Dead Zero

CREECH AFB

OPERATIONS CENTER

INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

1600 HOURS

Here was war. In glowing screens that sent gray-blue shafts up to the ceiling of a smokeless bunker in a room that could have been full of insurance adjusters, or newsletter writers, or catalog telephone operators, the young people of the 143rd Expeditionary Wing (UAV) hunted and killed and blew shit up extremely well.

“You’ve been briefed on MQ-9 Reaper?” asked the colonel as he led them through the large, hushed room, ultra-air-conditioned, almost like a religious space occupied by intensely filled confessionals.

“More or less,” said Starling.

“Let me recap. It’s our primary hunter-killer system. It’s the Mitchell bomber of the war on terror, the do-anything, go-anywhere airborne sniper. It can hang in the air low or high for fifteen hours at a time and the kids who run it develop an almost mystical feel for its handling capabilities. They meld with it somehow, as an old fighter jock like me might say. It has superb optics and target-guidance systems. It has weapons hard points for up to twelve missiles and two guided munitions, as smart bombs are called. It’s a big thing too; you think ‘drones’ you think little buzzy kites with motors. Uh-uh. It’s the size of a Warthog, with a 950-shaft horsepower turbocharged engine. It’s nothing but wings and streamline and gizmos, and one of the reasons people assume it’s small is because it has no features, not really, to give it a sense of scale; no personality, no eccentricities, no pizzazz. It’s just white streamlined death. We think of it as ‘deadly persistence’ in the way it hangs around while it hunts. It’s got all the bells and whistles, including a Raytheon AN/AAS-52 multi-spectral targeting sensor suite which includes color and monochrome daylight TV, infrared, and image-intensified TV with laser range finder and target designator. You could broadcast a talk show from it.”

“What’re you shooting from it?” asked Swagger.

“Primarily, Hellfire AGM-114. And we are talking some kind of precision. They say ‘Hellfire’ is an acronym for hel-i-copter launched fire-and-forget. Sounds weak to me. I think it’s just some Baptist general’s Old Testament imagination for hellfire and brimstone, raining down on the evil and depraved of Sodom and Gomorrah and Afghanistan. For the record, it’s a laser-guided rocket with a twenty-pound warhead, initially developed to burn red tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap. No tanks here, so we put what we call a blast-and-frag sleeve on that twenty pounds of explosive so that when it goes, it sends out a hundred-thousand-piece spray of supersonic steel. It’s primarily for killing people or blowing up vehicles. It can take out a small building too. For those hard-to-reach spots, we have a little treat called ‘thermobaric,’ which means that in a nanosecond before detonation the explosive atomizes, that is, turns to droplets of mist that fill the air. Then it goes and it really rips a hole in the wall of the universe. We can put it nearly anywhere. Hellfire can fly about three miles, top speed 950 miles per hour, so time in flight is minimal. Originally it was to be TV guided but they couldn’t make it work. They switched guidance systems to what is called soft laser; our operators lock on the target from here and download that info into the guidance system of the weapon itself and then engage, and the bird follows the laser signature down to the end of the ride. It goes hot in a few hundred feet and then it’s very reliable. It’s a nasty bitch; it comes in at a low angle, a little over treetop level, and depending on how accurately it’s been aimed, it can go through a window, pass the Coke machine and the water cooler, stop and use the men’s room, knock on the door, go into the imam’s anteroom, wait until he’s ready, then go in and blow him up.”

Swagger got the joke, if Starling didn’t quite.

“But it’s a tank killer, basically, right?” asked Swagger. “Suppose you’ve got something bigger to whack?”

“That’s our Paveway Two,” Nelson said. “It’s a smart bomb, a TV-guided, five hundred pounder, thermobaric for enhanced destructiveness. The camera’s in the nose, the operator can switch to it and actually ride it down. That’s our crater maker, and each Reaper carries two, in case we need to wipe out a building. It happens. Now how do we decide to use these beautiful little toys? That is the question, isn’t it?” Nelson said.

“That’s why we’re here, sir,” said Starling.

“Fair enough. We have very strict policies on when we can and when we can’t fire. There are three levels of permissibility. The first is called Tango, mil-speak T, for tactical. Normally, all the tac jobs are handled by service aviation. A marine company is pinned down, they call their own command and get a marine Apache and he Hellfires the crap out of whoever’s shooting at the marines. Doesn’t concern us, but sometimes for whatever reasons, the Apaches aren’t able to get there fast enough and we have a drone in the area, our people will take the shot on a Tango license to shoot. They can communicate directly in real time with the grunts. I’m somewhat prejudiced here, but I think the marines would prefer a drone shoot over an Apache or an F-15, because our people are so much better. I mean this is all they do, day after day, and some of them get an almost zen feel for what the aircraft can do and what it can’t, and they can turn on a pin, change angles of attack in a split second, Immelmann turn to the deck, do amazing things with those little aircraft and really put some hurt on the bad guys.”

Swagger watched: in one of many similar cubicles, a young woman in the smart uniform of an Air Force officer, but for her pink flip-flops, sat at a console. She had one hand on a joystick and one hand on a lever to her left. Before her, a black-and-white television screen mounted in a wall of switches and buttons displayed a landform sliding underneath her from ten thousand feet, plus all sorts of technical readouts. Her ears were muffed with earphones, and a prong mike curved around her cheek to her mouth. She was talking, flying, searching, and hoping all at the same time.

“Lieutenant Jameson represents our second level of permissibility. It’s called Oscar, that is O, the O standing for opportunity, as in targets of. Using intel developed by on-the-ground CIA assets, she knows where there is likely Taliban activity. Her battle manager vectors her onto the area, and they’re both looking hard for signs of men with weapons. They may or may not represent any direct threat to coalition troops, but our rules of engagement won’t let us just pop anyone. We have to see a weapon. Sometimes we’ll stay with a truck or an SUV for hours waiting for a glimpse of an AK muzzle. Then we spend ten minutes trying to get permission, first from whoever’s area of responsibility it is, then from the Agency, first on the ground in Afghanistan, then from an agency coordinating committee, then from AF command, and they have a legal officer sitting in on all Oscar operations, and all of them have access to the same battlefield visuals. Then and only then do we shoot. That’s most of our shooting.”

Lieutenant Jameson seemed to have come up with a possible target. Now she was really flying the aircraft ten thousand miles away, and Bob watched as her body language indicated the torque and concentration she was putting in as she delicately played the two controls against each other.

“The stick,” said Colonel Nelson, “is vehicle manipulation, stick and rudder in the old days. Up, down, left, right. The rudder pedals are now part of a computer program, so she’s not pumping away with her feet at the same time. Meanwhile, the lever on the left is throttle, controlling airspeed, engine pitch, that sort of thing. When we’re close to the ground and engaging targets, we’re operating right near the stall zone, so the trick is to find the equipoise between the stall and the maneuver. As I say, these folks develop an amazing touch for it, I mean I’ve seen them do things I couldn’t even dream of in my F-15.”

Jameson was good. Just a few feet from her glowing, lit-by-screen face, in black and white and flickering with the technical monitors that, in a river rush of cascading integers, told her the speed, direction, health, and mood of her unmanned aviation vehicle, the ridges of Afghanistan slid by. After one of them, she banked hard left, tilting her wings to forty-five degrees to match the incline of the slope beneath, then jacked into what felt like a left hand so harsh Swagger could feel the imaginary Gs in his stomach as she skittered over a village, twirled again, until a cruciform was on a single house. She rotated in low orbit, the house staying locked in the cruciform reticle.

“Jameson’s our new ace. They call her New-D, which she doesn’t like, but it’s a tribute to her and to Old-D, Dombrowski, who was the best until she left. Now watch: Jameson could take it out with the snap of a button,” the colonel said, “but not without permission. You can’t hear it, but she’s on the horn this very minute, extremely intense conversations with a variety of sources, not only her battlefield manager”-he pointed to an officer on a platform in the center of the room, bathed in gray light as he was following several dramas of interception at once-“but the other sources I mentioned. She’s even reading the license plates of the vehicles to see if they match any affiliated with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.”

“And if she gets a signifier, she’ll shoot?” asked Chandler.

“With approval.”

But this wasn’t a good one for Diana the Huntress. That goddess would have to wait for her blood offering from her young acolyte Jameson as her unseen collaborators and supervisor decided against pulling the trigger, and she climbed from the area, locked on a steady course, riding the grid this way before she rode it that way.

Nelson led them onward, talking as he went.

“The third level of permissibility is what we call Sierra, S for strategic. That’s polite terminology for assassination. That’s when the Agency develops a high-value target opportunity, specific to time and place. A big bad guy, in other words. It’s rare enough to be fun and a highlight in a duty week. We will intercept him, just like we did Yamamoto in World War Two. We’ll know where he will be and we’ll be there, real high or real low. All the permissions are already in place, legal has signed off, we’re just looking for one of a dozen preselected descriptors. Maybe an on-ground asset will be communicating with us. All the folks involved generally tune in; it’s everybody’s favorite TV show. But it’s really up to the battle manager and the pilot to bring it off, and the other people usually keep their mouths shut. That one’s all flying, just waiting for a moment when Mr. Big is in the car, there aren’t any school buses or ambulances or trucks full of violin prodigies nearby, and they drop the hammer. The Agency is very strict on collateral, particularly in a Sierra shoot. It’s one thing to blow up a school when you’re trying to save a platoon from getting overrun and another to blow it up to kill one guy whose presence you’re not a hundred percent clear on. Anyhow, you’ll see a good one when you look at the shot tapes. We got a Taliban assistant commander in Kandahar province on that shift, I’ve already checked. Poof. Instant vapors. My people like those a lot. They’re the shots that’ll end the war sooner, rather than later.”

“There’s no other ‘level of permissibility’ as you call it, nothing beyond Tango, Oscar, and Sierra?” asked Starling.

“No, ma’am. Not at present. Not seven months ago. Now, if we find ourselves in a fall-of-Vietnam scenario, that might change. Or if Al-Qaeda goes belly up if we get the tall man, that might change too. I can’t forecast the future. But those are our standards, our rules, and as you will see, we document everything and nothing is left to chance.”

“And drones aren’t run out of any other base?”

“No sir. The Air Force flies the drones, the CIA provides the intel and co-ops on the supervision. The CIA and the Air Force have a very good operating relationship, at this level anyway. Everybody’s on the same page.”

“And you tape all your shots?” asked Starling.

“Yes, ma’am. Partially to learn from them, but also to cover this eventuality so that we can answer any questions quickly and honestly.”

They walked on through the center, seeing Jameson’s scene played out by a dozen other pilot operators, some in Air Force officers’ uniforms, some in shorts and T-shirts-civilian contractors, the colonel explained-passed under an archway, and came to a corridor. The colonel led them to a room.

“This is where I’ve set you up. We’re at your disposal. You see before you duty logs, and the sergeant here will call your operators and battlefield managers for interviews. You can go through each operator’s shifts in real time-well, you won’t want to do that-or on channel two, you can see all the shots. You can talk with Captain Peoples, who was the battle manager that shift. I’ll have meals brought to you, the bathroom is down the hall, and call me if you need anything at all. As I said, I want it noted that our cooperation was one hundred percent.”

“Thank you,” said Starling, and she and Swagger got to work.

FBI HQ

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1700 HOURS

Nick was in records on the second floor. It looked about as law enforcement as a midsize software company, with a lot of intense people locked into their computer terminals. He went to the duty desk and waited for someone to notice him. He could have sent someone, for as an assistant director, he now had a fleet of staff, as well as endless extras assigned for the duration of this task force emergency, but somehow he felt it best if he handled it himself. He also could have had a clerk dispatched to his office, but he’d never adjusted to the perk thing. It was something you didn’t want to get too attached to or you’d really miss it when it went away.

“Yes, Mr. Director?” one of the clerks asked, having rushed to his side. ADs were big news in this part of the building, on this floor, and assisting one could always lead to some kind of break in the career climb.

“Hi,” he said, squinting to see her nametag, “Doris, how are you? How’re the wife and kids?” he joked, playing the sincerely-insincere card that was always good for an ice-breaking laugh.

“The kids ran away with a motorcycle gang and the wife is divorcing me for a bull dyke in Latent Prints,” the girl said brightly, and both laughed. He liked her spirit.

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. I’m not sure how you access this, but I’m thinking that in some way you ought to have records on a certain kind of guy.”

“You don’t have a name, a crime, a booking number?”

“Only a category.”

“I’ll try my best.”

