Cold Barrel Zero (20 page)

HAYES'S WIFE, WHO
now went by the name Lauren Parker, turned a page in the textbook. She rested her elbow on the table and her head in her hand as she copied notes down onto an index card. The house was a modest ranch, neat, though showing its age, with deep-pile brown carpet and linoleum in the kitchen.

She was still wearing the scrubs she'd had on for fourteen hours. A year of coursework remained for her to become a nurse-practitioner. It had taken her a little longer than the others in her class because she was raising Maggie by herself and working full-time as a registered nurse. Plus things had been hard ever since Hayes…she tried not to think about Hayes and focused on the page:

The Cockcroft-Gault Equation for Creatinine Clearance

She worked through the problem set. Her daughter stood on a chair next to her. She had started asking questions about everything recently, which was normal for her age. But more and more, she asked about her father, and those questions Lauren didn't know how to answer.

Maggie mimicked her, placing her head in her hand and, armed with a crayon and a Babar book, pretending to work her own calculations.

Lauren couldn't help but crack up. She checked the clock on the stove: eight p.m. She should have put Maggie to bed fifteen minutes ago, but this was the only time they had together. The child thrived on the schedule, and it was selfish to let her stay up. But it was nice not to be alone, especially at night, out here in the middle of nowhere, with good reason to believe every creak of the house or engine in the distance represented a coming threat.

Ten more minutes, she told herself, and she returned to Cockcroft and Gault. She couldn't focus. After everything that happened, she was used to having eyes on her. For two years, every car, every passing stranger had seemed to be following her. And she'd learned to deal with the paranoia, but today had been different. She couldn't convince herself that it was all in her head, that no one was hunting her.

Were the police going to take her again for endless hours of questioning? Would the rumors start again? Would she have to move for the fourth time, change her name and cut ties once again? Part of her believed it would be Hayes, and she was never sure whether to be hopeful in those moments or afraid. And then it would cycle: hating the men who did it to him, hating him, and sometimes hating herself for hating him.

Maggie put her finger on a graph of drug concentrations and did her fake-reading bit: “Blah-blah-blah.”

Lauren looked at the page.

“Exactly what I was thinking, kiddo.” She scooped her up in her arms. “Time for bed.”

Maggie rested her head on her mother's shoulder. She pointed out the kitchen window. “What's that?”

Lauren turned. She could see the dome lights in the vans and trucks. There were at least four. She went to the bathroom, kept the light off, and looked out the window. Two squads of four men were approaching the house.

There was a pistol in a safe above the fridge. A long gun locked in the hall closet. Instinct told her to grab one or both and defend her child. She was a better shot than 90 percent of the guys at the range. But that would only give them what they wanted, confirm their fears, grant them a reason to kill her.

“Bailey!” She snapped her fingers and pointed to her daughter's door, closest to the living room. The chocolate Lab slipped inside, and she closed the door behind him.

They would come from the front. Lauren took Maggie into the kitchen. She knelt down and looked at her.

“Sweetheart, we're going to play a game. We're going to lie on the floor and keep our hands out to the sides no matter what happens. It may be scary, but we're going to be brave and just stay where we are and not get up and not run. It's all a game. Do you understand?”

“No.”

Lauren's hands were trembling so badly she could see them shaking her daughter's arms.

Maggie's lower lip stuck out. “I'm scared.”

“It's going to be fine. Will you play? For Mommy?”

“Okay.”

“Here we go, baby.” She kissed her on the forehead and laid her down.

“Police!” The door splintered in, and something metal tinked against the wall. A half a second later, the explosion shook the house. Pure white light burned Lauren's eyes.

Maggie was silent for a moment, then opened her mouth wide and held it, held it before the sobs broke through.

“Stay there, sweetie! It's just a game!”

This was a night raid. It was what her husband did for a living, in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and the Horn of Africa and God knew where else.

She heard the rattling of the load carriers. It was bad enough that they were here but worse that she had seen them coming. This was not her husband. These were small-town police, tweaked on adrenaline.

