Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “These are professional people. They don’t go around bends. I will make certain delicate inquiries, but my accessibility itself has been threatened by this episode. They’ll all know we had a shot at Cruz and whiffed. That doesn’t help, Swagger.”

  Delicacy! Swagger wanted to say: Are you here for them or for us? Is your job the truth or is it to protect your bosses? But he couldn’t. She had stood hard for him and gone into battle with swords for him. She had brought him the rest of his life in the form of his daughter, Miko. She had nothing to prove to him.

  “Susan, I will obey any policy you say. I’m sorry if I suggested otherwise. You can count on me not to betray you or disobey you.”

  She nodded. Then she said to Nick, “Look, let me talk to him alone.”

  “Sure, but no necking on company time.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Susan, “count on the Bureau for laugh riots.”

  But she turned to Bob once they were alone.

  Her gaze was steady, as it always was, her face annoyingly perfect. Her hair looked a little mussed, and of course that made her seven or possibly nine times more attractive.

  “Look, this isn’t easy,” she said. “I am well aware that they put me here because we worked together before and I get a sense, once in a while, that you seem to like me a little. They know that, they’re using that, just as they’re manipulating me through the fact that I never met a cowboy with brains before until I met the old dog. Cowboys are cheap, but the smart ones are one in a million. So don’t think I don’t feel whatever it is we’re not supposed to talk about. But, Bob, I have to cover for the Agency. I married it, it’s my husband, everything I ever got I got from it. It’s my Marine Corps. I know its follies, its pretensions, its weaknesses, how many of its people are self-infatuated fools. But it is necessary and it is the only one we’ve got, so no matter how many times I remember when Samurai Swagger kicked in the door and faced off with that creepy Yak and sent his head in the direction of Sevastopol, I have to pull back to my loyalty to the Agency. Okay? You have your code, Semper Ho and Gung Fi and all that, and I have mine.”

  “I’m hearing you, Okada-san. You were a hell of a case officer.”

  “Get some sleep, cowboy. We need you on two legs and a horse.”

  He smiled—a little—through cracked lips.

  Nick stepped back in.

  “Okay,” he said, “old friends’ time officially over. Bob, we will forward any info we develop to the state police detectives—they’re waiting for your statement, by the way—who have to solve this case. In the meantime, we will continue our pursuit of Ray Cruz. We need you in Washington to read the possible shooting sites. Be on our team, be our friend, okay? As Ms. Okada says, rest a few days, wait till the ringing stops and you only look like a tomato and not a grapefruit, and come back to work. Is that clear?”

  Bob said yes, knowing secretly that he would never leave this case till the end, if it killed him—or anybody else.

  He had to find out: who was trying to kill Ray Cruz?

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  THE 600 BLOCK OF NORTH CHARLES STREET

  OUTSIDE THE RESTAURANT ZABOL

  MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT

  1530 HOURS

  A FEW DAYS LATER

  It had to be Baltimore. The thinkers at the various agencies, offices, bureaus, and departments all agreed. They discounted the Meet the Press site because, although the studio had a transparent rear window to show the dome in the background, the material was high-strength ballistic glass through which no bullet could penetrate and the only shooting location would be in public, somewhere on Capitol grounds, even up a tree, impossible to hide. The White House was also a no-go, as security was extraordinary, and that night, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Washington Metropolitan Police would be out in abundance. No sniper could get close enough. The speech at Georgetown was in the center of buildings that could be easily controlled for access.

  Just as important, the three Washington sites were terra firma for security people, who knew every nook, cranny, crack, and fissure in the zone. It would be extremely hard to penetrate without an elaborate set of false documents that were almost certainly outside the reach of lone gunman Ray Cruz, who was a singleton, without elaborate intelligence professionals backing him up. The cordons in all three cases would be tight with choke points everywhere in a city that was used to and unfazed by choke points and presidential security.

