Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  Samael turned back at the sound of screws tearing against the plywood. The act of resistance seemed almost amusing in its futility, a desperate move by an unarmed man short of blood. Foley threw himself at the handrail, eyes wide open. He felt peace and a certain satisfaction, as he was sure Samael realized what was happening. He couldn’t hurt his interrogator, but he could hurt himself.

  He thought of the wife and child as he fell, and he was happy. He was protecting them. He had done his best. He hadn’t given them away. A good death. The old man was glad to be of use.

  Samael lunged to stop him, but it was too late. The IV pulled out, dripped against the fiberglass. From the flutter of Foley’s feet, Samael knew he was dead.

  Foley hadn’t brought his arms forward, had faced death square and unflinching. Samael couldn’t help but admire the old soldier.

  He had held up for a long time and given up far less than Samael had expected. But still, it should be enough.

  A trail of blood ran along the sole and drained into the bilge. The pump whirred below them.

  “Get the gas cans and head back to land.”

  Chapter 27

  HAYES ACCELERATED ONTO the freeway. I was in the backseat, leaning forward so I could talk with him over the engine’s hum.

  “What are you going to use with Nazar?” I asked. “Sniper?”

  “It’s the least dangerous, but it’s kind of Hollywood for an assassination,” Hayes said. “No one’s travel is that predictable. Scouting lines of sight takes weeks, and a kill with one round from a cold barrel is harder than you think. Poison’s out. That leaves us guns or explosives. You always get the target in transport. It doesn’t matter if it’s an old woman or a prime minister—they’re most vulnerable when they’re on the move.

  “The state of the art with this stuff is the Kidon. It’s part of Mossad, the assassination squads. They like to use a small shaped charge on the door or a few grams of explosive in a cell phone or headrest. If they’re using guns on the fly, they’ll take motorcycles and a four-man team: a spotter, a man to guide the bike to the target, the bike driver, and the shooter on the back. You steal the motorcycles and use a container against the cartridge port to collect your brass. Totally untraceable.”

  “Hollywood is what we’re going for here. We’re not actually killing her.”

  “Sure,” Hayes said. “Force of habit.”

  Our plan was to try to kill Nazar and fail. Riggs had just threatened Nazar, so we would pose as Riggs’s men, make an attempt on her life, and miss. We had spoofed Riggs’s BlackBerry and sent a message to Nazar to meet. She had just responded. She would be at the meeting site, a hilltop park, ten minutes from now. It was six miles away. We were speeding west in a Suburban.

  The dome light had been pried open and disabled, to avoid any chance of our being detected at night, I gathered. A small module hung down from the diagnostic port under the dashboard. The truck was stolen. We used to scrounge for medical supplies downrange. In the military, the polite term to describe hot goods is skillfully acquired. In the navy they’re referred to as cumshaw.

  Hayes scanned the map again. “She’s going to be meeting us here,” he said, and pointed to an out-of-the-way section of the park. “I can put Moret here. Though if it’s a sniper shot that misses, Nazar might not even notice.”

  “I have the high-explosive rounds,” Moret said. “One in the car and one in the ground, and she’s definitely going to pay attention. It’d be all the payoff of a bombing with none of the prep.”

  “I like it,” Hayes said. “Byrne, we’ll wait on you to ID her. You stay with Moret.”

  “Rog.”

  We drove along an access road up the foothills, then stopped on a knoll in a grove of pepper trees.

  I stepped out. Hayes and Moret took wind and distance readings and set up cover for the SR-25.

  Kelly and I were alone. “Are you sure about this?” she asked. “There’s a big difference between running away from a threat and being party to an execution.”

  “Hayes isn’t going to kill her.”

  “So he says.”

  “You heard the intercepts of Riggs and Nazar. It confirms what Hayes said.”

  “I did. But those could be faked.”

  “Why bother to trick us into coming along? They can handle it themselves.”

