Day Zero

by Marc Cameron

  “Well, do you recall how the neighbor’s TV was always so loud and how we could hear them talking about what to have for dinner?”

  Thibodaux shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “If I worried about people listening in on us, I’d never have gotten pregnant with our first two boys. I think the neighbors left their TV turned up all the time so they didn’t have to listen to you jumpin’ my bones every minute of the day.” She patted the bed, talking out loud now. “Get your ass up here, Gunny Thib—”

  The smaller of the two cell phones next to their bed began to chime. Jacques gave an exasperated sigh, but picked it up immediately. He rolled his hand in the air, motioning for Camille to make more noise to help camouflage his conversation.

  Dressed in nothing but her grin, Camille began to jump up and down on the bed, squeaking the box springs and driving Thibodaux crazy in the process.

  “Speak to me, beb,” the Gunny said, eyes locked on his bouncing wife.

  “It’s happening,” Jericho Quinn said. “They’ve found me.”

  “You okay, l’ami?” Thibodaux had to turn away so he could concentrate. The two men had known each other just over two years, but they’d bled and spilled blood together and were closer than brothers—even if Quinn happened to be a member of what he’d always considered the “pansy ass” Air Force.

  The Cajun listened while Quinn ran down not only an attack on him, but on his wife and daughter.

  “What can I do?”

  “You know that thing we discussed?”

  Thibodaux found himself shaking his head. “I remember,” he said. “But you might want to rethink that, Chair Force.”

  “It’s already in motion.”

  “You’re serious about this?”

  “Dead serious,” Quinn said. “My dad and brother are with them now. Would you mind heading over and giving them a hand? You know, looking outbound. They need all the security they can get.”

  “No problem,” Thibodaux said. “I just . . . I mean . . . Are you sure about this plan of yours?”

  “I’m sure,” Quinn said. “Listen, I have to go. Sonja will have the particulars.”

  “Okay,” Thibodaux said, “I’ll talk to Sonja then.” He made a face when he said Ronnie Garcia’s code name. He hated all the code names and beating around the bush. If something threatened him, he much preferred to walk up and shoot it in the face.

  He ended the call and turned to catch his wife around the waist in mid bounce.

  “What was that about?” She leaned forward off the edge of the bed to nuzzle his neck.

  “It was Quinn,” he whispered. “Sorry, Cornmeal, but I gotta run.”

  “Okay.” She stuck out her bottom lip. That was the great thing about Camille. She might pout a time or two every year, but then she sucked it up and did the Marine wife thing, supporting her man when he went off to fight.

  Thibodaux pulled on his socks and stepped into a pair of jeans, wondering how much of this he should tell his bride. He decided on anything that might make the evening news.

  “Some guys tried to snatch Mattie,” he said. “It was very likely an effort to lure our buddy out of the woods.”

  “That’s awful.” Camille knelt on the bed, hugging a pillow to her bare chest. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s scared,” Thibodaux said, “but safe. Bo’s there . . . and Quinn’s dad.”

  Camille gave a low whistle. “I was just thinking . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What’s that, cher?” Thibodaux stretched a gray T-shirt over broad shoulders and monstrous arms.

  “I was just thinking that if they really knew Jericho, they’d know it’d be better to let him stay on the run.”

  “You got that right,” Thibodaux said. He left out the part about Quinn sending his daughter and ex-wife to Russia in order to keep them safe.

  Chapter 18

  Gaithersburg, Maryland

  Ronnie Garcia set her leather backpack on the kitchen counter and activated the alarm on the panel inside the front door. She usually didn’t do it until later, when she was about to go to bed, but things were getting weird. Standing at the kitchen counter again, she stared at the lone goldfish swimming in the bowl near the cordless telephone. A crusted soup pan sat nearby where Ronnie had spent last night’s dinner watching, and sadly, chatting up the little bug-eyed fish while she ate on her feet.

