Day Zero (4 page)

 

T
ang Dalu stood outside the security zone and watched his wife work her way toward security screening with the snaking queue of passengers. The Chinese man was thirty-nine years old and dressed for travel in gray cotton slacks and a short-sleeve white button-up shirt. He was short enough that he had to stand on tiptoe in order to keep an eye on his wife. Her name was Lin. They had been married for eleven years—long enough for him to know, even from nearly a hundred feet away, that she was crying.

Hers was a silent, anguished cry, manifested only by glistening red eyes that seemed ever on the verge of tears—and the periodic shudder of frail shoulders.

Tang had wept too, in the beginning, great choking sobs that wracked his chest and threatened to detach his lungs from his throat.

He could not eat. He could not sleep. He could not bring himself to touch his wife. The sadness was too much to bear. At first, he’d thought he might die. Then he’d watched the light vanish from his wife’s wide brown eyes and he feared he might have to live forever to witness her despair. She’d depended on him, on his position—and he had let her down.

Allah, it turned out, was not nearly as merciful as he had once supposed.

Only the man from Pakistan had saved him. Lin had never been devout, but she had listened to the man’s message and he had saved her as well. In her misery she did not seem to care.

Tang craned his head as he watched her move to the front of the line. He could feel his jaw tighten as a TSA agent ordered her forward with a dismissive flick of his fingers. All around her other agents barked orders at passengers to remove their shoes and empty their pockets.
Keep it moving, slow down, stop right there, step forward, quickly, slower, this not that
.

Do it my way
.

Bewildered or just plain numb, passengers plodded along like sheep. If they wished to fly there was no alternative but to submit to the will of the officious security agents who squawked and scolded like so many angry blue jays, steadfast in their own moral superiority. Such power always brought oppression—and under oppression the weak had no choice but to give in to despair or fight back. The man from Pakistan had taught him that.

Though Tang had been born to Hui Chinese parents and raised under the tenets of Islam, he had never heard of Ramzi Yousef. The man from Pakistan had explained that in 1994 Yousef had smuggled nitroglycerin and other components on board a Philippines Airline flight from Manila to Tokyo. Using a simple Casio watch as his timer, he’d assembled his bomb in the bathroom while in flight. He’d placed the bomb under a seat in the life vest compartment and then gotten off the plane in Cebu. The device had exploded on the way to Tokyo, blowing a Japanese sewing machine maker in half and ripping a hole in the floor. Security technology had progressed since then, but as the man from Pakistan explained, so had the technology of making bombs.

Tang felt the knot in his stomach grow as Lin put her camera bag on the X-ray conveyor. To her right, in an adjacent line, a red-faced passenger began to argue with his TSA overlord about a water bottle filled with vodka.

Most of the security staff on scene converged around the sputtering drunk, leaving Lin to pass through the scanners without a hitch. Relief washed over Tang as she retrieved her camera bag from the belt on the other side of the X-ray. She turned to wave, a hollow look of resignation weighing heavily on her sallow face.

The detonator was in.

 

Q
uinn pressed the phone tight against his ear, straining to hear over the wind and roaring motor.

“Hello,” he shouted.

“ ‘Mariposa’ hasn’t called in.” The caller started right in without introduction—par for Quinn’s former boss, even though he hadn’t spoken a word to the man in two months. There was a tense note of despair in the man’s voice that Quinn had never heard before.

It was Winfield Palmer, national security advisor to the recently assassinated president, Chris Clark. A West Point alumni and confidante of Clark, Palmer had served with him in various posts from their military academy days, including director of national security and then national security advisor. As such, he’d recruited Quinn as a blunt instrument, a sort of hammer to be employed when more diplomatic or traditional means failed.

Now, under the new administration, Palmer was unemployed and followed everywhere he went.

Living under constant surveillance, he had resorted to layers of security with his communication—proxy servers, shadow e-mail accounts, remote log-in to computers located in various safe-sites around the world, burner phones—and, of course, code.
Mariposa
, the Spanish word for
butterfly
, was the code name he’d chosen for Emiko Miyagi, Quinn’s martial arts instructor and friend. The name signified something beautiful and delicate. Miyagi was one, but certainly not the other.

“How long has it been?” Quinn asked.

“Five days,” Palmer said, uncharacteristically silent.

Both Quinn and Palmer knew Miyagi was 115 pounds of highly skilled badass warrior woman. Quinn, a more than talented fighter himself, had tasted defeat at her hands each and every time they had sparred. If she hadn’t made contact in five days, she was in serious trouble.

“Maybe she’s close to something?” Quinn offered.

“Maybe,” Palmer said, hollow, unconvinced. “She gave me a name last time we spoke. I have ‘Sonja’ looking into it now.”

