UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM
1216 CRENSHAW
PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND
0415 HOURS
Nobody liked it. It wasn’t a thing a soldier would ever brag about. It involved no heroics at all, just suppressed pistols. Mick did all the killing. They slipped into the house, Crackers in the lead with the night vision monocular. Mick just behind, with an untraceable M9 Beretta and a Gemtech suppressor. No kicking in doors, no shouting, nothing. They crept to the first floor and began to edge down the hallway, coming to a bedroom. Crackers pushed the door in, Tony Z, also with a suppressed M9, covered the six o’clock. Mick stepped in, target acquired, and fired.
One or two stirred when Mick hit them. The impacts puffed up little supertime geysers of fabric debris, maybe some blood misting into spray in the force of the considerable subsonic velocity. Mick shot for midbody. Nobody screamed. There were no scenes. Room to room to room. Crackers cupped his hand right at the breech of the weapon, so that each ejected casing struck his palm and was deflected downward. After the shooting in that chamber was finished, he scooped them all up. He also counted rounds. And he handed Mick a new mag. Room to room, floor to floor. The smell of men living together, of showers used a lot, of cigarette smoke. The sound of the heavy breathing in sleep.
One man looked up and Mick shot him in the face. He got to see the details, though not in Technicolor but in the muted tones of ambient light, by which the blood that coursed voluminously from the hole in the cheekbone was dead black.
• • •
It didn’t take long.
“You get ’em all?” Mick asked.
“You fired twenty-two times. I have twenty-two shell casings,” said Crackers.
“Okay, let’s extract.”
They left the house and walked to the car. Across the street, a smear of dawn was beginning to ooze across the sky. The air outside smelled fresh and clean.
“You drive,” Mick told Crackers.
“Got it, boss.”
“I feel like shit,” said Tony Z.
“Guess what, nobody cares what you feel like,” said Mick. “You did your job. That’s the important thing.”
CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION
1216 CRENSHAW
PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND
1115 HOURS
Most of the drama was over, though forensic technicians from both the Bureau and the Maryland State Police were still working inside the house. The bodies, ID’d and photographed in situ, had been moved to the morgue. Nick had released most of his team to change, chill, and then move to duty stations in Mount Vernon for that 2 P.M. to 5 P.M. ordeal. The convoy from DC into Baltimore was about to leave, but its trek from one city to the other was in Secret Service’s bailiwick, so Nick hadn’t yet begun to focus on the real business of the day.
He leaned against his sedan fender, across the street from 1216, numbly watching the action at the big house, whose lawn was jammed with law enforcement vehicles and clots of Baltimore county detectives smoking, joking, joshing as they broke it down. Meanwhile everything seemed draped with yellow crime scene tape, like a Christmas celebration. The press was cordoned off down the block and there was more activity there, with all the on-the-scene standups going on, than here.
Next to him, Swagger also leaned, a dull look on his face. He had the thousand-yard stare of the man who’d seen too much.
An agent came up to Nick.
“The last ID came through,” he said.
“And?”
“Dionysus Agbuya, thirty-nine, born in Samar, the Philippines. Employed at Johnny Yang’s Chinese Delight in Columbia, dishwasher, never missed a day of work. That’s it.”
“No Ray Cruz?”
“Not on the prelims. Maybe there’s a fake ID in there, but I don’t think so, Nick. One guy maybe looks—looked—a little like him. Maybe they made that one and thought they had a go.”
“Or maybe one of them hadn’t paid off the Manila syndicate that got him into the country. And this was a message it was sending to its other clients. You pay us first, then your family.”
“Maybe, Nick.”
“Thanks, Charlie. Didn’t mean to snap.”
“It’s okay, Nick. It’s been a long night for all of us.”
Nick took a sip of coffee, found it had cooled beyond the drinkable stage, and flung it out on the pavement.
Swagger said, “This is all wrong.”
“Murder is always wrong.”
