Day Zero

by Marc Cameron

  Lovita reached above her console and scrolled through several screens on the GPS, nodding to herself as she spoke. “It’s a dead zone out here. No cell towers and radio traffic is no-go unless it’s plane to plane. Satellites are so low on the horizon this far north a sat phone call is even iffy.”

  “Maybe,” Quinn said, twisting around again to watch the plane behind them.

  Lovita picked up her iPod and put on another Freddie Mercury song.

  “Do you trust me, Jericho Quinn?” she said, shouting above a throbbing engine and the loud music that now streamed across the intercom.

  Quinn turned from where he’d been watching the plane behind them to stare at the back of her head.

  “Yes,” he said. “I trust you.”

  “Good.” She pulled back the throttle, slowing the plane a hair and allowing the Caravan to close the distance behind them. Freddie Mercury still wailed over the headphones. “Because we need to get them really, really close for this to work.”

  Lovita waited until the other plane was almost on top of them, and then dropped the Piper’s nose, plowing back into the weather.

  The brilliant sun winked out as clouds enveloped them again. Quinn’s stomach rose into his chest. His back pressed against the seat. He didn’t know if he should worry more about the planeful of contract killers behind them, or the hungry black rocks that lurked in the fog below.

  Chapter 22

  Las Vegas

  Tang boarded the underground train that would take them to the Alaska Airline gates on the other side of the airport. They had plenty of time, but he could not bear the thought of missing the flight and prolonging their agony even more than the Pakistani already had.

  “Why would they do this?” Hu stood clutching a stainless-steel handrail as the train started to move. “At the last possible moment . . .” Oblivious to the other passengers now, he whispered what everyone else on the team was thinking.

  Tang shook his head. He spoke in Mandarin, but kept his words broad. The number of Americans who spoke Chinese—or any other language—was small, but it was prudent to be careful. “I do not know,” he said. “But his reasons are surely important.”

  Hu grabbed the rail with both hands and leaned a distraught face against his arms. His eyes glistened with tears. For a time, Tang thought the man might cry. He certainly deserved to.

  Hu Qi had been a champion gymnast and still found time to study law at Zhejiang University. His coaches said he had a chance at the Olympics and his professors spoke often of his future in government. But those dreams were crushed when his father had been arrested for trafficking heroin. The man was a devout Muslim and never touched alcohol, let alone something as evil as heroin. The entire family knew the drugs belonged to Qi’s older brother, but the authorities had found them at his parents’ home. Any mitigating circumstances had been swept away when a routine blood test at the time of arrest revealed old man Hu had AB-negative blood, the same type as a deputy minister in need of a liver transplant. Both Qi and his elder brother had been tested as well. Qi was A-positive, but his brother, the real owner of the heroin, shared his father’s blood type. He was summarily arrested as an accessory.

  A speedy trial found both men guilty of the capital offense of trafficking dangerous narcotics. In keeping with Yanda, China’s policy to strike hard against drug traffickers, both men were sentenced to death. With many such cases, the court might hand down a death sentence with a two-year probationary period—showing the seriousness of the crime, but demonstrating the mercy of the state if the condemned did not commit another crime during the two-year period. In the case of the Hus, all appeals were carried out with lightning speed, in order to ensure the deputy minister received his vital organ transplant before it was too late. Both men were executed four days after the original verdict was pronounced.

  Hu Qi, little more than a boy, had waited in the shadows across from the prison and watched the nondescript white bus roll through the iron gates. This mobile execution van parked in front of the administration building, behind the prison walls, but in plain sight of the road. Qi was able to witness a chain gang of five men, including his father and brother, as they were ushered at gunpoint into the open back doors of this kill house to have their organs harvested for party officials and Chinese businessmen rich enough to afford them. A short time later, uniformed guards carried coolers of what were surely kidneys, hearts, and even eyes out the back, while the van exited the gate and turned up the quiet road toward the crematorium with what was left.