“That’s good,” Quinn said, nodding to himself. “She still has resources.” “Sonja” was Palmer’s code name for CIA agent Veronica “Ronnie” Garcia. Apart from hair color, the buxom, sword-wielding fantasy heroine Red Sonja was a perfect ringer for Garcia—who also happened to be Quinn’s girlfriend. At least she had been, before he’d dropped off the grid. Quinn was smart enough to know that girlfriends needed care and feeding—and he’d been around to do neither for nearly half a year.

“Maybe she can get us something to go on,” Palmer said. “I don’t mind telling you, though, I’m worried.”

Behind Quinn in the boat, Ukka shouted from his position at the tiller. “Nearly there!”

Quinn gave the Eskimo a thumbs-up to show he understood, and then turned back to the phone. “Listen, I’ve got to go. Things are heating up out here.”

“Anything that I can do?” Palmer said, more out of habit from the old days than any ability to actually help. Even with his little ad hoc resistance movement, as a private citizen in suburban Virginia, there was nothing he could offer Quinn in Alaska beyond good wishes.

“No,” Quinn said, careful to not to use military trigger words like
negative
and
affirmative
that might trigger closer scrutiny from the NSA. “Looks like I’m burned, though. They’ve sent what looks to be contractors.”

“Contractors?” Palmer said. “That’s not good.”

“Yeah, well,” Quinn said, “they’re three down from when they started. Watch yourself. Looks like the gloves are off.” Quinn ended the call. He made certain the phone was on silent—a ringtone at the wrong moment could get him killed.

Twenty meters away, Ukka took the skiff out into the current to make a wide turn back toward the bank. The white crosses in the cemetery on Azochorak Hill ghosted in and out of the fog above them. They were coming in downriver, about a quarter mile from the village proper. Quinn traded his float coat for a more neutrally colored Helly Hansen raincoat he’d found in the borrowed skiff. The jacket was tattered and stunk of fish and mildew, but its olive green would be far less noticeable against scrub willow or even the open tundra. He slung the MP7 over his shoulder and stuffed the cell phone and the dead man’s radio in the pockets of the raincoat. He stood at the rail, ready to jump and run as soon as the bow touched gravel.

Cut, broken, and bruised to the point he could barely walk, let alone run, Quinn had come to Mountain Village one step ahead of US authorities. The marshals had taken him off their Top Fifteen wanted list for all of about ten minutes, until someone in the new presidential administration had caught wind of it and insisted he be made a priority. Thankfully, a deputy named August Bowen, an acquaintance of his from his boxing career at the Air Force Academy, had been assigned the case. Bowen had been in Japan and knew much of the truth about Quinn, so he dragged his feet as best he could. Still, Top Fifteens were worked by many hands. Quinn had to keep his wits about him to keep from getting captured—which under the present administration would surely mean a speedy trial and quick backroom execution.

He’d made too big a splash in Japan to stay there, leaving a wide and lengthy trail of bodies in his wake while looking for the assassins responsible for shooting his ex-wife. Even with friends in Japanese law enforcement, security footage of his face had already made it onto every news feed and blog in Asia, branding him the murderer from the US who typified the Japanese view of American bloodlust and gun craziness.

It killed him that he was too banged up to follow leads to Pakistan. He’d lived much of his life gutting it out through the pain. But this time was different. Miyagi took him to a doctor in Japan who asked few questions and patched him up well enough to travel. When Quinn argued or tried to do too much, she reminded him that “though a concentrated mind could pierce a stone, it was a long process.”

Fellow OGA “Gunny” Jacques Thibodaux pointed out the reality that “that which does not kill us makes us weaker for the next thing that tries to kill us.”

Quinn had needed a place to hide out, to heal from the many wounds he’d gotten in Japan—both physical and mental. His friends in the tiny Yup’ik Eskimo settlement of Mountain Village provided exactly what he’d needed.

He’d made the long trip by oceangoing car hauler from Tokyo to Seattle, just one step ahead of Interpol. A barge going up the inside passage had taken him to Anchorage, where he’d caught an Era flight to the bush. He’d not chanced seeing his parents or his daughter, or going to any of his old haunts. They were all certainly being watched.

Once he arrived in Mountain Village, Ukka’s wife and mother-in-law had tended to his wounds with traditional herbs as well as antibiotics they got from the clinic and school by feigning illness themselves. Of course, nothing went on without everyone eventually finding out in a close community like Mountain Village, called simply “Mountain” by locals. Soon, the entire village became accessories to the crime of harboring a fugitive. Few knew what he was wanted for, or his real name, but they knew he was wanted by the United States government, and that alone was enough of a reason for most to hide him.

 

 

Ukka threw the skiff into reverse just before they scraped gravel. Quinn hopped to a clump of willows, using them to keep his feet on the slippery mud and vegetation along the eroding cut bank. Gnarled limbs and bits of wood from upstream littered the area from the recent “breakup” when thousands of tons of ice melted enough to crack and give way ahead of the pressure of meltwater building upstream. Great, frozen slabs scoured the riverbed as they were shoved downstream by the tremendous pressure that built up behind them.