“Okay, you know these guys who work overseas for these big security firms on government contracts? Graywolf is the biggest, but there must be more.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I know we looked into Graywolf in 2005 on the issue of illegitimate or indiscriminate shooting in Baghdad.”

“I remember it.”

“The guys they hire: they seem to be called contractors, they’re tough, hard guys, with a lot of military, even Special Forces, experience.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I need a list of the ones who’ve gotten in trouble with the law.”

“I can cross-reference by affiliation against conviction. What sorts of infractions?”

“Gosh, I’m guessing assault, second-degree murder, maybe extortion, maybe rape, the kinds of crimes you’d find in a war zone. Wouldn’t be crimes against property, but excess violence, a tendency to shoot, things that would get someone in trouble even in a wild and woolly town like Baghdad or Kabul. Maybe cross-reference with the authorities there, maybe check with State, Department of the Army, the marines, and so forth.”

“Okay. I’ll get right on it.”

“And maybe also check with State as to whether or not any of them have recently reentered the country. I’m looking for a hard-ass guy with lots of combat experience, a real operator who’s shady on the criminal front at the same time. I’m sure a lot of these guys are straight-on professionals, doing a very hard job in a crappy piece of the world. But the guys capable of that sort of thing over the long term, the guys who enjoy the action, who love to carry the black rifles and wear the watch caps low over their heads, the tactical freaks addicted to the rush of pulling the trigger-there’s got to be a kind of pool of them available for various odd, dirty jobs in those towns. The washouts, the screwups, the just fired, the embittered. Those are the guys I’m looking for, and I’m real curious to see if any Tommy Tactical heavy hitters have come back recently.”

“I’ll get right on it, sir,” she said.

“And this is just between you, me, and the bull dyke who stole your wife.”

HIGH DESERT

95 SOUTHBOUND TO VEGAS

1040 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

She drove listlessly if proficiently. The desert slipped by, unremarkable in its repetitiveness as the rental ate up the miles between Creech and Vegas and the hotel beds that would give them a few hours’ rest after an all-nighter talking about and watching missiles blow up vehicles mainly, the odd mud shanty, now and then an unidentifiable gun position, a spot on a ridge, a copse of trees, a wall off the road.

It was the same. The missile hit too hard and fast for even the highest res camera and the slowest slo-mo to catch it. What one saw was only the release of an energy bolt in the severe constraints of the black-and-white camera work, first a blinding smear of illumination, then unleashed, boiling coils of smoke lit from within, tumbling tumultuously, almost with anger and vengeance as their propulsion, while at the margins waves of dust whipped outward in supertime and anything unobscured by the blast wave rippled against the sudden pressure spike, people, furniture, junk of any sort, all of it airborne and deposited elsewhere in a second.

And the shooters. The same. Earnest techies, some civvie, some young Air Force officers, all polite and to the point, like a Boy Scout patrol dead set on a high merit-badge count. They were so decent you couldn’t really play them, somehow, so eager, having been clearly instructed by command to give it up to the feebs, all with bleached-white teeth. Maybe the civvies were a little more loosey-goosey, but not much, and in all their eyes Swagger read only commitment to duty, pride in warrior skills, the lack of self-consciousness of the best fighters (no intellectuals, no ironists, no wise guys among them). They were a one-way street.

The drive rolled onward, low energy and without seeming purpose except getting there and getting to bed. At a certain point, Bob checked the messages on his cell, then settled back into the silence that pretty much defined his relationship with Starling when they weren’t trying to nudge a young officer into explicating more precisely on the nature of this or that hit and the protocols that determined it. It had been exhausting, and only the work ethic of Spartans had gotten them through it despite jet lag and the need to return to DC and the actual mission at hand as soon as possible.

It wasn’t until the comical cityscape of the strip, that mile or so of fantasy money-trap architecture that comprised tourist Vegas, revealed itself that she spoke.

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“No, ma’am.”

“So I’m going to e-mail HQ a prelim. I’ll account for our time, enumerate our IVs, and report our conclusions, which would be, correct me if I’m wrong, zilch, zappo, zip, nada, rien, and, of course, nothing. Do you disagree?”

“No, ma’am,” said Bob. “Nothing we didn’t know before.”

“I’m going to ask to fly back tonight, tomorrow earliest. What day is it, again? All that time underground, you lose a sense of time.”

“It’s Sunday, it would be one-forty in the East.”

“Okay, give me a minute.”

She flipped her phone open one-handed, punched in a preset number, waited for the answer, and spoke quickly, listening more. Then she snapped it shut.

“He’s been to the Sunday talkers under that heavy security, no difficulties, no emergencies, so Cruz has gone to ground for the time being and I think we’re okay. I do want to be back before the next outing, that speech in Georgetown.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Anything to say? Any disagreement with my conclusion? For the record, I was impressed. You handled yourself very well and you slipstreamed nicely with my lead on the interrogations. Hard to believe you aren’t a trained agent.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Just trying to be helpful.”

More silence.

Then she said, “What did you mean?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said, ‘Nothing we didn’t know before.’ But we didn’t know anything before. We still know nothing, or am I missing something?”

“Well, I would say we learned that a) there is a secret CIA program, and that b) we know what it does and how it’s structured and who mans it and what its task is, and c) that Dombrowski took the shot on the day in question, though it wasn’t a Hellfire, it was more likely one of the big boys, a Paveway Two.”

Starling was silent for a while, then she guided the car to the shoulder. Cars buzzed by loaded up with prospectors, hungry to reach the promised land just ahead and, as promised, lose all their money. The comical town with its pyramids and space towers and Renaissance castles set against a crusty rim of low mountains lay bleaching in the sun. It looked like an idiot child’s creation.

“All right, Swagger. What are you seeing that poor dumb Chandler isn’t? What does the cowpoke Svengali have up his sleeve?”

“Yes, ma’am. First, the milieu. Hey, ain’t that a fancy word? Can’t believe I used it. I must have read it in some book or something.”

“No attitude, please.”

“I’m just funning you, Agent Chandler.”

“Since you seem dead set on destroying my entire interpretation of the last sixteen hours, why don’t you call me Jean. Or, I suppose, ‘Starling,’ since everybody else does.”

“The milieu. If you looked carefully-”

“I suppose I didn’t.”

“You saw a lot of tape strips. Meaning there were a lot of banners taped up in that op center that they took down. It had been sanitized, you know, like a toilet in a motel with a paper ribbon around it. I’m betting the banners said things like ‘Kill Towelheads!’ and ‘Go Git ’Em, Tigers.’ All that fighter pilot macho kill-the-bastards stuff. See, that’s that colonel. He’s a fighter jock, he brings fighter jock mentality to the job, his thing is get in close and blow the bastards away. That’s the spirit of the room, not the hum of techies. All those kids, they was suppressing, they was holding it in. They’re young killers and they’re proud of it. And they compete. That’s why they have nicknames like New-D and Old-D and I bet the rest have ’em too, like Saxon Dog and Red Hawk and Bravo and Lion-heart. They don’t want us to see that but that’s how people who kill operate, because they have to stay close to their high so they’re together when the shit is in the air. I know. Three tours, ’Nam, one as a sniper.”

“I know you’ve done some killing.”

“Way too much.”

“So what does that tell us? That’s not-”

“No, but it sets up the climate of the place and it tells us it ain’t as ‘professional’ as it seems and in that kind of a joint, things are sloppier, wilder, crazier. The stars have latitude, the bossman wants his kids to perform, he doesn’t want to override them with ridiculous rules and bullshit, so he relaxes the regs. But he tightens it up for us and Jameson almost got with the program, but she couldn’t say no to her comfy flip-flops today and go with the short little heels the women officers wear with that duty uniform. She probably normally hunts in jeans and a T-shirt or a tank top, and she loves it and they love her for it, because right now she is at the top of her game. But what that tells me is: there’s room for something to slide by the Air Force monitors.”

“I’m listening.”

“Second thing: her battlefield manager, Captain Peoples. Remember him?”

“He was the dullest of the dull.”

“He did seem like an IRS agent, didn’t he? He is the key guy. He had to be in on it, and he probably reports directly to the Agency in certain circumstances. His console is so complex he could have all kinds of communications circuits the brass know nothing about.”

“That doesn’t prove-”

“I watched him extra hard. Remember when you asked him, ‘And there’s no other category of permissibility except Tango, Oscar, and Sierra?’ And he said, ‘No, ma’am, absolutely not’?”

“Sort of. I think I asked Colonel Nelson that.”

“You asked everyone that. But only Captain Peoples was interesting when he answered. You know why?”

“Obviously not.”

“Because unlike Colonel Nelson or any of the others, Captain Peoples leaned forward in his chair, fixed his eyes on yours, and did not blink. They all blinked, all through their chats, it’s human to blink. You don’t blink if you’re concentrating on controlling your eyes because you don’t want to give up the lying tell signs, the sideways or upper look to the script you’re trying to remember. He had been professionally coached on how to get through an interrogation, how to lie without no tells. They trained him too good and he overdid it.”

“Okay,” said Starling. “I missed that. You didn’t. Good work. It’s thin but it’s not without its compelling element. But you said you know what this program does.”

“Think about what Tango, Oscar, and Sierra don’t do. Think about the possibility they don’t cover.”

“Just tell me. I’m too tired to play games.”

“Tango is urgent, tactical. Oscar is longer in duration, involves hunting, obtaining permission, checking with legal. Sierra is longest in duration, requiring preengagement permission requests and acceptances. But suppose… suppose they get a big guy in their sights and they have to make up their minds fast. In minutes?”

“All right. I’m supposing.”

“They don’t have time to go through committees and permission protocols or to haul a junior partner in from legal. So there’s got to be an ultra-override program where somebody of senior judgment and experience can make a fast read on intel and authorize an immediate shot. You get a good ground Joe who reliably sights Osama in a tent in some province. He calls it in to his Agency case officer, and that officer trusts him, sees the shot, and he calls Langley to get a fast, fast-shoot permission. It’s built on speed, no time for arguments, assessments, ramification surveys, tallying the yeps and the nopes, nothing like that. He goes to a big guy. This guy, whoever he is, he gets to say shoot or don’t shoot. He says it, the code word is sent to Creech, not to Colonel Nelson or the XO or whoever, but directly to the battle manager who goes to his best shooter and speaks the code word, delivers up the grid location, and she puts a big, smart bomb on it ASAP. From first sighting to delivery of ordnance, probably less than three minutes. And who knows? The shooter, for one. The battle manager, who immediately erases the tape and makes no document entry, for another. And then some Air Force crew at the fly-off base in Afghanistan who maybe notice Bird Twelve done come back shy one of its two Paveways. It don’t go no further, because the point is, in certain instances they will miss and they don’t want to answer no questions in case they take out that school or a hotel with thirty-one traveling salesmen in the bar. It’s self-sealing. It’s deniable. In the instant it happens it ceases to exist.”

“There’s no proof.”

“There will be tomorrow. When we see Dombrowski.”

“I’ll tell DC, we’ll get her service records and bio. You run the interrogation.”

“I will.”

“But if she stonewalls, I don’t know where we’ll be.”

“I have the key to unlock her. Susan Okada left a message on my phone. She found out there is just such a program and she found out the name. It’s called Pentameter.”

FBI HQ

TASK FORCE ZARZI WORKING ROOM

FOURTH FLOOR

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1750 HOURS

Doris in records must have worked overnight, and she was very good. By late the next afternoon, she’d come up with a list of possibilities, based on the investigation into Graywolf run by the Bureau some years back on the issue of illegal shootings during security operations in Baghdad. That shook out seventeen names. Of the seventeen, she ran down and accounted for fifteen; it was the last two who seemed to have disappeared and she’d run each for known accomplices, and cross-referenced those to come up with a third. She researched them all, made the calls, put the packages together, and got it to him fast.

He thanked her, and retreated to his office while outside agents ran down Ray tips or just relaxed after the stress of playing security guard while Zarzi was doing his fabulous TV bits. Nick didn’t want it known what he was looking into, because people talked to people who talked to people. He opened the files.

Faces. One of the great mysteries of law enforcement: what do faces tell you? Do people look like their characters or look unlike their characters? Nick tried to read the faces. But the faces, so common to men of high vitality and action orientation, were blunt, mute, almost flat. Zemke, Anthony, was feral and quick, but well muscled, an ex-Ranger with combat in the Raq, a street cop in Sausalito, California, after his time in the service finished. Four years with Graywolf, three in Baghdad as a security specialist, cashiered over certain irregularities in expense accounts. Last know address “c/o Black Cat Cafe, Kabul,” evidently the spot where the mercs hung and drank and looked for odd pickups from the town’s many intelligence shops.

