Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  The answer was to use the Americans’ own strength against them. They could be tied down and bloodied, and their belligerence could even be made useful, redirected to destroy one’s enemies.

  Caro dealt with the men who paid for his true mission only through the most secret channels. Some were allies of the U.S., oil-rich states, cowards really, who used Caro to bite the hand that fed them. But nothing was ever black and white with him, and his patrons would often remark, with an uneasy laugh, that no one could be certain if he was working for them or if they were working for him.

  Caro had looked at his son and thought of what stirred men’s hearts, the pressure point that could turn a nation. One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Stalin had said it. Caro’s great innovation was to make the political personal.

  Family. Instincts stronger than Semtex that even he could only just control. He would join the ambition of terrorism with the intimacy of murder. And through the children, he could control the men who control the world.

  There are things worse than death, Caro knew, and that led him to this one opportunity and the idea that would deliver him: What if you had a bomb that didn’t kill?

  The message came back from the Mechanic.

  Trial run went perfectly. Waiting for green light.

  He was close. He would have the shipment back soon, and then he would pull the trigger.

  His other phone rang. He answered it, held it to his ear. “We have her,” said the voice on the other end.

  Caro punched the throttle and raced through the empty land.

  Chapter 29

  WE PULLED UP a quarter mile from the address where Nazar had told Riggs to meet her. It was a new subdivision in the foothills. Hydroseed and muddy patches ran up the slopes, promising future developments under the high-power electric lines. Hayes scanned the higher ground—plenty of positions for Speed. We stopped across the street.

  The address was a combined elementary and middle school. A few kids skateboarded in the parking lot. Others waited for their parents, but most had gone home. A quarter mile up the road, there was a police substation.

  Innocent bystanders, cops.

  “She’s spooked,” I said.

  “Good,” Hayes replied. “The coward is using kids as a shield. There’s a reason she was the only survivor of the massacre.”

  “Where is she?” I asked. We walked to the corner, and I spotted Nazar’s Toyota parked beside a wooden fence, just beside a playing field, opposite the police station. A whistle blew. I turned. A ten-year-old pitched a soccer ball over his head back into play. The kids sprinted after it, a seven-on-seven game.

  I ran back. “She’s on the bench near the clothes drop.”

  Hayes looked to the hills and raised his radio.

  “Speed. Speed. Do you copy? Speed?”

  “No radio?” Moret asked.

  Hayes looked up. “It’s the transmission lines. There are high-explosive rounds in the rifle?”

  “Yes,” Moret said.

  “He’s in the hills. His angle’s too low. He can’t see the fields. The bullet will go right through the car and the fence. He can’t take that shot.”

  Speed centered the reticle on Nazar’s head and measured her shoulders, her head, and height against the tick marks. He knew the average dimensions of the human body and adjusted for Nazar’s stature. That give him his distance to target. The calculations were automatic. He factored in the tailwind, the altitude, the downhill angle, and the temperature, since propellant burns faster on a warm day, then figured the drop and dialed in the vertical minute of angle.

  The road was still warm from the sunny afternoon that had passed. He saw the heat lines rising, magnified in his Nightforce scope. The lines rippled away at sixty degrees, which meant ten-mile-an-hour winds. He ran the numbers and dialed in his horizontal adjustment.

  Speed lay in the bed of the pickup and felt his lungs fill, his diaphragm expand. The bullet would drop slightly less than two meters over the half a kilometer to the target. He focused on his breathing, cleared his mind, and waited for Nazar to open the door.

  He would light up the Toyota as soon as she was a hundred meters away.

  Nazar glanced up the street to the police substation, then craned her neck around to listen to the children playing. She would be as safe here as anywhere. Riggs could kill her—no one would miss a lonely old teacher—but he couldn’t kill kids, not American kids, at least. It would bring too much attention.

  She didn’t like using them in this way, but she was a survivor, and she would do what she must. She hadn’t always been like this. A long time ago, she had been young and naive. She had told the story of what had happened to that girl to Riggs once. It was the story that led him to make Nazar his lead interpreter and fixer, his guide among the local tribes.

  Growing up, she spent her time reading the few books about America and Europe she could find, books by Henry James and Proust and Tolstoy. She read them as much for the luxuries as the stories. She had to hide them from the rest of the villagers. She made it through the hard and hungry days by dreaming of escaping to those lands.

  And when a foreign army came through the village for the first time, she was drawn to the blue-eyed invaders and sought out their friendship. She found a man. And he was her first, rough and sure, and he brought her more books than she had ever seen, and fine clothes, and food like she had never tasted. And he told her he would take her away to a better place.

  And one morning he was gone, without a word. The whole army had left.

  She was alone, and after the summer passed there was no way to hide the pregnancy. Everyone she had grown up with called her a whore and a collaborator, and after the birth, they threatened the child, a son.

  She took what she could carry in two woven bags and ran because they were going to kill her, or worse. The elders had strange punishments, doled out by the young men in the central square, where only the shame eclipsed the pain.