One glint, one move, one shout. An ashtray, a wallet, a silver necklace. Anything could set them off. She had to be brave at the wrong end of the gun, give them nothing to react to. If she let the fear take her and grabbed Maggie and ran like every nerve in her body was screaming for her to do, they'd kill her.

The sliding door to the patio blew out and sent a shower of glass into the living room, skittering along the floor toward her daughter. She looked back, saw the men throw the forty-pound battering ram down and rush in: four, eight, twelve. She stood up and tried to count as they blinded her with flashlights.

“Where is he!”

“Who?”

“Your husband!”

“He's not my husband. I haven't seen him in years. My daughter is here. Please. It's just the two of us. Please. We're cooperating. Please don't shoot.”

She knelt down. He pushed her to the ground, spread her arms out to the sides.

“Put your hands out. What are you carrying? Who else is here? Do you have any weapons?”

“It's just my daughter and me. There's a pistol in the kitchen. Rifle in the closet. They're locked and I have a permit. There's a dog in that first bedroom. He's friendly. Please don't hurt—”

Another man stormed over. “Where is your husband! You got any guns?”

Maggie screamed for her mother, boosted herself onto her knees. The lights crossed to her in the dark.

“Just stay there, sweetie,” Lauren said. “Please…please don't hurt my daughter. Please don't take her away. Her aunt lives fifteen minutes from here. If you're going to arrest me, please let me call her to take my—”

“You're lying. We know he's—”

Wood splintered in the hallway. The dog's barks echoed down the hall. They kicked down the bedroom door.

“He's friendly! Please don't hurt—”

Three cracks of rifle fire. The dog whimpered.

“Did you have to shoot my dog!” she screamed.

Other men heard the gunfire.

“Shooter? Shooter?”

The voices drowned each other out. More shots. The cries of the dog, hurt badly. Maggie screaming, and someone else groaning in pain.

“I'm hit! Shooter! Shooter!”

More shots. The room stank of smoke. Lauren gagged.

Some cops yelled for order, but the panic was contagious.

“Bailey!” Maggie screamed. Lauren saw her stand. She was going to run.

“Stay still, baby. Please.” Lauren reached for her. “My daughter. Don't hurt her!”

“Don't you move!” A light mounted on the barrel of a rifle shone in Lauren's eyes. “Are you trying to warn him? Where is he!”

Lauren saw the gun lights converge, the lines pass through her and her daughter, reflect off windows, illuminate the sweaty faces of the men, veins plump in their necks, eyes wide with fear and panic, their fingers too tense on their triggers.

“Lie down, baby! Please—”

Her daughter took a wobbling step toward the dog, arms outreached.

“Freeze!”

Lauren saw the officer near the kitchen, wearing black goggles and a black helmet, take aim.

“No!”

Her daughter fell to the floor.

HAYES STOOD TO
my right. I put my hand on the lid of the trunk and looked inside.

At first it seemed like reams of printer paper wrapped in thick blue and clear plastic. Through a transparent section, I could see it was made of many smaller plastic-wrapped bricks. Then I saw Benjamin Franklin, with his scraggly hair and sad eyes, staring back at me.

“How much is it?”

“Sixty-eight million,” Hayes said. “All four of those are full.”

“Jesus, you could buy an F-16 with that.”

“Two, actually. Or a Pakistani nuke. It cost only half a million to pull 9/11 off, and those guys didn't have the kind of connections and state support Samael has.”

Hayes lifted one of the bundles, considered it, then let it fall back. He shut the case. “The root of all evil, prior to every bomb, every bullet. Sell your cloak and buy a sword.”

“It's the black money Riggs stole. You stole it back.”

“That was our first step. Take the money, his strength. He doesn't have all those people working for him because they believe in him.”

“What was he doing with it?”

“He plays it off as some service project, giving jobs to warriors after they leave the military, but he's hiring guns. We didn't know exactly why. Then we saw him with Samael. He doubled-down with him. He had the funds and the means and he's working with one of America's most dangerous enemies.

