Zero Day (26 page)

T
HEY LEFT
the J2’s office, grabbed a left on Corridor 9, and took the escalator to the basement. The lower level at the Pentagon was a bewildering maze of sterile white corridors that not a drop of sunlight would ever touch. It was Pentagon lore that there were DoD employees from the 1950s still wandering around down here trying to find their way out.

The personnel of J23 were analysts and graphic artists, about two dozen in total, who methodically built the briefing book each week, using intelligence input not only from DIA but also from other agencies like CIA and NSA. Then they would tweak it to the current Chairman’s intelligence preferences. It was a PowerPoint presentation set in hard paper and was succinct in getting to the meat of the matter without delay. In the Army brevity was a virtue beyond all others.

The people in J23 were a mix of uniforms and civilians. Thus Puller saw fatigues, old green uniforms, new blue uniforms, slacks, button-down shirts, and the occasional tie. The unit operated around the clock and the perk for the night crew was that they got to wear polo shirts. Reynolds had been the highest-ranking officer here.

Since J23 was housed in a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, room, Puller and Bolling had to put their cell phones and other electronic devices inside a locker on the wall outside the entrance. No picture-taking or outside communications capabilities were allowed in a SCIF.

They were buzzed in and Puller eyed the reception area. It
looked like many others he’d seen in the Pentagon. This was the only way in or out, except for possibly a fire emergency exit somewhere in the back. At the end of the corridor was an open bay. Here individual cubicles were lined up and analysts and artists toiled away on the product that General Carson would be poring over tomorrow at 0500. The lights in here were dim. The lights at the cubicles were better. Still, Puller thought, half the people here probably needed eyeglasses after less than a year fighting terrorists from their desks mostly in the dark.

Puller and Bolling showed their creds and were granted access to Reynolds’s coworkers, the highest ranking of whom was a lieutenant colonel. There was a small conference room where Puller conducted his interviews. Each person was spoken with separately, a common enough interview tactic. Witnesses questioned together tended to tell the same story, even if they had different information and perceptions to begin with. They were informed by Puller and confirmed by Bolling that Puller was cleared for everything up to “TS/SCI with polygraph” and had a “valid need to know.” In the intelligence world those phrases opened many a locked door and mouth.

The coworkers expressed more shock and sorrow over the death of Matthew Reynolds than his commanding officer had. However, they also could not provide any useful information or leads about why Reynolds had been murdered. His work, while classified, did not involve anything that would have led to his death, they told Puller. When he was done he was no further along with his investigation than he had been when he’d entered the building.

Next, he searched Reynolds’s office, which had been secured ever since he had left for West Virginia and been murdered. While J23 was technically open storage space, meaning if you put something somewhere, there it would stay safely, Reynolds might still have had a safe in his office. As it turned out, he didn’t. Neither could Puller find anything in the man’s office that would assist the investigation. It was clean and sparsely furnished, and computer files, which he went over in Bolling’s presence, yielded no clues.

He exited J23, retrieved his cell phone from the locker, walked
back to one of the main exits with Bolling, and left the DIA man there. He returned to his car in the vast parking lot. But instead of driving off right away, he sat on the hood of his rental Ford and studied the five-sided building that was the single biggest office space in the world. It had received a sharp punch in the face on September 11, 2001, but had come back stronger than ever.

The Pentagon had started a long renovation of the then nearly sixty-year-old building back in the late 1990s. The first wedge finished, ironically enough, had been the part hit by the American Airlines jumbo jet temporarily flown by madmen. More than ten years later the entire renovation of the building was nearly complete. It was a testament to American resilience.

Puller looked the other way and watched as kids of Pentagon personnel played inside the fence of a daycare center within the Pentagon grounds. He guessed that was what the military was always fighting for, the rights and freedoms of the next generation. Watching little boys and girls sailing down plastic slides and riding toy horses somehow made Puller feel a bit better about things. But only a bit. He still had a killer to catch and he felt no closer to doing so than he had when he had first been given the assignment.

His cell phone vibrated and he slipped it from his pocket. The text message was brief but intriguing:

ARMY NAVY CLUB DOWNTOWN TONIGHT
1900
I’LL FIND YOU
.

He didn’t know whom it was from, but the sender obviously knew how to contact him. He studied the words for a few more seconds before putting the phone back. He checked his watch. He would have enough time. He’d been meaning to do this when he came back east anyway. And after spending time with the dysfunctional Cole family, it seemed more important still.

He punched the gas and left the Pentagon in his rearview mirror.

“
W
HAT ARE YOU
doing here, XO?”

Puller stood at attention as he gazed down at the man.

“Reporting in, sir,” he said.

