“Sure, we’ll just go downstairs, talk shop, drink Pellegrino, and eat those little shrimpy things they have here that are so good.”
“If you touch my hand, I’ll stab it with a shrimp fork.”
“You’re so damned good at playing hard to get!”
HOWARD COUNTY, MARYLAND
95 NORTH TO BALTIMORE
1330 HOURS
Green country hurled by outside. Swagger drove, passed a town called Laurel where somebody had once tried to kill a presidential candidate, and closed the distance to Baltimore. In his pocket was an envelope. It had been delivered to the hotel suite that was his living quarters in Rosslyn that morning. He’d opened it to find nothing but an ad ripped out of a newspaper that read “Best Car Wash in Baltimore/Brushless Wash/Professional Detailing and Waxing/Howard Street Car Wash at 25th/Rain Check If the Weather Is Bad Next Day.”
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 STREET CAR WASH
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.
UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM
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—”
“Cool!” said Crackers.
“—and people will run like fuck. Tony Z pulls the SUV up and we jump the wall—”
“It looks like a pretty high wall, Mick.”
“You’re an Airborne Ranger, you can do anything.”
“I’m an old Airborne Ranger. It’s my knees. They aren’t what they used to be.”
“Just roll over it like an old man,” said Tony. “You know, hit it, swing your legs over. You don’t have to do any Hong Kong gangster shit.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Crackers. “That’ll work.”
“May I continue?” asked Mick. “Or are there other important areas of discussion you two would like to examine?”
“Sorry, Mick,” said Crackers. “I was just thinking about shit.”
“I hate it when you do that. No good can come of it.”
“But if I’m in the SUV, they’ll still get a read on our license plate.”
“Okay, okay. So . . . the car we steal, we trade plates.”
“Actually, it would make more sense if we stole two sets of plates,” said Crackers earnestly. “We steal SUV plates and we put ’em on our vehicle. We keep our plates. Wait, no, we steal SUV plates because they’re different from automobile plates. We put them on our wagon. Then we switch back to our plates.”
“Numb nuts, we have a .50 caliber Barrett in the backseat. I think that’s going to—”
“Jesus Christ, girls, this bicker-bicker-bicker shit has got to stop. We steal SUV plates and make the change. Then we steal a car. One pair of SUV plates, one car. Then we do it as I have laid it out. I take the car in, Crackers wanders down the street to the yard. I do the dirty deed, Crackers burns off a mag or two making holes, breaking glass and blasting pennants out of the air, his own private Fourth of July, and off we go in the SUV. I’m guessing nobody gets a read because it’s going to be thirty seconds of World War Three. But we do the plate switch just to be sure. Then, Miami Beach, here we come. Home free, a year’s vacation, lots of pussy and dope, some new tats, the life of O’Reilly.”
“Reilly. Not O’Reilly. He’s a TV guy.”
“O’Reilly lives plenty high enough for me.”
Body armor. An entire 9-mm trousseau including MP5s and SIGs. Randall fighting knives. Black wool watch caps. Danner Desert warfare boots. So Tommy Tactical. They looked really cool.
FBI HQ
DIRECTOR’S OFFICE
HOOVER BUILDING
PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
WASHINGTON, DC
1700 HOURS
The call came at five. Swagger was just back from a too hasty trip to the Georgetown site of Zarzi’s upcoming speech. He joined Nick in the director’s anteroom, and the two were beckoned in.
“Sit, sit,” said the director.
They sat.
“You guys look all frowny. Why the frowny faces?”
“It’s too fast,” said Nick. “If you had good news, there’d be an Agency liaison, two or three guys from Justice, and probably an Administration overseer. I’m not optimistic.”
“It’s not as bad as you think it could be. The key is, Cruz has to come in. Cruz has to come in, he will be placed under our protection, and he will cooperate. All charges against him will be held in abeyance. He will be placed on administrative leave from the Marine Corps, seconded to the FBI TDY, and he will give his material, under oath, to us and to Justice. At that point a determination will be made between the players, us, Justice, the Agency, and the Administration, as to whether or not we will progress with the investigation. I’m promised a fair and positive chance to make our concerns known and to build a case, and the Agency will cooperate. Evidently, there’s some in-house feeling over there that the Afghan Desk cabal has become too powerful policy wise, and this is seen as a way to take them down a few notches. You can have Okada on the team too, if that’s what you want. But Cruz has to come in. Can he be reached? I’m assuming one of you is in contact with him, because your stuff has to come from him.”
Silence, and then Bob said, “I may have a way to reach him.”
“I thought so. Swagger, once again you impress. I love the way he takes over our investigations, changes their objective and content, and advances them in another direction—fortunately for us, the right one. Oh, and once this is completed, you are to go home to Idaho and you are sentenced to the rest of your life in a rocking chair. Nick, I’ll get you another promotion if you agree to handcuff him to that chair.”
