Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  He knew the drill. They were taking him to a black site, or maybe the Fort Leavenworth supermax prison, to be warehoused, disappeared in a cell where the light shone twenty-four hours a day until the mind destroyed itself.

  But his own fate wasn’t his concern right now. They hadn’t believed him. Caro was gone, but whatever plot he had started could still be ticking. How many would die?

  He heard footsteps, the breath of a man, figured him for a hundred and eighty-five pounds.

  “There is an imminent threat,” Hayes said. “Please listen. I understand that you don’t believe me, but people are going to die and you can stop it.”

  He felt the blacked-out goggles tugged away from his face, pulling at the deep cuts along his cheek and ear. The light blinded him.

  As his eyes adjusted, he looked at the man standing over him. They had met before, at Bragg. His name was Cox. And Hayes recognized him as the man who had broken through the crowd at the last minute and stopped the SWAT team from killing him on the spot.

  Cox said nothing and reached into his pocket. He placed a key in Hayes’s shackles and released his feet, then his hands. He put the restraints on the seat across the aisle.

  Hayes’s mind worked quickly as he surveyed the jet’s interior. This must be a trap. Maybe an attempt to build rapport, which meant he had a trained interrogator with him rather than a sadist. He preferred sadists. They caused more pain but were less effective.

  “I’ve been hunting you for a long time,” Cox said.

  Hayes narrowed his eyes, trying to puzzle out this man’s game.

  “And now I need your help, Captain Hayes. Riggs told us what happened.”

  Hayes refused to believe it. It would be snatched away. He held on in silence while the prospect of freedom, of making this all right, stood before him like a false vision before death.

  “There is a terrorist attack under way,” Cox said. “The suspects are inside the country. We don’t know where they will strike.”

  Hayes had faith in his country, in the truth. He’d figured that for a martyr’s cause. But it had worked.

  “It must be Samael,” Hayes said. “He was using the name Caro and had somehow managed to gain Riggs’s trust. They were developing an operation. I don’t know what the goal was. We had a source on Samael before…before everything fell apart. We were tracking him on that deep infiltration. What did Riggs say?”

  “He doesn’t know how much he can believe of what Caro told him. He thinks that he was planning a provocation, a way to start a war by striking at political elites.”

  “Samael has been building up to this for years. Our source talked about him going after leaders where they were most vulnerable, deriving the greatest effect from the smallest cause: targeting the families.”

  “Riggs believed it would happen abroad, against America’s enemies.”

  “No,” Hayes said. “It’s the same strategy, but he’s doing it in the U.S. That’s why he tried to kill Riggs, who knew the logic of his plans. The provocation is the first domino. He’s trying to draw us into a conflict. The U.S. will walk right into his trap. It could bring decades of bloodshed.”

  He looked down. “I know where he’s going. Washington. We need to get to Andrews.”

  “We have an imminent-threat alert out. Metro SWAT teams. The National Guard. We have security up around every target.”

  Hayes shook his head.

  “No, you don’t.”

  The patrol car stopped at the corner of Thirty-Seventh and Upton. Officer Paul Santoya scanned the street, then glanced down at the box on the passenger seat. It was a vapor-ion detector. For work at range, the bomb-sniffing dogs were ineffective.

  There was a red bar on the screen: Nitramine detected.

  The call had gone out from the tactical operations center downtown: a full alert. They wanted added security at the schools. Everyone was carrying a long gun. He figured it was just the politicians looking out for themselves as usual, and today would be an easy job, babysitting VIPs’ kids. He had been assigned to Sidwell.

  White smoke rose down the hill. He called it in and was trotting toward the school down Thirty-Seventh Street when he saw sparks pouring into the air. He had been army National Guard infantry, with two deployments. He had seen plenty of IEDs go, but this looked like fireworks.

  As he came around the corner, he saw the man standing in front of the school: bulky coat, hands in pockets. The vapor detector went to five bars. Could have just been the fireworks. New Year’s wasn’t that far away.

  He dropped to one knee to steady his rifle, took aim, and keyed his radio.

  “This is Santoya. I have a man on Thirty-Seventh, Sidwell Friends, outside the middle school. Bulky coat, hands in pockets. There’s some kind of fireworks going off. Should I approach?”

  He aimed his rifle at the man’s center mass, as he had been trained, felt the cold wind against his cheek, and moved the target a few mils to the left in his scope to compensate.

  Santoya remembered the day insurgents had blown the checkpoint outside his forward operating base. Even the high-powered rifle round to the insurgent’s chest hadn’t killed him fast enough to stop him from pulling the trigger.

  But this guy didn’t look like a bomber. He was smiling.

  “Stand by, Santoya.”

  The man in the coat watched the fireworks blaze, then looked up at the children, their faces against the windows.

  “I say again, do I approach?”

  He kept his finger outside the trigger guard. Santoya had a good thing going with a younger girl he’d met online, no drama, a steady job, enough for the alimony. He was not going to throw it all away by acting like he was still downrange and killing some poor guy who was just out for a morning walk.