  And on the cold nights as she fled, she remembered those books, and the weave of the cloth on the covers, and the smell of the pages. The villagers had burned them all.

  She was just another refugee in a land of refugees and shifting borders. That strange-looking child marked her as a traitor to her people, and she could never rest, never hide from the rumors. Her son heard them when he was still a boy, and her son, even as she tried to protect him, hated her for what she had done. He called her a whore and was even worse than the others in order to protect himself, in order to belong. And he left her. She was alone for a long time, lost.

  Then another army came. The Americans took her in. She found work interpreting.

  She told Riggs her story, and he understood how much she had suffered and sacrificed because of her love for the West. He brought her books and took her into his confidence.

  When the news went through the village that the Americans would be taking them away to safety, that they would finally have a home, she knew it couldn’t be true. She had been burned before.

  She watched. She had been betrayed once already by a man with promises from the West. And she looked on, hidden, as they rounded up the others, friends and family, and the killing started. She watched it through the shaky viewfinder as she made a record of it all, and then rushed off to leave the photos somewhere safe.

  A new life at last, a home; the promise would be made good, but only for her. She went to Riggs. She told him she wanted to come to America. She knew he would need someone to back up his story after the massacre. He was a smart man. The mere mention of the evidence was all it took for him to understand that she would expose him if he didn’t agree to her request. They made their uneasy pact.

  And why did she do nothing but watch as her people died? Because she wanted to record the truth? To expose what happened? No. Because she wanted out, and that film was her only chance.

  She would corroborate Riggs’s version of the massacre. From her work she knew that that was the secret of trans
lation: the story changes with every telling.

  She found a way to live with herself. She wouldn’t be betrayed again. All she wanted was her books and her electric kettle and a quiet place to do her work.

  Nazar was sorry for those who had died, but she had done what she must for her freedom, and she would do what she must to keep it. She opened the door and stepped out of the car.

  Speed watched her walk away. She would be clear in a few seconds. He focused on his breathing, the way it moved the reticle up and down, up and down, within a half minute of angle. With that long a shot, even the heartbeat in his chest and the pulse in his finger affected the scope, faster rhythms than his breathing, like wind chop on top of ocean swells.

  She would be clear in three, two…

  He took a breath, held it, and pressed the ball of his finger against the trigger.

  One.

  “She’s clear of the car,” I said. “He’s going to shoot.”

  “I can’t get him on the radio,” Ward said. “There are fucking children there.”

  “Hayes,” I said.

  But he was already gone, running in a crouch toward the sniper’s line, his arms crossed at the wrist in an X.

  “Did she see him?” Ward asked.

  I looked through the scope. “No, she’s turning around.”

  Hayes ducked behind the car as Nazar scanned the street, then took out her cell phone and tapped the screen.

  As she turned, Hayes worked his way back, keeping out of sight, then rounded the corner toward us.

  Nazar glanced at her phone again, and Hayes joined us.

  “Now what?”

  “We wait. At least we know she’s getting rattled.”

  “And then?”

  “We do the drive-by. There’s nothing but empty hills on three sides of this place. We’ll have a chance. Just brandishing a gun might be enough to scare her into releasing the evidence.”

  Nazar dropped her phone into her purse, took a last look around, then stepped back into her car.

  “She’s moving,” Hayes said and pulled a black balaclava from inside the van. “Let’s finish this.”

  The pickup stopped at the end of the block. It was Speed. Hayes met him halfway. I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but it was getting loud. They were in each other’s face. I took a step toward them.

  Moret put a hand on my arm. “Let it be.”

  I moved closer. I heard Hayes say something about killing her.

  “That is an order,” he went on. “We’re going to finish this my way. Do you understand?”

  Speed laughed. “We’re not soldiers anymore.”

  Hayes stormed back.

  “You good?” I asked.

  “More or less,” he said. “None of us have had a good night’s sleep in two years. Two years, they’ve been calling us terrorists, murderers. And after a while, no matter how much you fight it, you start to feel like one. It eats away at you, turns you into the lie.”

  “She’s on the move,” Ward said. “And I’m getting a cross signal.”

  “On the BlackBerry?”

  “No. Her regular phone.”

  Speed walked our way. Hayes jumped into the Suburban. He opened a Pelican case, took out a silenced submachine gun, loaded a magazine, and pulled back the charging handle to cock it. He held the map out to me.

  “Byrne, you and Britten take the pickup and meet us here.” He pointed to a spot two miles away. “We’ll need to burn these vehicles as soon as we’re done. We probably won’t even have to shoot, but I don’t want you nearby once we go kinetic. There might be a lot of fire, and you’re not up on the tactics. I don’t need any blue-on-blue.”

  “But—”

  “It’s an order. I don’t want you getting killed and we need a ride.”

  “Understood.”

  He handed me a radio. Speed tossed me the keys.

  They climbed into the Suburban and took off. We rolled out a minute behind them in the pickup.

  Hayes’s voice came over the radio. “Wait till Nazar is out of the residential areas.”

  We crossed an overpass above the freeway and entered a section of low-rise commercial and industrial buildings—warehouses, wholesalers, machine shops—laid out on a grid of four-lane roads.

