Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  I signaled back to Kelly to suppress the man on the other side of the street. Three, two, one. She put rounds into the car he had taken cover behind. I came over the top of the truck. My shooter was surprised and aimed a burst in my direction, but coming from cover, his fire wasn’t accurate. I was dropping back down when I heard the click of steel on concrete; he was changing mags. I vaulted over the panel, came around, and lit him up.

  The bullet leaned him back a few inches. He didn’t react for a second, then he seized up with pain and grunted, fumbled the magazine, and glared at me with a strange, indignant look.

  Kelly kept going, keeping the other shooter out of play. Six rounds, seven, eight. She had fifteen in the Glock. I had to move. I ran toward my injured man as he managed to get the magazine in and cock the gun. He lifted it and took aim.

  I shot him in the stomach, and he flinched, but it wasn’t enough.

  He got up on one knee, tried to raise his gun again.

  Two, three, four shots. Two of them hit.

  He staggered toward me, still trying to lift the gun. Goddamn 9 mm. He wouldn’t drop.

  Six. Seven. Another hit. He fell back, unconscious. The crack of gunfire came from my right, but they were God-willing shots, way wide.

  I ran up, grabbed the injured man’s MP7, and put three rounds into the minivan the shooter across the street had taken cover behind. I ducked behind the hood of a car on my side of the street and peered out from under the bumper.

  He was gone. I ran forward.

  The pulse of the man I had shot was thready. Bright red blood flowed from his arm.

  “Kelly!” I shouted. “Clear.”

  No answer.

  I looked back. She lay on the ground next to the transformer.

  I ran to her and checked her pulse—weak. Her face, turned to the side, was beautiful and untroubled. But then blood dripped from the hairline and began to flow down her forehead.

  I was reaching for something to wipe it away when bullets ripped through the steel of the transformer. Oil poured out and covered the green sheet metal.

  The blood ran into her eyes and down the side of her face.

  I mopped the blood off with my sleeve, being careful not to move her neck. I could stop the bleeding. But that didn’t matter. There was no time. I had to kill the other man first. It was a choice I’d never wanted to have to make again. The gunman was moving closer and closer, and soon he would be straight across the street from us with a clear shot, and then we were done.

  The bushes might give me cover to circle the building and flank him, but that would take too long. I looked ahead. There was a storm drain. It must run under the street. The third dimension. People always forget it, but it’s crucial in urban operations. I could get behind him.

  He moved even closer. I took her pistol and loaded a new magazine. My heart pounded in my chest and my vision sharpened. The blue of the sky and red of her blood looked impossibly bright, hyperreal. The fear and the noise and the chaos faded out, leaving a simple imperative: destroy this man.

  Another burst of fire chewed apart the steel of the transformer. A shower of sparks burst out.

  The bullets sawed the air next to my head, and then I felt a wall of heat.

  I turned away and lifted the gun. No sound but the ringing in my ears. The transformer blew.

  As I went down, I knew the truth: Hayes had lured me in. I helped them kill Nazar. Everything false was now true; I had aided terrorists, abetted whatever horrors they were going to unleash with the stolen shipment.

  In my blindness, all I could see was Kelly’s face: no pain, only repose, her lower lip tucked under just slightly, like when she slept, and then the blood pouring down.

  The world exploded around me. Pressure bloomed in the back of my head. Everything went black.

  Chapter 31

  THE ORDER CAME from Hayes. “Is the box ready?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Move out.”

  Hayes’s associates dropped the crate in front of the consulate general of Egypt, on Wilshire in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile, then disappeared into the endless traffic of rush hour.

  The black, white, and red flag of Egypt hung slack from the pole. A dog walker who approached forty minutes later was the first person to see the crate. She noticed the strange Arabic markings, jerked the leash, and quickly moved away from the consulate, an imposing tower of brown stone and black glass.