  Hu Qi had withdrawn from the university at once to take care of his mother, getting a job digging graves at the cemetery where the ashes of his mutilated father and brother were buried. Somehow, the man from Pakistan had found him as well. He’d plucked the bitter young student from the life of misery with the promise of a chance to fire a killing shot at the regime that had destroyed his family.

  Tang gathered his bag as the train came to a stop and the passengers poured out. The crowd clumped together as they waited for the escalator that would take them up to their gates. He turned to make sure Lin was still with him. She shuffled along behind, barely more than a shell anymore. She looked so much like their daughter, a fact that added even more anguish to Tang and surely pierced Lin’s heart each time she looked in the mirror.

  Chapter 23

  Alaska

  Quinn twisted in his seat, face pressed against the window, doing his best to keep an eye on the other plane. The Caravan drifted back and forth in the clouds behind them as if towed by an invisible rope. It was close enough he could almost see the sneer on the pilot’s face.

  “Okay,” Lovita said. “This is where it’s gonna get a little hairy.”

  Quinn looked forward to see nothing but gray fog. The instruments on her console said they were flying straight and level, but there was absolutely nothing to reference outside but mist and rain.

  Lovita checked her GPS again and then reached down long enough to bring up another song on the iPhone connected to her headset. There was a flurry of drums and electric guitar as “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” started to play.

  “Hang on to your lunch!” Lovita said as she added steady power. Hauling back on the stick, she began to sing along with Freddie.

  The Super Cub nosed up into a near vertical climb as a rock face loomed up through the fog, less than a hundred meters in front of them.

  Quinn leaned back in his seat, hands in his lap—helpless to do anything but sit there. He’d never been a screamer, and in any case, there was little he could do.

  Lovita kept adding power until the throttle was all the way to the wall, putting the plane as nearly straight up and down as she could. The rock face grew darker as they closed in. Quinn could see the deep blue of a glacier and the black cracks and jagged teeth of its crevasses spilling over the peaks like froth running down the side of a glass.

  There was no way to see what was going on with the plane behind them. He was only aware of the scream of the Piper’s engine, and then weightlessness as the little airplane reached the apex of its ability to climb. It hung in the air for a brief moment, before breaking to the right.

  Black rock and blue ice flashed through the clouds as they fell, close enough to reach out and touch. Quinn hung from his seat belt, above Lovita now as she pointed the nose straight down, gaining back the speed she’d lost in the climb.

  The sharp concussion of an explosion somewhere behind them caused the little Super Cub to shudder as Lovita leveled her out going away from the mountain, less than two hundred feet off the valley floor.

  Quinn breathed for the first time in two minutes.

  “That big Cessna may have had more range and speed than my little bird,” Lovita said over the blaring music, her husky voice an octave higher than normal. “But it couldn’t do what we can do at slow speeds.”

  Quinn worked to slow his heart rate. He didn’t know many professional jet jockeys that would have tried such a maneuver in a plane
like this. But Lovita knew bush Alaska. She’d probably made the trip through this particular pass a hundred times and knew each side canyon as well as the gravel streets of her own village. The hammerhead stall had taken them straight up the face of the mountain, leaving her just enough room to pull out and go the other direction while the larger, less limber Caravan had simply flown into the face.

  Lovita banked to the left and back into the main pass. Raindrops streamed along the windows again and the world seemed to close in around them.

  They were back on the deck again in no time, skimming the turquoise waters of Lake Clark, ghosting in and out of clouds.

  “How are we for fuel?” Quinn asked, checking the indicator tubes on each wing. He could tell they were fine, but wanted to make sure Lovita’s head was still in the game after such a huge adrenaline dump.

  Lovita’s shoulders rose and fell as she took a deep breath. She craned her head around to look back at Quinn. “We’re fine,” she said, eyes narrowed in a tight smile. It was the happiest face he’d ever seen her put on.

  “Good,” he smiled back. “Because I really need to pee.”

