Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  He opened a folder and slid a photo to me: a bombed-out armored truck surrounded by burned scrub and torn metal. It looked like news footage from Afghanistan.

  “The truck attack. They did that in less than three minutes.”

  I looked at the scorched metal where the doors had been sheared off. It was a surgical hit.

  “What did they steal?”

  “Something very dangerous. This is the latest in an escalating pattern of strikes. And now they seem to be after you.”

  “But why?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No clue. I don’t know why you or the police would think I have anything to do with Hayes.”

  “We’ve been over your file. You two nearly died together at K Thirty-Eight. You’re going to tell me you’re not close?”

  “I haven’t seen him since then.”

  “Hayes’s first target inside the U.S. was an office building in North Carolina,” Riggs said. “It’s an annex of the Defense Cover Program that handles classified-unit personnel records. It is as secure a building as we know how to make, and they went through it like a breeze.

  “He and his team destroyed their personnel files, the information we would need to find them and their aliases, associates, and family members. Pentagon investigators are attempting to reconstruct those records.”

  “You didn’t know him well?”

  “Few did. He was in the field for most of the time I commanded the task force. Your name surfaced when we canvassed past teammates and associates of Hayes. That’s why the FBI picked you up when they found out how close you were to the assault on the truck.”

  “Jesus.” I lifted the photo and shook my head. “You thought I would help him do that? I’m a doctor now.”

  “He can assume identities with ease. Some people thought you were Hayes. We know better, now that he’s following you. He may try to contact you or coerce you into helping him. It’s one of his strengths. Don’t let him lure you in. He’s done it to many people, and it’s a fatal mistake.”

  “I’m nothing to him.”

  “That can’t be true. You saved his life.”

  “I was just doing the job.” I took a sip of coffee, then leaned back in the chair. “How about this: Is it possible Hayes is watching you, hunting you?”

  Riggs looked around the safe house. “Certainly.”

  “He probably saw the police and Hall drag me in. And now he and his team are checking me out. It’s pretty simple.”

  “Help us find him, and we’ll protect you and sort out your travel and financial issues.”

  I clamped both hands around the mug and took a long breath. I was innocent, but they were going to keep treating me like a terrorist unless I made myself a target for the real bad guys. I would suffer for an obvious mistake made high above me that no one could be bothered to correct. Boy, I missed the military.

  “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

  “I imagine Hayes’s crew are already none too happy with you. Why else would they be following you? And now that they’ve seen you talk to the police and us, I don’t think they’ll consider your jawing over coffee with me any worse than what you’ve already done. They can’t kill you twice.”

  I muttered a curse. This was insane. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t help you because I don’t know anything. Unless you want to use me as chum to draw them out.”

  Riggs gave me a disingenuous look: Heaven forbid.

  “This is extortion,” I said.

  “You can do some good here.”

  “No.”

  Riggs stood suddenly. His chair skittered back. He tripped with his weak leg, stumbled, and then caught himself. Hall went to help him, and Riggs shoved him away.

  “Hayes,” Riggs growled. “Blood on his hands, and still you people line up to help him. He’s the goddamn pied piper.” He turned to Hall. “Give it to me.”

  Hall handed him a folder.

  “Do you have a clearance?” Riggs asked me.

  “No.”

  “I could go to prison for showing you this,” he said, then shrugged. “To hell with it.”

  He laid a photo in front of me. It looked like doll parts at first, then I made out a shipping container in the background and got a sense of scale. It took me a second to understand what I was seeing. It was a pile of bodies, many dozens, heaped like trash in a landfill—men, women, children, some two or three years old, all of them torn apart by gunfire, massacred. I knew I would never be able to unsee it. Those bodies would mingle with my own ghosts, making themselves at home.

  I pushed it to the side.

  “That’s more of their handiwork,” Riggs said. “Hayes and his team are in the late stages of an operation. You are a target, individually and as an innocent citizen. Everyone you know and love is at risk. I am here to stop them. I am here to save you. So have some basic human decency and help me. Because that”—he tapped the photo—“is a warm-up. Will you help us stop him?”

  I looked back at the eight-by-ten, at the bodies. I had enough blood on my hands and I wasn’t going to get Kelly involved in this. I finally had someone to lose. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Riggs straightened up. “Get Nazar,” he snapped to Hall.

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s someone you need to meet.”

  Hall stepped away and opened a sliding door. I looked around the room. There were guards at both exits. I didn’t like the setup. I peered through the door after him, expecting some enforcer to emerge. But in the slanting light, all I could see was an older woman leaning over a table in a sunroom. He beckoned me in, and I stepped through the door.

  Windows filled most of the two far walls, looking out over a courtyard. The patchy fog pressed against them, condensed on the glass, and streaked down. I could hear waves crashing.

  Hall said something to her, and she looked up from her work. She had been writing in a slanting script, filling a page of letter paper. I looked at the book on the table in front of her.

  “The Odyssey?” I asked. I didn’t recognize the language she was writing in, but it was clearly verse. She was translating it.

