Cold Barrel Zero

Book 1: John Hayes Series

by Matthew Quirk

Genres: Spy Thrillers; Military Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

Clancy meets LeCarré in Matthew Quirk’s action-packed new thriller.

Former combat medic John Byrne’s vacation in southern California is interrupted when FBI agents bring him in for questioning and charge him with burglary, grand larceny, the use of weapons of mass destruction, and a litany of other felonies. It’s a case of mistaken identity, but the FBI isn’t taking any chances, freezing Byrne’s bank accounts and adding his name to the no-fly list. Byrne is left with nowhere to turn—until he’s picked up by the very man the government seeks: Thomas Hayes.

Byrne recognizes Hayes from the early days of his military service. In the years since, Hayes has become a special ops squad leader as formidable as he is infamous. He claims he and his teammates have been wrongly accused of terrorist acts, and the series of heists they’re planning will yield enough evidence to clear their name. But Byrne sees another possibility: these daring heists could lead to a catastrophic attack on American soil.

Byrne isn’t sure who to believe—Hayes, his former brother in arms, or Colonel Riggs, the leader of the task force charged with bringing Hayes down. Byrne must decide where his allegiances lie—or he and the entire country will face the consequences.

Release date: March 29, 2016

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter 1

MORET YAWNED AS she walked past the only grocery store in town, a Chinese-run market. Dust caked her skin. She had been on the highlands for three days and nights. She spent most of her time hunting, both to feed herself and to cover her expenses with guide work, trophies, and bounties. A pool of brown, foul water filled half the square. She circled around it.

She left her dog, a boxer mutt, in the passenger seat of the truck with the window cracked and headed for a storefront off the main path. She came every week. Fax and ADSL were hand-painted on the window below Arabic script. She pulled her headscarf forward, looked away from the security camera, and took a terminal in the far back. She opened up the browser and went to Hotmail.

She double-checked the date—the twelfth of October. From her shoulder bag, she pulled out a small volume with a cloth cover over the original leather. It was a Bible, the most common book in the world, the King James Version.

They were using a book cipher based on the date. The twelfth; she counted off twelve books, which brought her to the Second Book of Kings. October, the tenth month; she went down ten chapters. And, finally, she used the last two digits of the current year to count down verses. Her finger rested on the page:

And he said, Take them alive. And they took them alive, and slew them at the pit of the shearing house, even two and forty men; neither left he any of them.

She took the first letters of the first ten words and typed them in as her username: [email protected]. Then she proceeded to the next verse and used the number and the first ten letters as her password: 15AwhwdthloJ.

She had done this every Sunday for the past two years, and every Sunday she had found nothing. She was starting to hate this ritual. It felt like rolling over in the morning and reaching for a spouse long dead.

Each account was used only once. She clicked on the spam folder and skimmed the page. There wasn’t much because of the randomness of the username. Then she saw it—the fourth message down. She thought at first it must be a mistake, but no; it was what she had been waiting for. It read like any other prescription-pill come-on, but for two years she had been waiting to see this sender’s name: John Okoye27.

She clicked on the e-mail. Best and Cheapest Premier Pharmacy! the text read. What interested her was the embedded JPEG file at the bottom of the screen. It showed a blue diamond-shaped pill. The colors looked normal to the naked eye, but the pixel data had been manipulated, with extra bits written over the least significant color codes.

Photos modified with this embedding technique, called steganography, appeared as normal file attachments. An encrypted message wouldn’t be able to withstand the NSA’s deciphering tools, and encryption would only draw attention to it. That was why Moret’s instructions masqueraded as spam, hiding in plain sight, just one more drop in the sea of garbage coursing through the web.

She downloaded an open-source program from the Internet and extracted the message embedded in the photo. It was a sequence of fourteen letters and numbers, which she broke into grid-zone designator, 100,000-meter square ID, and position north and east, down to the meter. They were MGRS coordinates, the military’s version of latitude and longitude.

She memorized them, then took a disc from her bag and inserted it in the computer. It spun and began wiping the machine’s hard drive.

She returned to her truck, a rusting Toyota Hilux. She kept everything she owned in it. A battered Pelican case behind the seats contained an Mk 11 Mod 0 sniper rifle, a nightscope, and a suppressor. She’d removed the passenger airbag to make room for a hidden compartment, known as a trap. The only way to open it was to press down both window buttons and the hazard lights for three seconds. Inside there was $90,000 in U.S. currency, five passports, and a 1911 pistol with no serial number.

The boxer cocked his head at her. She opened the door and led him out of the car. She ran her hand over his head a few times, then climbed back in and drove off. In the rearview, she watched the dog fall back, sprinting after her through the mud, disappearing slowly in the distance.

