbacks, and arroyos in the dark of night, but slowly. Dust rose. No moon guided them. The landscape was raw and ugly, mostly tall, spiny vegetation that could kill you. Bilal drove, trying to stay on the donkey track before him without headlamps, and his Mexican contact Rodriguez, a veteran of many crossings to and from, sat next to him, squinting to read the map and compare it with his memory.