Then there was Crane, Carl, twelve years U.S. Army, Airborne Ranger, Fifth Special Forces, demo, commo, and first aid, aka “Crackers the Clown” for his stony, humorless demeanor, just a medium-size guy with enough combat in his background to have won a war, any war, single-handed. Silver Star, DFC, Bronze with two combat valor indicators, CIB, three tours in the Raq, one in ’Stan. It came apart on allegations of rape, him married, with two kids and a loving wife in Jupiter, Florida. The next three years were Graywolf, then again a whiff of scandal and separation. He was interviewed twice, deemed uncooperative on the issue of indiscriminate shootings while commanding a Graywolf security unit but, as he pointed out, none of his principals ever got his hair mussed.

Finally, Adonis. Or maybe Hercules. This one was really interesting. Michael C. “Mick” Bogier, considered his senior year the number one or two high school linebacker in America. Heavily recruited, he settled on the football factory at Alabama as the straightest road to the pros, but six games into a stellar freshman year he got drunk at a fraternity party, took his high school girlfriend on a ride in the yellow ’Vette some alumni “loaned” him, wrapped it, himself, and her around a tree. Neither the car nor the girl survived, the tree was also totaled, and Mick left school. He tried juco, Divisions II and III, Canada, played some pickup ball, got into drugs and partying in L.A. while trying to become “an actor,” and finally enlisted after 9/11. For a while he’d found his niche: fast-tracked to Special Forces, he was sniper qualified, demo and commo cross-trained, a natural combat leader, a real Sergeant Rock. Decorations up the wazoo and it seemed he’d stay Green Beret for his twenty and morph into security consulting. But then along came Graywolf and their $200,000 sign-up bonus and Mick, who’d never been rich, and thought the NFL would make him so and was thus bitter about vanished chances, couldn’t say no. He should be running the joint now, the poster boy contractor with the lean face, the thick burr of blond hair butch-waxed to crew cut attention, the god’s body, the smarts, the guts. But he too had let his shooters go wild on the streets of Baghdad protecting various bigs. He was quietly let go, though with a bonus, and stayed in the Green Zone, where he acquired a reputation. He was suspected of a number of things, selling drugs and guns, trying to export dope (interviewed twice by DEA in Baghdad); that town finally got too hot for him and he took the picture show to Kabul, became a go-to guy for a number of drug lords with security problems, supposedly banked $4 or $5 mil in Switzerland, knew everybody and everything, and if you absolutely positively needed it done in Kabul by Tuesday, Mick Bogier was your guy.

Why did they bail on Kabul? War was their business and business was good. The three had entered the U.S. five months ago, via Miami International after taking the soft way home via Istanbul, then England, then the hop to Florida. State noticed and flagged, DEA noticed and flagged, and now and then Miami Vice checked up on them but just found three rich bruisers having fun getting drunk and laid. They disappeared from Miami just about the time… the Zarzi thing started up.

These were guys who could blow the shit out of a building or cut down nine unknown men, not for fun but because that was their job, they were being paid nicely for it. But who would hire them? They worked an exclusive world, mostly servicing intelligence agencies, international criminal entities, the odd billionaire who could buy his way in and needed some dirty deed done dirt quick and to hell with the expense.

Question of the day: who are they working for?

Wouldn’t it be nice to talk to these gentlemen and see what they’ve been up to? he thought, and tried to figure out how to do it. What tales they could tell…

But he had nothing, except some vague confirmation of Swagger’s claim of “contractors.” He didn’t have enough to book them, he didn’t have enough to APB them, he really didn’t even have enough to look for them. But he could put out a low-priority law enforcement request for any and all information regarding them to be forwarded to this headquarters, and maybe that would turn something up on the three stooges of death.

HENDERSON, NEVADA

13255 MAGNOLIA

HOME

0915 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

It was a small house, with gravel for a lawn and a cactus for a bush. One story, flat roofed, one of dozens like itself in a huge subdivision of Henderson, itself a subdivision of Vegas, laying out under a baking, bleaching sun. A Honda Civic was parked in the driveway and a half-scraped-off AF AND SOAR! sticker curled off the bumper, which, intact, had presumably declared JOIN THE USAF AND SOAR!

They knocked, and a young woman in a pair of gym shorts and a tank top answered the door in a bit, a pair of recently removed earpieces hanging around her neck from an iPod clipped to her shorts. Her hair was cropped short, naturally blond, and her skin beautiful, although, unfortunately, she was not. But she was certainly pleasant and looked kind without the intimidating beauty that scared so many off.

“Ms. Dombrowski?” Chandler asked, flashing her badge.

Badges are always bad news, even when they’re not. Dombrowski stepped back as if hit, blinked, lost all confidence, and said, “Uh, yes?”

“I’m Special Agent Chandler and this is Investigator Swagger. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’re looking into events in the 143rd Expeditionary Wing ops center at Creech a few months back. May we speak with you for a bit, please?”

Chandler had the warm but no-bullshit, no-refusal part of police-work down pat, and the young woman, her face closing off even more darkly, stepped back to admit them.

“I’m sorry I’m sweaty,” she said, “I was on the bike.” Then she launched into a pointless explanation of how she was due at Borders at eleven, then at the Center at eight, and she didn’t have time to exercise except in the morning except it was getting harder and harder and… but she didn’t really care and neither did they.

They sat, she in a chair, the two interlocutors on the sofa. Coffee? No. Juice, water, any sort of liquid, no. Now what was this all about? And finally, “Do I need a lawyer?”

“No,” said Chandler. “We’re simply being thorough. Allegations have been raised about a certain missile shot. Maybe it wasn’t even that, just a random explosion in a city full of them. But another agency has requested we examine, and so we have to. We were in the ops center yesterday and spoke to all the pilots on duty at the time in question, Colonel Nelson, and the battle management officer, Captain Peoples. You were the only one not present, and as you were in the area, we decided to complete the interviews for the record. You are not a ‘person of interest,’ nor at this time is any legal action contemplated against you. Possibly that will change, and if it does, you will be duly informed and given the opportunity to retain counsel.”

She nodded grimly.

She swallowed.

Then she said, “I can’t tell you anything.”

“Well, that’s not a good start,” said Starling, stagily disappointed.

“If there are any infractions or any crimes or any anything, they are my doing alone and I am guilty of them and nobody else is. I will not testify against any colleague or superior officer. If you have evidence against me and are going to indict me or subpoena me or anything, I will not testify or offer a defense. If I have to go to prison I will go to prison. I’ve thought this through carefully and that’s all I’ve got to say. You seem like nice folks and I don’t think you’re here to hurt me but that’s the way it has to be.”

“Whoa,” said Swagger. “We’re not here to bust you, Ms. Dombrowski. Ma’am, nobody wants you in jail. I already handed out my share of parking tickets, so I met my quota, and I shot a couple of rustlers in the driveway, so I don’t have to bring nobody in today. We just want to talk informally about events of that duty tour and see where that leaves us.”

“It will leave me in jail,” she said. “I killed thirty-one people that day for nothing, and it’s something I’d like to forget, but if it is determined that I’m to be punished, then I will be punished. That’s all I have to say.”

There was silence in the room.

Chandler looked at Swagger, nodded, and got up and left.

The older man and the young woman were alone.

“Why are you here?” the young woman said. “I’d think you would have concluded it might work better with a female interrogator. Empathy, gender identification, feminine bonding and understanding, all that.”

“Well, you and I have something in common that cuts much deeper than gender or any of that other stuff. And that is that we killed for the king. We were the royal assassins. We loved it, we enjoyed how special it made us, we liked the way the room quieted when we walked in. But there came a time when we looked at it, and thought, why? Why did that have to happen? Did it do any good?”

She shook her head, not in denial but in recognition.

“What were you?”

“Gunnery Sergeant, USMC. Sniper. Vietnam, seventy-three to seventy-five, until I was hit bad. Ninety-three kills on the record, many more off the record. Like you I put a crosshair on something and sent a package into it and watched it die. Like you I said it was for the good of the country, or at least each man I killed wouldn’t kill an American kid, and like you, at the end, I thought to myself, well, what the hell? Who am I? Why was I so good at it, and if it was so right, how come I see faces every night? You ride an exercise bike, I crawled up in the mountains of Arkansas and stayed drunk for twenty years before I finally came back to the world.”

She just stared at him.

“I wanted to fly fighters,” she finally said. “I wasn’t good enough. So I ended up with the next best thing and I never knew the price I’d have to pay.”

“You killed some people. So it goes. The world can be a wicked place, you and I both learned that the hard way. So let me tell you, for what it’s worth from a fella who’s faced the same bad demons as you, they don’t go away, but over time they soften and over time you realize that yes, there are boys who grew to be men and fathers and citizens because you done your killing. You can say, well, what about them people you killed, they might have grown to be men and fathers and citizens and made their contribution to their place too, and I say, I can only worry about so much, and I chose to worry about other marines, just as you did. No, it ain’t easy, and those of us who take the responsibility to press the trigger and fire the bullet or the missile, a little of us dies each time, but it does mend, heal, soften, go away, and you do get your life back slowly and are capable of contributing again.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I hope so.”

“And if you’re not talking about it because you think you have to ‘protect’ some people, let me tell you, that cat’s out of that bag. We know about Pentameter. We know about the top-secret, possibly illegal, fast-shoot leader-killing program that can be called up and executed in seconds and then ceases to exist. We know they used you to put a thermobaric Paveway into that hotel and that thirty-one souls went wherever they went, and no big bad leader died that day. But you didn’t kill them people. You lived up to your honor, your tradition, your family’s tradition”-Swagger knew Dombrowski’s father had been a lieutenant general in the Air Force and a Phantom jock in Vietnam, her grandfather a one-star general who’d done fifty (two tours) over Europe in the Sixth Air Force in World War Two, she’d graduated third in her class at the academy-“and you acted in a warrior’s good faith. You were used, but it happens, and you have to go on.”

“But,” she said, “in war, collateral happens. Wrong place, puff of wind, your finger slips, you misread a map, anything, and innocent people die. You live with it because that’s the process of war and it’s big and sloppy and cruel and you put it behind you. This was different. I was told to shoot, I rode the bomb down because Paveway isn’t a fire-and-forget system, so you have to actually fly it into the target. You’re in the nose. I saw that roof get bigger and bigger and bigger and then disappear in the flash. It happened because of me. And I checked the papers, I checked with everyone I knew: no, no leader went down, the intelligence was wrong, so let’s pretend it didn’t happen. You know, if the Israelis send a missile through the wrong window, they pay off and apologize. Here, we just pretend it hasn’t happened and we walk away from it. It’s not right.”

“And that’s why you left the service?”

“And broke my parents’ hearts and ended up selling books at Borders and working a rape hotline at night.”

“I’m betting you could get back in. They need people like you. You’re the best, and you make the service and the nation better for your participation.”

“Are you a recruiter?”

“No. I’m after whoever ordered a Pentameter hit that day. Someone high in government did it for reasons we haven’t figured out yet. Yes, he killed those thirty-one but he done some other killing too, for some policy goal that he’s the only one who’s aware of. He’s the bastard I’m hunting.”

“I’ll tell you everything,” she said.

U.S. 270

COLUMBUS, OHIO

1650 HOURS

LATER THAT AFTERNOON

The state trooper’s light flashed red-blue, red-blue and he hit some kind of klaxon device, an unpleasant sound not unlike the Israeli antiriot psy-war technologies. Bilal guided the van to a halt on the shoulder.

“What is it, Bilal?” asked Professor Khalid.

“I don’t know,” said Bilal. “You two sit there and keep your foolish mouths shut. This man does not want to be engaged in your dialectics. He is beyond enlightenment. When he sees that I am Muslim, he will want to arrest me and impound the vehicle. He will find what is in the back and we will be put on trial and treated like amusing dogs for the infidels. Then you will spend the rest of your lives in a Western prison and you will have contributed absolutely nothing.”

“Oh, dear,” said Dr. Faisal. “That would be most unfortunate. I would not go to heaven. Although it is meaningless to the apostate, as he is not going to heaven under any circumstances, the circumcised dog, and I-”

“Faisal,” said Khalid, “your hostility is pointless when directed at me. Save it for-”

“Be quiet, the both of you. Worthless, yakky old men, all the time with the yakking, I almost hope he does arrest us so I can get some peace and quiet.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Faisal.

“Use the jug,” said Bilal.