  That left Baltimore, and a neighborhood of aspiration called Mount Vernon, after the square that dominated it. The site centered on a civilian restaurant on a main thoroughfare, plenty of ingress and egress, hundreds of windows. Baltimore was terra incognito, open ground, untested, just as new to the Secret Service as it was to Ray Cruz. It so happened that Ibrahim Zarzi’s brother Asa owned an extremely successful restaurant much favored by the city’s many academics and medical personnel, where lamb kabobs, rice, red wine, and squares of unleavened bread were served; colorful knit garments hung on the walls; and the photos of wily, craggy Pashtun faces gave the place a touch of the Hindu Kush without the danger of an IED, which was for marine L/CPLs to face on MREs in unarmored Humvees. So if Cruz was going to take the fatal shot and send Zarzi to his next destination, it would have to be somewhere along Charles Street, two or three blocks each way from the restaurant, as the Great Man was hustled into or out of the building.

  Bob walked the street with two Secret Service snipers, their supervisor, the Baltimore police SWAT commander, and Nick. The swelling blowing up the left side of his face had subsided and left a dappling of pinkish-red-yellowish bruise, and a jagged strip of bandage tracing the severing of his flesh on top of the cheekbone. Enough, already, with the “You should see the other guy” line of patter from the guys, though he took it in good spirit, and settled on the comeback, “That was no lady, she was two hundred pounds of steel desk.” Ha, ha, and ha. But all that ended with the initial discussions at the Baltimore FBI offices in a nondescript building just outside the beltway. Now, by caravan, they had reached the prime zone.

  It was one of those new urban American paradises, a reborn street in a once crummy zone that had found life hoping to mimic the European model, with low old buildings of stone turrets or copper wainscoting, each with a shiny set of retail opportunities at street level, trees in full leaf, sidewalk cafes, restaurants in various ethnic flavors besides Afghan, including Mexican, Chinese, gay, Indian, sushi, and snarky boho. It was very la-di-da, maybe even a little tra-la-la; it looked a lot like Paris, if you’d never been to Paris. At one end, a block from the Zabol’s facade, was Mount Vernon itself, a cruciform city park with trees. Each of the arms of the cross shape extended a block and offered a meadow, a line of trees, walkways, and benches. At the center of the cross rose a 200-foot-tall marble pedestal, and on top of it a man, also of marble, stood and looked the other way.

  “Who’s the general?” asked Bob, noting the marble figure’s tri-corn hat.

  “Washington,” said the SWAT commander. “This was the first monument to him, 1820 or something. The joke is, he’s extending his arm, and from a certain angle, if you look up, he’s got the biggest dick in the world. Father of his country.”

  All the security pros laughed.

  “Great shooting spot,” said the Secret Service sniper, “but I’m guessing we’ll seal it up real tight on game day.”

  “Nobody goes near it.”

  “So the normal drill,” Bob said, “is control over street and vehicle traffic, countersnipers on rooftops, all windows sealed, airborne surveillance, all tied together on one channel?”

  “That’s it, Gunny,” said the Secret Service supervisor. “Do you want to see the maps or read the mission plan?”

  “No.”

  “This guy is really good, huh?”

  “He can shoot a bit.”

  “What’s your take?”

  “He’s got something you’ve never been up against and he’ll use it against you.”

  “An
d that is?” asked the supervisor.

  “He’s got a great standing offhand. Not many do. What that means is that unlike anyone you ever heard of, he don’t need a ‘lair,’ a ‘hide.’ He don’t need a long look at the target, a ranging laser, ballistics tables, wind gauges, and the time to compute all the dope, followed by quiet to gather, concentrate, and deliver, as every sniper everywhere in the world does. Even with a top-of-the-line iSniper911 he’d be slower than with his offhand. He don’t need a calm zone. Nope, not him. He don’t need to be at a bench or prone on bipod. He’s much more flexible and unpredictable. His main thing is concealing the weapon, and he might even go to a short barrel, I mean abnormally short—”

  “What about a scoped handgun?” asked the Baltimore commander.

