Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  “As soon as possible,” Samael replied. “The curry.” It was a long flight, and there was a lot of business to take care of in the east.

  It was a shame about the Sidwell attack, but they could start again. They still held the most important weapon: the millions in black money taken from Riggs.

  Caro was dead. It was a great loss, but the networks were intact. The logic of the plan was good. It would succeed eventually. The first time they attacked the Twin Towers, with a truck bomb in 1993, they failed, and the world seemed to forget until the planes hit. It would take time to rebuild, but they would be back. There was much work to be done. The first priority was sleep.

  The attendant offered a glass of Moët et Chandon. Samael declined and couldn’t help but smile at the extravagance. Not bad for a dead man.

  Chapter 53

  THROUGH THE WINDOW of the Suburban, Hayes watched the split-rail fence roll by. The last time he had come here, he had been in disguise, moving undercover toward his family’s home as if it were enemy territory.

  He saw the curtain pull back for a moment, and the outside lights came on. His truck crunched down the gravel driveway. He stepped out and saw the fresh paint and new windows where the bullets had torn through.

  He climbed the stoop. He’d taken hundreds of doors in his time, but he’d never felt fear like this. He had spent his whole life looking for a place to belong and spent years trying to get here, to get home. He always knew he might arrive to find that there was nothing left for him. He would be a refugee with no homeland, wandering endlessly, like those who had died in the massacre.

  He let out a long breath, lifted his hand, and knocked.

  No answer. He waited ten seconds and knocked again.

  The door cracked. A hazel eye peered out. Lauren opened it and stared at him, and her face fell. She began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” Hayes said.

  He had flowers and the oatmeal raisin cookies from the bakery in Southern Pines that Lauren loved. He looked down at the gifts and cursed himself. Idiot. Like a first date. She’s still traumatized and you come in a black truck and pound on the door.

  “No,” she said.

  “I shouldn’t have come.”

  She smiled. “No, not like that.” She grabbed his free hand, pulled him through the door, and threw her arms around him. “It was just too much for a second.” She laughed and wiped her eyes. “I don’t know. Welcome back.”

  He held her and felt peace for the first time in years. But it was clouded by the guilt that he hadn’t been there to protect her, that he had put her in danger. And the knowledge that this peace wouldn’t last.

  He and Lauren had separated before his last deployment, before she found out she was pregnant. He knew her well, knew she made up her own mind. He needed to come here so he could tell her the truth and so he could apologize for the pain he’d put her through. He owed it to her.

  “Thank you. I know what you said, before I left. I needed to tell you in person. I’m sorry, Lauren, for—”

  She put her hand on his cheek.

  “Don’t worry about any of that right now.” She took the flowers and cookies. “Come on in. It’s still a bit—”

  “Who’s that?” Maggie stood in the arched entry to the family room, holding a toy hammer. Hayes took a step toward her.

  “Hi, there,” he said. All he wanted was to be part of his daughter’s life, but he wouldn’t be the one to tell her who he was. It wasn’t his call. He had missed so much already, left his wife to shoulder the weight alone. He looked from her to Lauren, waiting on the verdict.

  She crouched next to Maggie and pushed a strand of the child’s hair back behind her ear. “That’s your daddy. Do you remember what I told you about Daddy?”

  “She knows?” Hayes asked.

  “Of course. It’s been hard, but I always believed in you, John.”

  He ducked down next to his daughter. “Can I give you a hug?”

  Maggie shrugged. Hayes picked her up, held her to his chest.

  “I remember him,” she said.

  Lauren tilted her head. That was impossible.

  “He was outside,” Maggie said.

  Lauren looked to Hayes.

  “I came by the house before I went after the men who did this to me. I had to see her. I didn’t know if it would be my last chance.”

  He looked at the fresh patches in the drywall.

  “Are you okay?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You did nothing wrong.”

  “And Maggie?”

