Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “You get me the intel. More is better. And I will finally nail this little sucker, for Carl if for no other reason.”

  He turned, put the phone down. Kay was sitting naked on the table. Her eyes demonstrated her utter innocence as to the talk she had overheard. Her flesh was luminous, piles and piles of it. For some strange reason, unlike so many Korean women, she had permed her hair so it was frothy with curls. Her face was a happy pie. Her eyes were happy and shallow. He discovered himself tumescent and could tell that pleased her as much as him.

  CIA HQ

  FIFTH FLOOR MEETING ROOM

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  1100 HOURS

  THE NEXT DAY

  There were four of them, and various coffee- and briefcase-bearing assistants. They were serious men, pinkish, well dressed, in suits, though one outlier had a tweedy professional look to him in a sports coat and bow tie; he was the one without the assistant and he carried his own briefcase. Their faces, out of long discipline, expressed personality but little else, as if otherwise all nuances had been mastered and controlled. One looked fierce, two bureaucratic, the last one—the academic—kindly.

  Swagger watched them come into the bland green meeting room. He could almost ID them by Susan’s descriptions.

  Walter E. Troy, “the Assistant,” assistant director, longtime spook, thirty years at the Agency, specialist in counterterror, a mover and a shaker who was said to be disappointed that he didn’t get the big boy job that instead went to an ex-congressman with big connections.

  Jackson Collins, “Afghan Desk,” the fierce one, ex-Navy SEAL, radiating hostility, face too red, hair too brusque, all mil-spec in body language, tiny pig eyes, a squid, and thus on Swagger’s instantaneous must-fight list. Looked like trouble.

  Arthur Rossiter, “Plans,” head of clandestine operations, the guy who coordinated and produced all the actual dirty tricks, guileful, willful, yet almost faceless and without any personal eccentricities, no color at all, could have sold encyclopedias, collected child porn, written novels, painted bad pictures.

  And finally Ted Hollister, the only outside-the-agency presence, the National Intelligence director, technically the boss and coordinator of them all, but also a man in a job that didn’t exist until recently, so that no one had quite figured out what he could or couldn’t do and whether they had to return his calls or not. Hollister had clearly been chosen to succeed a less successful NID because of his very inside-Washingtonness, his charm, tact, discretion, a creature totally of the foreign policy/intelligence/Washington circuit where he’d thrived for years, when he wasn’t teaching at some prestigious university. Worked at the Agency for ten years, moved on to State, did Princeton, Yale, and Hopkins, then State again, well-known op-ed scribe for the Post and the Times, and now in the big job as the president’s number one whisperer. In the movies, his kindliness would instantly make him suspect number one.

  Yet they all had their finger on the trigger. Any one of them had the power to go to a computer terminal, a cell phone, enter a code number, say a code word or whatever the mechanism was, and order a hit halfway around the world, without justification, explanation, recrimination. A word from them and somewhere far away a First Lieutenant Wanda Dombrowski sent five hundred pounds of thermobaric HE into someone’s back pocket and cratered a building, a mansion, a village, a hangar, a cave, even exploding the air around it. They were the real snipers.

  “Good luck reading these Claudiuses, Hamlet,” Nick whispered to Bob, before he stood to greet them with a peace offering from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Bob, in his off-the-rack suit and black tie, sat next to Nick at the head of the table as Nick stood.

  “Gentlemen, thank you for coming,” he said. “I know how busy you are—there is a war on, after all—and I appreciate your time. I am Assistant Director Nicholas Memphis of the FBI, chief of Task Force Zarzi, responsible for coordinating with you and with the Secret Service and with my own people on this issue. I’ll try to be brief. I’m here for two reasons: first of all, since you’re all involved in the state visit of Ibrahim Zarzi, I wanted to keep you in the loop about our efforts to apprehend the threat to him whom we have identified as Gunnery Sergeant Reyes Fidencio Cruz, USMC, currently AWOL from his service obligations, operating on motives unknown. And second, since I know rumors are swirling about our inquiries, I want to assure you that we are not contemplating a witch hunt against the Central Intelligence Agency, or any kind of examination of professional behavior in the crucible of the war on terror. Our investigation has brushed up against security issues, but the issues themselves are not germane. I will answer any questions you have, at length or in brevity, at any time.”