  

Seventy-five hundred miles away, a screwdriver rested on the open pages of Speed’s Bible. Electronics and machinery spilled their insides over every horizontal surface of his one-bedroom house. It hadn’t taken long for word to spread through the peninsula about his ability to fix anything. The pocket watch in his hands had been a labor of love; he’d carefully tweezed apart the workings, even milled a new balance staff. He had been planning to drop it off at the apartment above the billiards hall on his way out of town when someone knocked on his door. He wiped the sweat from his face, drew back the mosquito netting, and answered, as always, with a pistol drawn.

It was Emiliano. The people in the village loved to watch Speed work, piecing together gears and screws a few millimeters wide, his long fingers moving like spiders. But today he just handed the boy the watch through the partly open door, refused the crumpled pesos, and sent him away. He packed his tools and a few leather cases marked Falle in his backpack, walked the half a mile to the coast road, and waited an hour to catch the fifty-year-old yellow school bus that now served as the intercity line.

Speed found a seat. His bag held two kilos of HDX high explosive. He set it down between his feet next to an old woman’s purse and a sack of red potatoes.

  

At the same moment that Sunday, in a time zone eight hours ahead, Green locked the front door to his Communist-era apartment building. He took the key off his ring and dropped it through the grate of a sewer. He had been planning to move on anyway. He had helped out his neighbor’s daughter first, resetting a badly broken radius and ulna. Soon more came, because they couldn’t afford a doctor, or because they couldn’t afford to draw attention to their injuries. Too many people were looking for him, and more and more were showing up with professionally laid-on bruises and welts, which meant internal security, which meant trouble.

He rounded the corner and saw the girl climbing in the apartment complex’s playground. The arm had healed nicely. She waved to him from the top of the slide. He waved back as he passed through the gate, then he tucked his chin down against the freezing wind and headed for the footbridge over the highway.

One by one they opened their Bibles and made their way to the stashes: cash, explosives, small arms, frequency-hopping radios, false papers, instructions on the target, and specifics of how to slip across the U.S. border.

They knew the stakes if they were caught. Aiding the enemy was punishable by death. But that didn’t matter. They were coming home, all of them. He was calling. It was time.

Chapter 2

A MAN SOME called Hayes put his spotting scope down on the passenger seat. The skin on his forearm was mostly healed from when he’d burned it in the brushfire.

Hayes had been waiting for the moment for a long time. They were on the kill list. He knew the routine all too well: find, fix, finish. They would be tracked down one by one. That’s why he had sent the messages, why he had gathered them together. He was already inside the United States. So was Green. The time for running was past. He had to make a stand, to take them down from the inside. And soon he would have the means.

But first, he had to see her, even though he knew it was a mistake. He crossed Orchard Road, then skirted the split-rail fence. Daytime, suburbs, male; he’d picked clothes to blend in. He wore Dickies and a short-sleeved button-down, just another contractor, pest control if stopped. The movements came automatically as he closed the distance: fast when the wind blew and the rustling leaves covered the noise of his steps, tall and relaxed through the dead space behind a knoll, slow when out of cover. He stayed downwind, moving closer and closer, everything he’d learned in the stalk, everything he’d taught to so many. He missed the weight of his rifle.

At the edge of the trees, he paused and looked over the house, a ranch on two acres. A basket of black-eyed Susan vines hung in the kitchen window. Lauren’s clothes swayed gently on the drying line in the back. It was as if nothing had changed. She had parked the F-150 so the two passenger-side wheels rested on the curb. He saw her walk away from it, balancing the oil pan with both hands. Her hair was up in a ponytail, and she was wearing one of his old flannel work shirts.

He saw movement fifty feet away; at the edge of the backyard, a two-year-old girl in a puffy vest climbed up a pile of mulch.

Hayes thrived on stress, enjoyed the stimulation. It’s why he was chosen, how he survived, through selection and a dozen deployments. He could regulate his breathing, lower his heartbeat, manage his cortisol levels. But suddenly he didn’t trust his body, doubted his control.

The girl jumped off the top, landed hard, fell, and came up with dirt all along her right side. She examined her arm for a moment, then looked his way and began walking straight toward him. He was a little disappointed that after everyone he had killed, unseen, with one shot from a cold barrel, he’d just been made by a toddler. It was impossible, unless he’d wanted to be seen.

Hayes felt his heart rate rise, easily past a hundred and ten now. This was a mistake. He was putting himself in danger, which didn’t matter, but he was putting them in danger too.