  Jericho had called the moment she’d walked in the door. She’d heard the urgency in his voice, but the fact that he was willing to send his ex-wife and daughter to communist Russia to keep them safe from the new administration said all she needed to know about his present state of mind.

  Jacques had called seconds later, filling her in on the specifics of the attack on Kim and Mattie. He knew the plan and told Ronnie he’d brief them on what she was about to do.

  She ran a hand through thick hair, rubbing her eyes with a thumb and forefinger as she thought through her course of action. A hot bath called her name, but there was no time for that. She had a call to make—and the sooner she made it the better. There was no way she could make it from her house—even on the burner phone. There was no way of knowing what someone might be able to pick up with infrared or laser listening technology.

  Apart from letting her know how easy it was for someone from the Internal Defense Task Force to find out where she parked her car in the CIA parking lot, Garcia’s conversation with Agent Walter had twisted her gut into a knot.

  A long run would help quiet her nerves. More important, it would give her the perfect opportunity to make her call.

  Stripping off her street clothes as she walked down the short hall to her bedroom, Garcia rummaged through the pile of laundry beside her dresser until she found a reasonably clean pair of running shorts and a loose T-shirt. Barefoot, she sat on the edge of the bed and rummaged through her wallet until she found a business card to a local pizzeria with a coded phone number written on the back.

  The IDTF and NSA had become bosom bedfellows under the new administration—so much so that she’d had to purchase two prepaid cell phones. Not wanting to burn her communication link with Quinn in the event this international call was hacked, she dedicated one of these “burners” to Jericho and the other to calls like the one she was about to make. Monitoring was always likely, but tens of thousands of people made international calls from the US each day. As long as the conversation stayed plain vanilla and no names or trigger words were used, Garcia hoped she could melt into the digital background noise.

  Falling back on the bed, she took a moment to decipher the safety code she’d written on the card. It was meant to slow down anyone who might have been snooping around her wallet. Once she figured it out, she picked up the phone and dialed 01 to exit the US, 7 for Russia and the Skylink prefix, which acted as an area code for the Russian cell service, before punching in all but the last digit of the number.

  A member of the Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB, Aleksandra Kanatova was a spy Jericho Quinn had spent a considerable amount of time with, traipsing around South America while they looked for a missing Soviet-era nuke. Ronnie had seen her once, at a party near Miami where they had been hunting the same terrorist. They’d both been dressed in flimsy bathing suits so it had been easy to get a read on Kanatova, physically at least. Ronnie supposed the Russian was pretty if one had a thing for smallish redheaded assassins who were covered in freckles. Thankfully, Jericho Quinn seemed to prefer his killer girlfriends built a bit more on the robust side with a little more pigment to their complexions—and the hint of a Cuban accent.

  Garcia laced up her running shoes and slipped the tiny Kahr 9mm pistol into a black leather fanny pack that blended in with her shorts. Skipping her usual stretch, she reset the alarm and headed out the door with the burner phone in her hand.

  She put in a single earbud, letting the other one dangle. It was an unwise spy who cut herself off from the warning signs of outside noises when out on a run—or anywhere for that mat
ter.

  Garcia checked up and down the quiet residential street in front of her modest frame house. She was half surprised that she didn’t find Agent Walter’s black Lincoln Town Car parked half a block away. There were a couple of other runners out—the cute guy who worked at the Pentagon and a housewife from three doors down who was out jogging off the extra pounds her spandex shorts so prominently displayed. A small ganglet of three preteens rode by on their bicycles, heads ducked in an all-out race for the end of the block. She was a horrible neighbor and wouldn’t have been able to give the names of a single individual who lived around her—even under threat of torture. But she was an excellent spy and recognized them as people who did in fact live on her street. It was a quiet neighborhood with quiet people who kept to themselves, just like Ronnie. The houses were modest things, some decades old, some built on subdivided lots within the last five years. None were very large. These were not the Great Falls or Vienna, Virginia, homes of three-star generals and undersecretaries to the presidential cabinet. They were the plain brick and stick homes of the worker bees, close enough to DC to be within commuting distance and far enough away to be affordable before you hit GS 14 on the government pay scale. The warm scent of new-mown grass and blossoming flowers hung on the humid air. The lawns were manicured and the shrubs well-trimmed, but there were no sidewalks, so Ronnie ran along the edge, next to the gutter.