  She pushed back her chair and stood. She wore a flowing printed dress and had gray hair up in a loose bun. As she turned, I could see scars beside her eye.

  “Tom Byrne,” Riggs said. “This is Nazar. Nazar, Tom Byrne.”

  We shook hands. She gave me a kind smile, though there was something sad about it. She was tall and thin and carried herself in a manner that struck me as old-fashioned, European.

  “Nazar is your last name?” I asked. It felt impolite to call her by her first.

  She began to speak, but Riggs interrupted. “Let’s just stick with Nazar for now.”

  He stepped closer, between us. He wanted to protect her.

  “Nazar was one of our interpreters—no, much more than that, a fixer, my trusted local guide. She worked with Hayes occasionally.”

  “Just a translator, really,” she said, laughing quietly. “The colonel makes me sound like Gunga Din. I’d rather be hiding out among these books.”

  I pointed to the open volume. “I remember a part where he goes down into the underworld, and he meets all these people he knew who died.”

  “The shades. The shadows of the dead. The Greek is skia, the Latin umbra. Dante used similar language.”

  Her English had a faint British accent. Something else too—a trace of a hard burr I couldn’t place. I took another look at the scars, then caught myself.

  “It’s okay, Tom,” Riggs said. “We’re the bang-and-dent section. And we’re the lucky ones. I understand your reluctance. You’d be an idiot if you didn’t try to avoid these men. So don’t ask any questions. Just listen.”

  “You were at the massacre,” I said to her, and I turned to him. “Hayes did this?”

  Riggs nodded. “We survived.”

  “What happened?”

  Through the windows, I could make out guards on the wid
ow’s walks and upper-floor arcades looking down at us.

  “I’m afraid I can’t say where exactly we were fighting. It’s a borderland. A bad neighborhood, geopolitically. Hayes’s team was preparing the battlefield.”

  I’d heard that phrase—preparing the battlefield—before. It’s a bit of Pentagon jargon. The Department of Defense uses it to broaden its activities around the world. As long as it claims it is preparing the battlefield, the DOD can conduct clandestine operations. The CIA functions under a different set of laws, rules that govern covert actions. The terms may sound similar, but there is a world of difference between them.

  The Pentagon, unlike the CIA, can conduct clandestine missions without presidential authorization and without telling Congress, operating with zero civilian oversight. That’s why more and more intelligence work has been pouring into the military side.

  “Two years ago, the men and women under Hayes’s command conducted a low-visibility clandestine operation,” Riggs said. “It was dangerous and complex. A long incursion into enemy territory that was crucial to U.S. national security.”

  “Men and women?”

  “There’s an all-female division in the Intelligence Support Activity and other women in the special mission units. We borrowed the tactic from the Mossad. Sending eight jacked young men into a hostile area raises suspicion. Couples have far less trouble. If the enemy thinks we have no women operators, we damn well better have some.

  “Hayes was given an exceptional amount of autonomy for a captain, though he was no ordinary captain. Several members of his team were killed on the mission. Perhaps we had them working for too long out in Indian Country, under too ambiguous a moral compass. But they came back to the safe house, the forward base they had been operating out of, and…”

  He trailed off. He still had the photo from the massacre in his hand, but he brought it down beside his leg. I could see he felt embarrassed, as if it were indecent to let Nazar see it.

  “It’s fine,” she said, and she stepped toward Riggs. She laid a hand on his arm to reassure him, took the photo, and held it in the light. “I can’t go for more than a few minutes without seeing it up here, anyway.” She gestured to her temple, then looked at the faces of the dead.

  “My niece and nephew, here. And this is my sister.” Her finger moved across the glossy surface of the eight-by-ten. “She was always the pretty one. We used to tease her.”

  She smiled, then shut her eyes hard, waited for the emotion to subside. She cleared her throat.

  “Yes, well,” she started, in control again. “Captain Hayes came back to the base and began to gather the interpreters. We were all essentially refugees,” she said, and she glanced down at the book she had been translating. “From…”

  She looked at Riggs.

  “No details, please,” he said.

  “From a country hostile to the United States. We had been persecuted, some of us killed, for what we believed and what we looked like. The colonel gave us shelter, protection. He was good to us. And Hayes, he was good to us too. We all loved him.”

  She pressed her lips together and shut her eyes again, let the anger flow through her. “He had a way of making people love him, making them trust him. That is why we followed him on the day of the massacre.”

  “You have to understand,” Riggs said. “Hayes was much more than a door kicker. He trained with the CIA at Camp Peary and Harvey Point. He was born to be a spy, spent his whole life blending in, winning confidences, making everyone his accomplice. That’s why he was so lethal. You have to be careful with him, Byrne. He could turn you without your even knowing it. He draws people in, uses them as tools to kill others, then discards them. And we’ve never seen anyone better.”

  “He played on our hopes,” Nazar said. “All we wanted was a home, a safe place for our families. Hayes told us we had been granted asylum in the U.S. and Europe. We gathered our relatives, what possessions we could carry—none of us really had much more than that anyway—and went to meet him. I’ve never seen such joy among my people. For generations we had wandered, lost and hunted, and soon it would be over.