She moved closer, picked up a long stick, and dragged it behind her. She stood fifteen feet away. Hayes watched her. He didn’t move, couldn’t move. She had his mother’s eyes. He prayed for strength.

She turned her head to the side. “Who?” she said.

“Hey, kiddo.” He’d never seen her before and now she was in front of him, speaking. His pulse raced, past counting. He swallowed and it caught in his throat.

The girl looked back to her mother, then to Hayes.

“Mom!” she shouted. “Stranger!”

Good girl, Hayes thought. He watched her mother as she came around the corner of the house. Lauren looked older, with more gray in her hair than anyone deserved to have earned in two years, but still as beautiful, even more so.

How had she survived the shame he had brought her? He wanted to tell her how sorry he was, how the regret burned in him like a disease. He wanted more than anything to hold her, to feel their breath rise and fall together. But he had already gone too far. They didn’t deserve any more pain. And she was most likely armed and liable to call in the FBI.

No. He stepped back into the shadows. He couldn’t live like this, but the answer wasn’t here. He would use any means necessary to get back to them. He would do what he had been trained for, ingrained after so many years. Develop the situation. Increase the tempo. Audacity above all.

He slid through the woods, silent as sunlight, until he reached his box truck. He opened up the back door and pushed a camera with a telephoto lens to the side, then picked his radio up off a coil of detonation cord. Everything was ready. He’d be home soon, in this life or the next. The time had come to find out which.

Chapter 3

HELEN MCREARY WAS always the first to arrive at the Applications Personnel Support Office. The pain in her hands tended to wake her before dawn and by then her terrier was whining at the side of the bed. She looked forward to the quiet of the empty office, sitting at her desk with a travel mug of strong black coffee from home.

She opened the door, entered the bland front foyer, and brought her right eye a few inches from a plastic and steel box on the wall. The bolt retracted with a clunk. She stepped inside a short hallway and took a sip of coffee. As soon as the door behind her closed, the door ahead unlocked.

The gray slush outside had soaked her sneakers. She took them off, slid them under her desk, and pulled a pair of flats from her shoulder bag. She dialed the combination into her filing cabinet, opened the drawer, and flipped the sign stuck in the handle from the red side marked Closed to the green marked Open.

She took her hard drive from the drawer and inserted it into the dock on her computer. As it powered up, she put her smart card into the reader and logged in with her PIN. Once her terminal was ready, she checked her messages and navigated a secure database, noting on an index card the paper files she would need to pull that morning. She shut and locked the drawer, flipped the sign back, took her keys from her bag, picked up her mug, and crossed the office.

A fine metal mesh was embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling, and copper contacts were built into the doorjambs. These transformed the entire suite into a Faraday cage, from which no electronic or radio signals could emerge. The outlets were filtered for the same reason, and there were no connections to the public Internet.

At the far end of the room, she turned her key in a lock, opened a steel door, and entered a corridor. Along one side were vault doors. She walked to the fourth and dialed in the combination. Five revolutions right, four left, three right, two left, and then a final spin until it stopped, which meant the bolt had drawn. The door opened slowly due to its weight. She flicked on the fluorescent lights, consulted her card, searched out the appropriate file drawer, and pulled it open.

The coffee mug slipped from her hand as she let out an uncharacteristically foul obscenity. As she grabbed for the falling mug, a gush of hot liquid ran over her hand. She ignored the burn, picked the cup off the floor, and stared into the drawer.

The cabinet was three feet wide and one foot deep. The thousand folders that normally filled it had been filed left to right. Now it was empty. She tried the one above it: empty. The next one over: gone.

She went to the vault door. The lock was intact, perfect. There hadn’t been a single thing out of place. It was as if the documents had simply vanished.

She entered the corridor and opened the next vault. The racks were empty; they had taken the hard drives too. She needed to make the call. At her desk, she pulled a directory from her drawer and picked up the phone. She looked under Joint Special Operations and dialed the Special Security office.

“I need rapid response at APSO. The records are gone.”

“Which records?”

“All of them.”

“I don’t understand. Is this urgent?”

McReary dropped the index card into the burn bag. “This is your career on the line. Put me through now.”

The command in her voice was unmistakable.

“Hold, please.”

She waited a moment as she was transferred and then explained what had happened.

“So this was a break-in?”

“There must have been a breach, but I don’t understand,” she said as she scanned the room. “There’s no trace. The biometrics are fine, the locks, the vault doors too. It’s like it all just disappeared.”