Swagger and Nick looked at each other.
“It’s pretty good,” Nick admitted. “I thought we’d be bigfooted into silence, the investigation officially closed before it got started, and—”
“Can I say one more thing?” Bob interrupted.
“What would that be?”
“This just seems smart to me. The Agency people have got to feel a little on the spot by now, like we’s hunting them. So I’m thinking we run a briefing for them. We reach out and give them some kind of palaver on our progress with Cruz. Get all the players there, all the big Afghan Desk people, all the Zarzi big believers. We’re real smooth and assy-kissy.”
“You could do ‘assy-kissy’?” Nick asked.
“Not for long. Maybe fifty-nine minutes. Around minute sixty, you throw a blanket over me.”
“I’d pay to see that. But is this really the time for a public relations offensive?” said Nick.
“No, no,” said the director, “it is a good idea.”
“Okada can give us a list by name,” said Bob. “Get ’em in one room just to set them straight and settle them down. I’m thinking the deputy director, the head of plans, the head of Afghan Desk, and of course, in the Administration, the director of National Intelligence. We’ll even bring free doughnuts.”
“No doughnuts,” said the director. “It isn’t in the budget.”
FBI HQ
CORRIDOR AND ELEVATOR BETWEEN DIRECTOR’S OFFICE AND TASK FORCE ZARZI WORKING ROOM
HOOVER BUILDING
PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
WASHINGTON, DC
1720 HOURS
Do me a favor,” said Nick, “the next time you get a bright idea about doing PR, let me in on it. That way, I get the credit, it helps my career. Helping your career doesn’t amount to much because you don’t have a career.”
“If you’d suggested it,” Bob said, as the elevator doors opened, “he’d have turned it down. He only said yes to annoy you, to punish you for bringing me into this again.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Anyway, I didn’t do it to help the Bureau with its Agency problems. That don’t matter spit to me. But one of those four guys pulled the trigger on Cruz. I want to see ’em, throw some business their way, and get a read.”
“Uh-oh. You’ve been reading Shakespeare again.”
“What?”
“Hamlet. ‘The play’s the thing, in which to catch the conscience of the king.’ Old idea: if you put before the bad guy an image of his crime, he’ll in some way react and give himself away. Shakespeare believed it, but it’s bunk.”
“I ain’t never read Hamlet. Not in Polk County, Arkansas, in the fiftie
s where I’s educated.”
“Whatever, it’s based on a folk concept of the mind. The image of their crime sparks some kind of overt response. But it’s bunk. We know now that people are complex, devious, sophisticated, practiced, and they don’t go ‘Boo!’ when manipulated into such a confrontation.”
“Still like to try.”
“I know you have all kinds of sniper voodoo and eighth and ninth senses, but these guys are much smarter than Hamlet’s uncle. These are all sophisticated, mentally tough, experienced, widely traveled, and brilliant men. You won’t see anything they don’t want you to see. If they’ve navigated their way through DC intelligence politics, plus survived in the field, they will have a little bit of smarts in how to handle an office meeting, even with the great Bob Lee Swagger.”
“Everybody has tells, from eye rolls to breathing patterns to body posture. Everybody’s his own landscape. And I will say this, if I have a skill it’s at reading landscape. So let me look over the landscape and we’ll see what I—”
They had emerged from the elevator, made it down the hall, and turned into the suite of working rooms that Task Force Zarzi occupied, and there to greet them was Starling, looking shaken.
“What’s up?”
“There’s been a huge shoot-out in Baltimore,” she said. “World War Three at a car wash. And it involves somebody you put an APB out on, somebody called Crackers the Clown.”
HOWARD STREET CAR WASH
HOWARD AND 25TH
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
1215 HOURS TO 1656.38 HOURS
The glasses were the key.
Check the glasses, he always told himself. Once every five minutes, check the glasses.
Cruz had fallen into that rhythm. Here, he worked anonymously, one of twenty or so invisibles who scurried for tips by drying, sweeping, polishing the drippy wet vehicles that emerged from the tunnel of spray wax, steam, jetting soapy water, and rubber strips like jungle fronds that hung from a mechanically contrived tube structure and somehow magically undulated the road grime off the cars. It saved him from brooding, it brought in money, it kept him active. Nobody asked questions, nobody took roll, nobody made friends outside their ethnic groups; the pay, usually about $50 a day, was in change and small bills. He was faceless in this crowd of hustling shiners and polishers, and he was the only one who looked at the shape of the sunglasses, for a teardrop that spoke not of Jackie O and her husband Ari, but of the sandbox, the ’Stan, the global war on terrorism.
Dead Zero Page 24