“It’s not that one. It’s the other one. A jug is of no use.”

“Then just hold it. That’s all we need, shit all over everything for this big American hero to smell.”

He tried to gather himself. The Ruger.380 with a Velcro strip adhesived to its slide was held in place by another Velcro strip wrapped around his forearm. He could draw and shoot in a second. Yet what would that accomplish? Broad daylight, highway, the middle of America, top speed sixty-two mph. They certainly weren’t getting away with anything, much less getting away, period.

Finally, presumably after checking their Arizona plates with HQ, the trooper lumbered out of his vehicle, stopped to hitch up his belt, then ambled forward to the van window. Bilal watched him advance, placed his wallet out on the empty seat next to him so that the officer could watch him reach for it, then set his hands at ten and two on the wheel, and concentrated on holding still.

“Good afternoon, sir, may I see a driver’s license, please?”

“Yes, Officer.”

He reached over and picked up the wallet, held it deliberately out front so the cop could watch both hands-this was a trick he’d learned as a child when the Israeli Security Forces detained boys en masse-and plucked out the license, a very good fake linked to an actual license holder in Tempe, Arizona.

The officer took the license, took a brief look around the van, giving the two old men a once-over, then said, “I’ll be right back, sir.”

He went back to his vehicle, now to run the license against watch lists, APBs, wanted circulars, other security checklists.

“I have shit myself,” said Faisal.

“Praise be to Allah,” said Khalid. “When you need Him, He comes to your service.”

“Infidel. Apostate. Fiend. Demon.”

“Stop it, you two. I will find a place for you to purify, if we get out of this.”

“I am trying to be rational.”

“The text is all the ‘rational’ you need-”

“Please, I can take no more,” said Bilal. “Silence. He returns.”

The officer came to the van window again.

“All right, Mr. Muhammed,” he said, handing the license back. “The reason I stopped you, your right rear tire looked wobbly to me. I think you should pull in at the next highway rest area and have a mechanic look at it. Maybe the lug nuts are loose, or maybe you have a worse problem and it’ll need some looking after. You could also help whichever old fellow had an accident get cleaned up. Sorry to detain you and cause an unpleasantness, but your safety is our most important concern.”

“Thank you, Officer,” said Bilal. “I will have it taken care of.”

“Good luck on your trip now.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Bilal started the engine again, waited for a space to open up, and reentered the traffic.

FBI HQ

DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

HOOVER BUILDING

WASHINGTON, DC

1000 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

So let me get this straight,” said the director, “your job was to apprehend a man who’d made a threat against a high-profile diplomatic visitor to this country. You haven’t done that. You really haven’t even come close and he’s come closer to doing his job than you have to doing yours. But you say you have uncovered a secret CIA killer program that in at least one case has targeted American servicemen in Afghanistan. You’ve decided that case is more important than apprehending Ray Cruz. You now want latitude to widen the investigation, bring in the U.S. Attorneys’ Office, begin subpoenaing high-ranking Agency officers working in the most secret and sensitive of national security areas. Hmm, Mr. Swagger, it seems like every time we hire you as a consultant, we end up in a completely different pea patch than the one we thought we were going to end up in. Is that a fair assessment?”

Bob said, “Yes, sir, that is fair.”

The three sat alone in the director’s big office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue with a nice view of the Capitol dome. The man himself, pink and glowing in his dark suit like so many of the DC big-footers, had his legs up on his table and his body language communicated the “friendly talk” mood as opposed to the “you are so fucked” mood. He liked Nick, and had more or less “supported” (best not to look too carefully at it) Nick during the twisted investigation that had led to the still controversial murder-one four times conviction of Tom Constable some years back. But he was also putting out a message that maybe this time, Nick was asking a little too much. He was a genius at sending messages with layers and layers of subtext.

“Mr. Director,” said Nick, “the evidence is pretty incontrovertible. We have a former drone pilot willing to testify that she was ordered, via secret CIA protocols, to destroy what turned out to be a nonmilitary target. We can tie that by time frame to the destruction of the hotel in Qalat where a U.S. Marine sniper had told his headquarters he would be setting up his mission. It connects to almost the minute. No, we don’t know how the Agency got into the marine communications net. But we’ll find that out. The marine was set to go Afghan time 1700, the missile, smart-bomb hit actually, was set up fast in real time, enabling an on-ground spotter to relay the info to whomever that the sniper had indeed entered the hotel, and the shot was ordered at about 1658.30 Afghan time. That gave the pilot just enough time to vector her Reaper vehicle to the exact grid location her battle management officer had given her, acquire target, launch the Paveway, and guide it down so that it hit at 1559.38. The time is on record at Two-Two Recon, Cruz’s battalion, outside Qalat. That fact won’t go away.”

“And you believe that operation continued in the United States?”

“I have the entry into the U.S. of three extremely proficient ‘contractors,’ last known locality Miami, Florida. After they disappeared, things started happening: a building was shot up in Danielstown, South Carolina, and a man killed. Mr. Swagger here just survived the incident by chance and you can still see the scar on his face where he was hurt in the gunfire. Second, four days ago, nine Filipino temporary workers were killed in Baltimore by a highly proficient team utilizing silencers and extremely developed raid craft. They had, we believe, followed Swagger and me to that location and meant to wipe out its inhabitants as a way of nailing Ray Cruz, whom we thought might seek shelter there. They’re still around, they’re still trying to kill Ray Cruz, and they won’t be leaving any witnesses. Since we believe they have satellite assistance in all the tracking they do, there is a good chance they are working for elements within the Agency.”

The director nodded. But then he said, “And the fact that Ray Cruz is still out there, that he tried to make his kill in Baltimore, the fact that he has not been apprehended, that seems not too important to you.”

This was the time to put it on record, Bob realized, that he had been in contact with Ray, that Ray had agreed to back off while the scandal was sorted out, and that he had not attempted any operations on Sunday last against his supposed target.

But knowing that was the only card he still had to play, Bob kept it to himself. Instead, he said lamely, “He did not make an attempt this past Sunday. Maybe he’s backing off. Maybe he’s letting us dig into Pentameter and that’s the point of his game, not killing this Zarzi fellow. He actually never pulled the trigger in Baltimore. His supposed ‘attempt to kill’ Zarzi certainly did lead us to Pentameter. Maybe that was the original idea.”

“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe you’re giving him too much credit. Maybe you like him too much.”

“That is a possibility,” said Swagger. “I hope it ain’t the case, but maybe it’s working that way in my mind.”

The director sighed.

“I will take your findings to the U.S. attorney general and we will see what will exists in the Justice Department to continue and widen the investigation. I suspect very little, and I warn you of that. If this Ray Cruz has evidence to give, he’d better turn himself in. That would make everybody’s job a lot easier.”

“Yes, sir. I’d like to emphasize that time-”

“Yes, time is of the essence. I’ve got a crew of attorneys on their way over and their Administration overlords too. This will be political, you understand. Politics will have its way, maybe more than truth and justice. You have to get, especially you, Swagger, that we can’t have any Marshal Dillon stuff this time or the hammer will come down in very hard ways on all of it.”

“I won’t do no Marshal Dillon, sir,” said Bob. “Way too old for it.”

FBI HQ

OUTSIDE THE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE, CONTINUING INTO ELEVATOR, AND CONTINUING TO NICK’S

OFFICE IN TASK FORCE ZARZI WORKING ROOM

FLOORS 7 TO 5

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1028 HOURS

Okay, we will see what we will see,” said Nick as they waited for the elevator. “I told you, I’d give it my best shot and he will too. You have to prepare yourself for the fact that some things won’t happen.”

“Such as?”

“They are not going to give Ray Cruz a Silver Star and his old job back and erase the several crimes he has committed. He will do time, no matter what.”

“Don’t seem right,” said Bob.

“Can’t have one law for heroes and another for us normal folks. Although, yes, you can have one law for corporate presidents, elected officials, congressmen and lobbyists and Wall Street bankers, and one for the rest of us. I’m sorry about that and if I ever get any juice in this town, I will try to change it. But it doesn’t change reality: Ray will do time and his marine career is finished. Assuming he doesn’t kill Zarzi.”

“He won’t.”

“And I don’t think we’ll get a case out of it. I think what we’ll get is nothing but the satisfaction that the Agency had to explain itself and back way down and a lot of heads will roll and maybe Susan Okada will get a big promo and maybe when she gets it she will run off to Idaho and iron your Jockeys for you for the rest of your life.”

“Unlikely,” Bob said.

“Well, you’re probably right about that. Okay, I’m going to bump up my inquiries about these guys Bogier, Zemke, and Crane to ‘Detain for interrogation. Approach with caution.’ If we get them off the field, then maybe Cruz will be more cooperative.”

“Them bastards may not go easy. You could get some cops killed.”

“I will also add a ‘Caution, presumed armed and dangerous.’”

“Real good.”

“And I want you to go to Georgetown today and make a site analysis, just like the last time. Then it’ll be the same, a round of meetings with our good friends from Secret Service and metro police and we’ll lay out our plans for Friday.”

“There ain’t going to be no hit on Friday.”

“Let’s hope. Meanwhile, we’ll wait for our callback to the director’s office.”

“Sure,” said Bob, “I’ll get right on it.”

“Starling says you did really well.”

“The gal pilot and I had a lot in common. I don’t want to see her getting in any trouble over this either.”

“I don’t see how she can. There isn’t going to be any case, you have to be ready for that. The Administration is too in love with drones to let anything happen to the program. Okay? Comprende?”

“I get it.”

“Now go, do your job. Or someone else’s, anybody’s job.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bob, knowing that first he had to get his car washed.

FOUR SEASONS HOTEL

SUITE 500

M STREET NW

WASHINGTON, DC

1207 HOURS

You are so beautiful,” Zarzi said. “Your eyes, black diamonds. Your skin, the touch of satin. Your limbs, smooth and graceful as poems. Your throat a golden vase of supple nuances. But it is your mind that is remarkable, more remarkable than your beauty. It sees, it penetrates, it isolates the actual, it understands the play of history and tradition. It is the most extraordinary of your many, many gifts.”

He put his hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry, sir,” said Susan Okada, “but just out of curiosity, does that stuff ever really work?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “I could make you a queen.”

“Queen of Afghanistan!” she snorted. “Please, are you trying to be funny?”

“I will make you queen of Washington. I will make you queen of Bloomingdale’s.”

“Hmm. What about Saks?”

“Well, I-”

“No, not even for Saks. And anyway, you’re lying. You lie most sincerely. You’re at your best when you lie. But we both know you wouldn’t make me queen of anything. And we both know I don’t want to be a queen. I’m already a princess, why would I want all the responsibility?”

“Such wit. But you think yourself too good for me.”

“I think no such thing, sir. Thinking doesn’t enter into it. I know I am too good for you. It’s simple fact.”

The watch faces on the winders undulated all about her. Was this his seduction technique? Maybe it worked with idiots, but it just made Susan slightly nauseous and she’d arrived knowing the bastard would probably throw some moves on her. It was his nature. Ugh, he was handsome and charismatic in an extraordinarily uninteresting way. Yes, the technical aspects were all in place, but he seemed to lack a coherent center to bring it all together.

“So, I assume we’re finished with the Cary Grant-Doris Day aspects of the interview and now, if I may continue?”

“Certainly.”

“Around five P.M. that day, a hotel across from your compound explodes.”

“Most ferociously.”

“I have been tasked by the Agency to look into it. We are concerned that it represented an attempt on your life by Taliban members or even Al-Qaeda.”

“No, no,” said Zarzi. “The brotherhood would not have missed. If they decide I must die, then I will die. I happily sacrifice myself for the good of my country. I yearn for martyrdom not to get to paradise but to inspire our young to stand against the forces of evil arrayed against us. Why would I want to go to paradise? I am already in paradise.”

“Well, if being surrounded by watches is your idea of paradise.”

“And the flesh of beauties. You turn me down, that is the right of a Western woman, but I must say, not many do. I have, what do you call it, oh yes, according to Page Six, that ‘Omar Sharif-Dr. Zhivago vibe’ going. And I think a young man from the New York Times fell in love with me some days ago. Such a puppy. Why, he even fainted. We had to call a doctor.”

“Journalists,” she said. “Attention sluts, all of them.”

“You know, young lady, to return to the subject of the explosion, there is much narcotics trafficking in that area. I believe that the explosion was related to narcotics trafficking. The money in that business is capable of corrupting even the holiest of imams.”

She knew of course that he had banked about $90 million in a Swiss bank from his control of certain vast poppy field holdings, but she ignored the subject and veered off in another direction.

