Dead Zero (29 page)

“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?”