  

Six hours later, Cox knelt at the vault and examined the dial of the Sargent and Greenleaf combination lock. It was perfect, with no sign of any manipulation or forced entry, none of the marrings characteristic of a robot dialer. Cox’s formal title was special assistant to the secretary of defense. His job was to make problems go away. He was a brigadier general but traveled in civilian clothes.

The officer with direct oversight of APSO, Lieutenant Colonel Barnard, had come from Bragg and stood over him, arms held loosely behind his back. Cox had flown from DC on a C-20, the navy’s version of a Gulfstream jet, normally used only by general officers. That set Barnard on edge. Cox made no mention of his own rank. He found it easier to read people when they weren’t kissing his ass.

“If there’s no damage, we must have an inside job,” Barnard said. He put his hands on his hips, a tic to project authority. “Do we have the audit logs? We’ll simply find who entered and then case closed.”

Cox removed the last screw and pulled the back off the safe lock. “We already did.” Without standing up, Cox held a printout over his shoulder.

Barnard took it, scanned the entries for the previous night, and saw only his own name. “Me?” He made a noise that was a cross between laughing and clearing his throat. “I wasn’t here. This is impossible.”

“Not quite impossible. A high-res shot of your iris, superimposed over a live pupil; either a contact lens or a good printout could do it.” He unscrewed the wheel pack from the threaded rod. “What worries me is the Abloy Protec up front and the Sargent and Greenleaf here. There is no sign of picking or bypass.”

He held up a long threaded rod with the safe dial on the end, shone a light on it, and lifted his glasses to examine it up close. “I almost missed it. It’s too perfect. Zero wear. This is a new spindle and a new dial.”

“Well, let’s get the camera footage and see who it is.”

“That won’t help. I checked. They did the whole thing in the dark.”

“You’re telling me that anyone can just waltz in here and defeat four layers of the hardest security the U.S. government and Joint Special Operations Command can manage?”

“Not anyone. No.” Cox stood and wiped off his hands. “Only one of our guys could do it. The night-vision, the Abloy decoder, the tools for the safe bypass; we have them. No locksmiths. Only USG, a few teams at JSOC, the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI.”

This office had two names, one official and one known only to a few. That is why a C-20 had been sent to the front of the line on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews with Cox on board. Applications Personnel Support Office was a cover, something for the org charts and paychecks. It was a name that could be handed out when an employee needed to list a reference for a bank or a landlord.

In reality, this office housed the security roster of the Defense Cover Program, which provided false identities to members of classified units within the Joint Special Operations Command. Their records were pulled from the normal military personnel system and stored here under lock and key with any connection between present and past erased. The members of these special mission units lived as civilians, under cover. That allowed the president to disavow any tier-one assets who were caught working behind enemy lines. It also firewalled the day-to-day identities of the soldiers in order to protect them and their families from enemy reprisals during and after their service.

“Good, then,” Barnard said. “That gives us a short list to work from. We’ll just narrow it down.”

“They stole everything we’d need to make that list. That’s probably the point.”

“You know we have assets unaccounted for. We lost track of Hayes and his team after the air strikes,” Barnard said. “But that would be insane, to enter the lion’s den.”

“If it is them, it’s brilliant.”

“We need to find these people.”

“Every cover identity available to them, every passport, every safe house, every cache of arms and currency is now lost to us. We barely know their real names.”

“But this entire program is designed for deniability, to protect us against them.”

“Now it’s working the other way. And the measures to guard their families against the bad guys are going to hide them from us. They stole the records of everything we’d use to find them in the United States: next of kin, associates, means of support.”

“For Christ’s sake. Someone has to know who these people are,” Barnard said. “We have the material from the investigations.”

“The annexes were kept here.” It had been Barnard’s order, a way to control the political damage to JSOC by limiting access to the details of Hayes’s crimes.

“You’re telling me that we have war criminals loose in the United States and they are goddamn ghosts! You know what these men are capable of.”

“I do,” Cox said. This was what these soldiers had been trained to do: assume a name, a face, a life. Hide out for years if necessary. “We can work backward. Everyone leaves a trace, even if the paper’s gone. We know he came from Marine Special Operations. We can go back to his old unit. He stole his personal file, but we can pull the unit rosters by hand, talk to those who served alongside him, commanded him, reconstruct what we can about where he is likely to go and who is likely to help him stateside. He’ll need support.

“Some of it may be on magnetic tape in a bunker, though that’ll take weeks to drag up. It’s going to be a lot of legwork.”

“Well, we should get started.”

Cox already had. “I will.”

“Jesus,” Barnard said, surveying the empty file drawers. “They took the files for every cover identity in the field. They could sell those to our enemies. It would be a slaughter. Worse than Hanssen, worse than Ames.”