“It has been reported that the explosion was instrumental in your decision to envision an American future for your country, ‘our two nations entwined and facing a bright future ahead.’”

“I believe I did say that, yes. Another lie, of course. I cannot help myself, the West is so eager for another thousand or so Arabian Nights. And, as you say, I am at my best when I lie. See, that is another remarkable thing about you, your perception. So precise, so in depth.”

“Possibly we should not focus on the ethical, the psychological, the political, but merely the practical. What sort of blast was it?”

“A blast like any other blast. Ka-boom!-that is all. Rather big, I suppose. Bigger than normal, if explosions can be called normal. Rubbish and body parts rained into my courtyard for days afterward. A head dropped in on the Tuesday following. Most astonishing.”

“Heads falling from the sky are only amusing when they belong to other people.”

“My head will stay where it is until Allah calls it to be placed at his right hand,” he said, too merrily.

“If I thought you actually believed that, I’d be horrified.”

“I do sometimes exaggerate. It is my way. I’m of the impression your legs may be the most extraordinary thing about your body. They appear to be quite long for an Asian woman. Yet you hide them in pants. You should enjoy the Western freedom and wear short, tight skirts and very high heels, black leather, I think, and I am undecided as to stockings, black of course but still rather sheer, or bare, with the shine of the skin so…”

It went on, until finally she acknowledged that Ibrahim Zarzi was immune to blandishment, refusal, shame, threat, or pressure. He was a self-sealed system, utterly impenetrable by the West, hiding efficiently behind an armor of superciliousness and clichés copped from bad thirties movies. She ended the interview, endured a rather long, warm handshake, almost a sexual act in itself, gathered her stuff, and exited as graciously as possible with the vague promise of having a drink with him sometime, and knew what had to happen next. This is what she’d been playing for. She looked around, saw some Afghan Desk handlers, a few cops, and had started to think Oh, shit when a presence rushed through the door, slightly frazzled, slightly flushed, no less than Jared Dixson, assistant to the Afghan Desk. It was the only time in her life she’d ever been happy to see Jared Dixson.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said.

“Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,” she said.

“Susan, please, it has to be fate that I ran into you.”

“Does it? I bet when you found out I was here, you blasted off from Langley and made it in twenty minutes.”

“Susan, you overrate my love for you. I didn’t have a police escort, I drove myself. It was a full thirty-two-minute ordeal, and I only ran six reds. Look, nothing is going to happen here. He’ll sit in there among his watches and think of new lies to tell and which reporters to tell them to. That’s his job, after all, and he’s damn good at it. Let’s have lunch. I want to hear the latest manhunt news and I have some very funny stories about Jack Collins’s real war, which isn’t against international terrorism but against international Jared Dixsonism.”

“No let’s-have-an-affair bullshit. The answer on that front now and forever will be no. I don’t feel like going over it again.”

“Got it. I’ll prove to you I can play by your petty, bourgeois rules.”

“And no martinis either. Two and you’re sticking your tongue in my ear. That’s so attractive.”

“Sure, we’ll just go downstairs, talk shop, drink Pellegrino, and eat those little shrimpy things they have here that are so good.”

“If you touch my hand, I’ll stab it with a shrimp fork.”

“You’re so damned good at playing hard to get!”

HOWARD COUNTY, MARYLAND

95 NORTH TO BALTIMORE

1330 HOURS

Green country hurled by outside. Swagger drove, passed a town called Laurel where somebody had once tried to kill a presidential candidate, and closed the distance to Baltimore. In his pocket was an envelope. It had been delivered to the hotel suite that was his living quarters in Rosslyn that morning. He’d opened it to find nothing but an ad ripped out of a newspaper that read “Best Car Wash in Baltimore/Brushless Wash/Professional Detailing and Waxing/Howard Street Car Wash at 25th/Rain Check If the Weather Is Bad Next Day.”

The cell on the next seat rang.

Who knew his number?

“Hello?”

“Swagger?”

It was Susan Okada. He felt a little spurt of something. Not big, but not small: something.

“Hi,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Listen, I’m in the ladies’ room of the Four Seasons. On your behalf I’ve just spent too long with a bitter asshole named Dixson who’s high in Afghan but wants to be higher.”

“You poor thing.”

“It wasn’t easy. And it’s not done yet. But I want to get this to you. I think, from several things he’s said, I’ve figured out the meaning of ‘Pentameter.’”

“I looked it up. Some kind of measure of verse, ain’t that it?”

“Shakespeare wrote in ‘iambic pentameter,’ yes, which has to do with the number of ‘feet’ or beats to the line. That number is five. That’s really what Pentameter means: five.”

“Like the sides of the Pentagon?”

“That’s it. Or, in this case, five senior intelligence officials who are vested with the power to call a Pentameter shot. One of them had to order the hit on that hotel. One of them wanted Ray Cruz dead in a hole in the ground. It could be no one else.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Not, surprisingly, the director. He’s a political appointment and he showed good judgment in declining the offer because he didn’t want to make a real-time call without the background. So: the three in the Agency are the assistant director, the director of plans, i.e., ‘Operations,’ and Afghan Desk himself. Outside the Agency, in the Administration, are the National Intelligence director and the president himself, though Dixson says the president doesn’t seem really engaged on the issue and probably wouldn’t let himself get involved.”

“Okay. Four guys. Great.”

“I’m going to work on ways to smoke out one of these four guys.”

“Well, we’ll see if we have an investigation. We went to the FBI bigfoot and he said he had to share with the Justice Department and he fears they’ll close us down.”

“Maybe we can at least get Ray Cruz out of the hot seat,” she said.

“That would be something, I guess,” he said. “Anyhow, thanks.”

“Anything else?”

“Okada-san, as usual, you are terrific. Sorry I’ve been a jerk. For some reason I’m too close to the edge on this one and I’m all cranky and smart-ass, quick to go mean and rotten. It’s just me. It don’t mean a thing. Sorry I’m such a jerk.”

“Some are born jerks” she said, “some have jerkhood thrust upon them, and some mature into rich and vibrant jerks. You are all three.” She hung up.

He drove on, watching the skyline of the city reveal itself as he hit the beltway, looking a little like Omaha, without the fun parts.

He was totally unaware that a mile back, a Ford Explorer carrying three men and a lot of guns followed quietly, like a Reaper drone, silent, deadly, watching.

HOWARD STREET CAR WASH

HOWARD AND 25TH

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1400 HOURS

Swagger sat in the sunlight under a crisscross of flapping pennants strung on wires, as if at some kind of medieval fair, while the rented red Taurus was shipped through a long tunnel, squirted, sloshed, rubbed, spritzed, steamed. Soon it would emerge into a kind of courtyard here just off Howard, and a bunch of third worlders, Mexicans, Salvadorans, a few blacks, a few Asians, would fall upon it with a kind of intense rub-the-paint-off thing going on, and theoretically the car would emerge a few minutes later shiny as new and smelling of whatever, God knows, wafer-chocolate, spearmint, lime, fruit punch?-they hung by string from the rearview mirror. He guessed Ray was among them, but the scene was complex, with vehicles of all sorts-beamers, Benzes, SUVs, pickups, cabs-moving in and out, a substantial number of car owners drifting into the courtyard to watch, then tip the men with the towels, some kind of white foreman acting like a landing officer on a flight deck, trying to keep the whole chaotic process moving and prevent the overenthusiastic towel guys from banging the cars together as they moved them through the steps.

He watched the dripping car emerge, he watched an ad hoc crew assemble around it, as one guy steered it to an empty space and the others pounced. Like all the Mercedes owners and all the BMW owners but none of the cabdrivers, he drifted out to supervise, and bent in to point out one particularly loathsome rental car smear to a hardworking towel professional in an old Orioles cap, baggy jeans, and a Harvard sweatshirt, and the towel guy said, “So what’s happening, Gunny?”

“I didn’t recognize you,” said Swagger. “But I guess that’s the point.”

“I just look like any other little brown man in this place. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay,” said Bob, and summed up the last few days of investigations.

“I wish you’d quit this high-paying, prestige career, climb in the car with me, and we’d go to DC together now,” he concluded. “It would save a lot of trouble.”

“I’m not in this to save trouble. I’m in this to get some justice for Billy Skelton and all the other little people these motherfuckers stepped on, Sergeant. You know that, so don’t even ask me.”

“Stubborn bastard. Okay, you tell me. What’s next? Please, please don’t do nothing at Georgetown. You do that and I don’t think I can help you. We are almost there, Cruz. I’m betting the time you do won’t be nothing, you can have your life back, you can-”

“I still have a death sentence, Sergeant. For all I know, these guys could put a Paveway on me right now. They’d kill everyone you see here to take me out. Collateral means nothing to them. I’m appreciating what you’ve done, but we won’t be there until I get some kind of solid assurance I am off the bull’s-eye, that whoever set this thing up is the one doing the time, and that the contractors who filled all those body bags are somehow dealt with. In prison, preferably in the ground, but I don’t care. It’s not about me getting my life back, it’s about payback.”

“Jesus, you are a hard-case sonovabitch.”

“Here,” said Ray, handing over a cell phone. “Hit one and it rings me. You keep me in the loop, I’ll keep you in the loop. I know you won’t use it to track me. Now I gotta go. Saw a Benz coming through the line. Those guys are usually big tippers.”

And with that, he turned back to his wheel-trim-polishing career.

Bob slipped the cell into his pocket, got in and eased the car through the busy yard, then turned onto Howard Street and headed back to DC. Hell of a long way to go for a car wash.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

24TH AND LEXINGTON (ONE BLOCK EAST OF

HOWARD STREET CAR WASH)

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1430 HOURS

There was no celebration. They were too coldly professional for that. It was simply time to get to work, and with this troublesome asshole, no chances could be taken.

Too chaotic a scene to snipe into. Too many bodies moving unpredictably here and there, the.50 Barrett on its bipod was more unwieldy than a plow, so tracking target movement under duress could be a bitch, and the.338 Lapua was only a little lighter; plus the courtyard was hemmed off from the street by a brick wall and all Cruz had to do was drop and he was under cover.

“Your basic raid deal,” Bogier proclaimed. “Go in shooting, get up close, put the fucking mags into him. Then we get the fuck out of town.”

“They’ll get a read on the license plate,” said Tony Z.

“That’s why when we get suited up, we go somewhere nearby and steal a car. We take the car to the scene. I take the car through the line, get the car washed. You guys are down the street a bit. When I have Cruz marked, I will give the signal. Crackers ambles down to the courtyard. I give another signal and the thing begins. I will close on him and full-auto his ass to itty little bits. Crackers, meanwhile, will buzz-gun the shit out of the car wash wonderland of Baltimore-”

“Cool!” said Crackers.

“-and people will run like fuck. Tony Z pulls the SUV up and we jump the wall-”

“It looks like a pretty high wall, Mick.”

“You’re an Airborne Ranger, you can do anything.”

“I’m an old Airborne Ranger. It’s my knees. They aren’t what they used to be.”

“Just roll over it like an old man,” said Tony. “You know, hit it, swing your legs over. You don’t have to do any Hong Kong gangster shit.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Crackers. “That’ll work.”

“May I continue?” asked Mick. “Or are there other important areas of discussion you two would like to examine?”

“Sorry, Mick,” said Crackers. “I was just thinking about shit.”

“I hate it when you do that. No good can come of it.”

“But if I’m in the SUV, they’ll still get a read on our license plate.”

“Okay, okay. So… the car we steal, we trade plates.”

“Actually, it would make more sense if we stole two sets of plates,” said Crackers earnestly. “We steal SUV plates and we put ’em on our vehicle. We keep our plates. Wait, no, we steal SUV plates because they’re different from automobile plates. We put them on our wagon. Then we switch back to our plates.”

“Numb nuts, we have a.50 caliber Barrett in the backseat. I think that’s going to-”

“Jesus Christ, girls, this bicker-bicker-bicker shit has got to stop. We steal SUV plates and make the change. Then we steal a car. One pair of SUV plates, one car. Then we do it as I have laid it out. I take the car in, Crackers wanders down the street to the yard. I do the dirty deed, Crackers burns off a mag or two making holes, breaking glass and blasting pennants out of the air, his own private Fourth of July, and off we go in the SUV. I’m guessing nobody gets a read because it’s going to be thirty seconds of World War Three. But we do the plate switch just to be sure. Then, Miami Beach, here we come. Home free, a year’s vacation, lots of pussy and dope, some new tats, the life of O’Reilly.”

