Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Not me,” said Swagger. “I’m so damned perfect it’s thrilling. Never make a mistake. Always guess right. I know it sucks being around such a great human being, but there you have it.”

“Anyway,” said Nick, “our ambition has seduced us into attacking the conspiracy from the top down, hence the little drama at CIA today where we could eyeball the boys to try and find a tell, a giveaway. But you don’t attack a conspiracy from the top down. Its top is too protected, too entrenched, its leaders are too smart and experienced. You have to attack it from the bottom up. We have to see this as a crime and we have to deal with it as a crime. And how do you crack a crime? How do you bring down the Corleone family?”

Well, everybody knew, but clearly Nick was riding this one for all its dramatic potential, so neither Swagger nor Okada said a thing.

“It’s like Afghan Desk said. You bust the little guys. You turn the little guys. You plea them out, get them to testify, even if you have to immunity their scurvy asses. You use the littles to get at the bigs.”

Susan wasn’t quite with him. “I don’t see where-” she started.

“The contractors!” said Nick, so pleased with self and idea, so excited. “We have to take them! It’s our best move. Bust them, play them off against each other, get one or the other to break. Use that to go to the next level.”

Swagger was a no-buy. “Nick, are you sure? Those boys are big-time tough, fast to guns, not afraid to kill or to die. Pulling them in won’t be no easy thing. Scary guys.”

“Well, if they scare you, then, yes, they are scary. But here’s the move. First, you have to get some kind of commitment from Cruz to back off on Friday night. His presence completely fucks things up. If that’s settled, we can get a good SWAT guy to play him and we can set up a scenario. A phony hit at Georgetown on Zarzi. We arrest our fake Cruz. We make a big deal of it on scene. But the point of the op is to lure the contractors in tight to make the hit on our fake Ray Cruz. We’ll work out details and craft later, but when they make their hit-”

“What happens to the poor guy playing Ray? No body armor’s going to stop a.50.”

“We will handle that. The man will know the risks going in. Hell, I’ll take that job if I have to. Anyhow, the deal is, when they make their hit, our real trap is sprung. We’ll have stand-by teams hiding all over. We’ll flood the zone, we’ll apprehend the shooting team, and we’ll go to work on them. These are hard-core individuals, as you say, rock and rollers, action heroes. They are not guys to like the idea of spending the rest of their lives in some cesspool of anal sex and boyfriends as girlfriends. They’ll turn, I swear.”

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “They might be harder to take than you think. You might end up with a Baghdad city fight on your hands.”

“Swagger,” said Susan, “listen to him. Cowboy, brave as you are and no matter how it kills you to put someone else in a kill zone, the truth is, we don’t have another move. We cannot go directly against the Agency. We have been so ordered. We are stuck going around to legal back doors for months. This is a way of back-dooring the process.”

“Are you aboard? I need you both aboard. I need you Gung Ho, Semper Fi, the truth shall set you free, all the way. Okay?”

“I guess so,” said Swagger.

“What’s going on? I can see the something in your eyes. It looks like fear to me. I’ve never seen it in your eyes.”

Swagger said, “Well, it’s fine for you to volunteer to play Ray Cruz, or get some guy to play Ray Cruz. But that won’t work, you know it and I know it. These guys have been hunting him for months. They know how he moves, how he thinks, they’ve had him in their scopes, they see him in their nightmares, they fought him at muzzle-flash range in Baltimore. You ain’t putting any stand-in into place for him and making it work. You know that, I know that.”

Nick said nothing.

“Uh-oh,” said Susan. “I see where this is going.”

“So I’m the one,” said Bob, “who has to sell Cruz on playing Cruz. I have to get him to trust us-me-not only enough to turn himself in but to put his ass on the bull’s-eye with Mick Bogier’s trigger finger six ounces away from sending him to hell.”

Again, silence from Nick.

“And you know and I know and everybody knows that these things always break in odd and unpredictable ways, that you can plan till you’re goddamned purple, and not plan right. And you can’t say: ‘Ray, you’ll be all right. I guarantee it.’ There ain’t no guarantee.”

“To some degree,” said Nick, “it is his job. If he wants justice for Whiskey Two-Two, this is a risk he has to take. But you’re right: no one says it’s easy, it’s safe, and no, no guarantees.”

“It always comes down to one guy out there in the bush on his lonesome,” said Bob. “Then, now, forever. Same as it ever was.”

WILSON BOULEVARD

ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA

1630 HOURS

Swagger finally put in the call.

It rang and rang and rang. No answer.

Where was he?

But then came a knock at the door.

Swagger peered through the peephole, then opened up.

“Jesus Christ, you were here all along?”

“Nah,” said Cruz. “I moved in this morning.”

“How did-”

“A friend did some TDY for the Bureau some years ago. He told me they put him up here. I came, I sat in the lobby, I followed. You were careless. I came up in the elevator after you and saw you go into your room. Then I went to my room and waited. I like to know where the people hunting me are quartered. You never know what might come in handy.”

“I’ll say this, Sergeant Cruz, you are good in ways I never even thought of. Now sit down. We have some talking to do.”

Cruz sat. He was in a polo shirt, jeans, some kind of running shoes, and wore the Ravens purple baseball cap. He could have been any slightly exotic early middle-aged guy who hit the gym a lot, kept the belly off, and moved efficiently, like a man in shape.

“Look,” Swagger said, “this ain’t my idea. But it’s a good idea. I want you to listen to it and consider it. Don’t say yes or no right away.”

“I’m listening.”

Bob laid it out, though he didn’t cover the issue of who would play the fake Cruz.

“I have to come in, that’s what you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“And suppose I do that, I’m off to a federal holding tank and the next thing you know I’m under arrest for any one or all of the dozen things I am guilty of. And they say to you, ‘Thanks, asshole, you did a good job suckering the jerk in. Now get lost.’”

“It won’t happen that way.”

“How do you know?”

“I know Memphis. I’ve been in a gunfight with Memphis next to me. He’s alive today because I made a fast shot on a real bad guy in a parking lot in Bristol, Virginia. He got his promotion to assistant director because I made some good shots on a quartet of Irish snipers in Wyoming. He wouldn’t sell me out. It goes even further back, to the early nineties, not worth telling about. He’s quality.”

“How do you know the Asian woman won’t run back to CIA and say this is happening and the Agency sets up some counterplotting to screw me? After all, I represent nothing of help to them and a whole lot of harm.”

“Because I cut the head off a fat Yakuza bastard who was about to take her down. Then I fought the best swordsman in Japan and cut him near in two. Blood like a river, everygoddamnwhere. Worst fight I’s ever in. Nightmares about it, every night. Anyhow, she got Tokyo head girl and now she’s in line for deputy director. These people owe the old man a thing or two. I ain’t bragging, I don’t brag; but it’s so.”