  A head shot. That was SOP. He aimed two mils higher. He had qualified on this carbine, a law-enforcement version of the M4, and remembered that his cold shots always flew a little low, one minute of angle or so. Propellant burns more slowly in a cold barrel.

  “I say again, do I approach?”

  The man’s hand reached deeper into his jacket pocket.

  A thirty-foot bank of video screens filled the front wall of the tactical operations center—the TOC. Cox’s face appeared on one of the dozens of displays. They relayed the message to him from Officer Santoya at Sidwell. The TOC commander didn’t want to take the shot.

  On-screen, there was a man to the side of Cox who looked like he had just been dragged back from hell, his cheek bandaged and face scratched up.

  The whole staff wondered who they were, these people who had authority straight from the White House and had ordered roadblocks around half the schools in Washington.

  The fireworks. A distraction before the main blast. To draw them to the glass. To cut them when it shattered. Hayes had seen it before.

  “Take the shot,” he said to Cox. “The head. Take the shot. Now.”

  The command went from Cox to the TOC to the officer’s radio. Santoya laid his finger on the trigger and pulled it smoothly.

  The head of the man in the jacket disappeared in a cloud of red. His body fell back as it crumpled, out of view from the school behind a low concrete wall. Only a few children witnessed anything. Most of them knew nothing of what happened that morning until years later. Their eyes were fixed on the colors pouring from the small package as the sparks slowed, then stopped, and left only a cloud of white smoke drifting into a clear sky as their teachers called them back to their desks.

  Chapter 51

  “HEY.”

  A hand closed on my shoulder.

  “Byrne.”

  A figure rose over me. I sat up, startled, and grabbed the wrist.

  It was Kelly, holding a cup of coffee in her other hand. She stepped back.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re at the hotel. Everything’s cool.”

  I looked around the room: generic landscape paintings, a minifridge, light angling in between the drapes.

  “
Right.”

  She was smiling at me like I was the last one to get the joke.

  “What time is it?” I asked. There was something strange about the light.

  “Nine thirty.”

  “Wait. Was I…”

  “Yup,” she said. “Like a log. I didn’t know you snored.”

  “Neither did I.”

  I lifted myself up on one elbow, put my hand to the side of her face, and kissed her.

  “I haven’t been able to do that in a long time.”

  “You look like a little boy when you’re asleep.”

  “All right. Don’t get cute.”

  It was Kelly who had first told Cox the truth of what happened. It took two dozen officers to catch her, in the sloughs near the Mexican border. Without her giving Cox the story, preparing him for the truth, we never would have been able to stop the bomber in time.

  It takes a while to get off the no-fly list and undo the damage of being branded an enemy of the state. Forced R&R with Kelly was fine by me.

  “Here.” She handed me an orange pill bottle and then took a bottle of her own and dropped a tablet into her palm. We were like a couple of old fogies, but the injuries were healing, and I was starting to be able to use my shoulder again.

  “Cheers.” I swallowed my pills down with a glass of water from the nightstand. I had had them put us up at La Valencia. She stepped onto the terrace. I followed and put my arm around her waist.

  Swells filled in the cove, a ten-foot set, peeling beautifully as the late-season Santa Ana blew offshore.

  “That’s gorgeous.”

  “The ocean?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m off oceans for a while.”

  She had her phone in her hand and was fiddling with it. Something was on her mind.

  “Any news?”

  “My CO called.”

  “And?”

  “Cox straightened everything out. And my unit-transfer request went through.”

  “Great. Where are you headed?”

  “Bragg.”

  Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, home to Airborne and Special Forces.

  “It’s the cultural support teams.”

  “Congratulations.” That’s the closest women could get to frontline combat, at least officially, accompanying Rangers and SF on raids. And she would be first in line for Special Operations if the policy changed.

  “Cox pulled some strings. I still have to make it through assessment.”

  “You will. I am damn sure of that. I feel sorry for the bad guys. When do you leave? Fall?”

  She pursed her lips. “A week.”

  I did a decent job hiding my disappointment. I was happy for her and didn’t want to bring her down.

  “They’re trying to stand it up by summer. If it works out, I’ll be gone eighteen months.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. We both stood there, pinned by the awkward question in the air.

  “I’m sorry, Tom. I’ve got to do it. This was supposed to be—”

  “Of course you’re going to do it. We were always on the same page. Don’t worry about that for a second.”

  “I meant everything I said.”

  “Me too.”

  Sure, I had slept through the night beside her, but I still had a lot to deal with, and I wasn’t going to rush into anything. It wasn’t fair to me, or her.

  “Thank you for trusting me, and for…”

  “Not dying?” she said.

  I almost laughed. “Well, yeah.” She’d proved me wrong. I wasn’t a curse.

  “You’re easy to please.”

  “I didn’t think I could have this again. That I would deserve it.”

  “You do, Tom.”

  I kissed her and brought her to my chest.

  “You’re a good guy. Don’t be too hard on yourself, okay?”