“Reilly. Not O’Reilly. He’s a TV guy.”

“O’Reilly lives plenty high enough for me.”

Body armor. An entire 9-mm trousseau including MP5s and SIGs. Randall fighting knives. Black wool watch caps. Danner Desert warfare boots. So Tommy Tactical. They looked really cool.

FBI HQ

DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1700 HOURS

The call came at five. Swagger was just back from a too hasty trip to the Georgetown site of Zarzi’s upcoming speech. He joined Nick in the director’s anteroom, and the two were beckoned in.

“Sit, sit,” said the director.

They sat.

“You guys look all frowny. Why the frowny faces?”

“It’s too fast,” said Nick. “If you had good news, there’d be an Agency liaison, two or three guys from Justice, and probably an Administration overseer. I’m not optimistic.”

“It’s not as bad as you think it could be. The key is, Cruz has to come in. Cruz has to come in, he will be placed under our protection, and he will cooperate. All charges against him will be held in abeyance. He will be placed on administrative leave from the Marine Corps, seconded to the FBI TDY, and he will give his material, under oath, to us and to Justice. At that point a determination will be made between the players, us, Justice, the Agency, and the Administration, as to whether or not we will progress with the investigation. I’m promised a fair and positive chance to make our concerns known and to build a case, and the Agency will cooperate. Evidently, there’s some in-house feeling over there that the Afghan Desk cabal has become too powerful policy wise, and this is seen as a way to take them down a few notches. You can have Okada on the team too, if that’s what you want. But Cruz has to come in. Can he be reached? I’m assuming one of you is in contact with him, because your stuff has to come from him.”

Silence, and then Bob said, “I may have a way to reach him.”

“I thought so. Swagger, once again you impress. I love the way he takes over our investigations, changes their objective and content, and advances them in another direction-fortunately for us, the right one. Oh, and once this is completed, you are to go home to Idaho and you are sentenced to the rest of your life in a rocking chair. Nick, I’ll get you another promotion if you agree to handcuff him to that chair.”

Swagger and Nick looked at each other.

“It’s pretty good,” Nick admitted. “I thought we’d be bigfooted into silence, the investigation officially closed before it got started, and-”

“Can I say one more thing?” Bob interrupted.

“What would that be?”

“This just seems smart to me. The Agency people have got to feel a little on the spot by now, like we’s hunting them. So I’m thinking we run a briefing for them. We reach out and give them some kind of palaver on our progress with Cruz. Get all the players there, all the big Afghan Desk people, all the Zarzi big believers. We’re real smooth and assy-kissy.”

“You could do ‘assy-kissy’?” Nick asked.

“Not for long. Maybe fifty-nine minutes. Around minute sixty, you throw a blanket over me.”

“I’d pay to see that. But is this really the time for a public relations offensive?” said Nick.

“No, no,” said the director, “it is a good idea.”

“Okada can give us a list by name,” said Bob. “Get ’em in one room just to set them straight and settle them down. I’m thinking the deputy director, the head of plans, the head of Afghan Desk, and of course, in the Administration, the director of National Intelligence. We’ll even bring free doughnuts.”

“No doughnuts,” said the director. “It isn’t in the budget.”

FBI HQ

CORRIDOR AND ELEVATOR BETWEEN DIRECTOR’S OFFICE AND TASK FORCE ZARZI WORKING ROOM

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1720 HOURS

Do me a favor,” said Nick, “the next time you get a bright idea about doing PR, let me in on it. That way, I get the credit, it helps my career. Helping your career doesn’t amount to much because you don’t have a career.”

“If you’d suggested it,” Bob said, as the elevator doors opened, “he’d have turned it down. He only said yes to annoy you, to punish you for bringing me into this again.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Anyway, I didn’t do it to help the Bureau with its Agency problems. That don’t matter spit to me. But one of those four guys pulled the trigger on Cruz. I want to see ’em, throw some business their way, and get a read.”

“Uh-oh. You’ve been reading Shakespeare again.”

“What?”

“Hamlet. ‘The play’s the thing, in which to catch the conscience of the king.’ Old idea: if you put before the bad guy an image of his crime, he’ll in some way react and give himself away. Shakespeare believed it, but it’s bunk.”

“I ain’t never read Hamlet. Not in Polk County, Arkansas, in the fifties where I’s educated.”

“Whatever, it’s based on a folk concept of the mind. The image of their crime sparks some kind of overt response. But it’s bunk. We know now that people are complex, devious, sophisticated, practiced, and they don’t go ‘Boo!’ when manipulated into such a confrontation.”

“Still like to try.”

“I know you have all kinds of sniper voodoo and eighth and ninth senses, but these guys are much smarter than Hamlet’s uncle. These are all sophisticated, mentally tough, experienced, widely traveled, and brilliant men. You won’t see anything they don’t want you to see. If they’ve navigated their way through DC intelligence politics, plus survived in the field, they will have a little bit of smarts in how to handle an office meeting, even with the great Bob Lee Swagger.”

“Everybody has tells, from eye rolls to breathing patterns to body posture. Everybody’s his own landscape. And I will say this, if I have a skill it’s at reading landscape. So let me look over the landscape and we’ll see what I-”

They had emerged from the elevator, made it down the hall, and turned into the suite of working rooms that Task Force Zarzi occupied, and there to greet them was Starling, looking shaken.

“What’s up?”

“There’s been a huge shoot-out in Baltimore,” she said. “World War Three at a car wash. And it involves somebody you put an APB out on, somebody called Crackers the Clown.”

HOWARD STREET CAR WASH

HOWARD AND 25TH

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1215 HOURS TO 1656.38 HOURS

The glasses were the key.

Check the glasses, he always told himself. Once every five minutes, check the glasses.

Cruz had fallen into that rhythm. Here, he worked anonymously, one of twenty or so invisibles who scurried for tips by drying, sweeping, polishing the drippy wet vehicles that emerged from the tunnel of spray wax, steam, jetting soapy water, and rubber strips like jungle fronds that hung from a mechanically contrived tube structure and somehow magically undulated the road grime off the cars. It saved him from brooding, it brought in money, it kept him active. Nobody asked questions, nobody took roll, nobody made friends outside their ethnic groups; the pay, usually about $50 a day, was in change and small bills. He was faceless in this crowd of hustling shiners and polishers, and he was the only one who looked at the shape of the sunglasses, for a teardrop that spoke not of Jackie O and her husband Ari, but of the sandbox, the ’Stan, the global war on terrorism.

He saw them while the fellow was still in the glass building laying out his $15 for the super wash.

Tear shaped, dark, held in place not by two arms but by a stout elasticized strap as insurance against vigorous action, with insectoid, convex lenses under polyurethane frames, the curvature of the lenses extreme so that the polarized plastic, strong enough to stop buckshot, also protected the wearer’s peripheral vision, just the thing to pick up the approach of a fast-moving assaulter from three or nine o’clock. They were Wiley X’s, of the style called AirRage 697s, big in Tommy Tactical contractor culture.

Ray slipped low, between cars, not panicking, but breathing hard. Then he had a spurt of rage. How did the motherfuckers find me again? There had to be a leak somewhere, goddamnit, and he swore that if he got out of this, he would brace up old man Swagger so hard he shook his dentures out. Every fucking time Swagger showed, these goddamn bastards were right behind him.

But he got his war mind back fast. He pretended to polish a wheel cover of an already shining BMW convertible, and slipped a quick recon glance at the dude just as he emerged from the building and sat under an umbrella on a kind of patio where the owners waited and watched as the towel boys worked over their cars.

Guy was wearing a black baseball cap without insignia and some kind of bulky raincoat as if it was cold out and of course it wasn’t. You could hide a lot under that coat. Cruz continued to steal seconds of examination, noting next that the Tommy Tactical made an obvious show of disinterest in the cars before him, not hunting for any particular one, not noticing his own car-it must have been that Dodge Charger, just coming out of the steam, its wet skin glinting in the sunlight-but adapting a quick posture of lassitude and sloth as he flopped casually in a plastic chair and began to examine his nails.

Cruz shot a glance at the man’s shoes: Danner assault boots, though unbloused, the crumple of the sloppy hems denoting that they had been smartly tucked commando style until just a few minutes ago.

“Hey, guy, are you trying to win the Nobel Prize for that tire or what?” someone said, and it was the car’s owner, impatiently leaning across the trunk to hurry the pitiful illegal onward.

Ray smiled obsequiously and backed off, waving the man onward.

As he turned to work on another vehicle, he let himself look down the one-way course of Howard Street and saw another guy whose face, though far off, appeared obscured by the tactical shape of the ultracool combat shades and that guy was coming along, and would be here in a minute or two.

Run? He could pretend to mosey backward, hit and roll over the wall, and head down the alley to-but he didn’t know what was down the alley and cursed himself for the operator’s most basic mistake: he hadn’t had the energy to learn all the back streets, all the fast exits, the fallbacks, the shortcuts, the near invisible secret passages.

Besides, the guy on the street was drawing closer, ever closer, and now it was too late to make a sudden break. He saw how it had to go; they would wait a few more seconds, until the walker got right up to the courtyard, then he and the sitter would go to guns fast with whatever big mean black toys their coats concealed, and converge, catching him between fire from two angles, with nowhere to go but down.

He had a Glock 19 concealed in a Galco horizontal shoulder rig under his beat-to-hell Harvard hoodie and long-sleeved T-shirt, and two extra fifteen-rounders on the off-side, giving him forty-five rounds of 147-grain Federal hollow point. He turned his O’s cap backward on his head, so its bill wouldn’t protrude into the top zone of his sight picture. He reached inside the outerwear, unsnapped the Galco, felt the small, heavy automatic pistol slide into his hand and, under these circumstances, he took joy from its touch. It was found money, getting laid on the first date, all black on the range, a nice word from the colonel.

Okay, motherfuckers, he told himself with another deep, calming breath, going hard into his war mind, you want me, you come and get me.

Taking care not to directly confront or track his target, Mick Bogier eased into one of the plastic chairs sloppily, arms and legs all over the place, and tried to be a guy with no particular place to go getting it cleaned up real nice while sitting in the sun. As he oriented himself, he could see Crackers moving down the street, not rushing, not tactical, but-Crackers had a lot of combat and a lot of ops behind him-totally selling the pic of another innocent stroller shuffling along, maybe to the liquor store for a six of Bud and a lottery ticket, maybe to the library for a new thriller, maybe to the Mickey D’s down the street for a Big Mac with fries and a Diet Coke. Crackers just walked along.

A plug ran from Mick’s ear to a throat mike dangling just alongside his chin before the cord disappeared inside his jacket and linked to his cell.

“You got him?” he asked, trying not to speak loudly or even look like he was speaking.

“I saw him duck. Yellow baseball cap, maroon sweatshirt, he’s behind that brown Galaxy, working the tires. Seems to be a tire guy, that’s his specialty.”

“How’s he moving? I’m too close to look directly.”

“Like any shine boy. A little monkey. He hasn’t made us yet, he’s trying to get the shine on that Galaxy wheel.”

“When you get to the entrance, you slide into the lot and index on me. At that point, I’ll head out there like I’m reclaiming the car, swing behind the Galaxy, yank the five and give him a mag. When I fire, you dump a mag high into the glass of that building. That should scatter the fuckin’ ducks. Then we roll the wall and Z picks us up. You got that, Z?”

“Am pulling into street now,” said Z, from his spot a block away.

“I am watching you, you are watching him, any movement?”

“No, now that I’m close I can see him really scrubbing on that-oh, now he’s moved to the front tire, other side from you. Still ain’t made us, snoozing the day away. This is going to be easy.”

Crackers veered in from the roadway sidewalk, slid on the oblique through the wide entrance in the brick wall which the customers pulled into as they edged their way to the payment booths and the vacuum station up ahead.

Close enough to make eye contact now, Mick nodded through his dark lenses at Crackers as the other man unbuttoned his coat with his left hand, slipped his right hand through the slashed pocket to grip the cocked-and-not-locked MP5, a dandy little subgun from Heckler und Koch that had delighted the spec ops boys for three decades now, and Mick said, “Fast and total. He’s good, don’t forget. Okay, peanut gallery, let’s rock.”

He stood, his jacket already unbuttoned, and with a smile and a nod to the phantom fellow who’d just finished drying his car, he beelined to the Galaxy, circled behind it, shivered to shrug the cloaking of the coat over his own German dandy gun, felt his hand grip it expertly-he shot well enough to fire one-handed-and raised it to discover his target had spun and was a split second ahead of him on the action curve.

