Dead Zero Read online

  Laidlaw remembered him: he was a tall, stately man, handsome, always well dressed and exquisitely groomed, who favored Savile Row suits under beautiful lavender pashminas and an elegant if discreet fez of some kind of highly glossy material, possibly silk or velvet, neatly encompassing his silver-gray hair. His vanity was watches. Patek Philippe, Rolex, Fortis, Breitling, always something beautiful and complex. He had deep brown, extremely empathetic eyes.

  “Get ready to die, motherfucker,” said Exec.

  All eyes switched to Ray’s site on the roof, 230 yards out, revealed by the cruciform.

  At that moment, so hot it burned their eyes, so fast it had to be a phenomenon of explosive energy, a smear of white ruptured and radiated outward, sending waves of electronic disturbance across the screen and in another second the image itself wobbled crazily, as if a giant wave had reached and smashed into the light unmanned aircraft, disturbing its equipoise and threatening its survival.

  “S-Two, what the fuck was that?”

  “Detonation,” said S-2.

  PART TWO

  SEARCH MODE

  CASCADE MEADOWS, IDAHO

  32 MILES EAST OF Boise

  1515 HOURS

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  Julie came out of the office where she’d been checking the expenditures at the Missoula barn when she heard the racket, watched the horses jump and shiver in the corral. The helicopter settled slowly out of the blue western sky, and in its rude, invasive way kicked up dust and energy everywhere. It certainly was an impressive machine, a huge green hull with lots of portholes, a bubble canopy behind which sat two men in goggles looking very insectoid, landing gear, struts, insignia—USAF—under the great swirl of the blade at idle. It looked like it had emerged from CNN, on the television set.

  A hatch opened and, as she expected, it was her husband’s friend, a man named Nick Memphis, now a hotshot executive with the FBI. They’d been trying to reach Swagger for some time now, but he wouldn’t talk to them. He was sick of them and, in a way, of the world, or at least the world they represented. He no longer read anything but big, fat World War II novels from the forties and fifties. Television annoyed him, he hated his cell phone and the e-mail process, and wasn’t interested in iPods or iPads or whatever they were, BlackBerries, all those little electronic things. Hated ’em. Mostly all he did was work like a bastard around the place and take his daughter Miko to junior rodeo events, which she usually won or placed high in, proving to be, at twelve, a fearless competitor in the barrel race.

  But after Nick, another figure emerged, familiar and yet not immediately recognizable. She searched her memory and then it came to her. Trim, pantsuited, waves of raven-black hair, a certain elegance, Asian: yes, it was a woman named Susan Okada, a mysterious figure who had appeared from out of the blue nine or so years ago with a gift that had lightened everybody’s life and spirit—the child Miko. She knew without having been told that Susan Okada worked for that mystery entity that went by the three initials C, I, and A, and knew that if Susan were here, it meant, without being stated, that an old favor was being called in. Perhaps Susan’s presence established some principle of obligation, a call to duty, whatever. They needed him and there would be no turning them down this time.

  “Hi, Julie,” called Nick as he got to the house.

  “Nice ride,” she said.

  She hugged him, kissed him, and did the same to Susan: you could not but love a woman who had somehow gotten you your second daughter, through some magic hocus-pocus making the bureaucracy and the waiting and the traveling and the interviewing all vanish.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said to Susan.

  “I hear Miko’s turned into a rodeo champ.”

  “She knows what she’s doing on a horse. Of course we pushed the rodeo, thinking the horses would keep her away from boys, and we ended up with both horses and boys.”

  She drew them onto the porch and into the living room. It was a beautiful, big house, the house of a man of property and success. That was certainly Swagger. He’d become something a bit more than prosperous and now owned fourteen lay-up barns in six states, enjoyed referential relationships with the veterinary practice in those locales, the key to the whole thing, and really it was Julie, an organized and determined woman, who kept the wheels turning and the engine grinding forward into the black. The pension from the Marine Corps and the medical disability pay was only the frosting, ammunition money.

  But then she turned to Nick.