“No, I mean the way this is happening. There’s a leak. In your outfit, in Susan’s, somewhere in the Bureau. These assholes keep showing up on us.”
“We don’t know that. It looks that way, but we don’t know it.”
“Come on, Nick. Everywhere I go, they’re there, either ahead or a little after. They’re pros. Barrett .50s, suppressed 9s, someone even has the thought to collect the brass.”
“Maybe they were using revolvers.”
“You can’t suppress a revolver. All the shooting, no noise complaints, had to be suppressed fire. And you wouldn’t do a job like this if you had to fumble through revolver reloads in the dark. This was a kill team. They’d done it before, they knew what they were doing, and they were trying to put down Ray Cruz. They were the same boys who blew up the Steel Brigade Armory offices in Danielstown, South Carolina. And then as now they had a fucking tip-off. We weren’t followed, not through dark city streets at night with no other traffic on the road. We’d have seen it, just as I’d have seen it on dark country roads ten days ago.”
“It’s fabulous stuff, just what I’ve come to expect from you. You’re operating on a level way beyond what I’ve got. That’s your job. But I have to be practical and responsible. That’s my job. We have to collect, catalog, analyze evidence before we proceed to conclusions. We picked up some forensic markers. When the shooter slid through one of the doors, he brushed it with his head, left sweat traces. We’ll run that, and then, maybe—”
“There’s only one conclusion. Well, two. You have a leak. And I’m an asshole for coming up with some bullshit thing that got nine guys killed for absolutely nothing.”
“You’re an asshole because that’s your nature. You can’t help that. All you hard macho door kickers and life takers are assholes. Your thinking was A-one, solid, deductive, top-of-the-line law enforcement creativity. I told you, you have the gift. Nothing wrong with it. Don’t hold it against yourself. As for the ‘leak’ stuff, the time element argues against it. We hadn’t even heard of this house until eight o’clock last night. The requests for subpoenas, the reports to higher headquarters, all that stuff didn’t go out until much later. If something did get out or if there was a mole, how’d the other team put it together so fast? Man, that would be footwork.”
“The team is here, all set, with all the tools of the trade. All they needed was an address.”
“I say again, not likely. Nobody’s that good. They had to follow us, know we’d left—”
“They couldn’t have followed us. We’d have seen them.”
“You yourself ‘felt’ something last night. You have the operator’s weird nerve system that’s unusually tuned to aggression. They had to follow us.”
“Okay, then. Satellite. That’s the only way. If it’s satellite, then it’s CIA. CIA wants Ray Cruz dead before he tells his story and a bunch of people are assigned to look into it. CIA wants Ibrahim Zarzi to be the next president of Afghanistan, no questions asked, forget all that ‘Beheader’ stuff. He’s our man in Kabul. And CIA will want to protect him, even if it means targeting our own guy.”
Nick ceased being Nick. Instead, he became an assistant director of the FBI, in full dignity and severity, posture improved, face drawn into upper-Bureau solemnity.
“I am not making accusations against the CIA,” he said in policy-announcement voice, “until we have something to go on other than your theories. Going against the CIA means opening a big goddamn can of worms, and once the worms are out, you may never get them back in.
We have to see where the evidence takes us. There aren’t any shortcuts.”
He looked at his watch and the old Nick came back.
“Come on, cowboy guy. We’re due on station downtown. In all this terrible bullshit, we’re forgetting: Ray Cruz is still out there.”
UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM
JUST OUTSIDE THE SHOOT ZONE
THE 900 BLOCK OF MARYLAND AVENUE
MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
1650 HOURS
The boys had the blahs. They sat grumpily, without talking. Where was the banter, the wit, the snappy retorts, the fabulous esprit de corps of Special Forces operators? Wherever it was, it wasn’t here today.
Mick was in the off-driver’s seat, his big foot on the dashboard as he sat back against the seat. Man, he could use some shut-eye himself. This was, what, hour number forty-eight without sleep?
Crackers, in the backseat, said, “I am about to pass out.”