Ray shot him five times in the chest.

That gunfire ignited screams, panic, crazed evacuation, a whole festival of human behavior at the furthest extreme of escape frenzy. People blew every which way, some to the wall to clumsy attempts to climb over it, some back toward the glass building as if it offered cover, some racing into the mouth of the torrential downpour that was currently frothing up an Escalade in the tunnel. For a brief moment, that perfect world of equality so longed for in some imaginations actually existed on earth as Salvadoran illegal and Baltimore hedge fund manager and energy executive’s well-turned-out wife and Sid the cabbie fled outward with equal passion, though never quite ruthless disregard for the other. The good behavior and fundamental politeness of the typical Baltimorean was in play on the war field as much as the adrenaline-powered survival instinct.

Crackers was not concerned with surviving, however, but with killing. He had that rare gift of natural aggression that made him a god in battle, funnily unfunny with his buddies, and a nasty prick everywhere else. He just believed: if you weren’t war, you weren’t nothing. He rotated right, seeing Mick go down, looking for his target who was clearly among the abandoned cars gleaming and dripping in the sun. Bracing the gun against his shoulder via its stubby, compacted telescoping stock, he fired a short burst into the cars, seeing glass spider-web and metal puncture and dust and water fly, while the gun roared, the spent shells cascading free in a brass-glinting spurt like flung pebbles across a lake. Great special effects but to no seeming result.

His urge was to run to Mick, but he saw that Mick had spun, low-crawled out, and was now rising on this side of the Galaxy, reacquiring his German machine pistol, though moving stiffly from the bruising hits on his Kevlar.

“Converge, converge!” Mick was screaming. “Z, get your ass in here, goddamnit, and come over the wall on him, he is hot, live, and still moving.”

Saying that, Mick raised the subgun above his head, angled it down, and squirted a long burst into the space where he thought the sniper Cruz should be, mostly tearing up dust and asphalt debris from the deck. Then he rammed through a superfast mag change, tossing the empty box-God, was Mick smooth!-seating the new one, throwing the bolt, and began to move through the corridors between the now bullet-dinged automobiles. At the same time, Z had arrived, slalomed off the road and up to the other side of the brick wall, only with a pistol though, and he too hunted for the sniper. They had him three on one, with no place to go… but where the fuck was he?

It’s better to be lucky than smart, rich than poor, smart than dumb, but in a gunfight, best of all is to be smart and skinny. That was Ray, who had gone to earth after putting the five hard ones into the big guy from nine feet and slithered across the ground to, er, nowhere, and then, being quite agile, actually wiggle-waggled sideways under the dripping-wet pickup truck next to him. He came up in another aisle between cars, rolled, and popped up like a Whack-a-Mole game in a Toyland, two hands on the gun, oriented, as it turned out, slightly toward the oncomer, not the original assaulter.

In the naturally firm isosceles, triangles within triangles for structural solidarity, his hunched, tensed muscles controlling the pistol between his crushing grip, Ray shot that guy twice, high left-side chest, knocking him back and off stride, even as he was now catching on to the concept of body armor not in words but in an image that decoded instantly into all he needed to know. He felt things in the air nearby and cranked down, realizing that the other shooter, seeing him fire, had vectored on to him instantly and put a burst into him, but that between the two of them, unseen in the intense focus of advanced extreme pathological war-fighting Zeitgeist, neither had realized that the cab of a Honda Civic lay between them and so while that burst chewed the crap out of the windows, splintering, shivering, fragmenting them, the passage through two glass barriers also skewed the bullets mightily and they rushed off at one remove from their target. By the time that shooter realized and came around for an unimpeded shot, Ray was to ground again, crawling like a muskrat under the cars.

“Can you get a shot?” Mick yelled at Z, who had two-handed support of his SIG over the top of the wall.

“That way, that way,” screamed Z, sliding northward down the wall, craning his eyes through his AirRages for a glimpse of something to shoot, but seeing nothing.

Bogier looked back to Crackers, who, though he’d never gone down, had been staggered and briefly stunned by the two bolts that had cracked into his body armor and would leave him bruised blue and purple for a month and a half.

“Close, close, close,” yelled Bogier as he himself darted between cars, not quite having figured out that Cruz’s tactical improvisation was to move under the cars, not between them, and that he was skinny enough to do it. It didn’t occur to him to lean down and spray-paint the entire 180 to his front under the cars and thereby hit the guy if only once or twice.

There was a frozen moment. Bogier and Crackers, guns loose and fluid in their hands, faces sweaty and bug eyed with concentration, moved stealthily through the fleet of parked, shot-to-shit cars, spurting ahead now and then to unzip a blind spot, while from the other side of the wall, with his SIG like the mighty Excaliber, Z too hunted but also covered them.

A siren heated up, then another.

Then Crackers went down.

Ray froze. He was trapped. He was on his back under a Chevy cab, this fucking thing turned out too low to get quite all the way under and he knew that he needed to make a strong, wretchedly awkward maneuver to get himself out the way he’d come in. And he couldn’t cover anything to his left, under his feet, or above his head. But he heard the faintest scuffle of tread to ground, and saw a Danner-booted foot just a few inches from his head. Without much thought, he shot it.

He heard the scream, saw the blood fly, and in a second, a man was lying next to him, almost parallel, not three feet away. It was Dodge City, only horizontal, under cars, with cool modern black guns, as the guy, seeing him, eyes bulging with fear or excitement, tried to wedge his MP under the car for the shot, while Ray had to twist, pivot on his shoulder, and bring the gun to bear in a new quadrant. Intimate, nasty, graceless, only speed mattered, and-crak! spurt of muzzle flash, jerk of recoil, drama of slide rocking back and forth in supertime, leap of spent shell-Ray got his shot off just a split second sooner and shot the man in the throat, causing him to jerk and vomit blood, then shot him higher in the face, just below the eye, hammering a black hole into it and imposing terminal stillness on the body.

Cruz dug his feet into the ground and propelled himself forward, expecting to emerge into blue sky and the sight of two armed men with submachine guns about to dump mags into him, but instead he was unimpeded. Sirens sounded.

He pulled himself up, knowing that he was cut, abraded, bruised, scored, ripped, whatever in about two thousand places, just to see the two survivors hit their parked SUV and gun it to life. Coolly, one of the guys opened the door, cantilevered himself half in and half out and fired a burst. Ray tracked the trajectory of the burst until it splattered into the hood and grill of a blue-white first responder, and that police unit tanked left, hit a parked car, jarred itself sideways, hit another, and halted.

Ray thought, I should get a shot off, but by the time that imperative made itself clear, he was too late, and the SUV had zoomed away.

Silence. Steam rose, automobiles still ticked or issued death sounds, but there were no fires.

Go on, move your goddamned ass, he told himself.

He ran backward through the car wash complex, came to a cyclone fence, and scaled it. He climbed a hill to a railroad track, rolled down the other side, climbed another fence, came out into a yard, cut between two tiny houses. He didn’t remember replacing it, but the gun was back in the holster under his T-shirt. Now he did a neat thing. He pulled off his crimson hoodie and dumped it, to reveal a T-shirt, an orange-and-black long sleeved, proclaiming sans serif loyalty to a team named after a bird. He flipped his Orioles lid away and out of his back pocket came an all-purple ball cap, again with bird loyalty as its primary message. He strode on blindly, waiting for a cop car to pull him aside, but none did, though farther along, on a major street, he could see them rushing to the site of the gunfight.

At last he came to a bar. It seemed to be what you might call “old style,” meaning it attracted old Baltimoreans who remembered the town as a nesting place of grim taverns filled with smoke and grunge, a five o’clock city that worshipped Johnny and Brooksie. Everyone in the joint was fat and neckless and looked like they wanted to fight if you made eye contact-even the women. But it was also the sort of place where nobody noticed a thing. He found a place at the rail, ordered a beer, and watched the game. The Orioles won, 9-7 with a late comeback. It was pretty thrilling. Then he took a cab to another neighborhood, had himself dropped at the wrong address, cut through two yards, and found his car, untouched, where he’d left it fifteen or so hours ago. He got in, started the engine, and drove to his motel in Laurel. After a shower, half an hour of watching the gunfight and baseball coverage on TV, he called Swagger.

FOUR SEASONS HOTEL

SUITE 500

M STREET NW

WASHINGTON, DC

2300 HOURS

Her neck was slender, her skin alabaster, her teeth brilliant and blinding. She wore jewels only a king could have given her. Tawny blond hair piled on top of her head in a cascade of swirls, torrents, and plunges, secured by pins and a diamond tiara. Her eyes were passionate, dewy. Do you want me? Then take me. Make me do bad things.

Too bad she was only in a magazine.

Zarzi put the thing down. He sat alone with his watches. He wore a silk dressing gown and an ascot, was freshly bathed, groomed, and powdered in all the delicate man places. Alexander’s blood moved in his veins, that was the original strain. But it had mixed over the generations with a thousand injections of mountain warrior DNA, possibly a Mongol element or two, since the odd squadron of Genghis Khan’s cavalry had surely passed through the valleys that nurtured his line, leaving memories of rapine and strapping progeny that combined with the odd brave European explorer’s, and finally with the entrepreneurs who turned the Western need for the poppy into billions. And it all climaxed in him, he the magnificent, he the extraordinary, he the potentate, the seer, the visionary.

“I want my Tums,” he called. “My stomach is aflame.”

A servant stole in and laid the two wonder tablets before him on a silver platter.

“Ah,” he said, delicately ingesting them, feeling them crunch to medicinal chalk beneath the grind of his strong molars. R-E-L-I-E-F, he thought, as the glow spread and the fires were quenched beneath the balm.

“Is that better, my lord?”

“It is,” he said. “For this alone, the West should be spared. Though I’m sure, like the airplane, the oil rig, the missile, and differential calculus, the antiacidic is originally an Islamic invention.”

The servant said nothing, the jest lost on him. Servants do not speak irony; they only speak obedience.

“Young man,” he said, “how old are you?”

“Twenty-three, my lord.”

“Do you fear death?”

“No, my lord.”

“Why are you so brave?”

“I know that Allah has a plan and if he wills it, I will die for him. It is written.”

“But suppose his plan is that you work in subservient positions until you are unattractive and all your teeth have rotted, and so your master sends you into the streets because you now disgust him. You become a bitter Kabul beggar and freeze to death in the mud and shit of an obscure roadway.”

“I… I had not thought of that, sire. But if that is his plan, then that is the life I shall have.”

“You young people, you assume glory lies at the end of every journey. But at the end of most journeys lie nothing but squalor and oblivion.”

“If you say so, sire.”

“Thus, given the chance, you would choose glory, no?”

“Of course, sire.”

“What if in the glory there was also death?”

“It is nothing, sire.”

“But you are nothing. I mean not to degrade you, after all, this is the West, one does not degrade another; but it is the truth, is it not? You, truly, are nothing. You live to bring me pills, flush the toilet when I have deposited, sweep up my toenail clippings, make sure my repellent underwear makes it to the laundry. That is not much of a life, so leaving it for glory would be an easy thing, would it not?”

Pain fell across the boy’s handsome face. He wanted to satisfy but was clearly not sure where satisfaction lurked. And he didn’t want to make a mistake. He said nothing, but looked as if he had sinned.

“Now I, on the other hand-exalted, gifted with beauty, wit, wealth, courage, the admiration of millions-which should I choose, glory but early death or banal but comfortable squalor unto forever? I have so much more to lose than you.”

“I am sure you would chose glory, sire. You are a lord, a lion, a true believer. You would do the right thing.”

The older man sighed. “The right thing.” It came so easily to the youth’s lips. At his simple age, “the right thing” was obvious and knowable. It was clear. But for the great man, as for all great men, too much wisdom and experience gave the meaning of “the right thing” a maze of filters and screens through which to negotiate. Thus, “the right thing” was not always so apparent.

“Here,” he said, “come with me.”

He led the boy to his bureau, upon which a hundred or so watches gently trundled to and fro.

“Do you have a watch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me see it.”

The boy peeled off a rather unimpressive low-end Seiko, built on a cheesy quartz movement from Switzerland manufactured in a huge, dreary plant full of Turkish emigrés for about a nickel, shipped to Japan, encased in clumsy stamped metal and low-grade plastic, then affixed to a thin leather strap by a Korean immigrant for twenty-four cents an hour, thirteen of which must be returned to her parents in Korea.

“Pah,” said the great one, “it summarizes your life: nothingness.”

He tossed it into the wastebasket and turned and selected two watches.

