Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  The coffee mug slipped from her hand as she let out an uncharacteristically foul obscenity. As she grabbed for the falling mug, a gush of hot liquid ran over her hand. She ignored the burn, picked the cup off the floor, and stared into the drawer.

  The cabinet was three feet wide and one foot deep. The thousand folders that normally filled it had been filed left to right. Now it was empty. She tried the one above it: empty. The next one over: gone.

  She went to the vault door. The lock was intact, perfect. There hadn’t been a single thing out of place. It was as if the documents had simply vanished.

  She entered the corridor and opened the next vault. The racks were empty; they had taken the hard drives too. She needed to make the call. At her desk, she pulled a directory from her drawer and picked up the phone. She looked under Joint Special Operations and dialed the Special Security office.

  “I need rapid response at APSO. The records are gone.”

  “Which records?”

  “All of them.”

  “I don’t understand. Is this urgent?”

  McReary dropped the index card into the burn bag. “This is your career on the line. Put me through now.”

  The command in her voice was unmistakable.

  “Hold, please.”

  She waited a moment as she was transferred and then explained what had happened.

  “So this was a break-in?”

  “There must have been a breach, but I don’t understand,” she said as she scanned the room. “There’s no trace. The biometrics are fine, the locks, the vault doors too. It’s like it all just disappeared.”

  Six hours later, Cox knelt at the vault and examined the dial of the Sargent and Greenleaf combination lock. It was perfect, with no sign of any manipulation or forced entry, none of the marrings characteristic of a robot dialer. Cox’s formal title was special assistant to the secretary of defense. His job was to make problems go away. He was a brigadier general but traveled in civilian clothes.

  The officer with direct oversight of APSO, Lieutenant Colonel Barnard, had come from Bragg and stood over him, arms held loosely behind his back. Cox had flown from DC on a C-20, the navy’s version of a Gulfstream jet, normally used only by general officers. That set Barnard on edge. Cox made no mention of his own rank. He found it easier to read people when they weren’t kissing his ass.

  “If there’s no damage, we must have an inside job,” Barnard said. He put his hands on his hips, a tic to project authority. “Do we have the audit logs? We’ll simply find who entered and then case closed.”

  Cox removed the last screw and pulled the back off the safe lock. “We already did.” Without standing up, Cox held a printout over his shoulder.

  Barnard took it, scanned the entries for the previous night, and saw only his own name. “Me?” He made a noise that was a cross between laughing and clearing his throat. “I wasn’t here. This is impossible.”

  “Not quite impossible. A high-res shot of your iris, superimposed over a live pupil; either a contact lens or a good printout could do it.” He unscrewed the wheel pack from the threaded rod. “What worries me is the Abloy Protec up front and the Sargent and Greenleaf here. There is no sign of picking or bypass.”

  He held up a long threaded rod with the safe dial on the end, shone a light on it, and lifted his glasses to examine it up close. “I almost missed it. It’s too perfect. Zero wear. This is a new spindle and a new dial.”

  “Well, let’s get the camera footage and see who it is.”

  “That won’t help. I checked. They did the whole thing in the dark.”

  “You’re telling me that anyone can just waltz in here and defeat four layers of the hardest security the U.S. government and Joint Special Operations Command can manage?”

  “Not anyone. No.” Cox stood and wiped off his hands. “Only one of our guys could do it. The night-vision, the Abloy decoder, the tools for the safe bypass; we have them. No locksmiths. Only USG, a few teams at JSOC, the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI.”

  This office had two names, one official and one known only to a few. That is why a C-20 had been sent to the front of the line on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews with Cox on board. Applications Personnel Support Office was a cover, something for the org charts and paychecks. It was a name that could be handed out when an employee needed to list a reference for a bank or a landlord.

  In reality, this office housed the security roster of the Defense Cover Program, which provided false identities to members of classified units within the Joint Special Operations Command. Their records were pulled from the normal military personnel system and stored here under lock and key with any connection between present and past erased. The members of these special mission units lived as civilians, under cover. That allowed the president to disavow any tier-one assets who were caught working behind enemy lines. It also firewalled the day-to-day identities of the soldiers in order to protect them and their families from enemy reprisals during and after their service.

  “Good, then,” Barnard said. “That gives us a short list to work from. We’ll just narrow it down.”

  “They stole everything we’d need to make that list. That’s probably the point.”

  “You know we have assets unaccounted for. We lost track of Hayes and his team after the air strikes,” Barnard said. “But that would be insane, to enter the lion’s den.”

  “If it is them, it’s brilliant.”

  “We need to find these people.”

  “Every cover identity available to them, every passport, every safe house, every cache of arms and currency is now lost to us. We barely know their real names.”

  “But this entire program is designed for deniability, to protect us against them.”

  “Now it’s working the other way. And the measures to guard their families against the bad guys are going to hide them from us. They stole the records of everything we’d use to find them in the United States: next of kin, associates, means of support.”

  “For Christ’s sake. Someone has to know who these people are,” Barnard said. “We have the material from the investigations.”

  “The annexes were kept here.” It had been Barnard’s order, a way to control the political damage to JSOC by limiting access to the details of Hayes’s crimes.