“If you do, I will kick your ass all the way to Washington. I need you on game, fully alert, concentrated. We don’t know what breaks next.”
“Easy for Superman to say. Superman has all the answers. Superman has no weaknesses, flaws, human foibles, neurotic conditions. But I am not Superman. I am Mere Mortal. And Mere Mortal needs to go to bed, sleep late, read the Sunday papers.”
“Drink some more coffee,” said Tony Z behind the wheel. The car was parked near a church with a red door and a steeple, one block west of Charles, that is, one block away from all the hubbub of the fabulous Ibrahim Zarzi’s visit to his brother’s restaurant, the Zabol, on Charles Street. From where they were—a block over, but with a parking lot’s emptiness granting a clear view of the shoot area—they could see the convoy of Secret Service Explorers parked in the street’s left lane, their blue-red gumball flashers spitting out blink-fast blasts of light, their windows darkened to hide the gunned-up agents just inside. Meanwhile the street was cordoned off by Baltimore cops; Secret Service, FBI, and news aviation orbited noisily in the ether a few thousand feet up, cops and Bureau boys in raid jackets with big FBI letters, snail cords leading to their ear units, and tactical holsters pinioned to midthigh were up and down the street, looking this way and that.
“The coffee lost its charm sometime yesterday. Anyway, he’ll never get in,” said Crackers. “If he did, he’d never get out. Which means he’d never go in in the first place. So I say we hit a motel and crash for a thousand or so hours.”
“Swagger’s still on the case, so we’re on the case,” said Mick.
He held the BlackBerry, and on its screen, with the map of Mount Vernon glowing as its template, a pulsing light that signified Swagger’s transponder responding to interrogative requests from satellite, blinked away brightly. The guy was less than a quarter mile away.
“He’s another Superman,” said Crackers.
They were low because the victim list from last night’s episode had just been released. Nine names, none of them being Ray Cruz’s. Nine guys taken out, no home run. A complete waste of energy and lives. Not a good day in professional-killer land.
Tony flashed his big tactical Suunto and read the time.
“It’s almost five,” he said. “This party’s breaking up. Where do we go?”
“We’ll stay with Swagger. When he beds down, we’ll bed down. He’s still our best—”
The satellite phone buzzed.
“Oh shit,” said Mick. “Now this guy is going to crap all over me for ten minutes. Man, when this is over, I would like to . . .” And he trailed off as he wearily hoisted the heavy communication device.
“Talk to me,” he said.
“Genius Bogier. You’ve heard, I assume. You missed him again.”
“Yeah.”
“You killed nine men who had nothing to do with anything.”
“No kids, no women though,” said Mick. “No suffering. It’s not like we tortured them.”
“How reassuring. What a humanitarian you are. Now tell me your thought process.”
Bogier went through the whole thing.
He lamely finished up with, “Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don’t. Last night, we didn’t.”
“A massacre. No one authorized you to massacre anybody. When this is over, I am getting you out of the country ASAP and I don’t want you back for twenty-five years.”
“Hey, there’s no forensics on us. No witnesses. The pistol’s in a river. No DNA, no hair samples, no footprints. We wore rubber gloves. We were clean, we were professional. Nothing leads to us from our end. Your end I don’t know about.”
“There was some DNA and I hope yours isn’t on file somewhere.”
“It isn’t.”
“Memo: you always leave DNA. Always. Got it? My end is secure, don’t you worry about it. What’s the sitrep now?”
“We are off the shoot zone, but still on Swagger, who’s put himself about a hundred feet north of the restaurant. He’s just another street pair of eyes, that’s all. But I don’t think Cruz is going to show because this place is flooded. He couldn’t get in, he couldn’t get out. We’re just waiting. When Swagger goes off duty, we need to crash. We’re on our third day without sleep, which isn’t helping matters any.”
“Good idea. And here’s a little something to improve your morale. Your decision? To hit those people. It was the right decision. It was a good risk. I don’t think it cost us anything. I’m sorry about the collateral too, but it’s a tough-luck world. As I say, after action, you are so gone no one will ever know you existed.”