  “You’re the only one who has had a good look at Nazar. Just because Riggs turned out to be a bastard doesn’t prove that Hayes is innocent. The enemy of your enemy means nothing.”

  “You believe what Riggs said about Hayes killing those people? They’re saying we’re terrorists too.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he stole from that truck or what else he’s hiding. And I sure don’t know if I’m willing to bet an innocent woman’s life on it.”

  I thought back to those dark passages from the Bible, to Hayes’s dilated eyes. I remembered the Marines, that moment when Hayes pulled a hilt-deep knife from a man’s eye.

  And now he was cut loose. He had lost the only things binding him to this world, his wife and child.

  I thought back to the photos from the massacre, and what Riggs had said about him: You have to be careful with him, Byrne. He could turn you without your even knowing it. He draws people in, uses them as tools to kill others, then discards them. And we’ve never seen anyone better.

  I had dragged her into this, and we were one bullet away from clearing our names, from the truth going out, from Riggs going down. What was the alternative? To run for the rest of our lives?

  There was a curse following me. This was my own damn fault, and I couldn’t let it bring her down.

  “I believe him,” I said. “But you should—”

  “I’m not leaving you behind.” She reached for me, rested her hand on the side of my face. “I’ve always wanted to ask you, Tom. Why don’t you sleep?”

  “What?”

  “You think I haven’t noticed. I’ve had guys bail, but you, you stay, but you never sleep. What is it?”

  The other woman; my hand plunged into her chest. Her face serene, her body a shambles.

  “I can tell,” Kelly said. “You’re lost. You need something to believe in. Are you sure it’s him?”

  “You’re right about me. But that’s not why I believe him.”

  “Always running away. There’s someone else, isn’t there?” She said it matter-of-fact, without pain or recrimination.

  Hayes shouted, “Byrne, she’s coming! We need you on the scope to ID Nazar.”

  “No,” I said to Kelly. “There is…there was. But it’s not like that.”

  “Byrne!”

  “Go,” she said. “I trust you on this.”

  “Byrne! Go time!”

  I stepped away. I trust you.

  Don’t, I wanted to say. Please don’t. Because that’s when I kill them. But there was no time. Nazar was coming, and Moret had zeroed her rifle and chambered a round.

  Hayes handed me the spotting scope. I looked over the brown hills surrounding the lagoon, scanning to where the sun glinted off the Pacific just over the 5. From a hill on the far side of the valley came the roar of gas filling hot-air balloons for the sunset rides. A few drifted toward Black Mountain in the east.

  I watched a silver Toyota Avalon wind up the road toward the park entrance where we had told Nazar to meet us.

  “Is that her?” Hayes asked.

  I pressed the scope to my eye, but the sunlight reflecting off the windshield was blinding.

  “Byrne?” Moret said, her cheek pressed against the rifle stock.

  The car turned slightly. Through the window I saw the gray hair and the scars near the eye. It was Nazar.

  “That’s her.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “As soon as she’s a hundred meters from the car, you light it up,” Hayes said.

  “Roger,” Moret replied.

  The car approached the entrance.

 
Moret watched the car through the crosshairs of her optic, leading the target to account for its speed. She could see the woman driving. People always looked so vulnerable sitting unaware in her scope.

  Her own mother was about the same age. After the massacre, the FBI had come for her. She was Turkish, and her father French, though Moret hadn’t seen him since she was six. She had been raised outside New Orleans as a casually observant Muslim. Her mother would have a glass of wine now and then, and she attended services every Friday but didn’t bother with the daily prayers. Moret went to mosque once or twice a year and still fasted, but only on the days during Ramadan when she was going to attend an iftar with family, mostly because it seemed rude to go to a breaking of the fast with a full belly.

  She liked the fast, found it cleansing, an invitation to reflect. The other soldiers would invariably give her shit when they found out her background, but it had been indispensable for intel work and deep recon. After the village massacre, FBI counterterrorism had come for her mother, jailed her for ten months on a trumped-up charge, and spent days grilling everyone from her mosque. Now her mother talked to no one, just sat alone in her apartment with the TV.