  “That’s funny.” Lovita’s tiny body shook with a nervous laugh. “I already did that a couple minutes ago.”

  Chapter 24

  The White House

  Vice President McKeon had not moved from the lounge in the presidential study. Long brown fingers still stroked the Japanese woman’s hair as she rested her head in his lap. Her shoes lay on the plush cream-colored carpet. Her skirt had crawled farther up, revealing the dark images of a mountain demon tattooed on the smooth flesh of her thigh. Small toes curled and clenched, like a cat moving just the tip of its tail. McKeon thought it both incredible and frightening that such a skillful killer could have such beautiful toes.

  Drake was still in the gym so they had the room to themselves.

  Ran shifted her weight slightly, rolling on her back. She made none of the grunts and groans normal people made when they moved after long periods of being stationary, calling such sounds “victim noises.” All her motions—all of them—were done in silence.

  “I do not see how you continue with this ignorant man,” she said. Her chest heaved in pent-up frustration.

  “Drake?” McKeon continued to stroke her hair.

  “I had a dream that you were in that chair,” she said, arching her neck to look toward the small passageway that led to the Oval Office and the Resolute Desk. “It would be a simple matter to sort him out and put you there.”

  “In time, my dear,” McKeon said. “But not quite yet. I have too much to do without a new vice president to contend with, one who might not work together with me as he should.”

  Ran looked up at him, her eyes, it seemed, penetrating to the back of his skull. “Drake is unpredictable,” she said, the hint of a Japanese accent in her flat voice. “He is much too soft and comfortable in his new position. I think it will be difficult to give up his seat of power now that he has it.”

  “Ah.” McKeon smiled. “He does not know it, but that is all part of the plan.”

  “What if he has plans of his own?” Ran asked.

  “I am counting on it.” McKeon smiled again.

  “And what of me?” Ran closed her eyes, as if she knew he needed some respite. “I will never cover myself with a veil.”

  “It would be a crime to cover you,” McKeon said, wondering if he would go to hell for saying such a thing.

  “But you believe all women should,” Ran said. “Is that not your ultimate goal?”

  “I fear you would kill me if I tried to cover you.”

  “Without question,” she said. “And so I ask again. What of me?”

  “What of either of us?” McKeon said.

  Ran closed her eyes again. “That is the only answer I would have accepted.” Her breathing slowed and for a moment, McKeon thought she might be asleep. She spoke again, changing the subject. “Do you trust this band of misfits Ranjhani has tasked with sorting out Jericho Quinn?”

  “They are all more than willing to die,” McKeon said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  Ran shook her head, half dozing. “I am Japanese, so I am intimate with death for an honorable cause. My father spoke with great reverence of Tokubetsu Kgekitai—the Special Attack Squadrons—suicide pilots of kamikaze planes and kaiten submarines. I know full well that there are many besides the followers of Islam willing to give their lives in battle—or as you would call it, jihad. But from the descriptions given by Qasim, this group seems to be merely deranged.”

  “Deranged or not, they are useful to our cause,” McKeon mused. “They share a common hatred of China, and that is enough.”

  “Maybe.” Ran gave a soft sigh, thinking this over. “But the will to die is as fragile as life itself. I often wonder how many samurai who chose to commit seppuku changed their minds when the blade was a few inches in their belly. . . .”

  McKeon nodded. “That is why they had a second present to finish the job with a quick blow to the neck.”

  “That is so. . . .” Ran sat up suddenly, causing McKeon to flinch. He made a small victim noise, earning him a sidelong glare. “In any case, I am a patient woman, but I grow tired of endless meetings and the parade of politicians. A diversion would be good. Perhaps I should take care of your wife while she is yet in Oregon?”

  “I need you here.” McKeon’s phone rang. “You will have the chance to do plenty of sorting out, in the near future. I promise.” He fished the phone from his pocket and pressed it to his ear. “Yes . . .” he said. “She will be a good place to start.”

  He patted the back of Ran’s hand as he listened to the caller. It was small and delicate for one who spoke so often of blood and death.