“We want a beach, a gym, lots of chicks and dope, a really profoundly corrupt law enforcement establishment, and indoor plumbing.”
“You want Gilligan’s Island with porn stars. Really an original fantasy. I can’t guarantee the plumbing. You stay on Swagger, and we all believe he will lead you to—”
“Oh fuck,” interrupted Mick. “I hear shooting!”
THE SHOOT ZONE
THE 800 BLOCK OF NORTH CHARLES
MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
1654 HOURS
Getting him in was a bitch. Getting him out would be a bitch and a half because it took place after everyone had been standing around collecting blood in their feet for three grim hours.
Swagger felt like a ceremonial soldier at some state funeral for a distinguished old general. He stood, not at attention but in the uniform of the day—FBI raid jacket over shirt and tie, black cargo pants bloused into black tactical boots, a radio unit in his hand wired to his ear, along a street, doing nothing but yawning and watching. The only difference between him and the many other boys and girls thereabouts was the absence of a Glock .40 strapped to his thigh in a Nigel Ninja tac holster.
His sniper eyes darted about, looking for . . . well, what? A straight line where there shouldn’t be one? No, that bromide didn’t work in a city full of straight lines. The glint of sun off a lens? Cruz was too advanced for that. A figure on a skyline? A chopper would catch a rooftop shooter before any ground Joe would make the ID. A speeding black 1937 Cadillac with a Cutts compensator on a Colt tommy gun muzzle sticking out the back window? That made as much sense as anything else. He just watched, waited, looked around, eyes lighting on nothing, more or less committed to the single idea of movement, because if Ray Cruz moved, he’d move fast, and that might be the only way you could spot him, and then only if you happened to be looking at the small section of the universe through which he moved at the precise moment. But try as he could, he could not spot an uncovered area, that is, an area not already on someone’s regularly assigned observation schedule.
“Boring, huh?” said Nick, standing next to him.
“Not fun,” he said.
“I could use some sleep myself. I’m hoping to let everyone go when this guy—”
“BREAK-BREAK, ALL STATIONS, COMING OUT, COMING OUT!”
The Secret Service incident commander from inside the restaurant alerted a
ll that the moment of maximum risk was about to occur, as the principal was about to move to the limo and would be on the street and vulnerable for a few seconds. If Ray was here, this was when he would act, unless he had an RPG capable of blowing through armored limo glass, unlikely.
Along the street, all the drifting watchers tightened up, reasserted control over their dozing nervous systems, put hands on pistols, blinked crud from eyes, went to balls of feet for a few minutes of maximum concentration. Above, the choppers came down a few hundred feet, their rotor wash stirring up flecks of grit from the rooftops they were putting the binocs to, all the Secret Service sniper teams in various designated windows locking hands to comb, cheeks to stock, eyes to scope for serious examination of their shooting areas.
Bob sensed, rather than saw, the flurry of motion as Zarzi, his brother, two children, and about ten Secret Service agents and bodyguards spilled from the restaurant in a sloppy formation, the two brothers chatting animatedly, as if none of this security drama were surrounding them. Ibrahim, of course, had to show off. He dawdled in plain sight, holding the hands of two of the younger children, laughing at old memories of childhood with his brother Asa. He refused to move, out of some polo athlete’s macho instinct by which he dared the universe to destroy him if it had the nerve, while around him the Secret Service people ground molars to powder, looked feverishly this way and that for signs of movement or action, saw only the pedestrian and the banal, the expected, the normal, the dreary: a homeless man far down one block, a flock of pigeons on the park lawn, a hip-looking couple across the street, a garbage truck pulling out of an alley in the next block, a cab on a cross street, nothing to—
Bob thought: Wrong. Something wrong. What is wrong with this picture? What is—
Jesus Christ, in thoughts so fast they defied the words that tried to catch up with them, what the fuck is that garbage truck doing there?