  “I’m sure he’s damn good with a handgun,” said Bob, “but he spent last summer working hard on his standing. He can probably set himself, go to rifle, fire, slide the rifle back undercover, and make any shot out to two hundred yards, all in one second. Any one of these folks could be the shooter.” The streets were not crowded but were steadily negotiated by people of all ages, shapes, costumes, and inclinations, and it didn’t take too much imagination to see an old man, say 150 yards down Charles, as a guy able to whip out that short-barreled rifle, put the one shot into Zarzi as his guards hustled him out, full of lamb and wine, to the armored limo. It would be a near impossible shot for even the most trained sniper, but Ray’s extra abilities, his hard operational background, his intensity, made anything possible.

  “Is he a suicide guy?” one of the Secret Service snipers asked.

  “Nothing would indicate that,” said Bob. “He’s a sniper, marine style, trained to execute, yes, but to survive too. We don’t train our people to give it up for the kill. The point is to kill the other guy.”

  “Yet what would he get out of survival? We know who he is and even if he makes the shot and all of us lose our jobs”—they laughed—“and he escapes, what has he got? A few days before he’s run down, then either the rest of his life in jail or some legendary last-stand gunfight that gets him in the history books, but also the ground. He might see that as a glory ride.”

  “He’s not a glory boy. He ain’t looking to get his name in the papers, like some mall psycho,” said Bob. “He’s raised a good Catholic boy by good Catholic parents, on an American naval base in the Philippines, and to him suicide, like betrayal and murder, is a sin. He’s not no Moro, he ain’t high on hemp, he’s not no run-amok guy with a machete; everything he does is controlled, calm, graceful, quiet. He’s still following orders. You don’t notice him until it’s too late. The kill would be enough, and in his mind, he’s executing the perfect counterterrorism operation, he’s a hero preventing something else much worse from happening. He’d shoot, then surrender. Then he makes his case in court. He goes into everything he believes about his team being betrayed, he gets a high-profile attorney who’d lay subpoenas on the Agency and the National Security adviser’s office. He’s probably already made his notes and contacted his big-deal lawyer.”

  “What all this suggests,” Nick said, “is that if he makes it to Charles Street, we’ve already lost. We have to find him before he deploys that day. We have to find him where he’s gone to ground.”

  FOUR SEASONS HOTEL

  SUITE 500

  M STREET NW

  WASHINGTON, DC

  1335 HOURS

  THE NEXT DAY

  The Great Man arrived, by limo, from Andrews. Cops on Harleys; Secret Service gunboat SUVs; Army aviation overhead butter-knifing through the air, scaring off the news choppers; Agency handlers, gofers, commo experts, and upper-floor reps, the whole train about a mile long, tying up traffic for hours. Too bad for the unsuspecting citizen caught in it.

  Ibrahim Zarzi, warlord and patriot, boulevardier, seducer, smiler, toucher, gourmand and oenophile, clotheshorse, called by Page Six the “Clark Gable of Afghanistan,” and possible Our Man in Kabul, got out, accompanied by a number one factotum and two Agency functionaries, and was immediately surrounded by the Secret Service Joes from the following Explorer who were designated to take the shot meant for him. And they would too, because that was their job, even if this shady character had once been known as “the Beheader.” All that was in the past, everybody hoped, in a different lifetime, in a different world.

  Flashes strobed, suave TV reporters oozed against the ropes that restrained them, attempting to look cool and hot and concerned all at the same time, but Ibrahim Zarzi was rushed by them with no time to answer the shouters.

  He was an extremely handsome man, about fifty-five, with a thick head of dark hair, nicely graying temples, a brush-cut Etonion’s mustache, and piercing dark eyes that showed off his blindingly white teeth. Omar Sharif, anyone? He looked like, among other things, a polo player, a bridge champion, a scratch golfer, a man who’d killed all five of the dangerous game species at record trophy size, caught some really big scary fish, a man who had bedded many a blonde in his pied-à-terre in Paris and in his rooms in London, shrewd, ruthless, narcisisstic, and a total watch slut.

  Today, he’d gone with the Patek Philippe Gondola, in gold, muted, with a black face and roman numerals, as well as a single black sapphire cabochon on top of the winding stem. It was about an inch by an inch, secured by a crocodile band. It set off his blue, pin-striped Savile Row suit, immaculately tailored, his crisp white Anderson & Sheppard shirt with Van Cleef & Arpels cuff links in tasteful onyx, and his black bespoke oxfords from J. Cobb, one of White Street’s more discreet custom shoemakers. His face was brown, his tie was red (solid; he knew when to stop), and his watch was black. He dressed from the watch out.