  “I think sometimes I was relying on her more than she was relying on me.”

  Hayes held her, and they stayed like that for a long time, in silence.

  Maggie started to fuss. Hayes let her down. She took his hand.

  “You want to help me put her to bed?” Lauren asked.

  “Of course,” Hayes said.

  A chocolate Lab limped out from the kitchen. Hayes leaned over and rubbed his head. Lauren led him toward the hallway bathroom. He reached down and picked up a red vest where Maggie had left it.

  Hayes sat in a rocking chair and watched his daughter sleep.

  “Where are you staying?” Lauren asked him.

  “Foley’s cabin. Taking care of his affairs.”

  “You can stay here as long as you want.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Maggie rolled over, and after fifteen minutes, Lauren said good night.

  Hayes watched over the child. The night was long. He didn’t sleep, didn’t want to lose a minute with her. He’d never felt anything as strong as that love.

  And he’d never had so much to lose. Other thoughts crowded in. The CIA black money had never been recovered. There was more chatter about terrorist operations, signs pointing to Samael. Cox had told him that perhaps it was a successor, a deputy attempting to resume Samael’s work.

  But Hayes knew more about Samael than anyone, and he had devoured every piece of intelligence there was about Caro.

  He knew something was wrong. The evil was still out there. Mother and child. The overwhelming power of those instincts, of family. In that room, he began to understand, and he made his decision.

  She wouldn’t be safe until he finished it. No one would.

  Lauren came by the door just before dawn.

  “Did you sleep?” she asked.

  “Caught a couple hours,” he said, and stretched his arms over his head.

  “I can’t believe you lie for a living.”

  “You’re the only one who could ever tell.”

  “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  “This isn’t over.”

  “You have to go?”

  “Yes.”

  That was what had pulled them apart before, the endless cycle of deployments. That was the trade. He couldn’t be here for them, because he was out there for them, for everyone.

  Hayes called Cox and drew a hard line. For weeks, the Pentagon set had been trying to slap him on the back, give him the Ira Hayes treatment.

  “If I help you on this, you’re not parading me around like a hero,” Hayes said. “I’m going to be a ghost.”

  “That’s what I was hoping you would say. Full black. No one will know what you’re doing.”

  “No brass. No bullshit.”

  “We’ll have national command authority. From you directly to me and the NSC and the White House. That’s it.”

  “I need everything you have on Caro. And I need to talk to Riggs.”

  “He’s buried.”

  “Where?”

  “Leavenworth. It’s a heavy lift. Everyone just wants him to disappear.”

  “Make it happen.”

  The arrangements with Cox took a while. Hayes stayed at the house, got to know his daughter. On the day he was set to depart, Lauren and Maggie walked him to his truck.

  “This is the last time.”

  “That’s what you
said last time.”

  Hayes looked down at Maggie. It was too much. He couldn’t leave them.

  “Go, John,” Lauren said, and put her hand on his cheek. “I understand. We need you out there.”

  He said good-bye to Maggie. Lauren stood next to the open door of the truck. They knew each other well enough. The question was clear: And you and me?

  She embraced him, brought her cheek against his, and whispered in his ear.

  Chapter 54

  SAMAEL LOOKED OVER the Mediterranean from the terrace of the villa. It was owned by a sympathetic financier of the mission and stood empty for most of the year. Samael disliked luxury as a rule, but the only buildings secure enough for the work were these mansions. It would do. It would give them time. Theirs was the long game.

  The Americans were like children near a flame. They would blunder into this part of the world, get burned, retreat, forget their mistakes, return. How could they possibly police the whole planet? It’s as if they believed in all those superhero stories. Against them, Samael brought focus, simplicity, determination. It would take years, decades, but they would succeed.

  Twelve miles away, there was an aging stone warehouse that still smelled of the tobacco it once housed. At 6:50 p.m. local time, six ten-pound charges of C-4 detonated simultaneously against its vaulted walls. The high explosives incinerated everything inside, though some witnesses would later claim that they saw, falling through the air, burning U.S. hundred-dollar bills.

