Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

Nick was silent.

Susan said, “Tell us exactly what Cruz said. Can you remember?”

Swagger tried to re-create the conversation in his own head.

“‘Nobody’s been where I am now. And nobody can get me out but me.’ That’s the line I remember. He had an idea people were trying to kill him. Seems like he was right on that one, or maybe these stitches on my face came from my imagination. But he’s a serious man hell-bent on a course. He’s burned bad because of the death of his spotter. He thinks he’s the only one who can figure it out because all of us are in ‘the system’ and can’t be trusted or are being manipulated by shadowy forces. Wasn’t interested in coming in. I played that line hard, but he wasn’t having none of it, any of it.”

Nick let a melancholy ton of air escape his lungs.

“So, basically, we’re nowhere.”

“We do know it’s him. And we know that somebody wants to kill him. We do know that,” said Bob.

“We don’t,” said Susan. “Excuse me, but this colonel knew a lot of snipers, he ran courses for snipers, and among them are sure to be some unstable people. Maybe one had a grudge against him. You just can’t jump to the conclusion that it was an attempt on Cruz’s life without a thorough professional investigation. Maybe he was in a love affair, a business crisis, a lawsuit, any one of a dozen mundane reasons-”

“They’d go for him with a Barrett? His wife’s boyfriend goes for him with a-”

“Barretts are civilian legal,” said Nick. “If you wanted a safe way to kill a guy who was known to work very late in an aluminum building, a Barrett semi would be number one on your wish list, especially if you knew a little about guns, as anyone who knew the colonel probably did.”

“So you’re not going to-”

“Go on a witch hunt, no,” said Susan. “I know how conveniently the Agency fits all manner of paranoid fantasies, justifies any interpretation, satisfies any mandate of evil or conspiracy. We will not use this as an excuse to probe in areas that are off-limits unless we develop hard evidence, and I mean hard, that suggests Agency personnel were involved. Unknown gunmen shooting up a building in the night in rural South Carolina doesn’t cut it.”

“High-level gunmen. You could tell because he fired so fast and he kept his shots tight. He’d ridden that recoil before in dusty places full of guys with tablecloths on their heads and daggers between their teeth. Do I need to point out that it was almost certainly a Barrett that the guys in Afghanistan used on Whiskey Two-Two? Coincidence? Sure, the world’s full of them. Anyhow”-Swagger coughed, in the grasp of a phlegm-throated oxygen debt-“who are they, what are they doing here? What’s their interest in Ray?”

“Nothing ties them to Ray,” said Nick. “Sorry, but Okada is right. Without hard evidence we have no license to poke our way into Agency business. No one at the Bureau wants that. This temporary truce is something everybody wants and I can’t endanger it on the evidence of nothing.”

“You people and your rules,” said Bob. “It’s like dealing with kindergarteners at a goddamn ice-cream party. ‘I want the ice cream!’ ‘No, no, it’s my ice cream.’ How do you stand it?”

“The system is the system, Swagger,” said Susan. “Look, there is indeed a schism in the Agency: those who believe in Zarzi, those who don’t. The disbelievers have been exiled because the Administration also wants to believe in Zarzi.”

“Is it possible some of the pro-Zarzis have gone overboard in their protection of him?” Bob said. “They want the Zarzi ice cream, they’re crazy for the ice cream, and so they’ve gone around the bend to make sure it don’t melt?”

“These are professional people. They don’t go around bends. I will make certain delicate inquiries, but my accessibility itself has been threatened by this episode. They’ll all know we had a shot at Cruz and whiffed. That doesn’t help, Swagger.”

Delicacy! Swagger wanted to say: Are you here for them or for us? Is your job the truth or is it to protect your bosses? But he couldn’t. She had stood hard for him and gone into battle with swords for him. She had brought him the rest of his life in the form of his daughter, Miko. She had nothing to prove to him.

“Susan, I will obey any policy you say. I’m sorry if I suggested otherwise. You can count on me not to betray you or disobey you.”

She nodded. Then she said to Nick, “Look, let me talk to him alone.”

“Sure, but no necking on company time.”

“Ha-ha,” said Susan, “count on the Bureau for laugh riots.”

But she turned to Bob once they were alone.

Her gaze was steady, as it always was, her face annoyingly perfect. Her hair looked a little mussed, and of course that made her seven or possibly nine times more attractive.

“Look, this isn’t easy,” she said. “I am well aware that they put me here because we worked together before and I get a sense, once in a while, that you seem to like me a little. They know that, they’re using that, just as they’re manipulating me through the fact that I never met a cowboy with brains before until I met the old dog. Cowboys are cheap, but the smart ones are one in a million. So don’t think I don’t feel whatever it is we’re not supposed to talk about. But, Bob, I have to cover for the Agency. I married it, it’s my husband, everything I ever got I got from it. It’s my Marine Corps. I know its follies, its pretensions, its weaknesses, how many of its people are self-infatuated fools. But it is necessary and it is the only one we’ve got, so no matter how many times I remember when Samurai Swagger kicked in the door and faced off with that creepy Yak and sent his head in the direction of Sevastopol, I have to pull back to my loyalty to the Agency. Okay? You have your code, Semper Ho and Gung Fi and all that, and I have mine.”

“I’m hearing you, Okada-san. You were a hell of a case officer.”

“Get some sleep, cowboy. We need you on two legs and a horse.”

He smiled-a little-through cracked lips.

Nick stepped back in.

“Okay,” he said, “old friends’ time officially over. Bob, we will forward any info we develop to the state police detectives-they’re waiting for your statement, by the way-who have to solve this case. In the meantime, we will continue our pursuit of Ray Cruz. We need you in Washington to read the possible shooting sites. Be on our team, be our friend, okay? As Ms. Okada says, rest a few days, wait till the ringing stops and you only look like a tomato and not a grapefruit, and come back to work. Is that clear?”

Bob said yes, knowing secretly that he would never leave this case till the end, if it killed him-or anybody else.

He had to find out: who was trying to kill Ray Cruz?

THE 600 BLOCK OF NORTH CHARLES STREET

OUTSIDE THE RESTAURANT ZABOL

MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT

1530 HOURS

A FEW DAYS LATER

It had to be Baltimore. The thinkers at the various agencies, offices, bureaus, and departments all agreed. They discounted the Meet the Press site because, although the studio had a transparent rear window to show the dome in the background, the material was high-strength ballistic glass through which no bullet could penetrate and the only shooting location would be in public, somewhere on Capitol grounds, even up a tree, impossible to hide. The White House was also a no-go, as security was extraordinary, and that night, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Washington Metropolitan Police would be out in abundance. No sniper could get close enough. The speech at Georgetown was in the center of buildings that could be easily controlled for access.