  She entered the last remaining number into the cell phone, and then pressed send before breaking into an easy trot. She’d just reached a comfortable stride when she heard a loud click on the line, as if the connection was a stodgy throwback to the Soviet Cold War days.

  “Allo.” Aleksandra Kanatova smacked her lips as she spoke, as if groggy from a deep sleep.

  Garcia kept up her pace, glancing at her watch. A quarter after six in Maryland. She winced. It was after two in the morning, Moscow time.

  “Zdravstvujtye,” Garcia said. She used the more formal greeting. Speaking Russian always made her think of her father, which caused her to smile. She hoped the sentiment carried in her voice. She spoke slowly, allowing the woman on the other end to wake up and grasp the gravity of her call. “I am calling on behalf of your friend from Argentina.”

  Kanatova gave a heavy cough. Garcia thought she heard the scrape of a lighter. She envisioned the Russian in a drab flat with a weak, bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and flaking paint on the walls, smoke from the freshly lit cigarette swirling around her naked shoulders. Garcia didn’t know why, but she imagined all Russian spies slept naked and smoked a cigarette each time they got up to pee during the night.

  Kanatova coughed again. Her voice was coarse and whiskeyed. “We were better acquainted in Bolivia.” She gave the preplanned phrase to assure her identity. “I trust he is well.”

  “For now,” Garcia said, telling what little she knew. “He would like to visit.”

  “Ah. I see.” Kanatova was smart enough to know Quinn would have called to make the arrangements himself if he could have, so she did not question the fact that he’d asked his girlfriend to do it for him. Paper rustled on the line as she turned the page of a notebook. “Will he be bringing any luggage?”

  “Himself and two carry-ons,” Garcia answered.

  “A large and a small carry-on?”

  “That is correct.”

  “I have been watching the news,” Kanatova said. “This was to be expected. I will make the necessary arrangements on this end.”

  “I understand,” Garcia said. “I will call again soon to get the details.” She hung up, picturing Aleksandra Kanatova falling back in her rumpled sheets, blowing smoke rings in the darkness of her dingy flat.

  Kanatova had already taken care of the visas for just such an eventuality—one for Jericho using the passport under the unofficial and, with any luck, untraceable alias, John Hackman, and two more for a Kim and Mattie Hackman. A softening of the rules and few hundred extra bucks made the visas good for multiple entries over a three-year period from the date of issue. But there were still things that needed to occur on the other end. Knowing someone like Kanatova would smooth the way for Quinn to travel quickly with his “carry-ons.”

  Ronnie pulled the bud out of her ear and slowed long enough to shove the phone in the fanny pack along with her pistol. It made her stomach hurt to think of Jericho going to Russia with his ex-wife, even if it was just a place to stash her and keep her safe. It would have been easier if the woman was a flaming bitch, but Kimberly Quinn was fragile—especially since the shooting. Beyond that, she was the mother of Quinn’s child—and that frightened Garcia more than anything.

  Ronnie decided a little tradecraft would help push the jealous thoughts out of her brain. She spun in her tracks halfway down the block to run back the way she’d come. A blue Ford Escape with heavily tinted windows had been matching her pace. It sped up when she turned, passing with both the driver and a passenger staring straight ahead as if she didn’t exist. It was called “conspicuous ignoring.” The nimrods may as well have had government surveillance written all over the vehicle.

  Ronnie shook her head. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. She turned back again, heading toward the nearby lake that was surrounded by jogging trails. This was going to be a long five miles.

