Cold Barrel Zero by Matthew Quirk Page A

can show you where.”
    Caro looked to the two juniors, who avoided his gaze with shame.
    Kyenge had been dead for eight years. The man was lying.
    Caro stood close to him, nearly whispering in his ear. “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s over now.”
    “Please,” the man said. “Please—”
    “It’s okay,” Caro said. He took the man’s jaw firmly in his left hand, then reached his right into the man’s armpit and slid him up the table until his head just hung off the edge. He shoved the man’s face straight down toward the floor. The head fell back and dangled at a strange angle.
    The body shuddered and then relaxed completely, voiding on the table. The table’s edge had dislocated his cervical vertebrae and severed his spinal cord. The dead man’s member rose, taut, toward the ceiling; angel lust, a phenomenon that, even the hundredth time, never failed to unsettle Caro, though he gave no sign.
    He was grateful to the man for supplying the lesson so many of the younger fighters forgot. Terror wasn’t an end in itself, some pure expression of power or some innate evil, as the blacks and whites of the American outlook had it. It was a tactic, pure and simple. These boys had done too much killing and not enough reading—Qutb, Clausewitz, Robespierre. Terror was necessary, of course, but it had to be applied with care. Against a stronger man, it might have been appropriate, but this man was weak, and in the face of such pain, he crumbled. Fear was a means, a tool like any other. The ends were what mattered.
      
    Caro thought of that lesson again as he looked at his daughter’s school through the tinted windows of his Mercedes. Several buses rolled into the lot; today was a class trip. The children’s faces lined the windows.
    He watched them, their eyes wide open, inches from the glass.
    He turned away, paused, then looked back.
    The eyes. The glass.
    He would have to double-check the details of the operation. There would be a show first, a distraction before the main event, to draw them to the windows, and the charge would be much smaller, because terror was a tactic, and it’s far too easy to forget the dead. There are things worse than death. Knowing those things intimately was his specialty and his curse.
    One more day.
    “Sir, there is some traffic on the way to the airport.”
    Caro looked away from the school. He had been in Abu Dhabi, the closest thing he had to a home, only long enough to see his daughter, swap out his suitcase, and pick up a different passport. He didn’t like being home, with the strange smells and sounds of a hospital coming from the rear of the apartment.
    “Let’s go,” he said. He had to make his flight to Los Angeles. His associates now had the shipment inside the United States. He would have his hands on it soon, and in twenty-four hours he would pull the trigger.

Chapter 14
    THE BAG OVER my head hung close, damp with my own breath. I smelled fried food and chlorine. I had been stripped naked and searched. They took my clothes and my wallet and cut them apart stitch by stitch with a fixed-blade knife.
    My whole body was electric with fear, my skin goose-pimpled and my hair on end, but there was no panic. When things got bad, whether it was back in the navy or in surgery, it was always the same: I would slow down, grow quiet, focus.
    They pulled the hood off. I’d been wearing it for the last ten minutes. I sat naked on a wooden dining chair.
    My eyes focused on the stainless-steel shelves to my right and left. I was in a walk-in commercial freezer that wasn’t running. The space was warm, the air stale. Craning my head, I could see through the open door into the restaurant’s dining room. It looked long abandoned, and a sign that read Mariscos hung over some smiling Day of the Dead skulls.
    In the part of the kitchen I could see, all the windows were blacked out with plywood, and four rucksacks leaned against the wall. One man rested on the concrete