Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  It was an orange peel.

  I started moving and gestured for Kelly to follow. Hayes eye-checked me, and I glanced back at the trash. He saw it too and tilted his head toward North Harbor Drive.

  A black Suburban pulled up at the light a block away. As I turned I saw more coming from the other direction. Hayes crossed the street at an intersection, moving as fast as he could without drawing attention.

  We followed him, a hundred feet back, and jogged across the street just as the traffic light was about to change.

  The Suburban blared its horn and pulled through the red light. We took off sprinting, up the hill toward Little Italy. The Suburbans tried to plow through traffic at a red light, and the holdup bought us some time. We ran up the steep grade. The warning lights flashed at the crossing for the coastal train line ahead. We picked up the pace and crossed the tracks just as the gates closed.

  Sirens sounded to the east, and we ducked down another street. More police on foot at the intersection ahead. They were closing a cordon.

  We hauled ass down an alley. There was an underground parking garage ahead, lots of exits and entrances. The police hadn’t turned the corner yet. There might be time. We raced for the garage and fifty feet out heard an engine gunning up the cross street ahead.

  A van shot out at the end of our alley and pulled up short, rocking on its springs. The door banged open. I stopped, but Hayes kept going and jumped in.

  “Come on!” he shouted.

  It was a twenty-year-old maroon Astrovan. I recognized it; the driver was the one who had thrown my orange peel. Kelly and I dived in too, and the van pulled away.

  Hayes slammed the door shut as we hauled ourselves from the floor to a bench seat. I looked at the driver in the rearview. He was in his mid-sixties with a white beard and hooded eyes. He skidded the van around a corner, grinding the rear panel against the brick. A glance back in his mirror, then to Hayes.

  “Not bad for a blind guy, huh?” he said, tapping on his glasses.

  “Thanks, Foley,” Hayes said and clapped him on the shoulder.

  The chatter from a police scanner filled the car. The old man shifted routes on the fly, outflanking the choke points and avoiding the pursuing vehicles.

  “All units, be on the lookout for two additional subjects sought in connection with an armed robbery and attempted murder,” the voice on the scanner announced. “Suspect one identified as Thomas Byrne, age thirty-eight, white male, approximately five feet eleven inches, brown hair, medium build, clean-shaven. Suspect number two identified as Kelly Britten, age thirty, white female, approximately five feet seven inches, blond hair. Check mobile data terminals for photos and additional description. Possible links to terrorism. Both are considered armed and dangerous. Approach with extreme caution.”

  Kelly’s face turned white. I saw her throat working against the nausea.

  A helicopter growled in the distance, someone making announcements from a loudspeaker. I couldn’t understand the words.

  “Ditch the van,” Hayes said. We pulled into an underground garage near the convention center and crossed on foot to the marina.

  He and Foley moved down the D dock. The chugging of the helicopter blades came closer.

  Ahead of us on the dock, a woman I recognized from the first safe house stood on the deck of a thirty-foot cabin cruiser with Odessa painted on the stern. Hayes and the old man made for it.

  “Come on,” the woman shouted to Hayes, “you’ve got to hear this!”

  The helo approached from the east. Kelly ducked behind a dumpster. I watched Hayes vault over the transom of the boat and then I crouched beside her.

  “Do you trust him?” Kelly asked. “If we join them, there’s no turning back.”

  “He’s saved our asses twice now.”

  Hayes waved for us to come.

  “Go to the police,” I said. “Tell them we took you. You had nothing to do with this. Give me up. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  She looked back. The sirens grew louder.

  The boat’s engines churned to life. They threw the stern lines off. Hayes watched us and beckoned. He’d stalled them but couldn’t any longer.

  I stayed low, ready to sprint, and looked to Kelly.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, then she stood, ran down the dock, and jumped in. I came up behind her. We disappeared into the cabin as the boat pulled away and a helicopter cruised above the docks, beating the air overhead.

  Chapter 21

  AS I STEPPED into the cabin, a cat leaped onto the counter next to me, bared its teeth, and growled like a little lion. I flinched, drawing laughter from the crew inside.

  “That’s Quinn,” Foley said, and he scooped up the tabby. “Guard cat.”

  He climbed through the companionway. Hayes spoke with him on the deck outside, Foley’s head bowed slightly as he listened carefully, like a student. Hayes joined us in the cabin a moment later.

  “The helo kept going north,” Hayes said. “They’re looking for us on the roads. We’re clear. This is Ward and Cook,” he said, pointing to two of his teammates. To them he said, “Meet Byrne and Britten.”

  Ward nodded my way. I recognized her from the first safe house. She was pretty, solidly built, looked like she’d grown up on a ranch. Cook glanced up from the map he was reading and gave me a friendly look.

  Ward sat down at the galley table and started working on a laptop. One man was lying down on top of a trunk with a cap over his eyes. “That’s Speed,” Hayes said.

  “Is that ironic?”

  Hayes looked at me. “No. When he’s awake, he’s really fast.”

