Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Is that what you’d do?” asked a police officer.

“I’d have to find a white trash cranky old sack full of hot air and bad breath, but it’s the same principle.”

“We don’t have any evidence,” someone said. “He could also paint his skin black, buy a wig, and go Afro into the shoot zone, knowing that we’re hesitant to confront Afros.”

“But Afro falls apart if he’s confronted. One second of close examination and Afro goes away. Filipino doesn’t go away, and if he’s got the right easy-to-come-by docs, he’s in,” another argued.

“All right,” said Nick, “let’s run this and see where it takes us. Maybe nowhere. Maybe there are no Filipinos in the area and Swagger’s been smoking that weird pipe again.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Swagger said, to some laughter.

Nick ordered, “Check the lists of the already vetted. See if you can come up with any names of Filipino nationals, or immigrants. Maybe we get an address, and if so, maybe we raid. Maybe we nab the guy before he gets out of bed.”

It took an hour. The run-through of the hundred-odd vetted workers in the shoot zone for tomorrow indeed included four of possible Filipino derivation, an Abated, a Batujong, a Ganaban, and an Ulat, working at three different restaurants, an Indian, a Chinese, and a barbecued rib house known to be popular with gays (“Boy’s Town,” as it was called, was the next district north of Mount Vernon).

Calls to Immigration produced data on three of the four, who were not citizens yet. The fourth, a citizen, was a seventy-year-old sous-chef at an upscale place just marginally in the zone. He was discarded.

Immigration faxed the paperwork. Of the three, only one fit the profile. His name was Ricardo Ulat, from Mindanao originally, thirty-six years old, a dishwasher at a popular Indian restaurant just across the street and down half a block from the Zabol. He had been in the country a little over six months. But it turned out he lived at the same address in a suburban town bordering the city called Pikesville as one of the other, older immigrants. Possibly they were uncle and nephew or cousins? There were no legal problems, though the house had been raided once in 2002 in a search-futile, as it turned out-for Filipino illegals.

Pikesville wasn’t in Baltimore but some other entity called “Baltimore County” with a separate police force. New phone calls, new introductions, new arrangements had to be made, but ultimately, the county police input showed no complaints against the house, no altercations or police visits or calls, no trouble. The Filipinos were very good visitors. A traffic ticket for the older Batujong, that was all. The cops put Nick and Bob and the team in touch with the commander of the county police station, responsible for Pikesville and an old hand there, and he gave them a rundown on speakerphone.

“The neighborhood used to be Jewish when Baltimore was the Jerusalem of the East Coast. Lots of big old homes, built by prosperous business owners, bankers, furriers, restaurateurs, that sort of thing, at the turn of the century through the twenties. It’s now what you call a ‘changing neighborhood.’ It’s about sixty percent black, forty percent what we’d call ‘mixed ethnic.’ Real estate has been depressed for a few decades as the rich people move farther out. One of the things we’ve seen is a kind of ‘rooming house’ phenomenon. A restaurant guy, who depends on cheap labor, some of it possibly illegal, will buy one of these big old arks at low cost, do absolutely nothing to fix it up, and turn it into a kind of dormitory for his low-end labor force. With some of these, you’ve got continuous problems that generate a lot of complaints, fights, drugs, parties, noise, trashed property, sometimes a killing, which requires a lot of police activity.

“The Filipinos, though, are different. Never a fight, never a party, no drinking hardly at all, very tidy, lawn is always mowed, no rubbish anywhere. You’d never be able to tell that 1216 Crenshaw has ten occupants, all single. These are usually rural guys; they’re not from the big, crazy cities like Manila or Cebu, they’re not sophisticated and criminally inclined. What they do, they get the visa, they sign up with an employer, a restaurant guy who needs the cheap labor, and they come over here for seven years. It’s pretty awful, living four to a room in a country whose language they don’t speak and whose culture they don’t even get. But they work hard, live very simply, and manage to send home a pile of money. They’re really helping out their families. After the seven, very few of them jump and go illegal; they go back, having done their duty, and another family member comes over. So what you’ve got at 1216 is just that, a houseful of very quiet, hardworking guys without English skills at any level who just want to go home.”

Nick said, “Captain, we may want to raid tomorrow morning at dawn. These guys work late, and our best bet to nab all of them is early morning. I’ve got people at the federal level trying to get a search warrant, I may have to bring Immigration in, but I’m wondering if you’d provide perimeter security for our team, and if we need it, I’m hoping you could make a phone call to a local prosecutor on our behalf, and we’d go in under your flag. It’s not a hard bust, a kick-ass raid. I don’t want to disturb or harass these guys, but I need to contain them totally, and run a careful search for a possible terrorist suspect of Filipino heritage. This seems like our best possibility for apprehending him, if he’s there.”

“Sure,” said the commander. “Happy to.”

“I’m going to give you over to Special Agent Matthews,” Nick said, “for further coordination and logistical requirements.”

He handed the phone off.

“Okay,” he said, “Swagger and I are going to drive out there discreetly and take a look. You guys get on with the planning; again, let me emphasize, this is about containment. I don’t want any battering rams or flash-bangs, I don’t want any SWAT monkey suits or MP5s and Ninja Commando Force 9 bullshit. I want a lot of people in civilian clothes, wearing comfortable shoes and FBI raid jackets, I want to flood that zone, I want it all to go smooth and quiet and I don’t want any of these subjects to have cause to complain of police harassment, is that clear?”

THE 1200 BLOCK OF CRENSHAW AVENUE

0130 HOURS

Bob and Nick sat in Nick’s government-issue Crown Victoria, across the street and four houses down from the big dwelling at 1216, which just sat there in Gothic splendor, a many-turreted old beast of a house that had to have been built by a jeweler or a dry-cleaning magnate of the century before. Trees overhung the streets, and the houses, all of them big and most of them dark, were smothered in landscaping-though it was shabby and overgrown, as the original owners, with their American dream of success, had long since moved on, and the inheritors didn’t pay as much attention to the details. It was actually only a few minutes’ drive from the FBI office via a one-exit trek on the beltway. But Bob didn’t like sitting there.

“I don’t advise parking here.”

“I want to see if there are any surprises. We have the house plan, we have satellite photos from National Reconnaissance satellites, but I want to make sure no doors or windows are boarded up, or there are any new entrances. Relax. It’s dark.”

Nick was examining the property through his own night vision binoculars, and taking notes.

“This guy has radar for aggression,” said Bob. “That’s how he’s stayed alive so long. If he’s in the house, he’ll note that we pulled up and nobody left the car. Maybe he’s got binocs on us right now.”