“Ukka,” Quinn sighed as he watched his friend jump to the bank beside him. “I’ll never be able to repay you for—”

“So help me, Jericho”—the Eskimo shook his head—“you’re gonna make me cry. And if I start crying, the next thing you know, I’ll be picking berries and cutting fish with the women.”

The Eskimo’s cell phone played the snippet of “Old Time Rock and Roll” that he used as a ringtone. He dug it out of his float coat.

“This is James,” he said.

He listened intently while Quinn scanned the hillside above them. Quinn switched on the dead contractor’s radio and stuffed the earpiece in his ear. He was tempted to say something cavalier, but thought it better to keep the new crew guessing as to what had happened to their river-based compatriots.

Ukka’s face went white and he ended the call.

“That was my neighbor,” he said. “Two of those bastards are heading for my house.”

 

V
eronica “Ronnie” Garcia looked away from the image on her computer and rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger. A leaning tower of manila folders that she should have been analyzing sat precariously close to the edge of her desk. Each was striped and marked according to their classification level. She nibbled on the lipstick-stained straw sticking out of her cup of Diet Dr Pepper, taking a moment from the tedium of scanning the monitor for the last three hours.

Sliding down to let thick, ebony hair fall over the back of her chair, Garcia looked around her cubicle. Apart from the purple stapler and a Far Side calendar, the only other decoration was a photo of her with Jericho tacked to the door of the overhead cabinet. It was early in their relationship, on a trip to Virginia Beach they somehow had been able to wedge between missions. Her canary yellow swimsuit accentuated long legs and a multitude of curves. The color was a perfect complement to her rich, coffee-and-cream complexion. Jericho wore blue bathing trunks and a rare smile, big enough to show his teeth.

Garcia’s chair creaked as she leaned forward to touch the photo with the tip of a red fingernail, tracing the lines of Quinn’s bare chest and the many scars that mapped his body. She thought of something her Russian father used to say—“The way a man fights is the way he does everything else”—and that made her miss Jericho all the more. She kissed her finger, and then pressed it to Quinn’s bearded face. If they ever did have kids, the poor things were doomed to being hairy gorillas. Of course, you had to be in the same time zone to conceive a child, so even if they’d considered such a thing, the notion of it was as far as they would get.

For all practical purposes, she was alone in the bullpen. The girl that sat in the cubicle to her right had already gone home for the day, and Nathan, the tall, blond drink of water who occupied the stall to her left was off picking up copies at the communal printer, which happened to be next to the desk of the tiny brunette who was his latest conquest. He would be gone awhile.

Garcia took another quick sip of her Dr Pepper, and then turned back to the computer monitor. Resting an elbow on her desk, she began to scan the screen again while she pondered how odd it was that an intelligence agency that was so steeped in secrecy and compartmentalization would have a communal printer. Government cutbacks bordered on the bizarre. There were so many things about the present administration that were absurd. The new president had clamped down on everything and everyone with all the paranoid efficiency of communist East Germany. Garcia herself had been given the names of five people in the agency on whom she was to provide “vetting overwatch.” She was certain
her
name was on at least two other agents’ lists. Overzealous, even heavy-handed government employees were rewarded rather than constrained. Jericho Quinn and anyone else who’d ever stood in the way of the new administration were being hunted down, or, as in Ronnie Garcia’s case, sidelined to a life of busywork.

Citizens followed like sheep because President Hartman Drake, a victim of a terrorist attack himself if you believed the papers, gave them what they wanted—free health care; snarky, populist sound bites; and the drumbeat of war with anyone who dared cross American policies.

But not everyone marched in lockstep. A sizable underground had sprung up in the aftermath of President Clark’s death. Quinn, Garcia, and others who had worked directly for the former president’s national security advisor, Win Palmer, knew the incoming administration was behind the assassination of Clark and the Vice President. There was just no way to prove it, yet.

Garcia clicked her mouse, switching screens. Her breath caught in her throat when the image loaded. She looked away, blinking to clear her eyes, then back to check again.

It was highly pixilated from being enlarged several times over, but it was definitely the needle in the digital haystack she’d been searching for. Dr. Naseer Badeeb, the mastermind of a plan to bomb the wedding of the former vice president’s daughter, stood chatting with a man with a heavy black beard. But neither of these men were the most important find. Garcia clicked her mouse, enlarging the photo as much as she could without losing it completely. It was impossible to prove without enhancing the image, but Garcia was certain the young man standing behind Badeeb was Hartman Drake—the President of the United States. He was younger, in his early teens, but there was no mistaking the condescending sneer and vaporous look in the boy’s eyes.