  A guard came by next and called down the embassy’s chief of security. After a brief back-and-forth with the head of mission, they contacted the Secret Service, which is responsible for diplomatic security.

  There was a private elementary school across Wilshire, and a public middle school on the same street.

  The box sat partially obscured by the walls of the parking lot. The Secret Service closed off the street. LAPD cruisers blocked off Wilshire and the side streets for half a mile in either direction. They emptied the four-story terraced apartment buildings next door. Most of the office buildings were empty, but the cleaning crews were evacuated as well. Crowds gathered at the roadblocks. People filmed on their cell phones and craned their necks to see as the mine-resistant ambush-protected truck trundled past the police cars.

  If the box was full of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, like the explosive in the Oklahoma City blast, the lethal radius would be a hundred and fifty yards. That attack killed a hundred and sixty-eight people and injured six hundred and eighty. If it was full of C-4, it would leave a crater fifty feet wide, spray lethal shrapnel for a quarter mile, and send a mushroom cloud four hundred feet in the air. The effect would be about 50 percent more devastating than Oklahoma City.

  The explosive-ordnance disposal team stepped out of the MRAP wearing short-sleeved black uniforms. They moved purposefully but kept going back and forth to check with their commander and the LAPD, who were maintaining security at the scene. A few phones remained in the air snapping photos, but once the spectators saw the two techs help the third into the bomb suit, they began filing away from the barriers as quickly as they could.

  The EOD team sent a robot to do an X-ray inspection. The results were inconclusive. Two hours had passed. The Miracle Mile, a traffic nightmare even on a typical day, had been reduced to a snarl of horns and cursing drivers all the way back to Beverly Hills.

  The techs double-checked the specialist’s helmet, and he began to lumber down the center of the empty six-lane boulevard.

  They called it the long walk.

  The radiological and bioassays found nothing. He took a pry bar and forced it under the lid of the crate. The nails creaked as he wrenched it open.

  Inside, there was a trunk the size of a dresser. He didn’t recognize its origin. It was made of brass and bone, which he mistook for ivory, inlaid in an intricate design.

  He checked again for any signs of radioactivity or a bioweapon.

  Nothing.

  A drop of sweat fell from his nose and beaded on the inside of his face mask.

  “Opening the package,” he said into his helmet mic.

  He reached for the clasp. It was unlocked. He took a deep breath and lifted the lid.

  Chapter 32

  VEHICLES FROM HALF a dozen law-enforcement agencies filled the marina parking lot. A towboat had pulled the burned wreck of the Odessa into the harbor. Cox had caught the stench of burning oil and scorched fiberglass from a half mile away.

  He crouched next to the body. Half of the corpse had been burned beyond recognition, with the flesh charred and tightened, giving it a mummified look, but the upper torso and head were intact. Shallow cuts and missing skin. Death from head trauma, not exsanguination. Given the extent of the flaying, that meant an expert interrogator with a steady hand and a strong stomach.

  Cox looked at the face. It was definitely Foley. He had found a photo of him and Hayes together and got some background on their relationship from one of Hayes’s former commanding officers. Foley was not Hayes’s father, but he might as
well have been. He had been a Special Forces vet, a track coach who saw something in Hayes when he was a foster child and took him under his wing.

  The more Cox learned about Hayes, the less this made sense. He was the child of refugees, abandoned to foster homes. He didn’t know his own race, his own people. He could be anyone. The Joint Special Operations Command seized on that chameleon nature and his deep psychological desire to join, to blend in, to belong. He was born to go behind enemy lines.

  Hayes had been the best in Force Recon, and then the Marine Special Operations Command. They pulled him into the JSOC classified units because he wanted to be more than a trigger puller. He liked working with Special Forces, studying languages, going deep on cultural background.

  That’s why the massacre of the villagers didn’t add up. Hayes was a refugee himself, always searching, always looking for a home. Maybe that need to be a part of something was too great. He had stayed too long behind enemy lines. He’d lost his wife and kid. His own country had placed him into a deniable unit, ready to disavow any knowledge of him if anything went wrong. In the end he’d decided he belonged there, on the other side.