  “I know this is business. You didn’t come by helicopter for small talk.”

  “Sorry for the melodramatics, but you can’t get his attention any other way. He’s not even opening e-mail or accepting registered letters, much less phone calls. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think we had a real situation.”

  “I’ll go get him. And I’ll pack. I’m guessing you’ll be taking him with you.”

  “I’m afraid so, Julie. He knows the stuff and we need someone who knows the stuff. I know he’s sick and tired of us. I’m sick and tired of us. But still . . . it’s a real situation.”

  “And a tragic one,” Susan Okada added.

  Swagger, in jeans and a blue work shirt, sat across from them, his coffee untouched. He was sixty-four now and almost always in pain. The goddamned cut on his hip—exactly where all those years ago he’d taken the bullet that shattered the hip and almost killed him—had never really healed properly and gave him trouble every day. Yet the painkillers turned him groggy and he hated being groggy, so he just got through it. Riding horseback was a special agony, so he traveled most places these days by his three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, beneath a straw Stetson, much weathered, and a pair of sunglasses too cool, he thought, for such a worthless loafer. His hair had never turned white but stayed a kind of pewter gray, wiry like his old man’s, with a will of its own, and would only answer to butch wax; his cheeks had sunk for some reason and he thought he looked like a death’s-head, but when he saw how many men his age had turned to blobs, he supposed he ought to be grateful. He still had the face of some kind of Comanche warrior from some forgotten age; he still carried himself with regulation Marine Corps grace and posture, as some systems imprint so deep they never go away.

  “You’re a hard man to reach,” said Nick.

  “I’m not good for much,” he said. “That last one nearly killed me. I’m still tired from it. All I do is sleep or think of sleeping. Or dream of drinking. Can’t have a drop in the house, or I’ll suck it down. Been on the wagon thirty years and there ain’t a day I don’t miss it. Without all these damn women around, there’s no way I’d stay sober.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” called Julie. “He’s just playing the martyr to the choices he made himself. It’s not attractive.”

  “Let me lay this out,” Nick said. “Give it a listen, tell me if you don’t think you can contribute. Miss Okada’s agency got aboard when they heard what’s going on. She wouldn’t be here if this weren’t a situation.”

  Swagger looked at Okada, who other than an opening hug had said nothing to him. All that seemed so long ago: the mad, twisted run through the Tokyo underworld, the deaths by blade, the oceans of blood, the loss of some good people so tragic and hurtful even all these years later, and his own survival, the terrible luck of it, when he fought a man with swords who was a hundred times better than he was and somehow survived it.

  But there was this other thing. He had already lied: he said he dreamed of sleeping and drinking. But he also dreamed of Susan Okada. In ways that were too solid to be denied, he knew that she was The One. It just had to be, exactly as it never would be, their lives on different sets of railroad tracks heading in different directions, further separated by class, education, experience, levels of sophistication. So it could never, ever be and he’d never, ever act upon it, but at the same time, the unattainability, the taboo, the so-wrong-wrong-wrong of it made it delicious, a private, somehow comforting agony that he held close, telling no on
e. First thing he’d done, damn him, was to check her finger for a wedding ring and it was bare. That pleased him in ways he couldn’t have predicted and it also frightened him.

  “Hey, how come you’re not getting any older?” he said to her. “I turned into the cranky old neighbor in the dark house by himself and you’re still, what, on the cover of Vogue three times a year?”

  “Four, but down from five,” she said. “But you’re right, I am eternally twenty-eight, even if certain inaccurate documents insist I’m thirty-eight. And you still look like Hector on a break from a hard day’s night on the plains outside Troy.”

  “Them damned Greeks,” he said. “You cut ’em all down, and the next day, they’re back, just as pissed as before!”

  “Okay, guy,” said Nick. “I know you’re old, old friends. But let me get to the pitch. Here it is. And it’s why the Bureau and the Agency are working together, despite a long history of political animosity.”

  Nick leaned forward.