  Speed lifted the cap with one finger, checked us out, murmured, “Hey,” then let the cap fall back. I recognized him from the Valencia hotel and from his trigger-happy performance in the walk-in freezer at the safe house.

  I could feel the boat rocking with the swells now that we were in open waters.

  The cabin steps had been pushed to one side. The throb of the running engine filled the space. Hayes stood beside them and poured water into a brown pouch.

  “When’s the last time you ate?” he asked me.

  “Yesterday.”

  The pouch he handed me burned my fingers. It had been a long time but you never really forgot those brown packets—meal ready to eat. This one was beef ravioli. At least it was beef. Those were the best.

  “You hungry, Britten?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  I dug a plastic spoon to the mush, a darker shade of brown, and swallowed some down.

  “Who’s our captain?”

  “Old friend,” Hayes said. “Facilitates what we need.”

  “You trust him?” I asked.

  Hayes laughed. “More than anyone. And he’s spread around enough goodwill.” Hayes rubbed his fingers together: bribes. “So we’ll be all right as far as getting into and out of port. We have a fixer helping us with supplies.”

  Cook sat talking to Ward as she worked on the computer, a headset over one ear. Their discussion grew louder.

  “Seagal has no fight record!” Cook said. “It’s all hearsay. You get him in a clean match, he’s useless.”

  Ward looked up. “I’m telling you, Van Damme is just a ballet dancer with a pretty face.”

  A woman with long black curly hair tied back stepped out from the engine compartment and wiped her hands on a rag.

  “How are you supposed to be the world’s greatest fighter,” Cook went on, “when—”

  The woman stood over the table and twisted the cloth.

  “One more word,” she said. “One more fucking word on this issue and I will kill you both. Understood?”

  They leaned back. Cook started to say something but thought better of it.

  “Clear?”

  “Clear,” Cook said.

  Hayes turned to me. “And that’s Moret.”

  Ward lifted a headset to Hayes and said, “It’s ready.” He took the computer.

  Cook a
nd Ward looked at each other awkwardly in silence for a moment, and then Cook checked to make sure Moret was gone.

  “All right,” Ward said quietly. “Who wins in a fight, a silverback gorilla or a tiger?”

  “Bengal tiger? Siberian?” Cook asked.

  “Whatever.”

  “No contest,” Cook said, and they dived into the debate.

  Kelly and I climbed and stood at the entrance to the cabin, out of earshot of Hayes’s crew.

  “The people who tried to kill you after you escaped from Hayes—are you sure they were with the police?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hayes helped us out, but I still don’t know if I trust him. The old woman who told you the story about the interpreters, what was her name?”

  “Nazar.”

  “She backed up what Riggs said about the massacre, right?”

  “Yes. She even testified about it.”

  “If Hayes is telling the truth, if Riggs did kill her people, why would she lie and support Riggs’s version of events?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And I can’t figure out why they took me when I was with Riggs. Hayes said he was protecting me from Riggs, but Riggs didn’t try to kill me until after Hayes got me. The rescue almost confirmed for him that I was working with Hayes. If—”

  The door that led to the forward cabin opened. Hayes stepped through and saw us talking. We went back inside the main cabin with him.

  He leaned against the counter beside us. “I know this is a lot to deal with. You guys good? You have any questions?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Kelly nodded. No one said anything.

  “Seriously?” Hayes asked. “No questions at all? You’re just going with it?”

  “Why’d you take me from Riggs?”

  Hayes pressed his lips together.

  “We wanted to get you away from him because he’s bad news. You saw that when he came for us at the safe house. But we used you too, we put a tracker on you. You led us to him. Getting you out was a safeguard, in case he thought you were in on it.”

  “What did you do at that house? You were inside for a while before you came after us. And if you wanted Riggs, you could have gotten him there.”

  “We bugged all his comms. Ripped all his keys. If we’d wanted to kill him, he’d be dead. We took away his strength when we hijacked that truck, but there’s a lot more going on. We have to find out what he’s up to and why Samael is in the United States. I’m not going to stop until I have both him and Samael. We don’t just kill people. We develop intel, infiltrate, stop plots.”

  “You’re not trying to get away?”

  “No. We’re going straight at them, and I understand if you want to bail.”

  “What had Ward so excited? What did you need to hear?”

  He took us over to the laptop. “You should hear it too,” he said, and he pressed the trackpad.

  Audio played from the computer’s speakers. It was a commanding voice, a woman with a faint British accent, a poor-quality recording. It sounded like a cell phone. It took me a minute to recognize the speaker: it was Nazar, and the voice on the other end was Riggs.

  “You said you would protect me,” Nazar said.

  “I will.”

  “Those men nearly killed us last night on the peninsula.”

  “I’ll take care of them,” Riggs replied.

  “Forgive me if I doubt your abilities. I don’t need promises.”

  “Are we going to have a problem?”

  “You know that if something happens to me, the evidence will be released,” Nazar said. “It’s all arranged. Everyone will know what you did at the village. So don’t try anything.”

  “Don’t you dare threaten me.”

  “Or what? You’ll kill me? Go ahead. It’ll be the last thing you do before they haul you off to prison.”