  People had been telling me that for more than a decade. I’d always known in some way that I hadn’t caused those deaths, but that didn’t matter to the guilt. I knew it, but I could never fully believe it. Now I could start, and maybe I could stop running.

  “I won’t.”

  I held her close. And for once, a morning felt like a beginning instead of an end that would never come.

  I looked out over the cove, then back into the room, waiting for the punishment for my pride, my happiness, my gall. Nothing came. Where were the shades that had haunted me? Gone for now and, I prayed, for good.

  Those visions weren’t Emily. They were my own twisted guilt, my head looking for ways to hurt me.

  And I remembered her as she was, beside a mountain lake, young and strong and beautiful. I remembered the first time she handed me a glass of her father’s moonshine. She’d warned me it was strong. Come on, I said, took it down, then broke out in a fit of coughing, water welling from my eyes. She started laughing, under the summer sky so clear.

  That was Emily. That was the truth. That’s what I would remember now.

  We watched the ocean for a long time.

  “One week,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You want to stick around?”

  “More than anything. And then…”

  “You’re going to Bragg. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m not. And life is long, Byrne.” She pulled me in close and kissed me. “I’ll be seeing you around.”

  Chapter 52

  THEY BURIED COOK on a Wednesday. It was a cold, brilliant morning at the Main Post Cemetery at Fort Bragg. Hayes and Moret joined Cook’s father and brothers to carry the casket. Moret used her left hand. Her right arm was still in a sling.

  When Caro’s deputies had turned on Riggs’s men, Ward took advantage of the chaos and managed to escape, carrying Cook with his arms over her shoulders. She broke into a construction trailer and did everything she remembered from tactical combat care for the tension pneumothorax. She’d stayed there in the cold with her friend for hours, talking to him about old action movies like they used to. But he had never regained consciousness.

  Ward’s two sons, three and five, sat in the fifth row beside her ex. She had tried to draw them so many times, but she couldn’t get their faces right, couldn’t picture them anymore. Every time the guilt had devastated her, and finally she just stopped trying.

  Now they were here, trying their best to sit still, though the three-year-old couldn’t help but swing his dangling legs.

  They watched her stand at attention beside the rifle party at the full-honors funeral and lead the three-volley salute.

  After the burial, Hayes and Moret and Ward went to a dive bar in Southern Pines well known for its clientele: built guys with beards and Wiley X tans who kept to themselves and, if pressed, claimed to have the most boring-sounding civilian jobs imaginable: systems engineer, compliance analyst.

  Byrne and Britten wanted to leave them alone, to talk, to grieve, but Hayes had insisted that they come.

  They took the back room with the pool table and the dartboard. Moret passed Hayes a medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award in the U.S. military. Hayes had skipped the ceremony at the Pentagon. If they wanted a hero, they’d have to find someone else. Even after he had been cleared, Hayes didn’t like mingling among the generals who had spent two years trying to kill him. The award was classified. It was really about the brass honoring themselves for their magnanimity.

  It felt odd when he’d pulled on his class A uniform after so long on the run and operating undercover before that. He barely recognized himself in the mirror.

  The investigations had been an endless slog, but the glad handing from the command afterward was worse, the way they treated him as if nothing had ever happened.

  Hayes’s teammates were glad to be together here, on their own, away from the base. Mainly they checked up on one another, made sure everyone was getting on in the transition, families were okay, that they all had everything they needed.

  They’d been in the crosshairs so long that there was
something unsettling about peace and calm and empty days. They hunted for jobs, went through bills, shopped for basics, and were never able to stop looking over their shoulders for a kill team, even while dragging the trash cans out to the curb.

  But every day was a miracle. They talked about what they had missed, the small things: using their own names, eating a decent burger, taking the kids to the lake, mowing the lawn and smelling freshly cut grass.

  Byrne brought back another round. It had grown late.

  “Ask Hayes,” Moret said.

  Ward turned to him. “When Cook came to at the last safe house, he was trying to tell me something. I think it was a joke. Corduroy something.”

  Hayes shook his head. “You haven’t heard that one?”

  “No.”

  “Come on.” He sighed. “Everybody knows that joke.”

  “How does it go?”

  Hayes relented. “Did you hear about the corduroy pillows?” he asked, and looked around the circle. “They’re making head lines.”

  Britten laughed first. Moret joined in. Ward groaned. Even Hayes seemed to enjoy it.

  “He finally told a decent joke.”

  It grew quiet again, and there was some crying. They had held it back for so long. Hayes shut the door and they comforted one another, brothers and sisters, let it overflow at last, the warring feelings of sadness and joy for what was lost, and for what remained.

  They drank to the dead, and to one another, and to the lives they had saved. And they drank to Hayes, who had brought them home.

  As they lowered Cook into the ground, Samael woke from a deep sleep in the business-class cabin of an Emirates 777 and pressed the button to raise the lie-flat bed. The attendant approached and asked when would be a good time to serve dinner.

  The menu featured grilled lamb cutlets, roast chicken with a pistachio crust, and Thai-style fish curry.