“I don't know what his exact motivation is, but he was a ‘the worse, the better' kind of guy, believed the U.S. should let things fall apart, let the bad guys wipe each other out, and then step in to start rebuilding the region from scratch.”

“Is stealing this enough to stop him?”

“No. We took his legs out, made it hard for him, but there are other ways. All we know is that he is planning something big, he has unofficial sanction, and he could pull the trigger any minute.”

“Who did Nazar call? Didn't she order the evidence to be released?”

“A lawyer, an Iranian exile up in Orange County. He's dead. Car crash. Tried to outrun Riggs's men.”

“And the evidence?”

“It's still out there. We were able to pick that up from their comms. They hit him too early. He tried to run, lost control of his Jaguar. They forced the lockbox he was carrying. And it was empty. He must have been going to get it.”

“So Nazar is the only one left.”

“Yes.”

“Can we get to her, maybe turn her against Riggs?”

“If we can rescue Nazar, after what Riggs has done, she would almost certainly turn, but Riggs already has her. He took her in the firefight. That's the last audio pickup we got: ‘Keep her alive enough to talk.'”

“They're going to torture her.”

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“They're all together, on a ship that Riggs controls docked about an hour from here.”

“How much time do we have?”

“They're skilled at this sort of thing. Hours, if that.”

“It's all right,” I said. “We'll get to her in time.”

A look of doubt crossed Hayes's face.

“They killed Foley,” Kelly said.

“God. I'm sorry.”

Hayes took a deep breath, refocused. “Foley was tough, but they may have broken him. They're going to come for us with everything now.”

“Then let's get to them first.”

Things were uneasy between Riggs's and Caro's men. The colonel's soldiers dressed like typical contractors—ball caps, jeans, beards—while Caro's wore two-thousand-dollar suits and carried themselves like City of London bankers. Caro's lieutenant, a man named Kasem, had insisted on driving separately and now kept a side conversation going with his men in a language the others couldn't understand.

This was rally point Italy: a dry creek bed along the side of the highway, surrounded by new subdivisions.

“Are you sure you have the grids right?” asked Kasem.

He looked over the map and checked the GPS. “They must be using SARDOTs.”

Kasem cursed in a foreign tongue. SARDOT—an acronym for search-and-rescue dot—is a sort of geographic code word that's changed daily or even more often. When locations are communicated on open radio nets, they aren't given exactly but with respect to a predetermined point known only to friendly forces, an offset that obscures the real location to anyone listening in. These men were a mile from the home where Hayes and Byrne were hiding, but they had no way of knowing that.

“They must be close.”

“Most likely. But we won't be able to find them unless they screw up, break radio silence, or move out.”

Kasem lifted his binoculars and scanned the hills, passing without notice over Hayes's safe house where it stood among the thousand other newly built homes.

HAYES STEPPED OUT
of the truck and lifted his spotting scope. Sheer cloth covered the lens to stop any reflections. We were on a hill looking down over a commercial marina with three concrete docks. Across the bay came the sound of sailboat halyards clanging against masts like church bells.

“That's it,” Hayes said, pointing to the docks.

Our chances of rescuing Nazar were dwindling by the second. It's called progression of captivity. When you're taken by hostile forces, no matter what your situation is, it's only going to get worse: more secure, deeper in enemy territory, harder to overwhelm or escape.

Ward, Cook, and Green remained at Italy with the money. Ward had tracked Riggs's communications to this port where Moret, Speed, Kelly, and I had just arrived.

I followed Hayes's extended finger. On the closest pier, I saw a ship's silhouette against the ripples of moonlight on the water.

“The
Shiloh,
” Hayes said.

“You know it?”

Hayes nodded. “Every bulkhead. Operated out of it for months. It's a prototype, built under contract. It sucked up billions, but never went into production. It wasn't technically navy, so they used it for classified missions and then turned it into a floating brig to hold prisoners they wanted to keep off the books. A floating black site.”

“Riggs controls it.”

“Yes. Our only chance is to snatch Nazar back while they're moving her.”