  “No, I agree,” he said, drawing the hand to his lips to give it a silent kiss. “Pick her up right away. I’m keenly interested to hear how much she will tell you. . . . By all means . . . Whatever methods you deem appropriate. You have the full support of the office of the President.”

  Chapter 25

  Maryland

  “She’s just coming back from her run now.” The man in black BDUs and a matching ballistic vest spoke into the voice-activated microphone pinned to his collar. He was on the heavy side, with a jowly face and wavy hair that had been slicked back with half a jar of pomade. “She’ll be rounding the corner toward you in less than two minutes.”

  “Copy that, Joey,” Agent Glen Walter said, giving one last piece of advice before his team made contact. “Okay, boys. This is sure to make the ten o’clock news. Make it look professional.”

  Her code name was Fable—and she had zero doubt that any of the five men and women jogging around her in the loose diamond formation would take a bullet on her behalf. The same went for the agent on the twelve-speed race bike ten yards ahead and the young man in the armored Suburban that crunched slowly along the road behind them. It was getting dark, and though CIA Director Virginia Ross’s Rockville neighborhood was upscale to the point of old-money snobbishness, the protective agent in charge of her detail hated it when she ran so late in the evening.

  Adam Knight had been with her for the past three years and he was still as doting and overprotective as a young father with a first baby. Rarely letting her out of his line of sight, even at state functions, he often looked as if he wanted to taste her food before she ate it, just to be on the safe side. The tragic assassination of both President Clark and the Vice President had, she supposed, taken its toll on every agent charged with the protection of government officials.

  Still, Ross had to live her life. She had an agency to run—and a body that wasn’t getting any younger.

  She’d never been a skinny woman, but eight months earlier her doctor had pointed out that she was lugging around the equivalent of a bushel of corn in extra body weight. To get rid of that burden had meant lots of walking at first. Later, when half that bushel had gone the way of the dodo, her fifty-four-year-old knees had been able to take her
on long and glorious—if ploddingly slow—runs. She’d always been bottom heavy. Thankfully, her deceased math-professor husband hadn’t minded what he called her “butt to boobs ratio.” One could not put in what God had seen fit to leave out and she would forever be built like a pear, no matter how much she exercised. But the good Lord didn’t say that numbers in her husband’s ratio had to be quite so large.

  Ross wasn’t oblivious to the stress living her life caused her protective detail. As a sort of moral trade, she made it a habit to get to know them all personally, along with the names of their spouses and significant others. She couldn’t keep their kids straight, but forgave herself for that since she had trouble keeping up with the names of her own nine grandchildren.

  Three blocks from home, Ross picked up the pace, catching a smile from the tawny woman jogging next to her. Wiki was her name, a broad-shouldered Maori woman of twenty-nine. She’d spent time as an MP in the Army before joining the CIA’s Protective Division. Most of the men and women on Ross’s detail had military service—and while some clandestine agents thought of the protective folks as the knuckle-draggers of the agency, she’d come to respect their dedication and that no-BS swagger that earned them the reputation of knuckle-draggers in the first place.

  More academic than spy, Ross had grown up on an Iowa farm seeing the value of hard work and the good in her neighbors. In college, she talked her way out of trouble and into a political circle of friends that got her plucked from a career as an economics professor at Dartmouth to become the US ambassador to Chile before she was forty years old. A knack for being in the right place at the right time had put her in line to be director of the CIA under the president prior to Chris Clark’s administration. She’d done well her first few years, putting her mark on the agency and, to her way of thinking, making it better. Then, both her husband and her youngest daughter had passed away without any warning, sending her into a nosedive that surely bled into her professional life. It had taken her the better part of two years to dig her way out of that one, never quite having the energy to resign, but believing Clark would name a replacement at any moment. The fall of a very bright star was a notable, and often celebrated, event in DC. When otherwise brilliant people stumbled, the difference was drastic. The press and others who wanted the job circled like sharks.