  “Hayes and his team gathered us in the village square. My sister was crying, she was so happy. They lined us up in front of a mud wall and told us a helicopter was coming.”

  She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye and kept on, calm. “Then Hayes shouldered his rifle, and they began to fire.”

  She looked at the photo, examined the bodies.

  “Hayes executed them,” Riggs said. “Everyone who had interpreted for Hayes, their families, and all who witnessed his crimes on that day. He killed them all.”

  “I was hit twice,” Nazar continued. “But I was fortunate. I lay among the bodies, beside my niece and sister, as still as I could manage while the bullets cracked. And Hayes—I couldn’t believe it was the same man I had worked with. It was like a devil took him.”

  She looked my way, and I could see she was still trying to make sense of it. I knew Hayes as a good man, but I had seen him in battle, seen him kill face-to-face with a cold efficiency. It was as if, when we flicked our weapons’ safeties to fire, something switched inside him too.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. The words sounded weak and uncaring, almost cruel. We stood in silence. Nazar commanded the center of the room. I wanted to avoid her gaze, the simple moral insistence that burned in her, but I didn’t look away.

  Riggs cast his eyes to the ground. “I failed to protect them.”

  “He did everything he could,” Nazar said. “He came and tried to stop Hayes. They shot him in the chest, and he still fought.”

  “It wasn’t enough. Only Nazar survived, lying among the dead. To this day, her work, reading and writing, pains her.” I had seen how Nazar bent close to the page, almost touching it.

  “I was an air force colonel,” Riggs said. “I came up as a fighter pilot. And now I’m useless for anything but holding down a chair.”

  “What were they hiding?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They targeted their interpreters. Were they covering their tracks?”

  “I can’t talk about that. One of the team members was raised in the U.S. but has family connections in Turkey, an area known as a transshipment point for the al-Nusra Front. It’s a very worrisome scenario.”

  “What was in that truck?”

  Riggs nodded. “These are the right questions, Tom, but I can’t discuss the answers. After the massacre, Hayes and his team took arms and equipment that would allow them to work independently of the command. Based on their movements and the impunity with which they have been operating inside the United States, we believe that they are at full strength at the squad level, possibly higher.

  “I killed one of them on the day of the massacre, and Nazar and I are the chief witnesses in proceedings against them. Our safety is the least of our concerns. These soldiers have gone over. Hayes is not the man you knew. He has done things from which there is no redemption. We sent them into the dark, and the dark came back with them. They are in this country. And last night they stole something very dangerous to all of us.

  “The United States spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars training them for exactly this: to enter a nation and destroy it through violence from the inside. The problem is that their target is now the United States. And after last night, they have the means. So, Tom Byrne, how about a little help, if that won’t inconvenience you too much?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t care what happened to me, but Kelly was still out there, alone.

  Hall looked at me with disdain. “You were on a good track. Fleet Marine Force. Accepted into Special Amphibious Recon. Why didn’t you go on with Marine Special Operations?”

  “I wanted to be a doctor.”

  “But you and your guys got shot up pretty bad at K Thirty-Eight?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you started working on getting your commission. Got your bachelor’s
during active duty, applied to the USUHS.” That’s the military’s medical school.

  “Correct.”

  “Intern. General Medical Obligation. Resident. Fellow.” He read down the sheet, ticking off the steps. “That’s a lot of time hiding out in libraries and hospitals. And then you were at Camp Dagger?”

  “On the forward surgical team.”

  Hall put the papers down. “This tells me a story, Tom. You were on track to be a good soldier. Then K Thirty-Eight happened. You saw some real bloodshed and you quit, ran away, tried to find someplace safe. But even as a doctor, you couldn’t escape it. After the Dagger attack, you left the navy the first chance you got. Milked us for everything, then bailed.”

  He stood over me like a prosecutor wrapping up a closing statement.

  “You nailed it,” I said.

  Riggs leafed through the papers. “I don’t think so. You’re hiding something. You volunteered for a frontline trauma spot. Commendation with valor for K Thirty-Eight. And you earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal at Dagger. They don’t give those out to just anyone.”

  “After they mop up the blood, they go looking for heroes. Sometimes they just need a chest to pin a medal on.”

  Riggs frowned.

  “You can do some good here.” He lifted the folder. “Make things right. Save lives.”

  I remembered that day at Camp Dagger, remembered a woman, young and strong and beautiful, remembered how peaceful her face looked. The shadows. I couldn’t live with any more of them.

  “Dr. Byrne,” Nazar said. “Will you help us?”

  I thought back to the chief of surgery at the last hospital. Even one death was too many. You can’t save them all, he had said. But I had a feeling the patients on my table wouldn’t mind if I tried.

  “All right,” I said. “What can I do?”

  Riggs turned to Hall. “Bring me everything you have,” he said. Hall left. Nazar, Riggs, and I remained in the sunroom.

  Hall returned with a file and offered it to me. “To start, we want you to look at some photos. Tell me if you recognize the men who followed you today.”