Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “Oh my,” said Khalid. “Another who has gotten tired of me. Oh well, it was bound to happen. I seem to estrange myself from everybody. It’s something annoying in my personality.”

  The two stood there, slightly seedy men in baggy suits, unshaven and unkempt, looking a little too Levantine for the tastes of the local constabulary, unsure whether to move to hunt for the missing man or stay put and hope that he would find his way back.

  “Do you see that clown?” asked Bilal. He pointed to a plastic giant with a red nose, red hair, and a red, white, and blue hat standing outside a tent that said, obscurely, B-I-N-G-O!

  “Yes.”

  “You go stand next to it. Don’t wander, don’t start conversations, don’t make eye contact, do not feel you have to reach out to the peasants we are pledged to destroy.”

  “You see, I am not sure I agree with—”

  “Just stand there. I will, in the meantime, go up this avenue, find Faisal, and drag him back. But do you see, if you wander off, then finding Faisal has no meaning because you have become lost. And I will end up with either one man lost or, catastrophically, two men lost. You will soon be arrested, your patently phony ID will be seen through, and the whole thing has gone nowhere, a failure after all our tribulations. Do you see? Tell me you see.”

  “I see, I see, but if I may observe, it’s hardly my fault that—”

  “The clown, the clown of bingo.”

  “By the way, what would a bingo be?”

  But Bilal had already set off.

  He tried not to walk urgently, he tried to keep the fear off his face, he tried to emulate the loose-jointed walk of these Americans, he tried to blend in, to be invisible, a little man of no consequence. Mainly what he tried not to do was despise himself for his idiocy. Stopping at Dairy Queen: all right. Stopping at McDonald’s: manageable if tense. Stopping at Friendly’s: too intense, fraught with eye contact, demanding quick thinking in English and usually filled with suspicious white people who looked them over as if they were terrorists. Oh, wait, they were terrorists. Stopping at 39 or 41 or 57 Flavors? Marginally acceptable if during the daylight when not overcrowded. But stopping at the Williwaw County fair, just because it broadcast a rainbow of hues against the sky and weirdly reminded all of them, homesick and lonely and sticky and not unmindful of what lay ahead, of a mythical Baghdad from the old tales? Insane. He should be executed for so foolish a folly.

  Would Faisal have ridden a Tilt-a-Whirl? It seemed unlikely. What about the Ferris wheel, more sedate for an elderly man—no sign of him there? Perhaps he’d gone into the so-called Fun House but then Bilal realized the stereotype swami in turban painted on the outside of the rickety canvas-and-plywood structure would keep him out. What about the Wild Mouse? Highly unlikely. It only battered you, and the point was to get Western girls and boys into squeezing distance under the pretext of fear. There was some vehicle roadway over which smallish replicas of cars from the 1910s rolled, but no, that was not—

  He heard the whistle of a train.

  He turned. It was a magnificent if miniaturized diesel, yellow, two engines pulling six cars just sliding into the lights of the “station,” and indeed, there sat Faisal, quite happily sucking down the remains of what had to have been a giant soft-ice-cream treat, in the very last car. His face was a portrait of pure animal bliss.

  Bilal ran to him.

  “Sir, you cannot leave like that. You gave me a heart attack!”

  “What? Why, it was most enjoyable. Come on, Bilal, I have tickets left. Let’s go around again. This time I wish to ride near the engine. Look at the engineer. Now that is a job I would like to have.”

  The engineer was a slouchy teen boy who sat in a cockpit in the rear of the second engine. Bilal knew him immediately: one of those scornful Western ironists, too good for his job, his head full of dreamy ambitions. Pimply and anguished, yearning for something better than the Big Little Train.

  “No, no, we have a schedule. We must get back.”

  And so Bilal dragged Dr. Faisal back through the crowds, on some kind of beeline, knowing exactly where the clown was. After all, he had navigated by starlight the forbidden zone between Jordan and Israel, dodging the lights and the radar of the Israeli border patrols, many times. What was the Williwaw County fair to that ordeal?

  But when they got to the clown: no Professor Khalid.

  “Agh,” said Bilal. “You two, you will be the death of me. I told him—”

  “Bilal!” came the cry. “Faisal!”

  It was Khalid. He held a large golden pig with bright felt eyes and two happy fabric teeth sticking out from his open snout.

  “I won a bingo! I won a bingo!”

  FBI HQ

  TASK FORCE ZARZI WORKING ROOM

  FOURTH FLOOR

  HOOVER BUILDING

  PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  1300 HOURS

  It’s a conceptual problem,” Nick said. He and Susan and Swagger sat in his glassed-in office, while outside the two dozen agents pretended not to notice, even if these meetings usually produced policy shifts.