  The black money that Samael had stolen was gone.

  Samael counted out the recordable CD-ROMs on the desk. They contained instructions to the cell leaders and would be sent by trusted courier. E-mail and even thumb drives were too vulnerable to American methods of interception.

  The departure was set for five minutes. The plans lay on the desk. It was everything they needed to start again.

  Samael lifted the radio and called the guards at the front door.

  “Is the driver here yet?”

  There was no answer. Samael keyed the radio again, and checked the battery LED.

  “Hello?”

  Hayes slipped through the front door and took cover in an inside corner of the villa’s foyer. Outside, a small fire burned in a trash bin. He had unscrewed the fuse from a flash-bang and dropped it in the garbage. The fire grew quickly and drew out the guards at the front door.

  Now they both lay dead on the walk.

  Samael was on the move. Hayes had come alone on a last-minute patrol, intending only recon, but once here, he had to act. He had seen too many high-value targets slip away while he waited for approval from above. Other members of his unit had gone to blow the warehouse where the black money was being stored. He had called in for a helo team but didn’t have time to wait.

  It was dusk. He preferred three and four a.m., the time of night raids, the killing hours. But there was an advantage to going alone: the silence. He had used a suppressed .22-caliber pistol with half-loads on the guards at the front door, but inside, even that would be too loud. Often a raid against an enemy like Samael would be a kill order, but Hayes wanted to take the target alive, in silence, so there would be as little time as possible to torch intel.

  He crept into the grand entrance hall, a large central area with spiral staircases on either side. They led to open landings on the higher floors where anyone could stand, look over a railing, and take in the entire space. He needed to make it upstairs unobserved. He heard footsteps coming from a hallway to his left.

  He jammed the button on a radio, turned the volume all the way up, and slid it along the marble floor. It came to rest in the corner, and he took cover in an alcove fifteen feet away.

  A few seconds passed, and then the sound of someone laboring to breathe, perhaps due to an injury, perhaps out of fear, came from the radio.

  He waited.

  “Hassan?” one of the guards asked. The men moved through the entrance hall, searching out the source of the noise. They raised their submachine guns and approached the corner.

  “Hassan?”

  Hayes came from behind. He had been whispering the noises that came out of the radio in order to draw them into a trap. He took one man with the knife, a straight vertical stab behind the clavicle into the aorta. The guard died instantly.

  The other turned, but Hayes was already on him. There was a brief scuffle as Hayes twisted his arm until the shoulder joint broke, forcing him to the ground. He killed him with a stroke of the blade, then dragged him out of sight.

  Hayes had spent years in the gray area, hiding from his own country. All that time he had tempered his thirst for revenge with the knowledge that the American soldiers hunting him were good men doing their duty.

  But now it was black and white. He gave in to vengeance, the simple moral duty to kill these men before they could kill the ones he loved. Two years of suppressed rage flowed out of him like clear water.

  He pulled the guard’s radio and inserted the earpiece.

  “Hello? Is the car here?”

  It was Samael’s voice.

  It had taken six weeks of rehab for Hayes to be able to handle a weapon again. He tore the scar tissue apart between his barely flexing fingers. It was another six weeks of fifteen-hour days to get back into form. He tracked down everything he could about Samael and Caro. And as he regained his strength, he knew that Samael was out there, rebuilding at the same time, determined to strike again.

  That unsettled feeling had started at his home, in the room with his wife and daughter. As he and Cox worked the investigations, the clues lined up. Caro couldn’t possibly have been the one who tortured Foley to death on board the Odessa. He had been a hundred miles away, driving through the desert. Caro and Samael were two different people.