  Foley had been the key person Cox wanted to find and interview. Now he was dead. Cox’s only other good lead had turned up in seven pieces in a white marine cooler.

  He shook his head. He had been just a few hours away from finding these two men, but he was too late.

  Hayes was a step ahead of him, covering his trail through violence, killing as needed. How could Cox, operating within the law, possibly outstrip that sort of evil?

  The medical examiner arrived and gave Cox an unwelcoming look. “Can I help you?”

  “Probably not,” Cox said. He had what he needed. He climbed out of the cabin and stepped onto the dock.

  Once he was clear of the local law enforcement, he lifted his cell and dialed Riggs’s number. The colonel should know: Hayes was coming, and he was out for blood.

  Riggs picked up. There was an echo, as if he were in a tiled room.

  “Hayes just killed our two best leads.”

  “Foley?”

  “That’s right. Looks like Hayes tortured him. I want you to think about coming onto a base, where it’s safe.”

  “I’m safe,” Riggs said. “I’ll take care of my security.”

  Was that a dig? Cox wondered. If so, he deserved it. Hayes was winning.

  “So Hayes is killing anyone who might lead us to him?”

  “Seems like,” Cox said.

  “It’s inhuman,” Riggs said.

  “Yes.” But Cox wasn’t sure. He thought of the body again. Tortured. But you don’t torture if you’re covering your tracks, eliminating anyone who has information about you. You torture to get information. You torture if you’re following tracks. Which could mean that someone else was hunting these men down, just as Cox was, only better, more ruthlessly, without a thought for human life or suffering.

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s…” Cox hesitated. “Nothing. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Riggs hung up the phone and stepped through the metal passageway toward Caro.

  They were on a ship called the Shiloh that Riggs controlled through his military-contracting firm. It was often used by the Special Operations command for off-book jobs. They were on the third deck, below the waterline, surrounded by the sounds of running engines and waves washing along the hull.

  “They found Foley,” Riggs said.

  “And?”

  “They think Hayes tortured him to death. What did you do to the old man?”

  “Nothing,” Caro said, waving the question away.

  “How did you make it back here so fast?”

  He ducked that too. “So we’re good as far as the official investigation?”

  “Yes,” Riggs said. “Did Foley give up anything?”

  “Not as much as we hoped. But we have a few of their rally points and codes. We can go through them by process of elimination and tighten the noose around his network. They’re using country names as codes for the rally. We’re heading to a site referred to as Italy. We don’t know if it’s a safe house or a waypoint.”

  “We?”

  “I have some men in-country,” Caro said.

  Riggs nodded, doing a decent job concealing his surprise and what looked to Caro like a hint of suspicion. “What are the grids? I can have my men help.”

  They both knew what was at stake. Whoever took Hayes would also control the shipment.

  Caro knew he had to get there first, had to have control over the box. He put his hand on Riggs’s shoulder.

  “Excellent,” he said, and he opened the door to his right. It had once been the cryptography vault on the Shiloh. A dial-combination lock, the type used on safes, secured the door.

  Hall, Riggs’s deputy, stood guard just inside. Caro stepped through and looked at the captive. Her wrists were bound to the railing above her head, and she was slumped against the bulkhead with a blood-soaked bandage on her neck. It was Nazar.

  He noted the shock of recognition in her eyes, less fear than sadness, a look of love lost, maybe even misguided hope.

  Caro didn’t react, just turned back to Riggs. “What exactly did she say when she made the call about the evidence?”

  “She said to get it ready to release. And then she panicked and told him to do it. We think she gave the photos to her lawyer for safekeeping.”

  Hall stepped toward Nazar, racked a .22-caliber pistol, crouched slightly, and pointed it at her temple.