  “About six months ago, in Afghanistan, the Second Reconnaissance Battalion of the Second Marine Division, Twenty-second Expeditionary Force, operating in Zabul province, asked for and received permission to deal with—kill—a warlord local intel suggested was secretly allied with Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces. The marines were losing people in ambushes, IEDs, sniper attacks, and the like. It all led to this guy.”

  “Do I need to know his name?”

  “If you haven’t been watching television, his name won’t mean a thing to you, Bob,” Susan said.

  “So,” resumed Nick, “a sniper team was sent. Led by a very able guy. Idea was to mingle with the locals, come in from the Pakistani- border side of town, hit the guy with a rifle shot, and beat it before the locals got organized. The rifle was a Dragunov, expendable, untraceable.”

  “Got it.”

  “A day out, the team got hit. We don’t know what happened, but they were jumped by another sniper team and the spotter was killed, the commo equipment was totaled, the sergeant, we think, was hit.”

  “I’m guessing he didn’t turn back.”

  “You got that right. Very impressive individual. Your type of guy. You, in a way, twenty years ago at the top of your game. Gunny Sergeant Ray Cruz, full name Reyes Fidencio Cruz, forty-two years old, father a retired lieutenant commander, U.S. Navy, of Portuguese ancestry named Tomas Cruz, mother a Philippine national, Urlinda Flores Marbella. He grew up essentially on the big naval station at Subic near Cebu City, where his dad became head of the golf club as a second career. The kid should have been a pro golfer. Instead he became a sniper.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Pretty outstanding guy. Everybody wanted him to go to Annapolis, but he went to UCLA instead. A shooter. NRA junior champion small bore, three years running. Went distinguished in high power in a single summer before he was twenty. Talent with the rifles. High IQ. Good grades. Just the best.”

  “Not your country-boy sniper type. Why isn’t he running a software company somewhere?

  “Because his parents were killed in an auto accident and it really upset him. He joined the marines in ninety-one, won a batch of marksmanship awards, served with distinction in the first Gulf thing. He was offered commissions up the wazoo but wanted to stay a sniper. He thought it was a growth industry, I suppose.”

  “He was right.”

  “Was he ever. This is his fifth deployment after two in Iraq, two previous in Afghanistan. Hit twice, fast recovery. Incredible record all the way through. Now this is a guy who could have quit at any time, gone to work for big dollars at some security multinational. He could have taken a commission, retired a colonel, gone to work for GE or somebody. He could have started his own tactical school, run SWAT people and wannabes through for a thousand bucks a head a day and lived in the big house. He could have joined the Bureau, Secret Service, the Agency, State Department security, any outfit with initials instead of a name. Fool for duty. Stays operational, stays in the suck. Seems to love the suck. Goes out on this mission and gets whacked and keeps on going, full-tilt boogie.”

  “What happened?” Bob asked, loving the sniper already—where are we going to find more people like him?—and fearing the answer.

  “Somehow, again, we’re not sure how, he survived the first hit, he worked some fancy clever game on his pursuers and evaded them, and he made it to the target, but they were on his tail.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “He was carrying a GPS and transmitter and the satellite could track. At the battalion’s S-Two bunker they were getting a real-time feed from a recon drone the whole time. It was Monday Night Football. They have his signal at the shooting site at the time of the hit.”

  “He made the hit?”

  “There was no hit. There was a mysterious explosion. Thirty-one people died.”

  “That was on TV too,” said Susan.

  “Another night I must have missed,” said Bob.

  “The hotel—he was on the roof—was cratered. Nobody knows how or why. Missile? Doubtful, as we had no Reapers in the area—”

  “The drones are our program,” said Susan. “We had no missile activity at that time. I’ve gone over the records very carefully. Ugh, I went there, a princess like me, and talked to the on-the-ground people.”

  “Maybe your outfit even has secrets from you.”