  Hayes always thought back to what he had seen and heard aboard the Shiloh as it burned. There was one line from Riggs that had replayed ceaselessly in Hayes’s mind. Believed him? No. I didn’t believe him, Riggs had said. I believed—

  He never had a chance to finish. And Hayes had never found the answer to the question that troubled him the most. Why would Riggs double-down with Caro, a man he had just seen slaughter an entire village? Why would he trust him enough to continue working with him? It never made sense.

  It took two months and orders from the national security adviser herself for Hayes to be cleared to visit Riggs in his windowless cell. Riggs had confessed everything to the authorities. He had 30 percent hearing in one ear, none in the other. Hayes had to shout to be heard, but slowly, Riggs unspooled the story of the massacre.

  “Who did you believe? Who told you that the villagers betrayed you?” Hayes asked.

  Riggs told him. And though the crime was inexcusable, Hayes could at least understand why Riggs had let them be killed.

  A person Riggs trusted had told him that it was the villagers, not Caro, who stabbed the U.S. in the back. The information came from an unimpeachable source who had sacrificed everything for the West. It was tragic, in a way, because as Riggs joined in the massacre, he really had believed, by some twisted logic, that he was doing the right thing.

  And despite all the death, Hayes knew the true enemy was still alive, once again plotting safely while Hayes buried his brothers and sisters.

  Hayes climbed the staircase of the villa, then crossed the landing to the top-floor suite. The door was half open.

  “Hassan,” he whispered. “Hassan.”

  He ducked back behind the door frame as the barrel of a rifle appeared, and then a man. Hayes grabbed the barrel and found himself facing a six-foot-four bodyguard in a competent stance. With Hayes in too close for the long gun to be effective, the man pulled a knife with his free hand and came in lunging. Hayes released the barrel and let the blade come, moved six inches to the side at the last minute, and grabbed the back of the man’s neck. He pulled him forward and down as he dropped and fell backward. The momentum brought the aggressor tumbling toward the iron railing. Hayes planted his feet at the man’s wa
ist as he rolled onto his own back, pushed hard with both legs, and lofted the bodyguard up and over the edge.

  As the man fell, Hayes jerked his head back and broke his neck over the railing. The guard rag-dolled down and was dead by the time he hit the marble floor.

  Hayes moved across the top floor, clearing it systematically, then came to the office, the only closed door. The time for silence was over. He mule-kicked the knob and threw in a bang.

  White light and a deafening blast blew out. Hayes ran in, clearing the corners in that strange slowed-down time that always came after he took a door.

  On the desk lay a neat row of CD-ROMs and stacks of files. He was in the sitting room of an office suite. He quickly scanned the library, the other exits, then crossed the vaulted passage.

  Samael started for the desk and a pistol lying behind the files but couldn’t make it in time. Hayes took aim with the carbine. The concussion grenade’s effects on Samael were clear: unsteady steps, a hand held to the ear.

  Hayes had known whom he would find, but the sight still threw him: Samael was an older woman, her black hair touched with gray and piled in a loose bun. She had the look of an academic.

  “You’ve come to kill me,” Nazar said.

  “That would have been a lot easier.”

  He was going to take her alive, extract everything she knew, and destroy everyone she worked with. She would be responsible for the ruin of all she had built. No martyr’s death, just humiliation, cowardice, and compromise.

  She lifted her left hand and extended the fingers. The spoon from a Soviet F-1 grenade flew off and tinked against the window.

  Her body, when Hayes saw it on the Shiloh, had been a crucial clue. She hadn’t been tortured. Caro hadn’t touched her. As Hayes dug in and began collecting intelligence, he was able to trace Nazar’s and Caro’s roots back to the borderland where the massacre had taken place. They had been working together, mother and son, against Riggs from the beginning. She played the part of the refugee and fulfilled the American dream of a kindred voice in a hostile land, a local yearning for freedom. As a sympathetic interpreter and guide, she was able to infiltrate the invading armies, steal their secrets, whisper in their ears, and steer them wrong.