Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

The cell on the next seat rang.

Who knew his number?

“Hello?”

“Swagger?”

It was Susan Okada. He felt a little spurt of something. Not big, but not small: something.

“Hi,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Listen, I’m in the ladies’ room of the Four Seasons. On your behalf I’ve just spent too long with a bitter asshole named Dixson who’s high in Afghan but wants to be higher.”

“You poor thing.”

“It wasn’t easy. And it’s not done yet. But I want to get this to you. I think, from several things he’s said, I’ve figured out the meaning of ‘Pentameter.’”

“I looked it up. Some kind of measure of verse, ain’t that it?”

“Shakespeare wrote in ‘iambic pentameter,’ yes, which has to do with the number of ‘feet’ or beats to the line. That number is five. That’s really what Pentameter means: five.”

“Like the sides of the Pentagon?”

“That’s it. Or, in this case, five senior intelligence officials who are vested with the power to call a Pentameter shot. One of them had to order the hit on that hotel. One of them wanted Ray Cruz dead in a hole in the ground. It could be no one else.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Not, surprisingly, the director. He’s a political appointment and he showed good judgment in declining the offer because he didn’t want to make a real-time call without the background. So: the three in the Agency are the assistant director, the director of plans, i.e., ‘Operations,’ and Afghan Desk himself. Outside the Agency, in the Administration, are the National Intelligence director and the president himself, though Dixson says the president doesn’t seem really engaged on the issue and probably wouldn’t let himself get involved.”

“Okay. Four guys. Great.”

“I’m going to work on ways to smoke out one of these four guys.”

“Well, we’ll see if we have an investigation. We went to the FBI bigfoot and he said he had to share with the Justice Department and he fears they’ll close us down.”

“Maybe we can at least get Ray Cruz out of the hot seat,” she said.

“That would be something, I guess,” he said. “Anyhow, thanks.”

“Anything else?”

“Okada-san, as usual, you are terrific. Sorry I’ve been a jerk. For some reason I’m too close to the edge on this one and I’m all cranky and smart-ass, quick to go mean and rotten. It’s just me. It don’t mean a thing. Sorry I’m such a jerk.”

“Some are born jerks” she said, “some have jerkhood thrust upon them, and some mature into rich and vibrant jerks. You are all three.” She hung up.

He drove on, watching the skyline of the city reveal itself as he hit the beltway, looking a little like Omaha, without the fun parts.

He was totally unaware that a mile back, a Ford Explorer carrying three men and a lot of guns followed quietly, like a Reaper drone, silent, deadly, watching.

HOWARD AND 25TH

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1400 HOURS

Swagger sat in the sunlight under a crisscross of flapping pennants strung on wires, as if at some kind of medieval fair, while the rented red Taurus was shipped through a long tunnel, squirted, sloshed, rubbed, spritzed, steamed. Soon it would emerge into a kind of courtyard here just off Howard, and a bunch of third worlders, Mexicans, Salvadorans, a few blacks, a few Asians, would fall upon it with a kind of intense rub-the-paint-off thing going on, and theoretically the car would emerge a few minutes later shiny as new and smelling of whatever, God knows, wafer-chocolate, spearmint, lime, fruit punch?-they hung by string from the rearview mirror. He guessed Ray was among them, but the scene was complex, with vehicles of all sorts-beamers, Benzes, SUVs, pickups, cabs-moving in and out, a substantial number of car owners drifting into the courtyard to watch, then tip the men with the towels, some kind of white foreman acting like a landing officer on a flight deck, trying to keep the whole chaotic process moving and prevent the overenthusiastic towel guys from banging the cars together as they moved them through the steps.

He watched the dripping car emerge, he watched an ad hoc crew assemble around it, as one guy steered it to an empty space and the others pounced. Like all the Mercedes owners and all the BMW owners but none of the cabdrivers, he drifted out to supervise, and bent in to point out one particularly loathsome rental car smear to a hardworking towel professional in an old Orioles cap, baggy jeans, and a Harvard sweatshirt, and the towel guy said, “So what’s happening, Gunny?”

“I didn’t recognize you,” said Swagger. “But I guess that’s the point.”

“I just look like any other little brown man in this place. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay,” said Bob, and summed up the last few days of investigations.

“I wish you’d quit this high-paying, prestige career, climb in the car with me, and we’d go to DC together now,” he concluded. “It would save a lot of trouble.”

“I’m not in this to save trouble. I’m in this to get some justice for Billy Skelton and all the other little people these motherfuckers stepped on, Sergeant. You know that, so don’t even ask me.”

“Stubborn bastard. Okay, you tell me. What’s next? Please, please don’t do nothing at Georgetown. You do that and I don’t think I can help you. We are almost there, Cruz. I’m betting the time you do won’t be nothing, you can have your life back, you can-”

“I still have a death sentence, Sergeant. For all I know, these guys could put a Paveway on me right now. They’d kill everyone you see here to take me out. Collateral means nothing to them. I’m appreciating what you’ve done, but we won’t be there until I get some kind of solid assurance I am off the bull’s-eye, that whoever set this thing up is the one doing the time, and that the contractors who filled all those body bags are somehow dealt with. In prison, preferably in the ground, but I don’t care. It’s not about me getting my life back, it’s about payback.”

“Jesus, you are a hard-case sonovabitch.”

“Here,” said Ray, handing over a cell phone. “Hit one and it rings me. You keep me in the loop, I’ll keep you in the loop. I know you won’t use it to track me. Now I gotta go. Saw a Benz coming through the line. Those guys are usually big tippers.”

And with that, he turned back to his wheel-trim-polishing career.

Bob slipped the cell into his pocket, got in and eased the car through the busy yard, then turned onto Howard Street and headed back to DC. Hell of a long way to go for a car wash.

24TH AND LEXINGTON (ONE BLOCK EAST OF

HOWARD STREET CAR WASH)

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1430 HOURS

There was no celebration. They were too coldly professional for that. It was simply time to get to work, and with this troublesome asshole, no chances could be taken.

Too chaotic a scene to snipe into. Too many bodies moving unpredictably here and there, the.50 Barrett on its bipod was more unwieldy than a plow, so tracking target movement under duress could be a bitch, and the.338 Lapua was only a little lighter; plus the courtyard was hemmed off from the street by a brick wall and all Cruz had to do was drop and he was under cover.

“Your basic raid deal,” Bogier proclaimed. “Go in shooting, get up close, put the fucking mags into him. Then we get the fuck out of town.”

“They’ll get a read on the license plate,” said Tony Z.

“That’s why when we get suited up, we go somewhere nearby and steal a car. We take the car to the scene. I take the car through the line, get the car washed. You guys are down the street a bit. When I have Cruz marked, I will give the signal. Crackers ambles down to the courtyard. I give another signal and the thing begins. I will close on him and full-auto his ass to itty little bits. Crackers, meanwhile, will buzz-gun the shit out of the car wash wonderland of Baltimore-”