Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Could he be forties? Cruz is forty-two.”

“Hey, I’m no expert. They don’t age like we do. He could be thirty, he could be sixty.”

Mick rooted around, came up with a briefcase, pulled it open, and pulled out a xerox of a photo of a marine sergeant in dress blues in a formal promotion shot. But the duplication had eroded its subtleties and it flowed weirdly toward the generic.

“That him?”

“Hell, Mick,” said Crackers. “It could be. I couldn’t say for sure.”

“God, I wish I’d hear from that motherfucker MacGyver. Where is he when you need him? Look again, goddamnit, tell me it’s him.”

Crackers examined the flimsy photo first in the dark, then in a bright cone of illumination from his SureFire. “Mick, maybe. I suppose. You know, some of them have distinctive faces, round, square, fierce, dumb, fat, thin, whatever. This guy looks like all of ’em, with some white thrown in.”

“Mick, let’s roust ’em,” said Tony Z. “Do it fast. If he’s there, we pop him, we leave. They won’t know what hit them. The fucking door isn’t even locked.”

“That’ll never work,” said Crackers. “We don’t know how many there are, how do we control ’em, we don’t have cuffs or blindfolds, we don’t have balaclavas, we leave prints, man, that is all fucked up. Plus, even if we have him full frontal in the flashlight, how can we be sure it’s him? We just won’t know.”

“Okay, junior,” said Tony, too intensely, “what’s your bright idea?”

“Sit, wait, and see.”

“Negative,” said Mick. “The feds may raid at any second, and when that happens, if he’s there, we have failed, we are screwed, all hell breaks loose.”

Both the team boys were silent.

“I don’t like it either,” said Mick. “But I’m not here because I like it and neither are you. This is what we do. The hard thing. For the right reasons. It sucks, but there you have it. I am open to suggestions for the next five seconds.”

Silence.

“Look at it this way,” said Mick. “You call in artillery, you get a coordinate wrong, a shell lands in a village. Too bad. Our war, their village. You don’t feel good about it, but that’s the price of doing business. Collateral is to be expected. We’ve all seen it.”

“Mick, I don’t know if I can do it,” said Tony Z.

“Sure you can,” said Mick. “You’re a cowboy. You’re a trooper. You’re a one hundred percent life-taking, throat-slitting, mother-fucking rockin’, rollin’ operator, baddest of the bad, meanest of the mean. You’re Ming the Merciless, got it? How ’bout you, laughing boy? I know you’re in.”

“I don’t like it either, Mick.”

“It ain’t about liking,” said Mick. “It’s about doing. Give me the fucking night vision. I’m in the lead, I’m on the gun.”

1216 CRENSHAW

PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND

0415 HOURS

Nobody liked it. It wasn’t a thing a soldier would ever brag about. It involved no heroics at all, just suppressed pistols. Mick did all the killing. They slipped into the house, Crackers in the lead with the night vision monocular. Mick just behind, with an untraceable M9 Beretta and a Gemtech suppressor. No kicking in doors, no shouting, nothing. They crept to the first floor and began to edge down the hallway, coming to a bedroom. Crackers pushed the door in, Tony Z, also with a suppressed M9, covered the six o’clock. Mick stepped in, target acquired, and fired.

One or two stirred when Mick hit them. The impacts puffed up little supertime geysers of fabric debris, maybe some blood misting into spray in the force of the considerable subsonic velocity. Mick shot for midbody. Nobody screamed. There were no scenes. Room to room to room. Crackers cupped his hand right at the breech of the weapon, so that each ejected casing struck his palm and was deflected downward. After the shooting in that chamber was finished, he scooped them all up. He also counted rounds. And he handed Mick a new mag. Room to room, floor to floor. The smell of men living together, of showers used a lot, of cigarette smoke. The sound of the heavy breathing in sleep.

One man looked up and Mick shot him in the face. He got to see the details, though not in Technicolor but in the muted tones of ambient light, by which the blood that coursed voluminously from the hole in the cheekbone was dead black.

It didn’t take long.

“You get ’em all?” Mick asked.

“You fired twenty-two times. I have twenty-two shell casings,” said Crackers.

“Okay, let’s extract.”

They left the house and walked to the car. Across the street, a smear of dawn was beginning to ooze across the sky. The air outside smelled fresh and clean.

“You drive,” Mick told Crackers.

“Got it, boss.”

“I feel like shit,” said Tony Z.

“Guess what, nobody cares what you feel like,” said Mick. “You did your job. That’s the important thing.”

1216 CRENSHAW

PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND

1115 HOURS

Most of the drama was over, though forensic technicians from both the Bureau and the Maryland State Police were still working inside the house. The bodies, ID’d and photographed in situ, had been moved to the morgue. Nick had released most of his team to change, chill, and then move to duty stations in Mount Vernon for that 2 P.M. to 5 P.M. ordeal. The convoy from DC into Baltimore was about to leave, but its trek from one city to the other was in Secret Service’s bailiwick, so Nick hadn’t yet begun to focus on the real business of the day.

He leaned against his sedan fender, across the street from 1216, numbly watching the action at the big house, whose lawn was jammed with law enforcement vehicles and clots of Baltimore county detectives smoking, joking, joshing as they broke it down. Meanwhile everything seemed draped with yellow crime scene tape, like a Christmas celebration. The press was cordoned off down the block and there was more activity there, with all the on-the-scene standups going on, than here.

Next to him, Swagger also leaned, a dull look on his face. He had the thousand-yard stare of the man who’d seen too much.

An agent came up to Nick.

“The last ID came through,” he said.

“And?”

“Dionysus Agbuya, thirty-nine, born in Samar, the Philippines. Employed at Johnny Yang’s Chinese Delight in Columbia, dishwasher, never missed a day of work. That’s it.”

“No Ray Cruz?”

“Not on the prelims. Maybe there’s a fake ID in there, but I don’t think so, Nick. One guy maybe looks-looked-a little like him. Maybe they made that one and thought they had a go.”

“Or maybe one of them hadn’t paid off the Manila syndicate that got him into the country. And this was a message it was sending to its other clients. You pay us first, then your family.”

“Maybe, Nick.”

“Thanks, Charlie. Didn’t mean to snap.”

“It’s okay, Nick. It’s been a long night for all of us.”

Nick took a sip of coffee, found it had cooled beyond the drinkable stage, and flung it out on the pavement.

Swagger said, “This is all wrong.”

“Murder is always wrong.”

“No, I mean the way this is happening. There’s a leak. In your outfit, in Susan’s, somewhere in the Bureau. These assholes keep showing up on us.”

“We don’t know that. It looks that way, but we don’t know it.”

“Come on, Nick. Everywhere I go, they’re there, either ahead or a little after. They’re pros. Barrett.50s, suppressed 9s, someone even has the thought to collect the brass.”

“Maybe they were using revolvers.”