  He waited to see if he’d made a sale, and got dull eyes back at him. The assistants seemed to be the dedicated reactors; several snorted, rolled eyes, shook heads, issued semaphores of hostile intent. The Great Men just sat benignly, unmoved.

  “Let me—”

  But a hand came up.

  It was the old man in the bow tie, the National Intelligence director, Ted Hollister.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Since I seem to be the only ancient mariner here,” he said, “I thought I would take the opportunity to identify for my younger colleagues the lanky fellow sitting next to Assistant Director Memphis. When you all came to work this morning, you bypassed the first-floor Agency museum. Had you entered you would have seen a Russian sniper rifle, recovered from Vietnam in 1975. It was our first look at a weapon that had been tantalizing us for years. I was very new to the Agency then, but I was in Saigon at the time, and I know that the weapon came to us through the good offices of a marine sniper named Bob Swagger. I do believe we are in the presence of Mr. Swagger.”

  Swagger nodded.

  “Sounds like you remember it better than I do,” he said, and there was some polite laughter.

  “I mention that because I want all the Agency people and all the Bureau people—I believe I speak for the president on this and I also speak in an official capacity as National Intelligence director, though of course I have no idea what that means—to remember that we are all on the same side and that we have the same goal. I know there’s inevitable hostility between the entities, but I remind everyone, and that rifle in the museum should remind everyone, that we have worked together to great success in the past and if we remain civil and unconcerned with ego-driven issues like ‘turf’ and ‘perks,’ we can work this out.”

  “Well said, sir,” said Nick, relieved that he had not yet encountered his first insurrection.

  He then proceeded with the narrative: the threat, the response, the first encounter and death, the attempt in Baltimore—“That was Swagger,” Nick said, “he saved Mr. Zarzi’s life, no doubt about it”—on through the plans for the speech at Georgetown Friday night and the medal ceremony at the White House Sunday night.

  “We have implored Mr. Zarzi to forego both these events. But he is a stubborn, brave man and insists on keeping to his schedule and living up to his engagements. The Secret Service has performed magnificently, I should add, providing the real manpower for the protection on the ground. We have helped, but our primary responsibility is to apprehend, not protect.”

  He outlined the investigation so far; all the man-hours worked by the number of agents, the field offices filling reports—“More arrived even late last night from the Naval Investigative Service in the Philippines”—on the life and times of Ray Cruz; the proactive attempts at apprehension, such as the raid on the house in Baltimore, the nationwide law enforcement circularization of the Cruz photo and particulars.

  “Mr. Memphis, you still haven’t released Cruz’s name and threat to the public. He still has freedom of movement. May I ask why, sir?” asked one of the assistants.

  “Of course. We have found that such enterprises are of declining value. This is the Internet era where there’s such a profusion of information, it’s hard to make an impression, so the widely circulated p
icture and warnings don’t really justify themselves in terms of results, while the danger of overzealous reaction is magnified considerably. That’s why we beat the drums to publicize ‘most wanted people’ very reluctantly.”

  “Can someone explain to me why FBI agents arrived at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and interrogated Air Force Reaper pilots who are part of a joint Agency/Air Force program?” This was the hostile “Afghan Desk,” Jackson Collins.

  This time Swagger answered: “That one was my doing, sir. I learned from Second Recon’s records that an explosion occurred in the city of Qalat in Afghanistan shortly after Sergeant Cruz radioed in that he was on-site. That explosion seems to be at the core of his motive, that and an ambush earlier that killed his spotter. It seems he believes the Agency used a missile or a smart munition to—”

  If Swagger hoped for a Hamlet moment, the actors didn’t provide one. Before he even got it out, Collins, the Afghan Desk, was overriding him with another argument.

  “Are you aware that we had a very good officer, Ms. Okada, look into those allegations and interview all the participants, and she came to the conclusion that such an event was preposterous, given the security built into the system?”

