Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“You can’t suppress a revolver. All the shooting, no noise complaints, had to be suppressed fire. And you wouldn’t do a job like this if you had to fumble through revolver reloads in the dark. This was a kill team. They’d done it before, they knew what they were doing, and they were trying to put down Ray Cruz. They were the same boys who blew up the Steel Brigade Armory offices in Danielstown, South Carolina. And then as now they had a fucking tip-off. We weren’t followed, not through dark city streets at night with no other traffic on the road. We’d have seen it, just as I’d have seen it on dark country roads ten days ago.”

“It’s fabulous stuff, just what I’ve come to expect from you. You’re operating on a level way beyond what I’ve got. That’s your job. But I have to be practical and responsible. That’s my job. We have to collect, catalog, analyze evidence before we proceed to conclusions. We picked up some forensic markers. When the shooter slid through one of the doors, he brushed it with his head, left sweat traces. We’ll run that, and then, maybe-”

“There’s only one conclusion. Well, two. You have a leak. And I’m an asshole for coming up with some bullshit thing that got nine guys killed for absolutely nothing.”

“You’re an asshole because that’s your nature. You can’t help that. All you hard macho door kickers and life takers are assholes. Your thinking was A-one, solid, deductive, top-of-the-line law enforcement creativity. I told you, you have the gift. Nothing wrong with it. Don’t hold it against yourself. As for the ‘leak’ stuff, the time element argues against it. We hadn’t even heard of this house until eight o’clock last night. The requests for subpoenas, the reports to higher headquarters, all that stuff didn’t go out until much later. If something did get out or if there was a mole, how’d the other team put it together so fast? Man, that would be footwork.”

“The team is here, all set, with all the tools of the trade. All they needed was an address.”

“I say again, not likely. Nobody’s that good. They had to follow us, know we’d left-”

“They couldn’t have followed us. We’d have seen them.”

“You yourself ‘felt’ something last night. You have the operator’s weird nerve system that’s unusually tuned to aggression. They had to follow us.”

“Okay, then. Satellite. That’s the only way. If it’s satellite, then it’s CIA. CIA wants Ray Cruz dead before he tells his story and a bunch of people are assigned to look into it. CIA wants Ibrahim Zarzi to be the next president of Afghanistan, no questions asked, forget all that ‘Beheader’ stuff. He’s our man in Kabul. And CIA will want to protect him, even if it means targeting our own guy.”

Nick ceased being Nick. Instead, he became an assistant director of the FBI, in full dignity and severity, posture improved, face drawn into upper-Bureau solemnity.

“I am not making accusations against the CIA,” he said in policy-announcement voice, “until we have something to go on other than your theories. Going against the CIA means opening a big goddamn can of worms, and once the worms are out, you may never get them back in. We have to see where the evidence takes us. There aren’t any shortcuts.”

He looked at his watch and the old Nick came back.

“Come on, cowboy guy. We’re due on station downtown. In all this terrible bullshit, we’re forgetting: Ray Cruz is still out there.”

JUST OUTSIDE THE SHOOT ZONE

THE 900 BLOCK OF MARYLAND AVENUE

MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1650 HOURS

The boys had the blahs. They sat grumpily, without talking. Where was the banter, the wit, the snappy retorts, the fabulous esprit de corps of Special Forces operators? Wherever it was, it wasn’t here today.

Mick was in the off-driver’s seat, his big foot on the dashboard as he sat back against the seat. Man, he could use some shut-eye himself. This was, what, hour number forty-eight without sleep?

Crackers, in the backseat, said, “I am about to pass out.”

“If you do, I will kick your ass all the way to Washington. I need you on game, fully alert, concentrated. We don’t know what breaks next.”

“Easy for Superman to say. Superman has all the answers. Superman has no weaknesses, flaws, human foibles, neurotic conditions. But I am not Superman. I am Mere Mortal. And Mere Mortal needs to go to bed, sleep late, read the Sunday papers.”

“Drink some more coffee,” said Tony Z behind the wheel. The car was parked near a church with a red door and a steeple, one block west of Charles, that is, one block away from all the hubbub of the fabulous Ibrahim Zarzi’s visit to his brother’s restaurant, the Zabol, on Charles Street. From where they were-a block over, but with a parking lot’s emptiness granting a clear view of the shoot area-they could see the convoy of Secret Service Explorers parked in the street’s left lane, their blue-red gumball flashers spitting out blink-fast blasts of light, their windows darkened to hide the gunned-up agents just inside. Meanwhile the street was cordoned off by Baltimore cops; Secret Service, FBI, and news aviation orbited noisily in the ether a few thousand feet up, cops and Bureau boys in raid jackets with big FBI letters, snail cords leading to their ear units, and tactical holsters pinioned to midthigh were up and down the street, looking this way and that.

“The coffee lost its charm sometime yesterday. Anyway, he’ll never get in,” said Crackers. “If he did, he’d never get out. Which means he’d never go in in the first place. So I say we hit a motel and crash for a thousand or so hours.”

“Swagger’s still on the case, so we’re on the case,” said Mick.

He held the BlackBerry, and on its screen, with the map of Mount Vernon glowing as its template, a pulsing light that signified Swagger’s transponder responding to interrogative requests from satellite, blinked away brightly. The guy was less than a quarter mile away.

“He’s another Superman,” said Crackers.

They were low because the victim list from last night’s episode had just been released. Nine names, none of them being Ray Cruz’s. Nine guys taken out, no home run. A complete waste of energy and lives. Not a good day in professional-killer land.

Tony flashed his big tactical Suunto and read the time.

“It’s almost five,” he said. “This party’s breaking up. Where do we go?”

“We’ll stay with Swagger. When he beds down, we’ll bed down. He’s still our best-”

The satellite phone buzzed.

“Oh shit,” said Mick. “Now this guy is going to crap all over me for ten minutes. Man, when this is over, I would like to…” And he trailed off as he wearily hoisted the heavy communication device.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“Genius Bogier. You’ve heard, I assume. You missed him again.”

“Yeah.”

“You killed nine men who had nothing to do with anything.”

“No kids, no women though,” said Mick. “No suffering. It’s not like we tortured them.”

“How reassuring. What a humanitarian you are. Now tell me your thought process.”

Bogier went through the whole thing.

He lamely finished up with, “Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don’t. Last night, we didn’t.”

“A massacre. No one authorized you to massacre anybody. When this is over, I am getting you out of the country ASAP and I don’t want you back for twenty-five years.”

“Hey, there’s no forensics on us. No witnesses. The pistol’s in a river. No DNA, no hair samples, no footprints. We wore rubber gloves. We were clean, we were professional. Nothing leads to us from our end. Your end I don’t know about.”