  Nazar’s car pulled into the parking lot, slowed, and then accelerated to thirty miles an hour, turning hard toward the exit.

  “Where the hell is she going?” Hayes asked. “Moret, do you have a shot? Ahead of the car?”

  “No. She’s behind the rise.”

  “Is she calling?”

  “Message from Nazar,” Ward said, and read it out. “‘Change of plans. Come on foot.’ It’s a new address.” She had switched the location.

  “Speed, I want you on the sniper rifle,” Hayes said. “You tail her. Get over there and get yourself a shot.

  “Moret. You’re with us. I need you in case we have to do the shooting drive-by.”

  Delta consisted mostly of direct assault troops, and from those a small number of operators graduated to sniper/recon teams. Hayes, Speed, and Moret had all worked “recce.” The unit was modeled on the British SAS and borrowed some of its lingo. Speed had plenty of experience on the SR-25 sniper rifle, and Moret was the better shot overall, so they kept her near Nazar in case there was a need for on-the-fly close-quarters work.

  The team climbed into the Suburban and pulled out with Hayes at the wheel. Speed drove the pickup truck behind them. Three quarters of a mile from the park, Ward held out the laptop to Hayes with a map of the address Nazar had given.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Chapter 28

  THE MECHANIC DRAPED a black flag across the concrete-block walls. He knew that there was more to a bombing than ketanes and vapor points, and that is why he had prepared the room: soft lights, a table with a Kalashnikov and a long sword.

  The space needed to be prayerful, reverent, sacred. The Mechanic had pieced it together from the martyrdom ceremonies he had seen on the Internet.

  Bradac stepped into the room and lowered his head slightly in awe. For his entire life, he had known only the seedy and pathetic. His mother had been an addict, and the drugs were probably responsible for the fact that he had an IQ of around 80. He had bounced in and out of prisons since he was a teenager. They had found him before he came to the attention of any Western intelligence service.

  Caro had confirmed it, using the colonel’s resources. Bradac was a cleanskin, unknown to Western intelligence and able to slip past borders without a second glance.

  As he neared the altar, his eyes grew wide behind the thick glasses he wore to help with his lazy eye.

  “Can I touch it?” he asked.

  “Go ahead,” the Mechanic replied. “It’s not armed.”

  He reached a hand out and traced the threads in the nylon vest, then began praying quietly.

  The Mechanic wiped the fabric down with alcohol to remove the fingerprints. There would be no trace of the real author of this operation.

  He opened the files he had received from Caro; included with the instructions for the bombing was a set of fingerprints belonging to John Hayes. Planting false clues would be an interesting challenge but well within his powers. The only evidence from the bomb would point to the wrong culprit.

  A half dozen cell phones sat on the counter, all with their batteries removed. To communicate with Caro over the mirror network, he had had a phone specially built for privacy using a forked version of Android. They each had one. Messaging and, in an emergency, direct voice calls could be encrypted end to end.

  The Mechanic put the gauze down and looked over the tracks in Bradac’s arm. He had attempted suicide twice before. That was an excellent sign, and the intellectual disability would keep him from overthinking, from doubt. They had plied him with very weak intravenous heroin, enough to keep him responsive but too docile and clouded to second-guess what he was going to do.

  The Mechanic had sent him on a trial run the month prior. Bradac had thought it was real and performed flawlessly, flicked the trigger without a moment’s hesitation. The bombs were mock-ups. But he had moved simply, without hesitation, his mind numbed, like a wind-up toy marching ahead.

  For months, they had fed him an endless stream of propaganda videos—footage of Western-led humiliations and massacres of the faithful—and told him of all the promises of heaven waiting for him after the bombing. He was taking a few lives to save thousands more, to unite the people under the One.