  “I have seen her report, sir. I merely wanted to double-check and see if memories had clarified over the passage of time.”

  “And you found nothing?” asked someone new.

  “No, sir, not a thing at Creech,” Swagger said, keeping his statement technically truthful.

  His interlocutor was of course the colorless Plans, a sharp and focused prosecutor whose abruptness left no doubt as to his opinion of the investigation.

  “We had to cover all the possibilities, sir,” said Swagger. “So if any of you have any knowledge of any Agency connection to this mystery blast, I’d—”

  “It sounds to me like this Cruz is suffering from battle fatigue,” said Collins. “He’s snapped and entered a delusional state. Unfortunately, his sniper craft has remained intact and he functions at a very high level. May I ask, will you shoot to kill if that opportunity presents itself?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bob.

  “This isn’t just about my career,” Collins said. “Even if everyone thinks it is. I will resign the day after Zarzi’s election if anybody wants that, and never write a book or appear on a TV show. This man Zarzi, with all his flaws and his shady past, can help us achieve an important goal, so that all the marines, not just the snipers, can come home. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

  “We are sympathetic, sir,” said Nick.

  But Collins could not leave the issue alone, even if his pretty-boy assistant was squirming with embarrassment. He was a burly, brusque man, 105 percent military, with his brush cut, his face red from what had once been long days at sea but were probably now long days on the golf course, a busted nose, and a boar’s natural snarl. All squid lifer, and wasn’t he a SEAL too, so maybe he’d actually had some mud time like a marine.

  “You people, I know how you operate. You consort with scum, you grant immunity, you turn people and get them to testify against family and friends, you swear to hide and protect them. Well, this is exactly the same. We have to work with scum, we have to work with the people we detest. Zarzi was a drug lord, a beheader, a Taliban sympathizer, but because of all that, he is more, rather than less, valuable to us. He’s the ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravano of Afghanistan. It’s a crime that he survives and flourishes and it affronts the moral order. But through him, we protect the moral order and we prevent even bigger monsters from surviving and flourishing. I just want that understood, so that you don’t think we’re nuts or that I’m riding him on some quest to get a bigger chair.”

  “I understand,” said Nick.

  Memphis then outlined the security arrangements for the Georgetown University appearance of Zarzi, the various liaisons with the Secret Service, the usage of air cover, and so forth.

  “But, Mr. Memphis, it’s also true, is it not, that Cruz is an extremely resourceful man. He is a testament to Marine Corps training proficiency. He almost succeeded in Baltimore. How can you be sure that despite your best efforts, he’s not simply better than you?” This came from the assistant director, who had not spoken till this time.

  “Well,” said Nick, “he is a great sniper, but he’s only the second best in the world. Mr. Swagger here is the best. I’d bet on us.”

  That was it, pretty much.

  Nick sat back as his allotted hour was over. He watched the men and their assistants file out. Swagger had gone to talk to the National Intelligence director, the professorial Ted Hollister, and the two seemed to be enjoying an animated laugh about Saigon in the old days. They were the only ones who dated back to that ancient, lost war, and it looked like Hector and Agamemnon sharing a laugh in Olympus over a Hellene beer. Two old warriors, with their fading memories of the war of fetid jungles and ’villes and peasants in pajamas dying, dying, dying. Swagger leaned across the table and got old Hollister’s briefcase for him, and the two walked to the doorway of the room. It looked like they’d be at it for hours, so finally Nick walked up and said, “Bob, we’ve got to go.”

  He thanked Hollister for the opening remarks, which he thought did much to mollify the mood in the room, and then there was a round of handshaking and Hollister set off, jaunty and alone, for the elevator and his car back to the Executive Office Building.

  They let him go, and then their Agency escort came up and escorted them along the same path, from elevator to first floor, past the monument to the agents who’d lost their lives and out the door to the driveway where the car to take them back to the Hoover Building awaited.

  “That place always gives me the creeps,” said Nick.

  “Me too,” said Bob.