  “This isn’t The Bourne Conspiracy, Swagger,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Gas-main explosion. IED,” continued Nick. “Ammo cache, bomb factory, nobody knows, and our forensics people weren’t invited in to go through the wreckage. The Dutch made an investigation, but I’ve seen it, it was poorly done, and they were clearly uncomfortable outside their protected compound. It’s wild and woolly out there. Maybe the blast was legit, we don’t know. Things explode in tribal Afghanistan all the time.”

  “And this Ray, he was blown up.”

  “That would seem to be the case.”

  “What a waste. Remind me again what we get out of this thing?”

  “No politics. Only cop stuff. And here’s where it gets interesting,” said Nick. “The blast seems to have seriously shaken the target, a fellow named Ibrahim Zarzi, also known as the Beheader. He left the city—Qalat—and moved to Kabul. He’s hereditary aristocracy, well educated, cosmopolitan, he’s got money, lots of it, don’t ask why or where it comes from. Anyhow, about this time, conditions in Zabul province improve, no more ambushes, no more bombings, and Second Recon makes it home with no more battle deaths. Everybody gets a promotion.”

  “And this guy Zarzi,” said Susan, “he suddenly becomes an aggressively pro-American player in Kabul. He makes overtures to State, they ask us to look into it, and we vet him up one side and down the other. Supposedly, he’s now clean, he’s broken all his old associations, walked away from the sources of his fortune.”

  “Drugs?”

  “He was dirty. Now he’s clean. We had him at a safe house in Kabul for a week, at his insistence, and polygraphed him, drugged him, interviewed him in English and in Pashto, Agency, FBI, DEA, State, everyone, did the full nine yards’ dance on him, and he comes up clean. Very attractive guy, he may be emerging as a candidate for president in the upcoming elections. We view that possibility as very encouraging and are working discreetly to make it happen.”

  “You can’t trust ’em,” said Bob.

  “People do change. It happens. We worked this bird hard and we believe he’s genuine. I don’t know how he could fake something like that and get it through all the vetting we laid on him. So our new policy is: you can trust them. The future depends on it.”

  “Maybe you’re seeing what you want to see.”

  “Fear of that remote possibility shouldn’t preclude our making full use of this development,” she replied. “The trust has to start somewhere or your daughter Miko will be serving in Kabul.”

  Bob grunted, signifying that he didn’t quite buy it. But the
n he moved on.

  “So what does all this have to do with me?”

  “As part of State’s initiative to upgrade Zarzi’s profile before the fall elections, he’s coming to DC in a couple of weeks. You might call it a sort of further test, see how he stands up to that kind of DC pressure. Lots of things have been laid on. Debriefings both at State and at the Agency, news conferences, speeches before the foreign policy Council, a big national talking heads broadcast, and finally a medal ceremony at the White House, where all the biggies will be in attendance. He’ll announce his candidacy for the presidency, and a big Mad Avenue firm will take over the election. He’s our man in Kabul.”

  “And?”

  “And Ray Cruz isn’t dead. He’s alive. He’s back. He’s all snipered up. And Ray Cruz has said he will finish his job. He will hit his target and complete Whiskey Two-Two’s mission. He’ll take Zarzi down.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “He told us.”

  UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

  RITZ HOTEL POOL DECK

  MIAMI BEACH

  1600 HOURS

  Pablo trundled discreetly around the pool with a wireless telephone on his tray. He wore a tropical shirt, white shorts, and sunglasses. He was a good find. He’d also connected Mick with several high-end hookers, a very nice supply of blow, and every third drink off the hotel’s books. Behind him, the glass, turquoise, and alabaster crescent of the building itself formed a bulwark against the offshore Atlantic breezes, so that even the palms were still. The sun sparkled off the pool’s glossy blue waters. Many young women in bikinis the size of thumbprints were lounging about and most of them would sneak a peek at Mick once in a while. No surprise, since he had the hard body of an NFL linebacker—muscles without fat, all of them nicely bunched and protuberant—and the tattoos were all professional and elegant and military, not jailhouse shit with crude images of Jesus bleeding out on the cross or some chick named Esmeralda woven into hearts and violets. Mick took another sip of his Knob Creek on the rocks as Pablo reached him and presented the phone.