“There’s that,” Cox said.

“You don’t think that’s his game?”

“If he hadn’t taken all of them, we would know where to start. He had no choice.”

“So he’s covering his tracks. He’s on the run. This could be his last step, a disappearing act.”

Cox shook his head. “No. He can disappear anywhere. This is overkill. He’d take a risk this great only to avoid a greater one later.”

“Say what you mean.”

“He’s back in the U.S. It’s suicidal, but that’s his psychology, why we selected him: he’ll always choose duty over self-preservation. He’s coming for us. He’s going to finish this. And now”—he waved his hand at the empty racks—“we won’t be able to see him coming.”

“You’re on top of this?”

“Yes. And it would be wise to let Colonel Riggs know, so he can take precautions.”

“I’d like to keep this close to the vest,” Barnard said. Behind his back, he held the printout with the record of his biometric entry into the office.

“Hayes nearly killed Riggs. He is likely to finish the job.”

Barnard nodded. “You’re right. You find them, under whatever names, whatever lies they are living, and then we go after them with everything we have.”

“I will,” Cox said, and he was already in motion, striding away with the safe dial in one hand and his phone in the other.

As soon as his cell got a signal, he punched in a number, put the phone to his ear, and said, “Give me MARSOC.”

Chapter 4

IN THE BACK of a box truck, Hayes laid two packets down on a steel shelf. The magnets inside clunked onto the metal. He picked up a simple Nokia cell phone, dialed a number, and placed it beside the devices.

Each packet was about the size of a hardcover book and had a Nokia bound to the top with electrical tape. The phones’ plastic cases had been pried open, and a small piece of breadboard circuitry covered each keypad. As both phones rang, Hayes held the probes of a multimeter across the open wires and checked the current. It was plenty. He reattached the wires to the detonators and went through the continuity on the circuits one last time. Then he handed the packets back to Speed.

“Strong work,” he said.

Speed gave them a last once-over, kept one for himself, and handed the second to Moret. They stowed their packages in messenger bags and hopped out of the back of the truck. Two motorcycles were parked beside it. They climbed on. Green waited behind the wheel of a Nissan pickup, and Foley drove the Ford Taurus.

The bikes pulled out, nearly silent. The two other vehicles followed behind as they left through the gated entrance to the lot. The convoy disappeared around the corner, past a truck-repair depot that was closed for the night.

The box truck would stay behind for a few minutes. Cook stood guard outside. Ward was in the cargo area, leaning over a laptop on top of the communications rack. She handled comms and the tracking of the GPS in the packets. Hayes crouched beside her. He ran his finger over the gold cross embossed in leather on the cover of his Bible, then opened it and laid it on his knees.

His headlamp glowed red on the book of Matthew, the betrayal of Jesus. He read the passage where a disciple cuts off the ear of a servant of the high priest: Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.

Hayes turned to the Gospel according to Mark, then Luke, then John. Only Matthew mentioned that line.

He thumbed back to the Last Supper and Jesus’s instructions: And he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

The last verse he found with no trouble. The spine was creased and the pages seemed to open to it on their own. It was from Matthew: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Hayes ran the back of his hand along his chin and read it again.

“More codes?” Ward asked.

He watched her for a moment before he spoke. “In a way. Reading, mainly.”

“Don’t spoil the ending for me. We found the target. They’re at the airport.”

“On the move?”

“Yeah.”

Hayes closed the book. He had waited years for this. It was vulnerable in transit. He had one chance.

“Execute.”

  

The armored truck rumbled along Sepulveda Boulevard, approaching the tunnel where the road passed under the runways of Los Angeles International Airport. The man at the passenger window reached his hand into the bag from In-N-Out Burger. He shoved three fries in his mouth as he gazed at the multicolored towers rising one hundred feet into the night sky around LAX.

“The loose ones are the best, man,” he said as they inched through traffic into the tunnel. He was the messenger. In a normal armored truck, he would make the pickups. The man in the middle was the guard; he would stand outside the truck with his gun drawn and provide cover. The driver would stay with the truck, the most lethal weapon any of them had. This, however, wasn’t a normal truck. The selectors on their firearms went from single-shot to full auto. Only a handful of security companies in the United States were authorized to use those guns. Most of the ones who did dealt with nuclear facilities.

“Whoa,” said the driver as he stood on the brake. “Look lively.”

Horns blared. Brake lights lit the tunnel red. The Nissan truck in front of them slammed to a stop. It had brushed fenders with a Ford Taurus that was trying to change lanes. The drivers argued through their open windows, blocking the path ah. . .