  “You’re telling me that we have war criminals loose in the United States and they are goddamn ghosts! You know what these men are capable of.”

  “I do,” Cox said. This was what these soldiers had been trained to do: assume a name, a face, a life. Hide out for years if necessary. “We can work backward. Everyone leaves a trace, even if the paper’s gone. We know he came from Marine Special Operations. We can go back to his old unit. He stole his personal file, but we can pull the unit rosters by hand, talk to those who served alongside him, commanded him, reconstruct what we can about where he is likely to go and who is likely to help him stateside. He’ll need support.

  “Some of it may be on magnetic tape in a bunker, though that’ll take weeks to drag up. It’s going to be a lot of legwork.”

  “Well, we should get started.”

  Cox already had. “I will.”

  “Jesus,” Barnard said, surveying the empty file drawers. “They took the files for every cover identity in the field. They could sell those to our enemies. It would be a slaughter. Worse than Hanssen, worse than Ames.”

  “There’s that,” Cox said.

  “You don’t think that’s his game?”

  “If he hadn’t taken all of them, we would know where to start. He had no choice.”

  “So he’s covering his tracks. He’s on the run. This could be his last step, a disappearing act.”

  Cox shook his head. “No. He can disappear anywhere. This is overkill. He’d take a risk this great only to avoid a greater one later.”

  “Say what you mean.”

  “He’s back in the U.S. It’s suicidal, but that’s his psychology, why we selected him: he’ll always choose duty over self-pre
servation. He’s coming for us. He’s going to finish this. And now”—he waved his hand at the empty racks—“we won’t be able to see him coming.”

  “You’re on top of this?”

  “Yes. And it would be wise to let Colonel Riggs know, so he can take precautions.”

  “I’d like to keep this close to the vest,” Barnard said. Behind his back, he held the printout with the record of his biometric entry into the office.

  “Hayes nearly killed Riggs. He is likely to finish the job.”

  Barnard nodded. “You’re right. You find them, under whatever names, whatever lies they are living, and then we go after them with everything we have.”

  “I will,” Cox said, and he was already in motion, striding away with the safe dial in one hand and his phone in the other.

  As soon as his cell got a signal, he punched in a number, put the phone to his ear, and said, “Give me MARSOC.”

  Chapter 4

  IN THE BACK of a box truck, Hayes laid two packets down on a steel shelf. The magnets inside clunked onto the metal. He picked up a simple Nokia cell phone, dialed a number, and placed it beside the devices.

  Each packet was about the size of a hardcover book and had a Nokia bound to the top with electrical tape. The phones’ plastic cases had been pried open, and a small piece of breadboard circuitry covered each keypad. As both phones rang, Hayes held the probes of a multimeter across the open wires and checked the current. It was plenty. He reattached the wires to the detonators and went through the continuity on the circuits one last time. Then he handed the packets back to Speed.

  “Strong work,” he said.

  Speed gave them a last once-over, kept one for himself, and handed the second to Moret. They stowed their packages in messenger bags and hopped out of the back of the truck. Two motorcycles were parked beside it. They climbed on. Green waited behind the wheel of a Nissan pickup, and Foley drove the Ford Taurus.

  The bikes pulled out, nearly silent. The two other vehicles followed behind as they left through the gated entrance to the lot. The convoy disappeared around the corner, past a truck-repair depot that was closed for the night.

  The box truck would stay behind for a few minutes. Cook stood guard outside. Ward was in the cargo area, leaning over a laptop on top of the communications rack. She handled comms and the tracking of the GPS in the packets. Hayes crouched beside her. He ran his finger over the gold cross embossed in leather on the cover of his Bible, then opened it and laid it on his knees.

  His headlamp glowed red on the book of Matthew, the betrayal of Jesus. He read the passage where a disciple cuts off the ear of a servant of the high priest: Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.

  Hayes turned to the Gospel according to Mark, then Luke, then John. Only Matthew mentioned that line.

  He thumbed back to the Last Supper and Jesus’s instructions: And he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

  The last verse he found with no trouble. The spine was creased and the pages seemed to open to it on their own. It was from Matthew: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

  Hayes ran the back of his hand along his chin and read it again.

  “More codes?” Ward asked.

  He watched her for a moment before he spoke. “In a way. Reading, mainly.”

  “Don’t spoil the ending for me. We found the target. They’re at the airport.”

  “On the move?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hayes closed the book. He had waited years for this. It was vulnerable in transit. He had one chance.

  “Execute.”

  The armored truck rumbled along Sepulveda Boulevard, approaching the tunnel where the road passed under the runways of Los Angeles International Airport. The man at the passenger window reached his hand into the bag from In-N-Out Burger. He shoved three fries in his mouth as he gazed at the multicolored towers rising one hundred feet into the night sky around LAX.

  “The loose ones are the best, man,” he said as they inched through traffic into the tunnel. He was the messenger. In a normal armored truck, he would make the pickups. The man in the middle was the guard; he would stand outside the truck with his gun drawn and provide cover. The driver would stay with the truck, the most lethal weapon any of them had. This, however, wasn’t a normal truck. The selectors on their firearms went from single-shot to full auto. Only a handful of security companies in the United States were authorized to use those guns. Most of the ones who did dealt with nuclear facilities.

