Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

Cruz dug his feet into the ground and propelled himself forward, expecting to emerge into blue sky and the sight of two armed men with submachine guns about to dump mags into him, but instead he was unimpeded. Sirens sounded.

He pulled himself up, knowing that he was cut, abraded, bruised, scored, ripped, whatever in about two thousand places, just to see the two survivors hit their parked SUV and gun it to life. Coolly, one of the guys opened the door, cantilevered himself half in and half out and fired a burst. Ray tracked the trajectory of the burst until it splattered into the hood and grill of a blue-white first responder, and that police unit tanked left, hit a parked car, jarred itself sideways, hit another, and halted.

Ray thought, I should get a shot off, but by the time that imperative made itself clear, he was too late, and the SUV had zoomed away.

Silence. Steam rose, automobiles still ticked or issued death sounds, but there were no fires.

Go on, move your goddamned ass, he told himself.

He ran backward through the car wash complex, came to a cyclone fence, and scaled it. He climbed a hill to a railroad track, rolled down the other side, climbed another fence, came out into a yard, cut between two tiny houses. He didn’t remember replacing it, but the gun was back in the holster under his T-shirt. Now he did a neat thing. He pulled off his crimson hoodie and dumped it, to reveal a T-shirt, an orange-and-black long sleeved, proclaiming sans serif loyalty to a team named after a bird. He flipped his Orioles lid away and out of his back pocket came an all-purple ball cap, again with bird loyalty as its primary message. He strode on blindly, waiting for a cop car to pull him aside, but none did, though farther along, on a major street, he could see them rushing to the site of the gunfight.

At last he came to a bar. It seemed to be what you might call “old style,” meaning it attracted old Baltimoreans who remembered the town as a nesting place of grim taverns filled with smoke and grunge, a five o’clock city that worshipped Johnny and Brooksie. Everyone in the joint was fat and neckless and looked like they wanted to fight if you made eye contact-even the women. But it was also the sort of place where nobody noticed a thing. He found a place at the rail, ordered a beer, and watched the game. The Orioles won, 9-7 with a late comeback. It was pretty thrilling. Then he took a cab to another neighborhood, had himself dropped at the wrong address, cut through two yards, and found his car, untouched, where he’d left it fifteen or so hours ago. He got in, started the engine, and drove to his motel in Laurel. After a shower, half an hour of watching the gunfight and baseball coverage on TV, he called Swagger.

SUITE 500

M STREET NW

WASHINGTON, DC

2300 HOURS

Her neck was slender, her skin alabaster, her teeth brilliant and blinding. She wore jewels only a king could have given her. Tawny blond hair piled on top of her head in a cascade of swirls, torrents, and plunges, secured by pins and a diamond tiara. Her eyes were passionate, dewy. Do you want me? Then take me. Make me do bad things.

Too bad she was only in a magazine.

Zarzi put the thing down. He sat alone with his watches. He wore a silk dressing gown and an ascot, was freshly bathed, groomed, and powdered in all the delicate man places. Alexander’s blood moved in his veins, that was the original strain. But it had mixed over the generations with a thousand injections of mountain warrior DNA, possibly a Mongol element or two, since the odd squadron of Genghis Khan’s cavalry had surely passed through the valleys that nurtured his line, leaving memories of rapine and strapping progeny that combined with the odd brave European explorer’s, and finally with the entrepreneurs who turned the Western need for the poppy into billions. And it all climaxed in him, he the magnificent, he the extraordinary, he the potentate, the seer, the visionary.

“I want my Tums,” he called. “My stomach is aflame.”

A servant stole in and laid the two wonder tablets before him on a silver platter.

“Ah,” he said, delicately ingesting them, feeling them crunch to medicinal chalk beneath the grind of his strong molars. R-E-L-I-E-F, he thought, as the glow spread and the fires were quenched beneath the balm.

“Is that better, my lord?”

“It is,” he said. “For this alone, the West should be spared. Though I’m sure, like the airplane, the oil rig, the missile, and differential calculus, the antiacidic is originally an Islamic invention.”

The servant said nothing, the jest lost on him. Servants do not speak irony; they only speak obedience.

“Young man,” he said, “how old are you?”

“Twenty-three, my lord.”

“Do you fear death?”

“No, my lord.”

“Why are you so brave?”

“I know that Allah has a plan and if he wills it, I will die for him. It is written.”

“But suppose his plan is that you work in subservient positions until you are unattractive and all your teeth have rotted, and so your master sends you into the streets because you now disgust him. You become a bitter Kabul beggar and freeze to death in the mud and shit of an obscure roadway.”

“I… I had not thought of that, sire. But if that is his plan, then that is the life I shall have.”

“You young people, you assume glory lies at the end of every journey. But at the end of most journeys lie nothing but squalor and oblivion.”

“If you say so, sire.”

“Thus, given the chance, you would choose glory, no?”

“Of course, sire.”

“What if in the glory there was also death?”

“It is nothing, sire.”

“But you are nothing. I mean not to degrade you, after all, this is the West, one does not degrade another; but it is the truth, is it not? You, truly, are nothing. You live to bring me pills, flush the toilet when I have deposited, sweep up my toenail clippings, make sure my repellent underwear makes it to the laundry. That is not much of a life, so leaving it for glory would be an easy thing, would it not?”

Pain fell across the boy’s handsome face. He wanted to satisfy but was clearly not sure where satisfaction lurked. And he didn’t want to make a mistake. He said nothing, but looked as if he had sinned.

“Now I, on the other hand-exalted, gifted with beauty, wit, wealth, courage, the admiration of millions-which should I choose, glory but early death or banal but comfortable squalor unto forever? I have so much more to lose than you.”

“I am sure you would chose glory, sire. You are a lord, a lion, a true believer. You would do the right thing.”

The older man sighed. “The right thing.” It came so easily to the youth’s lips. At his simple age, “the right thing” was obvious and knowable. It was clear. But for the great man, as for all great men, too much wisdom and experience gave the meaning of “the right thing” a maze of filters and screens through which to negotiate. Thus, “the right thing” was not always so apparent.

“Here,” he said, “come with me.”

He led the boy to his bureau, upon which a hundred or so watches gently trundled to and fro.

“Do you have a watch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me see it.”

The boy peeled off a rather unimpressive low-end Seiko, built on a cheesy quartz movement from Switzerland manufactured in a huge, dreary plant full of Turkish emigrés for about a nickel, shipped to Japan, encased in clumsy stamped metal and low-grade plastic, then affixed to a thin leather strap by a Korean immigrant for twenty-four cents an hour, thirteen of which must be returned to her parents in Korea.