One was a thick Fortis, with a leather band, the chronograph that according to advertising was the favorite of the Russian cosmonaut service. It cost about $2,700 and you could use it to hammer nails or plant bombs on submarine hulls in Sevastopol and it wouldn’t lose a second. Ticktock, it was the inevitable vanity of materialism and glamour, possibly, or the fact that the snow will never melt in the Himalayas or that the West will never fall: it was destiny, strength, and beautiful design.

The other was a Paul Gerber. Gerber made twelve watches a year with his own fingers. When they were finished, they looked even plainer than the Seiko, except that they displayed the phases of the moon, the date, the day, the time in Buenos Aires or Cairo or London, the arrival of the next solar and lunar eclipse, and all in precise accuracy for 128 years, assuming the watch was kept running over that time period. The waiting list to get one was fifteen years long, and the cost over $100,000.

One was glamorous, sexy, fast, sleek: the West. The other was subtle, incredibly complicated, a symphony of wheels and gears and pins and diamonds. It represented the furthest reaches of the mind of man as applied to less than one square inch, and yet was impenetrable to those who did not appreciate its exquisiteness. Its maker had applied, even if he didn’t know it, the harshness of sharia against his own mind, and through that discipline had created that which was absolute, unknowable, irrevocable, impenetrable, undeniable. To Zarzi, it was the East.

“Go ahead, choose one. Which appeals? Each is equally fine, but you must choose.”

The boy pointed to the big watch.

“Of course. That is what I feared,” said Zarzi. “You take what is beautiful over what endures. That is the problem. All right, go ahead, take it, it’s yours, but do not brag of it or the other servants will be jealous.”

The boy took it.

“There, now go and enjoy the new toy.”

The servant hustled out and Zarzi was alone with his watch and his fate.

The boy had made the final choice for him.

MARRIOTT RESIDENCE HOTEL

WILSON BOULEVARD

ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA

0130 HOURS

It finally rang. Swagger had been staring at the folder for what seemed like hours. He imagined the young sniper Cruz shot up, bleeding out in a roadside ditch, losing consciousness, to be discovered in a few weeks by a convict cleanup crew.

He flipped opened the phone.

“Where are you?”

“As if I’d tell you, goddamnit. Every time you show up, a crew of gunmen shows up. I’m lucky to be alive.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Nah. Cut, scraped, twisted, bruised, pissed, but they didn’t quite finish the job, or even start it.”

“Okay, good. Now here’s what-”

“Hold on, goddamnit. Who the fuck are you? Are you being tailed? Are you stupid, sloppy, careless, unlucky? Are you the world’s best liar and double agent? Can you look me hard in the eye and lie to me? How’d you last so long if you’re this much of an idiot?”

“The answer to all them questions is no. I ain’t a liar, a double, or nothing. I’m just a beat-up former sniper with holes everywhere, like a piece of cheese. I wasn’t followed. I check. I have the discipline. Nobody was on me, not in sight anyway, and nobody has ever been on me, goddamnit. They must be using satellites is all I can figure.”

“Oh, well then, it couldn’t possibly be the CIA, could it? It’s probably a Pepsico satellite or maybe McDonald’s now has orbital birds.”

“I never said the Agency wasn’t involved. Clearly they are involved big time. But now we know it and we can use the satellites against them. Maybe there’s a transponder in my car, that’s the only way they could do it. I’ll rent a new one tomorrow, just to make sure.”

That seemed to quiet Cruz.

“Listen, it’s time for you to come in. We took our suspicion and all our dope to the Big Man, and he got the Agency to acknowledge some things and pledge cooperation. It seems clear that there are some people over there who are overcommitted to this Zarzi. If laws have been broken-that is, if Agency people have targeted you or other marines-that will be dealt with. But it all turns on your coming in, giving your statements and your facts, working within a team structure, following the rules and so on and so forth. You can’t be rogue no more. The rogue shit makes these people scared as hell and when they feel fear, they respond with violence.”

“I come in and another mystery explosion craters a building.”

“Cruz, it won’t happen. I’m speaking for the Bureau. No, I ain’t their number one boy, but I have Nick Memphis on the team and the director was-”

“The director was bullshitting you. Don’t you recognize the signs? He was jiving you, man; get me in, and watch the promises disappear, along with me. And whatever the Zarzi people want to achieve, they do. Maybe it’s for the good, but nobody can guarantee it, because it’s a crap shoot. Maybe it’s not.”

“Think about it,” Bob said. It was important to him to get Cruz through this for some reason. He didn’t want to lose this guy. “Don’t do nothing. Move tomorrow to another location. Do you need money? I can get you money. I think I can work on them about the time and maybe you won’t have to do none. It doesn’t seem nobody’s linked you to the shoot-out in Baltimore because I never told them you were at that car wash and nobody else got hurt and it was clear self-defense, so I’m thinking you should be okay on that one. By the way, the sucker you busted was named Carl Crane, ex-Special Forces, ex-Graywolf. He hung with a crew led by another ex-forces guy, big, blond linebacker type-”

Cruz remembered: the big guy with the Barrett, ambling down the crest of the hill after they’d checked out the kill zone that held the two parts of Billy Skelton. He remembered thinking: I will hunt you cocksuckers down.

“-named Bogier, Mick Bogier, who all hung out at a joint called the Black Cat in Kabul. Gun-for-hire types.”

“There you go. CIA hires mercs for the dirty stuff and when the mercs can’t make it happen, they laser-paint the hotel for the smart bomb. When they learn they fail, the Agency people go to the same team, for obvious security reasons, using people already part of it. The contractors hunt me in America. The Agency keys on you, plants a bug so they can tail you by a bird in the sky, feeding info to the contractors. When you locate me, they move in for the kill. In Pikesville, they thought I was in the house so they raided hard and killed every dishwasher in the place. They followed you to me at the car wash. They’ll follow you to me if I turn myself in.”

“It won’t happen again. I got it busted now.”

“And you still don’t know why the fuck Zarzi is here.”

“Cruz, damnit, for the first time, I’m thinking we’re ahead of them. Tomorrow I go to a meeting. I will meet with the four guys who have the authority to deal a Paveway strike without raising no questions. I will eyeball them and see what I can see. I will report back to you tomorrow and we will see where we are. Think on coming over to us. Give it a fair shot. This rogue crap is just going to get you killed. Okay?”

Cruz said nothing.

“Get some sleep, Sergeant Cruz. I will bring you in, we will make this happen. I swear to you, sniper to sniper, it’ll work out.”

“I’ll take you at your word, because I’m a fool and a dreamer. But only one more time,” said Cruz, breaking the connection.

A & A THERAPY

ROUTE 40 WEST

CATONSVILLE, MARYLAND

0230 HOURS

Bogier hurt everywhere. His nipples hurt, his toes hurt, his watchband hurt, the elastic in his underpants hurt. His mind hurt. But his chest was the worst. It was lit like the Fourth of July if that holiday was celebrated in fireworks primarily of the blue-indigo-violet range. Each of Ray’s five shots had delivered about five hundred-foot pounds of energy to the Kevlar chest plate that prevented them from penetrating, but did nothing to halt the energy transaction that hammered his flesh like a drill bit driven by a sledge. A pink blood blister signified the actual point of the bullet strike and was itself the center of a radiant bloom of BIV swirls that unfurled like daisies in the summer sunshine. The wounds leaked interior blood as far as belly, biceps, and neck, so the flowers were as if displayed on a field of bluish velvet and wine stain. It hardly looked human.

“What happen, baby?” asked Kay. “You been in fight?”

Kay, wrapped in a flower-print strapless dress that showed what appeared to be cleavage to end all cleavage and a butt to end all butts, had a fifties sex-goddess vibration that was undeniable; she could have played bad girls in B pictures for a decade. Her doll’s face was symmetrical but not quite approaching beauty in its flatness, her eyes were not without empathy but helpfully unencumbered by curiosity. The question was strictly pro forma.

“You should see the other guy,” Mick said, the point of the joke being that it wasn’t funny at all, and its lack of humor perfectly matched his black mood.

“You lie there. Kay take care.”

“I can’t shower myself,” he said. “I tried, I hurt too much. You have to do it for me. Leave the backside alone, just do the front, under the arms. I stink of sweat. Go easy, stupid white guy is hurting bad.”

She laughed in a way learned from cartoons. “Ha,” followed by another “ha.” Then she said, “You funny, honey.”

“I’m a regular talk show host,” he said.

She took his towel off, and if she was impressed with the MCGA equipage down there she said nothing. In her job she’d seen more dicks than a urologist, so nothing would surprise her. He lay on the table in a pool of hot water and she sprayed him three or four times, then smeared soap all over him-that is, all over him-and used her strong but gentle hands to knead some pleasure into his body. She was very good, the hands knowing and not shy, her concentration highly professional, up, down, around, slip-slop, squish-whish, in, out, here and finally there.

“Ah,” he said, “that felt good.”

“You big,” she did say, finally.

“Big but dumb. That’s how it goes.”

“You come now.”

She wrapped the towel around him and led him, quietly padding barefoot through the surprisingly clean hallways, to the room where the episode had begun. The place was dim, almost religious, but smelled of locker room disinfectants. Other dramas played out behind curtains sealing off rooms like the bland one into which she led him with its $8-a-night motel room art and lava lamp. There, she pulled off his towel, patted him down, and was surprised to find he was all ready to go again.

“Wow,” she said, “what a strong fella.”

“Strong but dumb.”

He lay on his back. She turned the lights down, peeled out of her print dress to reveal that beneath the hypnotic cleavage lay two wondrous Playboy-quality breasts. She touched them for him because he could not touch them himself and discovering an avid audience for the exhibition, she continued with the touching theme in various private areas and in various unusual postures until he got very interested.

She rushed to him at that point, and with a mighty bolt, he emptied himself. Then she crawled up next to him and snuggled. He was not a snuggler, but tonight, her softness and warmth and uncritical if professional adoration were welcome.

“You sad, baby?”

“A good friend went away today,” he said. “That’s never fun, you know?”

“In same fight?”

“The very same. Can’t be helped, it’s the business we chose, but it’s sad.”

At that point something that couldn’t have been a phone started to make a noise that couldn’t be a ring, and he rolled from the massage table, went to his dumped clothes on the floor, and pulled out the big satellite communicator.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He punched the button.

“Nice of you to answer,” MacGyver said.

“I’m not in the mood to take any shit,” he said. “From you or anybody.”

“What happened? Three on one, he kills Crane, and you guys run like hell. Hardly up to Black Cat standards, much less Graywolf or Fifth Special Forces.”

“What happened was, he outfought us. He read a tell, knew who we were, and jumped us instead of us jumping him. His first five went point blank into my chest. Goddamn lucky I was wearing a vest. The prick is world class, I’ll give that to him. Any man who could take down Carl Crane is a hell of a man.”

“They made Crane fast off prints from DOD. The FBI has a circular out for his pals Mick Bogier and Tony Zemke.”

“You want us out of here? Are we too hot? You want your money back? I don’t feel like calling Tony’s mother like I had to call Carl’s wife. Carl left her and three kids, he was a great dad, and he did what he did to keep them comfortable and because you told us it was for the good of our uncle.”

“I wish I could afford to cut you loose. But it’s too late now, I can’t bring new people in. And since Cruz got out clean and nobody up there seems to have connected this with him, you still have to finish.”

“Will do,” said Mick.

“It’s worth it. We’re trying to find a way out and Zarzi’s our best route. If this works, there won’t be any more young kids dying in that shithole. Cruz, his spotter, the thirty-one salesmen, the Filipinos, whoever, they will have died for a noble cause, which is stopping the pointless slaughter of our people for no advantage whatsoever. You get that? Basically, we’re trying to end the war and put you out of business.”

“There’ll never be an end to war, Nietzsche,” said Mick.

“He was right, but maybe we can get ourselves a little downtime before the next one.”

“Friday night. Georgetown?”

“That would be so nice. I may be able to get you security dispositions. Evidently this Swagger has some weird gift for figuring out where another sniper will shoot from. You don’t have to be near Georgetown; with that Barrett you can be a mile away.”

“A mile with ranging shots. No ranging shots. One shot, one kill, cold bore, twelve hundred yards would be the max. Then, Belize, here I come.”

“Bogier, tough about your friend Crane. But don’t stay depressed. Get this thing done, cover yourself with glory and honor and the thanks of a grateful nation. Save the sum of things for pay. What better epitaph could a mercenary want or get? Plus, all that dough.”

“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 picture 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.”

“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 hit 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.”