  “Whoa,” said the driver as he stood on the brake. “Look lively.”

  Horns blared. Brake lights lit the tunnel red. The Nissan truck in front of them slammed to a stop. It had brushed fenders with a Ford Taurus that was trying to change lanes. The drivers argued through their open windows, blocking the path ahead. Traffic stalled, hemmed in the armored truck on all sides. A plane landed on the airstrip overhead, and the screech of tires filled the tunnel.

  “We’re sitting in a kill zone,” the guard said. “Get around them.”

  The messenger dropped the paper bag to the floor and lifted his MP7 across his chest. The driver twisted the wheel to force his way into traffic, but two motorcycles were coming up fast on either side, between traffic, splitting the lanes.

  “Where the hell did they come from?” With all its armor, the truck had huge blind spots. But he hadn’t heard a thing as they approached. The bikes’ headlights glared in the side-views, blinding the three men in the truck.

  “Just my luck, getting killed for an empty truck.” The messenger slid a metal tab to his right and rested the muzzle of his submachine gun in the gun port.

  The pickup’s reverse lights lit up, and it backed toward them. “He’s going to hit us!” the guard shouted.

  The Nissan’s bumper stopped a foot from the front of the armored truck just as the motorcycles passed on either side. The one on the left swerved around the pickup as it shifted into drive and pulled ahead. The driver of the Taurus shouted a few more curses at the Nissan as it drove off, then he continued on as well.

  The traffic eased, and the armored truck went with it, out of the tunnel. The messenger kept his gun up, his eyes darting around.

  “Relax, dude,” the driver said. “Shut the port. We’ve got run-flats and armor good up to fifty-cal.”

  The messenger let his gun fall to the end of its sling, then lifted the manifest that detailed what they were supposed to be picking up.

  “A coffer?” He turned to the guard. “What is that?”

  “I think it’s like a dresser or a trunk.”

  The driver pulled through the airport gates and drove along the tarmac. He glanced at the manifest, the photocopied bill of lading written in a language he couldn’t understand.

  “I thought it was a safe.”

  A squad of armed guards waited around the plane. The messenger laughed as he saw them and the weapons they were carrying.

  “This better be some dresser.”

  He reached down for the paper bag between his feet, but by now the fries were cold.

  The cost of security on an armored truck is dead space. The narrow, high windows blind those in the cab to anything that comes close alongside. The convex mirrors bolted onto the side-views help, but in the tunnel they had been blinded by the bikes’ headlights. As an added measure, Green in the Nissan pickup had distracted the guards by nearly reversing into their front bumper. There was no way that anyone inside the truck could have seen the motorcyclists attach the devices to the rear wheel wells.

  Chapter 5

  THE BOX TRUCK parked outside the cargo terminals. A blue vinyl sign on its side read A&S Fire Protection Systems. Hayes jumped out, pulled a ramp down from the rear, and waited. The cargo offices were closed. He looked through an open gate to the runway. The perimeter security was a joke.

  Two headlights appeared at th
e end of the access road. Speed and Moret cruised toward the truck on their motorcycles and drove straight up the ramp into the back. Moret pulled her helmet off and let her hair down. It flowed past her shoulders.

  “Both wheels?” Hayes asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “They never stopped, never checked,” Speed said. “We’re good.”

  Foley drove up in the Taurus, the Nissan pickup right behind him, as Hayes lifted his spotting scope and watched the armored truck enter the cargo area through a gate a quarter of a mile away. It cleared security and parked beside an Emirates SkyCargo plane, a triple-seven freighter. The ground crew parked a scissor lift beside the hold and began to unload it.

  Hayes examined the guards. He noted the MP7s on slings, pistols on chest rigs, stances at once relaxed and commanding. They looked like operators, not ten-dollar-an-hour security. His scope passed over the guard who stood outside the armored truck, then he brought his attention back and fine-tuned the focus.

  “Hmm. Little Bill,” Hayes said.

  “Is that ironic?” Moret asked. None of the guards looked like they weighed less than two hundred pounds.

  “No. His dad’s also Bill. I oversaw his SERE course at Swick. He’s former Special Forces. Good guy; twenty-four with four kids when I met him.”

  Hayes would have preferred more easily rolled opponents. He did have the advantage of having designed a lot of their training. He could account for them, and, most important, they would recognize a detonator when they saw one.

  Thirty minutes later, the ground crew rolled a crate onto the lift, lowered it, then loaded it into the back of the armored truck.

  Disguising the shipment was good tactics, but when you do the low-value, hide-in-plain-sight trick, you have to go all the way. When Hayes worked with the Secret Service on presidential security overseas, he had a chance to watch the Brits do it right. Americans would never settle for less than a sixteen-car package for the president, while the Royal Protection Branch liked to shuttle the queen around London in an unmarked Vauxhall sedan. These men didn’t have the nerve to go that far with tonight’s shipment. It had gone regular cargo out of the Emirates, but the extra security on the ground stateside gave it away.