  Chapter 19

  The White House

  Vice President Lee McKeon took the buzzing cell phone out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID. It was blocked, as he suspected it would be. Calls that came in on this particular phone were rarely from anyone who wished to be identified.

  Drake was still in the gym on the second floor of the residence, foolishly working on his physique when he should have been attending to important matters of state, but McKeon didn’t mind. It gave him some quiet time with Ran in the privacy of the President’s study. Thin shafts of light filtered through the drawn curtains. He would have rather sat in the Oval Office, but there were too many gawkers walking back and forth along the colonnade. And, as he discovered when they had taken over, the door to the Oval Office had a peephole so staffers could look in and see when the President was about to finish a meeting.

  McKeon sat at the end of a leather chaise longue across from Drake’s desk. He’d kicked off his shoes and stretched out his long, somewhat bony legs to rest them on a Queen Anne chair he’d pulled around to use as a footrest. Though the West Wing staff, Secret Service, and Marine guards might not approve of the way the Vice President lounged around in the office while the commander in chief was away, there was nothing they could do about it as long as POTUS didn’t put his foot down. And if POTUS put his foot down, that foot would not remain in the presidency very long. McKeon would make certain of that.

  Ran, the Vice President’s slender Japanese aide, lay stretched out on the couch beside him, asleep, with her head in his lap. He toyed with the collar of her silk blouse as he answered the phone, peeking at the dark green ink of a tattoo above her smallish breast. It hurt his heart to think that his wife would return from Oregon soon. He would have to do something about that....

  “Peace be unto you, my brother,” the caller said, inhaling sharply to punctuate his words. It was Qasim Ranjhani, but neither man would ever speak the name aloud on the phone. Though their names and accents were miles apart, had the two men been standing side by side, people might believe Ranjhani was McKeon’s shorter brother. They were in fact, distantly related.

  “And to you,” McKeon answered. “I assume you have important news to be calling me at this time of day.”

  “In point of fact I do,” Ranjhani said, his voice clicking with Pakistani English. “Just moments ago, I received an interesting call from a friend with FSB.”

  “Is that so?” McKeon nodded in thought. FSB—Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti—was the Russian Security Service, the modern offspring of the KGB. It made sense that Qasim would have a finger in that piece of Kremlin pie. “And what did this friend have to tell you?” McKeon asked. He ran his hand over the
creamy skin on the nape of the sleeping Japanese girl’s neck.

  “It was regarding the fugitive,” Qasim said. “The one from that business in Japan. It looks as though someone has booked him airline passage from Alaska to Moscow via Vladivostok.”

  “Interesting,” McKeon said. That made sense, considering the sparse reports he was getting from the bumbling Oryx Group regarding their present mission. “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Qasim said. “He’s apparently going with his wife and daughter.”

  “His ex-wife,” the Vice President corrected. “Priceless.”

  “I keep forgetting they aren’t still married.”

  “So does he, apparently,” McKeon said. “Do you know what I am thinking?”

  “I believe I do,” Qasim said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Very well,” McKeon said. “Is there time to make it happen?”

  “Only just,” Qasim said.

  “I’ll leave it to you to make it happen.”

  The Vice President used his thumb to end the call, and then sat staring at the phone for a moment.

  The Japanese woman stirred in his lap. Taut muscles rippled under the sheer fabric of her blouse. She was curled into a fetal position, her wool skirt hiked up high on her thighs to reveal the heavy green-and-black shadows of the traditional tattoo that covered her legs like a pair of shorts. McKeon was certain she’d fallen asleep that way to tantalize him. She was a she-devil, of that there was no doubt. There was something about her that would surely drag him down to hell, singing all the way. The swell of a dagger was just visible at her waistline—a constant reminder of just how deadly she was.

  She nuzzled his hip with her cheek, but didn’t open her eyes.

  “Why do you not just kill him?” she asked.

  “Drake?”

  “Quinn.” She opened one eye, looking up at him.

  McKeon shrugged. “To be honest, I thought we had—but the men I sent were not successful.”