Cold Barrel Zero (26 page)

BRADAC BOARDED HIS
second bus of the morning and fed his dollars into the fare box. His ride toward Sidwell took him away from downtown, and the bus was uncrowded. The Mechanic knew the checklists that American law-enforcement officers used to spot suicide bombers—freshly shaved face, the scent of flower water to prepare for heaven, mumbled prayers—and had coached Bradac to avoid them.

Many of the warning signs were unconscious—sweating, nervous tics, unnaturally fast or slow breathing—but as Bradac sat on the 30N, he gave no indications of his intent. He had been through this before. The only thing that could upset him would be the denial of his chance at heaven. The twenty minutes passed as in a dream, and he was beaming the entire ride.

He caught the eye of an older Salvadoran woman holding the hand of a grandchild. Most of the riders stared into space, at their phones, or at the floor, but Bradac's bliss was infectious. The woman smiled back at him, and the little girl turned her brown eyes his way and followed suit.

The bus climbed the long hill toward Sidwell Friends School.

He waved to her, and she laughed and hid her face in her grandmother's side.

As they approached Tenleytown, a massive office building made to look like a colonial mansion rose to their left. “Upton Street,” chimed the prerecorded female voice.

Bradac pulled on the yellow cord to signal for a stop, then exited through the rear doors of the bus. School had been in session for thirty-five minutes at Sidwell, and students had settled in for their first lessons.

The vice president's daughter, age twelve, raised her hand to ask a question in pre-algebra on the second floor. The national security adviser's grandson, age seven, sat at a cluster of desks listening to a reading lesson on silent
e
's. The House Whip's daughter, a speech therapist, was working in the resource room by the south stairwell with a small group of children, including the niece, age six, of the deputy secretary of defense for Special Operations.

A fence ringed the entire campus except for the entrance to the middle school. Bradac walked along Upton, turned south on Thirty-Seventh Street, and saw his target. There, the windows on both floors of the school were only twenty feet away from the sidewalk. He didn't have to enter the campus or deal with the security guards at an institution that had educated the First Families of the United States since Theodore Roosevelt sent his son Archibald through its doors.

He stopped across the street, placed his USPS package on the ground, and tore away a tab—a friction fuse.

Nothing happened. He waited, and watched. A dark spot appeared on the box, turned into black ash, and then sparks flew crackling from the top. They poured into the air, sixteen feet high, red and black and brilliant electric white.

The morning was still. The smoke rose straight toward a clear blue winter sky.

Bradac crossed the street, hands plunged in the jacket of his coat, thumb pressed against the trigger. He watched the colors flare. It was beautiful. Children crowded around the windows, awestruck, their eyes open wide, inches from the glass.

Their souls were pure, and they would enter heaven too, without ever having to suffer the tomb, and his mother, whom he'd found when he was their age dead with her skirt up and a needle stuck in her groin because her arms were too scarred to shoot, would be there, and she was alive again and as beautiful as he remembered and they were all there in heaven because on this one winter morning he had been so brave.

“There is no god but God.”

He gripped the detonator, shut his eyes, and pressed his thumb down on the toggle switch.

THE NAVY C-20
jet cruised at four hundred and sixty knots at forty thousand feet. From the sounds, Hayes could tell they were in flight aboard a small jet but knew nothing else. He had been blindfolded and shackled wrist and ankle since his capture. At some point they cut his clothes off without loosening the restraints and left him naked in a cold cell. They stitched up his face and hands, then placed him in coveralls and readied him for a long flight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hayes shook his head.

“No, you don't.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stand by, Santoya.”

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

“I say again, do I approach?”

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

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

“I say again, do I approach?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HEY.”

A hand closed on my shoulder.

“Byrne.”

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

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

“Nine thirty.”

“Wait. Was I…”

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

“Neither did I.”

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

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

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

“All right. Don't get cute.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That's gorgeous.”

“The ocean?”

She nodded.

“I'm off oceans for a while.”

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

“Any news?”

“My CO called.”

“And?”

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

“Great. Where are you headed?”

“Bragg.”

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

“It's the cultural support teams.”

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

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

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

She pursed her lips. “A week.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I meant everything I said.”

“Me too.”

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

“Thank you for trusting me, and for…”

“Not dying?” she said.

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

“You're easy to please.”

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

“You do, Tom.”

I kissed her and brought her to my chest.

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

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

“I won't.”

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

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

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

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

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

We watched the ocean for a long time.

“One week,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You want to stick around?”

“More than anything. And then…”

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

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