  “I think I will change to my gold Rolex for dinner,” he said to Abba Gul, his assistant. “And, since it will be informal, my blue blazer—”

  “The double breasted?”

  “Hmm,” said Zarzi, contemplating the choices, “yes, and an ascot, the red-gold-blue Seventeenth Royal Hussar, I think. A blue shirt, the gold Tiffany cuff links, gray slacks, and that nice pair of cordovan Alden tassel moc loafers. White silk socks, of course.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Gul, who never had to write anything down, who never made a mistake, who understood the Great Man’s moods, needs, pleasures, agonies, ups, downs, wants, and occasional squalls of self-lacerating doubt. “It shall be done.”

  Zarzi did not acknowledge the man, who was from a family that had served his own for 250 years, after the first Zarzi, Alazar the Terrible, had swept down from the mountains with his band of fierce Pathans, said to be descended from the fierce Shinwari tribe, driven out the people of the flatlands and all their pretty poppies (or executed them by hanging them upside down from trees and cutting an incision from this hip bone to that nipple), and taken over Zabul, making Qalat its capital. The Guls made themselves useful to the Zarzi clan and were allowed to prosper.

  A hotel personage said, “Sir, this way,” after the man had been vetted by the Secret Service, led through the phalanx of Agency goons, and passed muster with the two bodyguards trained to give up their lives in an instant for the Greatness of Zarzi, “and I hope you enjoy your stay.”

  “I’m sure I will, Mr. Nickerson”—he’d noted the nameplate, part of his conspicuous charm being that he learned names quickly and never forgot them—“and I love the hotel. Please tell the florist”—he gestured to the sprays and waves of flowers decorating the lush central corridor of the place—“that he has done well, and please have a thousand dollars’ worth of flowers sent to my rooms today and every day.”

  “It has already been done, sir,” said the oily, professionally obsequious Nickerson, known to the others on the hotel staff as “the Greaser,” “exactly like last time.”

  “Most excellent,” said Zarzi.

  “You have the entire floor, sir,” said his Agency gofer, a minor handler with the Afghan Desk named Ryan, “and please, please, stay away from the windows. I can’t emphasize—”

  “Mr
. Ryan, you forget that Allah in his justice protects me and shall not permit any mischief to befall me. That has been decreed, as it has been decreed I am the one to lead my people out of darkness. I am a river to my people and I must—oh, dear, I believe I’m quoting Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia again. So easy to get caught these days with every peasant dog tied by tether to the horrors of Google and able to produce instantaneous correction.”

  “Ain’t it a bear?” said Ryan.

  “A bitch, in fact,” said the charmer.

  “You have a couple of hours. Then cocktails with three senators on the Foreign Relations Committee at Ms. Dowd’s place at the Watergate.”

  “And how is Mo? Is she still writing those delicious pieces twice a week?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good for Mo! She’s a jolly spitfire, that one! And tomorrow?”

  “The Agency all day, with Mr. Collins and our staff in Afghan.”

  “I hope the catering is good,” said Zarzi. “Burger King, double whopper, no fries. I prefer the McDonald’s French fry to the less-textured Burger King product. Surely some young CIA killer can be dispatched to McDonald’s for that.”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “A future president does not consume substandard French fries,” he said majestically. “So vulgar.”

  “I’ll see to the catering, sir,” said Ryan.

  “It will be such a pleasure before eating at my brother’s restaurant in Baltimore tomorrow. It will be so nice to see him, but the food! Ugh, I cannot fathom how he sells it. You could find better in any village main street, cooked on a stove the size of a portable television by a barefoot old hag without teeth. Yet he has made a good living. Your press thinks me a scoundrel, Mr. Ryan. My brother is a true scoundrel!”

  “I look forward to meeting him, sir.”

  “I look forward to seeing him, Mr. Ryan. I loathe the idea of dining with him.”