I could hear the ship's engines droning. To reach the
Shiloh,
first we needed to get past a chain-link fence that surrounded the whole complex, then past another fence inside, which ran between two industrial buildings and was topped by razor wire. Finally, at the base of the dock, there was a tall metal barrier.

“There's probably conventional security at the perimeter, shared for the commercial marina. Riggs looks like he has his own people closer in on the
Shiloh
's dock.”

“How many?” Speed asked.

“Can't say. Safe side, given his habits, eight to twelve, another dozen or more on the ship.”

“We should take her now,” Speed said.

“If we can take them by surprise. We only have the numbers for a stealth approach.”

Moret set up a prone sniper position behind a tangle of sage bushes and cut away the low growth. It would hide her muzzle flash and let her overlook the entire port.

We sneaked down to the base of the first fence. Hayes pulled out a twelve-inch pair of wire cutters and clipped the fencing right next to the post, then pulled it open wide enough for us to pass through. He took a length of gray paracord and laced it through where he had cut the fence.

If you didn't look close, it was impossible to tell it had ever been breached.

“You two stay here and cover us,” he said to me and Kelly. “We'll see if we can get through the next fence. Wait for my signal.”

“Check,” I said. Kelly and I put twelve feet between us and watched Hayes disappear down the hill toward the razor-wire fence.

Hayes and Speed moved silently toward the
Shiloh
's dock, avoiding the sight lines of the cameras. Speed raked open the American padlock on the razor-wire fence in a few seconds. There was a main gate through the high metal wall that guarded the dock, but Speed assumed the guards would be watching that entrance. Instead, he and Hayes were headed for a small secondary door.

They moved toward it, passing behind two corrugated-aluminum trailers and a parked truck, then a large steel job box. A crane on six-foot tires covered the last twelve feet to the gate.

Hayes halted. He could hear footsteps on the other side of the crane. He listened as the guard moved closer and then stopped. The flint of a lighter rasped, and they could smell smoke. Hayes unsheathed his knife.

The guard started moving again, the footfalls growing quieter. Hayes edged around and saw him disappear behind a trailer.

He raised his finger to Speed:
One minute.

They ran for the door through the high metal barrier, their last obstacle before the
Shiloh
's dock.

It was solid steel, with an Assa Abloy lock, certified to stand up to a skilled lock picker for thirty minutes at least. Speed unzipped a pouch on his chest and pulled out a tool that looked like a small power screwdriver. It was a Falle decoder, a skeleton key available only to select military, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies. Hayes and Speed had met with Falle. He was a former British commando who worked out of a little-known factory on the island of Jersey.

The business end was shaped like a key. Most keys have notches—called bits—at different heights. The correct combination opens the lock. But this decoder had bits that were adjustable.

Speed started with them all level at the full height of the key blade. He slid the decoder in and applied a light twisting tension. A thin metal rod ran through the handle of the device and allowed Speed to jiggle each bit and each corresponding pin inside the lock. If the pin was at the correct height to open the lock, he would feel the slightest wiggle. If wrong, there would be no give at all.

He moved the rod and felt each pin. Number five was correct. He took the decoder out, and using another tool, he lowered each bit slightly, except for number five.

He put it back in and felt the pins.

Nothing. The rest were still bound.

He lowered them again.

One and three were now at the correct height.

The Falle tool allowed intelligence operatives to decode a lock over multiple visits. All they would need was ten seconds unattended. They would do one height at a time in the embassy, under the noses of their targets. And the decoder, unlike other nondestructive entry techniques, left no forensic evidence.

“He's coming back,” Hayes said.

Speed worked his way down the bit heights. Then he felt the slightest give. The door was unlocked. It had taken sixty seconds. He pulled the decoder and hid behind the crane.

The guard continued on his rounds. Hayes radioed for Byrne and Britten to join them through the gate they had left unlocked in the razor-wire fence. As the two crept up to meet them, Speed put the decoder back in, with the correct combination still set, and opened the door a crack.

Hayes checked in with Moret for an overview, then peered through the door. He could see the
Shiloh
.