  After the trial run, he was so distraught they had to double his dosage. He wept for days because he thought he had missed his chance at heaven. He begged and begged for another chance.

  The central fact of Bradac’s existence was that no one had ever paid attention to him before, and he had never seen anything but abuse and mockery, violence and penny-ante betrayal. To be treated as special, to have a role, to be important for one moment; it was an easy trade for the rest of his sad life.

  Though it stood to change the fate of nations, it was a simple mission: walk up to a school that had essentially no security, no standoff distance.

  The initial charge would be placed on the ground. It would simply burn, throwing sparks, to draw the children to the windows. It would look like fireworks, and children loved fireworks.

  Then all he had to do was stand near the glass and press the trigger.

  Caro ran his thumb over the black phone, then dropped it on the seat of the Mercedes as he sped through the desert night. Enough information had been extracted from Foley for him to find Hayes and recover the shipment, and now they would be able to control Hayes through his wife and child.

  That type of leverage was a basic tool of Caro’s profession. There are things worse than death, he knew all too well.

  Caro hadn’t spent a night at his own apartment in months. He didn’t like to be at home. It was a comfortable place, far more modest than his role.

  But in the back, he could always hear the boy. He would always think of him as the boy, even though he was older now, with hair on his chin and arms. Caro didn’t consider him his son; he was just the timekeeper, a metronome ticking away empty seconds.

  He hated the hospital sounds of that room.

  It was the only time the West had ever come close to killing Caro, at least until the fierce fighting when he ambushed Hayes on the way back from his infiltration mission. An Israeli F-16 dropped a bomb on a Hezbollah compound that they had just fled. The concrete from an imploding apartment building blew through the window of their car and fractured Caro’s son’s skull. That was it. He was paused.

  He could murmur a few responses, but it was like seeing a one-year-old in a man’s body, and every year he grew older, and the gap between his handsome face and his drooling incomprehension grew more unsettling. Something had to be done.

  He was alive only because of Caro’s wife, who would come in and spoon food into his mouth.

  “It would be a crime against God,” she said whenever Caro brought up the subject. But Caro knew that this limbo between life and death was the real crime.<
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  He stole into his room at night and watched the blank eyes. He placed his hand over his mouth and pinched his nose until the boy would start to fuss, slapping weakly at his wrists, his face turning redder and redder, those instincts so strong, to hold on to a life not worth keeping.

  Caro watched him struggle and heard his wife’s footsteps on the carpet.

  He let his hand fall away.

  He hated that boy, the empty shell of his son, but there was a lesson in it. It filled him with anger and a desire for revenge, of course, but Caro refused to be affected by distorting passions. Such feelings were the tools of terror, and to master them he needed to master himself.

  When Caro was a young man, he learned to hate with an intensity that nearly destroyed him, and then came the hard part: learning to control it, to make it useful.

  Ever since the Twin Towers fell, so many of the young fighters clamored to go bigger: blasts, body counts, nuclear arms.

  But the West barely noticed when a hotel went down. There had been so much killing over the past dozen years. Two hundred thousand die in Syria. Five million in the Congo. The world shrugs, hides away in comfort and numbness.

  No. Terror was a tactic. What mattered wasn’t the strike, but the reaction. You could kill millions and no one would flinch, but if you touch the right spot, if you find the right leverage, a soft target, a simple act could ignite the world.

  It was an insight that would save lives. Instead of mass killings, there would be targeted violence. He felt bad for the children, but it was a sacrifice of a few young bodies to save thousands more, the same way the Americans had killed those in Hiroshima to save the world from a much bloodier war. That was Caro’s strength, to see past the immediate violence to the larger game beyond.

  The Americans would never stop meddling in his part of the world. Attacking them head-on was suicide, but martyrdom had plenty of devotees. When he watched the Shia march on Ashura, covered in blood and slamming knives into their foreheads, or the Palestinians striving to be the perfect victims, he could only shake his head. Why make a cult of losing?