  “You two old ’Nam guys have a nice chat?”

  “Very interesting fellow. So smart. He remembers Vietnam much better than I do, but then I have to say, he probably didn’t drink no six thousand gallons of drugstore bourbon to forget it, like I did.”

  “Anyway: conclusions, Dr. Hamlet? Was the king’s conscience captured? Suspicions? Progress? Get anything?”

  Bob shook his head.

  “I came up bust, and that goddamn Collins wouldn’t stop his spouting off. I do not like that guy. He is on the bull’s-eye on this one and he don’t like it one bit and most of what he said was for the other boys in the room, not us. Anyhow, all of them, they sure have their acts together. You’d need one of those ‘behavior specialists’ in the movies or on TV to get much out of that bunch. I thought Collins was a little too tough guy, the guy who scared me was ‘Plans,’ he didn’t say much but he had that killer temperament without no give, always hard to work for, with, or be around, so he must be real good or he wouldn’t have made it that high; the other two just seemed bureaucrat and policy monkeys of a higher order, and the old man was so goddamned charming and flirty it was hard to suspect him of anything except being your grandpop.”

  “Maybe that was his technique. To boost you, to flatter you, and in that way fog you on his real motivations.”

  “I thought of that, but I don’t think so. Too obvious. It’s an invitation to snoop. He wants us to snoop. No, I read it as utter confidence in himself, knowledge that he was, as a bigfoot, completely untouchable, so he could afford to be the life of the damn party. Them others all seemed to play their cards tight because they had something to lose.”

  “So as insight into your ‘theory’ of this situation, it produced nothing.”

  “Not a goddamn thing,” said Bob.

  “Good,” said Nick, “because it gave me an idea.”

  “God help us all,” said Bob.

  WILLIWAW COUNTY FAIR

  WHARTONSVILLE, WEST VIRGINIA

  1900 HOURS

  Dr. Faisal had disappeared.

  “Maybe Allah showed him a new path,” said Professor Khalid.

  Bilal was too anxious to laugh.

  Around them, the lights of the midway blazed. Odd
machines that served no purpose but to sweep people around at exhilarating speeds and make them squeal and shout trailed neon streaks as they whirled about madly, going nowhere except around and around. The smell of cigarettes, sticky corn syrup, cotton candy, perfume, salted buttered popcorn, corn dogs, everything forbidden, filled the air.

  “What should we do?” asked Khalid. “Drop to our knees and pray to Mecca?”

  “Not an opportune place for a prayer break,” said the ever-practical Bilal. Here in the heart of the heart of the heart of America, buffeted by crowds of cowboys and farmers and their womenfolk and chubby children, the three slightly disheveled and not terribly clean pilgrims had stopped in search of soft ice cream, under threat of another tantrum from Dr. Faisal. The man may have been a genius but he certainly had to have his ice cream.

  “He was swept away,” said Khalid. “Pfffft, like that.”

  It was true. They had stood, somewhat overwhelmed by the sight of the mysterious festival with its squads of whirling neon machines, its pennants, its odd play of colors unseen in nature against the dark sky, its crowds of flesh-packed Americans innocent in their simple joy at existence. They were looking for soft ice cream. They were not looking for hot dogs, funnel cakes, frozen Snickers bars on sticks, fried dough, nuts in a sugar glaze, doughnuts, hamburgers, bratwursts, gingerbread men, taffy, fried chicken, anything edible other than soft ice cream. Then Faisal took a step to the right and was swept up by a current of onrushers, and off he went. They soon lost sight of him.

  “Can you pray standing?” said Bilal.

  “No,” said Khalid. “It is forbidden, plus I do not pray.”

  “Not to Allah but to some other god. I don’t know, Jesus, Marx, Yahweh, Odin, something like that.”

  “You know about Odin, Bilal? Very impressive. A hard young man like you?”

  “I was once a student, and not a bad one. I will pray to Allah, standing, believing that in this case standing is allowed. You pray to Odin or Yoda or another one, I don’t care, just pray a little instead of making remarks.”