  “Not yet,” Caro said, ignoring her as she whimpered around her gag.

  “Wait until we hit the lawyer and get the evidence. We have to destroy every copy. We may still need her.”

  The Mechanic slipped the bomb vest over Bradac’s head and then stood behind a camera. There would be no recording, of course, no evidence.

  Faking the fingerprints hadn’t been too difficult. He’d printed them out on a transparency, using as much ink as possible, and took an impression from the toner with liquid latex. The only clues from the bomb would point in the wrong direction: to Hayes, and to false enemies.

  The Mechanic stoked the visions in Bradac: the entry into a new life; the forgiveness of sins at the moment the martyr’s blood is shed; the immediate admission to heaven, no suffering in the tomb, the privilege of standing in the highest gardens of heaven, next to God, among the prophets, saints, and righteous believers, and the marriage to the houri, the heavenly maidens.

  “Can you see it?”

  “I can see it.”

  “Can you see it?” It was almost a chant.

  “It’s beautiful.” Bradac stared into the middle distance of the dingy warehouse, ran his thumb along the handheld detonator, and began to weep as he smiled. “I can see it, I can see it.”

  In his unsteady gaze, the maidens danced in the garden.

  Chapter 33

  THE PAIN WAS everything when I came to, a ringing in my ears, electric-blue lines arcing across the inside of my eyelids. I was on my back on what felt like a tile floor. My head rested on rolled fabric, a used T-shirt, from the smell of it. I opened my eyes. White light flooded in. I closed them again. The injuries were plenty, but they seemed so small next to the guilt I felt, filling my body like some black poison.

  Kelly; where was she? My mind raced quickly to the worst: she was dead. And that was just my small, private pain. I had helped Hayes kill the main witness against him, led him to whatever Nazar was hiding, moved him one step closer to his goal of using whatever tool of destruction he had stolen from Riggs.

  I had wanted to believe that Hayes had done no wrong. That he could be redeemed. That anyone could. Because I needed redemption.

  Riggs had warned me. Kelly had warned me. I’d refused to listen. And Kelly would pay.

  Kelly. Goddamn it, why hadn’t they just done me a favor and killed me during the firefight?

  I opened my eyes again, just a millimeter or two. The light diffracted through my
lashes. I was in a modest home that looked brand-new. It was unfurnished. The solvent smells of paint and processed wood lingered. To my right there was a medical kit and some bloody gauze. Men moved in and out of the room. I closed my eyes, waited for the men to leave.

  My hand stole to the side.

  I waited for the shouts, the kicks in my ribs. None came.

  “Over here.” It sounded like Hayes. Footsteps drew closer.

  “Speedy, have you seen the shears?”

  He moved away. Then stopped. I felt the plastic handles under my palm, the metal point against my wrists. They would kill me five seconds after I went for it, I knew, but they would be doing me a favor.

  I gripped the shears tightly and steeled myself to attack.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d lain on a cold floor waiting for death.

  The first was after I killed the woman, Emily. She was an anesthesiologist I worked with in Afghanistan, part of a forward surgical team at Camp Dagger.

  Dagger; that’s what made me angrier than anything else. Hayes had said Samael was behind the Camp Dagger attack, had used it as a way to draw me in. He had exploited the death of a woman I loved, profaned her. And I had fallen for it, given in to revenge.

  The camp was little more than a collection of plywood huts and tents, but it was our best chance to save the casualties near the line. It sat in a valley not far from Gardez. We were hemmed in by ice-covered mountains and rock-filled defiles on all sides, but the valley itself was beautiful in summer; sheep and goats grazed, and green fields surrounded an oxbow in the river.

  Emily was a few years younger than I was and came from the sticks outside Louisville. I didn’t have time for much of anything outside of medicine, hadn’t had for years. I liked being busy. It kept me from thinking about the dead boys at K-38, about what I had done. It had been so many years since then. I was a doctor now, a lieutenant commander.