“Way to go, Miyagi,” she whispered, full lips trembling slightly as they formed the words. In the right hands, the photo could finally be something—something that could end this mess and bring Jericho home.

Lost in thought over how to proceed, Garcia nearly jumped out of her skin when her group supervisor walked up behind her and cleared his throat.

“Thought we agreed you wouldn’t put that up until I went home for the night.” Bobby Jeffery nodded toward the photo of Garcia and Quinn standing in the surf at Virginia Beach.

“So apparently,” Ronnie sighed, “keeping a picture of one of America’s most wanted fugitives is against CIA office policy.”

“Apparently,” Jeffery said. “Not to mention I have to keep all the straight guys in the office from trying to get a snapshot with their cell phone of you in your yellow string bikini.”

“It’s not a bikini,” Garcia scoffed.

“Well, give the guys here five minutes with Photoshop and it’ll be less than that.”

Garcia put the photo in her lap drawer and spun in her chair to face her boss. She wanted to get rid of the image on her way around but decided it would look too guilty. She left it up, as if it was routine.

“I appreciate it,” Jeffery said in his easy Georgia twang. If voices could grin, his did. As far as bosses went, he was likeable enough—a little aloof, but Garcia knew she shared that same quality.

He stood at the opening to her cubicle, his conservative striped tie hanging like a crooked noose around an unbuttoned collar. He was only a few years older than she was, but the way he kept his wireframe glasses low on his nose gave him the look of a favorite uncle.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Garcia said, gathering her wits. She forced herself not to shoot a look toward her computer screen. An image of the sitting president associating with a known terrorist was enough to put any good CIA agent on the guilty edge. “What’s up?”

“I’m not sure,” Jeffery said. “But something, that’s for sure. I just got a priority call from our friends over at Fort Meade.” He gave a noncommittal shrug, but his eyes stayed locked on her. “Some ID guy wants to have a chat with you.”

Garcia forced a smile.

“They asked for me by name?”

Jeffery nodded. “Afraid so.”

Stationed at Fort Meade in the offices of the National Security Agency, the Internal Defense Task Force was a government bureau formed by the new administration to root out moles and terrorists inside the government. Considering the assassination of the two top leaders in the nation under the very noses of the FBI and Homeland Security, this expansion of government was an easy sell to the American public.

Of course, Garcia could see the irony in the formation of such a unit by the President, who was now the highest-ranking mole in the government.

Other intelligence and enforcement agencies spoke of IDTF in hushed tones, if they spoke of them at all. Like the devil, if you admitted their existence, ID agents seemed to appear out of nowhere. Garcia wasn’t alone in thinking of them as vicious Orwellian dogs from
Animal Farm
—with President Drake as Napoleon.

Much like Winfield Palmer had organized his team using OGAs or Other Governmental Agents, the IDTF had handpicked its operatives from the NSA, CIA, and FBI, choosing, it seemed, those most bent on getting ahead in their careers at all cost.

Though rank-and-file citizens believed something with the innocuous name of Internal Defense Task Force was akin to a government Internal Affairs, that job fell to various OIGs or Offices of Inspector General. In reality, the IDTF was more like an American version of the Stasi, who had considered themselves the “Shield and Sword” of East Germany. Even agents within both the ultrasecret NSA and CIA saved a particular reverence toward those in the IDTF.

Ronnie remembered a CIA instructor at Camp Peary pointing out that in their heyday, the KGB had employed 1 agent for roughly every 5,800 Soviet citizens. The Nazis had 1 Gestapo operative for every 2,000 citizens in countries they controlled. But, using full and part-time operatives, the Stasi had 1 agent for every 6 East Germans.

The IDTF’s organizational chart was classified, but they and the administration that created them were both in their infancy, so she assumed the new bureau was yet in the middle of empire building. It would not be long before they were up and running at full strength. There were plenty of people in government willing to stomp others to a bloody pulp in order to get ahead, as well as those who just enjoyed seeing other people squirm. Recruitment wouldn’t be all that difficult.

Jeffery put a hand on the small of his back and arched, looked up at the ceiling to stretch. “Listen,” he said, “these guys are as much about witch hunts as anything. You have to watch what you say. Understand.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

“Anything you want to tell me about?”

“Nothing I can think of,” Garcia lied. “Probably just another routine bunch of questions about my old boyfriend.”

She nodded toward the lap drawer where she’d put Jericho’s photo and then kicked back in her chair, trying to look relaxed. Inside, her gut was doing backflips. She’d taken an endless number of precautions, but obviously that was not enough. With offices at NSA and who knew how many agents on the CIA payroll, the IDTF had fingers in everyone’s pie.

They might not yet be as well staffed as the dreaded East German Shield and Sword, but at least one of them had focused on Garcia. Considering what she was a part of, any sort of scrutiny would be a bad thing indeed.