Little Bill walked across his path, then turned back. Hayes saw only that one man covering one sector. Moret had a better view and had given him the position of several other sentries. Together, that was enough for Hayes to understand Riggs's entire security posture around the ship.

They were waiting for an attack. He craned his neck, and the assault plan came to him:
Put Byrne and Britten on the carbines for cover. Remain in the shadows beside the gate, take Bill from behind with a knife, and make a cut to the carotid on each side of his neck; he'll bleed out in a half a minute. Go over the port side, skip the pilothouse, stack on the door with Speed; breach, bang, and go below shooting.

The steps came naturally, without conscious thought, like moving his legs on a ship to keep his balance.

“Let's go,” Speed said.

Hayes had been at the christening of Bill's boy, but that wasn't what gave him pause. Another guard was making rounds in the distance. They didn't have enough guns for an assault against a well-prepared enemy. If they were at sea, in the chaos of noise and darkness and wind, they could take them by surprise, but not here, not with security on land and on the ship. Their chance was to take Nazar in transit, but now she was buttoned up. He knew the hold where they would put her, an old crypto vault they used as a cell. He needed a half a dozen shooters at least, and Moret's rifle would do him no good once they went below.

He ran it every way, longer on stealth, faster now, coming over the bowlines, shooting first, pure kinetic violence.

The end result was always the same: they would be dead before they reached the second deck.

There was a better way. They had the gear cached.

“No,” Hayes said. “We can't take them head-on.”

“You're worried about killing?”

“No,” Hayes said. “Just killing for no reason. We're not murderers.”

“You're the only one who believes that.”

“It's the truth.”

“How many did we kill?”

“That was war. It was different.”

“Why? Because a bastard like Riggs told us so? Killing is killing, and a few more traitors doesn't matter. You want to screw us all by playing prince? You're a warrior. Act like one.”

Hayes watched Bill lift his radio. “They're waiting for us.”

“Fuck this,” Speed said, and he fixed his sights on the sentry.

The deckhands on the
Shiloh
threw off the stern lines. “They're leaving,” Speed said. “We need to take them now.”

“Speed. We've lost surprise. We've lost the initiative. We have the gear to take that ship, but this is not the way. We need to fall back. If we go direct assault, we'll have to kill every one of them, and we'll die before we finish.”

Hayes had seen it before, many times, anger short-circuiting reason. The only way to sate it was by killing. It was as dangerous as enemy fire. And he could see it infecting Byrne as well, the adrenaline rising, the fear giving way to a taste for blood.

“You're afraid,” Speed said. “You've lost the will. There's no time. I need suppressive fire. I'm going.”

“Speed,” Hayes said. “Listen to me. They want us to come. It's a trap, a shooting gallery. There's a better way. The water. I'm ordering you—”

“You can't. We're not soldiers anymore. We're nothing. Now, give me a base of fire.” He brought his rifle across his chest.

“Don't.” Hayes grabbed for his arm, but he took off in a crouch along the dock.

He was ten feet out when the first shots came, every fifth a tracer, burning red through the night. Hayes took a knee and aimed at the shooter. The fire stopped, but more picked up from the ship.

Speed got twenty more feet. Hayes moved into the open door, taking out the enemy guns one by one.

More fire. Speed took two stumbling steps, then fell forward into the shadows.

Byrne lifted the radio. “Speed. Speed.”

Hayes ducked back and grabbed his arm.

“Stay off the comms.”

Floodlights fixed on the body. The volley had taken Speed's head off from the jaw up. Rounds filled the corpse. The tracers burned in the flesh.

“Fall back,” Hayes barked to Byrne and Britten.

“What about you?”

“I'll take those shooters. I need to get to the body. They can't take our radios.

“Go,” Hayes said, and he moved toward the gunfire as it closed in on them, thundered against the steel.

Byrne and Britten ran fifteen feet before they were hemmed in by fire and took cover behind the job box. Kelly reached forward and squeezed his arm. A tracer round punched through the metal, burning red, and slit the air between them.