  “Traffic ahead. She’s slowing down. Looks good. Byrne, are you all clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll see you at the rally. Get out of here. Speed, we’ll flank her at the next intersection and then execute.”

  “I don’t like this,” Kelly said. “Why did they get rid of us?”

  I turned twice and headed south on a street parallel to the direction Nazar and Hayes were moving. I didn’t want to get too far ahead in case they needed us.

  Our radio was still live. Ward came on. “I’ve got an intercept. Nazar’s talking on her phone.”

  “What’s she saying?” It was Hayes or Speed.

  “Hold on,” Ward said. “She called someone. Identified herself. She said, ‘I think they’re coming after me. Do you still have the package that I gave you?’ The other speaker confirmed that it was safe and ready to send. He asked for confirmation on whether to send it or not. Nazar told him to wait.”

  Hayes’s voice cut in. “Perfect. That’s the evidence. Hit her at the traffic light.”

  I heard pops up ahead and, an instant later, over the radio. It sounded like automatic fire.

  “Shots fired,” Ward said. “Nazar gave the order to send it. The other party confirmed. Holy shit. That’s it. The evidence is going out.”

  I pulled over to the curb beside a corrugated-aluminum warehouse, some kind of remodeling company.

  “Is that it?” Kelly asked.

  “If she sends it out, the whole story goes public.”

  “Riggs goes down, and we’ll be able to clear our names. Are you serious? It’s over?”

  “You heard what she said.”

  She leaned in and wrapped her arms around me. “We’re going to make it out of this.”

  “Thank God,” I said.

  I held her close, felt the dread leave my body for the first time since the police had knocked on my door. She took my face in both her hands and kissed me.

  I would tell her everything: the ghosts, the way everyone around me ended up dead. We might be all right. Maybe I wasn’t a death sentence for everyone who trusted me, for everyone who came close. Maybe one day I would make peace with the shades, with the green-eyed woman from the past, and remember her as she was, beautiful and warm, not as the distortion of my guilt. One day I might close my eyes, lie beside Kelly, and sleep.

  “Kelly, what I said before, about there being someone else. It’s not like that. Years ago, when I was deployed—”

  Gunfire ripped through the night, and I heard the screech of tires, then the crunch and shatter.

  A woman screamed.

  Chapter 30

  WE LOOKED AT each other for a moment, then took what guns we had, the 9 mm Glock and 9 mm Beretta, stepped out of the car, and started walking toward the gunfire. I took point around the corner of the building and looked to the right.

  A block to the north, Nazar’s Toyota had swerved across an intersection and crashed into the base of a liquor-store sign on the far corner. A seam of bullet holes ran up the side of the car. The engine compartment was on fire. Black smoke billowed out.

  Kelly came up behind me.

  “They fucking shot her,” I said.

  I could see Nazar dragging herself along the asphalt away from the intersection.

  The Suburban parked halfway up on the median. A cardboard sign scrawled in marker lay on the asphalt, abandoned by a panhandler.

  Shooters in balaclavas knelt at the southeast and southwest corners, the two closest to us. It looked like they were covering sectors. Another grabbed the shoulder of Nazar’s shirt and hauled her away. They disappeared behind a parked truck.

  I walked up the block, the gun at my thigh, aimed down, finger o
utside the trigger guard.

  “Hayes!” I shouted. One of the kneeling men turned toward me as I yelled. I was on the east side of the street and he was on the west, at the far end of the block.

  “What happened? Is Nazar all right? Need medical?”

  He waved me closer. I stepped between the parked cars and walked ten more feet. Then I saw the barrel of his MP7 come square, aimed at my head. I dived to the ground between two cars as a three-round burst hissed past me. I landed hard, taking the skin off my elbows, and low-crawled behind a truck for cover.

  It was Hayes. There was no way he could have mistaken me for someone else. And he had tried to kill me. They were getting closer now, one on the opposite side of the street and one on the other side of the row of parked cars I had taken cover behind. They moved quickly, one running, the other using a minimum of fire to keep me down every time I looked out.

  Kelly had dived behind a transformer about fifty feet away. The gunman shot a burst in her direction. She grunted in pain.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I crawled out to make sure. We’d be overrun in a few seconds. I signaled for her to run from the shooters, down the street around the corner, back the way we had come. She shook her head, crawled to a better position, prone beside the transformer. There were bushes around it. It was good cover, no silhouette, not where they expected us.

  I signaled again: I cover, you run.

  She shook her head again.

  Bullets punched through the panels of the car I was crouched behind. The adrenaline poured through me in a hot wash from my head to my feet. I felt strong, like I could flip the car over, but soon a tremble worked its way into my gun hand.

  Every instinct told me to freeze, take cover, but the way to survive was to keep moving, keep the pressure on, keep the initiative.

  I edged around the truck and slipped into its bed, out of sight. It was a hauler, with panels around the bed. They wouldn’t be expecting me over the top, and it would give me a line on the gunman on our side of the road.