His father sat in a chair next to his bed. He was wearing pajama bottoms, a white T-shirt, and a pale blue cotton robe cinched at the waist. He had socks and slippers on his long, narrow feet. He had once been over six-three, but gravity and infirmity had sliced two inches off him. Now when he stood he no longer towered over most people, not that he stood that often anymore. The fact was, his father almost never left his room at the VA hospital. His hair was nearly gone. What was left was cottony white, like Q-tips stitched together, and nearly encircled his head, just nicking his ears.

“At ease,” said Puller Sr.

Puller relaxed but remained standing.

“How was the trip to Hong Kong, sir?” he asked.

Puller hated playing this fictional game, but the doctors said it was better that way. While Puller didn’t put much creed in the shrinks, he had deferred to their expertise, but his patience was growing thin.

“Transport plane blew a tire on takeoff. Never made it. Almost ended up in the drink.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Not half as sorry as I was, XO. Needed some R and R.”

“Yes, sir.”

As his father looked at him, the first thing Puller noted was his eyes. It was also part of Army lore that Puller Sr. could kill you
with a look that would induce such a deep sense of shame at your having failed him that you would just curl up and die. It wasn’t true, of course. But Puller had talked to many men who had served with his father, and every one of them had been on the receiving end of such a look. And every one of them said they would remember it to their final day on earth.

But now the eyes were just pupils in the head. Not lifeless, but no longer full of life. They were blue, but hollow, flattened. Puller looked around the confines of the small, featureless room, just like hundreds of others here, and concluded that in many important ways his father was already dead.

“Any orders, sir?” he asked.

His father didn’t answer right away, and Puller often didn’t receive any answer to this question when he came to visit. When the response did come, it surprised him.

“It’s over, XO.”

“What, sir?”

“Over. Done. Dead and done.”

Puller eased forward a half step. “Not following, sir.”

His father had hung his head, but now he turned to look at his son. The eyes flashed like blue ice thrown at the sun. “Scuttlebutt.”

“Scuttlebutt?’

“You have to pay attention to it. It’s shit, but they get you in the end.”

Puller now wondered if paranoia had been added to his father’s list of issues. Maybe it had always been there.

“Who gets you, General?”

His father waved a careless hand around the room as though “they” were right there. “The people who count. The bastards who call the shots in this man’s army.”

“I don’t think anyone is out to get you, sir.” Puller was now wishing he had not come to visit today.

“Of course they are, XO.”

“But why, sir? You’re a three-star.”

Puller caught himself too late. His father had retired a three-star, a lieutenant general. That would have been a career achievement
worthy of virtually any person who ever wore the uniform. But Puller Sr. had belonged to that rare percentile who expected to reach the very top of the mountain with everything they did.

It was well known in the Army that Puller Sr. should have gotten that fourth star. The man also should have received something even more coveted: the Medal of Honor. He had earned it on the battlefield in Vietnam; there was no question about that. But in the Army it wasn’t just about valor in the field, it was about politics far away from battle. And the fact was, Puller Sr. had ticked off many important people who had a great say in his career path. Thus the fourth star and the Medal of Honor would never be his. And while his career kept advancing after that snub, it didn’t do so at quite the same trajectory. When the trajectory flattened, the highest targeted goals were no longer achievable. You would miss them. He had missed them. He did have three stars and every medal other than the one he had wanted above all others.

“It’s because of him,” snapped his father.

“Who?”

“Him!”

“I don’t know who you mean.”

“Major Robert J. Puller, United States Air Force. DD. Convicted at court-martial of treason. Imprisoned for life at USDB. They blame me for what that bastard did.” His father paused, drew an angry breath, and added, “Scuttlebutt. The sons of bitches.”

Puller’s face collapsed in disappointment. His brother had been convicted and imprisoned long after their father had retired. And yet he was blaming his son and Puller’s brother for his career problems. On the field Puller Sr. had never let the buck of responsibility pass him by. He took the credit and the blame. Off the field, though, it had been another matter. His father had been a finger pointer. He laid blame on the most unlikely of places. He could be petty and vindictive and callous and unfair, brutal and unyielding. These personality traits could also be applied to his description as a father.

Normally, Puller would say something before leaving. He would play out the fiction as the shrinks had requested. As he started for the door, his father said, “Where are you going, XO?”

Puller didn’t answer.

“XO!” yelled his father. “You have not been dismissed.”

Puller kept walking.

He passed down the hall of the VA hospital that was filled with old, sick, and dying soldiers who had given their all so that the rest of the country could live in peace and prosperity. He could hear his father screaming until he was three hundred feet away. There had never been anything wrong with the old man’s lungs.

When he hit the exit, he never looked back.

Family time was over.

The Army and Navy Club was next.

He was back on the hunt.

Where he really belonged.