  I turned to Hayes. “She’s blackmailing him.”

  “So it seems. We’d never been able to figure out why she lied and corroborated Riggs’s story of the massacre. We had our theories, mostly that he or Samael was threatening her.”

  “It was the other way around,” I said.

  I looked to Kelly. If this was true, her main reason not to trust Hayes—Nazar’s account of the massacre—would be gone.

  “She must have some evidence of his role in the killings,” Hayes said, “and she blackmailed him with it in order to get asylum in the U.S.”

  “That’s twisted. It was her own people,” I said. “But—Christ. This is perfect. If she has this evidence, you can clear your names, right? Riggs will go down, and that will clear us all. She was the primary witness against you?”

  “In every proceeding.”

  I couldn’t understand why they weren’t more excited. “Isn’t this everything you’ve been hoping for?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Which is why it scares me. This is intelligence work, not combat. The weapons are hope and fear and trust. That evidence is what we’ve been dreaming of for two years, a way to clear our names, to get back to our families. They’ve used hope as a weapon before: they lured those villagers to their deaths with the promise of freedom, of safety, of home.”

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Same as before,” Hayes said. “Regain the initiative. Take the fight to them. Go after Riggs. But now we have an advantage.”

  “We can turn Riggs and Nazar against each other.”

  “Exactly,” Hayes said. “She sounded like she was ready to let the evidence go public. And he sounded like he was about to come after her. If we can escalate that, bit by bit, we might be able to push them past the breaking point. Riggs is scared. The truth cuts both ways; it’s our biggest hope, and it’s his greatest fear.”

  “Can you find out what the evidence is and where Nazar is keeping it?” I asked.

  “Maybe. But we don’t need to in order to put the fear into Riggs.”

  “Where would she take the truth?” Kelly asked. “Who conducted the investigation where Nazar was a witness?”

  “Senate intel. Closed committee,” Hayes said, and then he thought about it for a moment. “That’s a strong idea, Lieutenant Britten. Before we hit the colonel, we can rattle him and see what shakes loose.”

  Chapter 22

  LATE THAT MORNING, Caro and Riggs drove to a private residence on the western slopes of Mount San Jacinto. The meeting was the culmination of two years of planning and quiet politicking. The members of the small cadre in attendance held a variety of formal and informal roles in the defense establishment; the company included a former CIA director, a special assistant to the National Security Council, and an industrialist who financed political movements and small but influential journals. They were mandarins.

  As the convoy carrying Riggs and Caro turned up the private drive, Riggs’s phone rang. He glanced down. The incoming call was from 202-224-1700. The first six digits meant that it was a Senate office. The number looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

  He answered it.

  “Hello, this is Carol Weigel. I’m a staff member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I’m calling because we were looking for an up-to-date phone number for your counsel.”

  “Counsel?” Riggs asked. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s for the task force investigation. The Cyrine Nazar testimony.”

  “That was all resolved over a year ago.”

  “Is there a good contact number for your lawyer?”

  “Why?”

  “No one has talked to you recently? From the committee?”

  “No. Explain to me what is going on.” His stomach tightened. The investigation was closed. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not at the worst possible moment.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” He heard papers shuffling. “My mistake. Let me check with the director and have him give you a call.”

  “Put him on the phone.”

  “He’s not here. We’re out of session, though he
might be back this evening. I think there’s just been some mix-up.”

  “What is Nazar’s testimony? Is there new evidence?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I’m just updating all the information. I can see if there’s anyone here who might know. Could you please hold?”

  “What is your—hello? Hello?”

  On the boat, Hayes ran his finger across his throat. Ward ended the call. “How was that?” she asked.

  “Perfect. He must be scared out of his mind.”

  Riggs called back, but the office was closed. The committee had blundered and tipped its hand. Nazar was going to leak the evidence.

  The cars in the convoy pulled through the compound gate and came to a stop.

  Riggs turned to Caro. “That was the Senate Intelligence Committee. They’re reopening the investigation. I think Nazar is about to tell everyone what really happened.”

  “No, she isn’t,” Caro said. “Leave her to me. She is simply afraid. As long as we go after Hayes with everything we have, she’ll be fine.”

  Riggs put two fingers to his temple and looked out the window at the estate. The shipment was gone. The whole thing was crashing down on his head. He looked back to see Caro studying him. Riggs swallowed, dabbed the sweat from his brow, tried to hide his fear and anxiety.

  “These are the most powerful men in America, and they’re looking to you for guidance,” Caro said. “This is our one chance. These are the moments that turn history. Show these men the way.”

  They didn’t have time for doubt. They had to go inside and sell this plan. Everything was ready. They just needed the yes, and then they would pull the trigger.

  Riggs straightened up and opened the door. He stepped onto the pavers, buttoned his jacket, and strode toward the house with a full colonel’s bearing.

  He walked through the front entrance and started shaking hands.

  After five minutes of small talk in the parlor, the host, an immensity of a man wearing a navy-blue sack suit and a permanent scowl, raised his hand. The guests turned and gave him the floor.