  “We see this as a conspiracy. We want the big guys. We want action, attention, success. Sorry, that’s the truth. Ms. Okada, Agency loyalist though you are, if you bring down ‘Afghan Desk’ and send somebody to prison for overstepping his authority and prevent the Agency from some major public humiliation, you’re golden.”

  “I suppose I don’t deny it.”

  “I want it too. It’s my job, but if I can take down a major government illegality and put the Bureau ahead of the curve instead of behind it, I win too. And if we beat those press assholes to the punch, we prevent a major investigative Pulitzer from going to some mutt from the New York Times, that’s only gravy. And what does Bob Lee Swagger get? He gets the satisfaction of being right, he gets the thrill of bringing in a marine sniper from the cold and seeing him recognized as a hero. That means more to him than our careers mean to us. So each of us, in his own way, has been seduced by pride, ambition, and greed.”

  “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 hi
t 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.”

  MARRIOTT RESIDENCE HOTEL

  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.”

  “That was then. This is now. This town corrupts. The perks, the flattering press coverage, the access to and friendship with powerful people, the sexual opportunities, the glittery parties in mansions and condos overlooking the moonlit monuments: it’s sweet poison.”

  “These two: no. That’s all I got to say.”

  “So I have to take on trust what you take on trust.”

  “Seems like it.”

  “Okay, who plays me?”

  “We’ll get a guy who has the same—”

  “No, you won’t,” said Cruz. “That’s bullshit. These guys know me. They know how I move, what my body language is, what my size is. And this is for Whiskey Two-Two, so it’s still my job. I’ll go. If I get hit, well, it’s nothing that couldn’t have happened in the sandbox.”

  “Cruz, be sure. Think it over. There’ll be a moment when Mick Bogier has you dead zero in his scope and his finger on the trigger and he’s taking up the slack. Maybe we get there in time, maybe we get there one second late. No body armor’s going to stop a .50.”

  “Just get him. Then break him. Then get the guy who set this up. Then find out what it’s all about. That’s enough. If you give me that pledge, then I’ll go play the tethered goat.”

  “You’d make your grandfather proud,” said Bob.

  “My grandfather died in 1967. He was a Portuguese fisherman in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.”

  “That was Solomon Nicola Cruz, the father of Lieutenant Commander Tomas F. Cruz, who raised you with his wife, Urlinda Marbella, at the Subic Bay Naval Station in the Philippines. Lieutenant Commander Cruz was by all accounts a fine man and you were so lucky to have him and your mother too. He wasn’t your real father and she wasn’t your real mother and you’re not half Filipino. They was stepparents. Your grandfather was a United States Marine who landed on five islands in the Pacific and was awarded the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima. He was as brave and tough and good as they come and that’s the dead-zero truth. He had one son, who married a beautiful Vietnamese woman who was killed in the Tet invasion in 1968. She was a fine, fine woman. Her husband never knew she had you, because he was in Laos attached to SOG at the time. When
he came back, she was gone. And so were you. I don’t know how you got to the Philippines. But sure as hell, and I see your grandfather’s look on your face all the time, you’re my son.”

  PART FOUR

  THE LAST BATTLE

  OF IWO JIMA

  INTERSECTION OF 37TH AND P

  GEORGETOWN

  WASHINGTON, DC

  1024 HOURS

  THURSDAY

  Here,” said Bogier.

  “Here?” said Tony.

  It wasn’t really an intersection. Basically, 37th bent to the right and became P, or, if you were facing in another direction, P bent to the left and became 37th.

  “It has to be,” said Bogier.

  “Mick, I see a hundred other places it could be.”

  “Name them. Don’t point to them, but indicate them.”

  “Any of those buildings on the campus,” he said.

  They were standing at the end of the wall that blocked off the public front to Georgetown University along 37th Street, the wall itself too tall to see over. But they knew what was there: several acres of campus lawn latticed with walkways and interrupted by benches, much of it shaded by the giant umbrellas of hundred-year-old trees, the whole maybe 250 yards long. From where they were, they could see an L formation of august Gothic buildings snared in vine over old stone, dormer windows, archways, whatever signifiers one can imagine indicating the solemnity of higher education. These sealed the north and west perimeters of the lawn and all faced directly or at a slight angle to the entrance, at the lawn’s southern end, of Lauinger Library, itself an outlier in newfangled, cutting-edge, hip-to-the-max architecture that would be the site of Ibrahim Zarzi’s upcoming speech before the American Foreign Policy Association. There, before assorted invitees mostly from State and the Administration, and several dozen reporters, it had been widely reported that Zarzi would make his formal announcement that indeed, he was a candidate for the presidency of Afghanistan in the fall election a few weeks off.