Free Cold Barrel Zero by Matthew Quirk Page A

Hall asked.
    I looked again. “Nothing.” I followed them inside.
    “You want water or coffee or anything?” Hall asked.
    “Coffee.” It would cover up my hunger for a while.
    The interior looked like an officers’ club from the early twentieth century: wood paneling, a model ship on the mantel. Most of the furniture was covered in drop cloths. The three of us walked past an open window toward a dining room. The drawn blinds moved in the breeze.
    “We have instant. Still getting settled.” Riggs stepped into the kitchen and leaned against a sideboard. “They have us going to the mattresses here. It seems like overkill, but I’ve underestimated the people who are after you before.”
    He pointed to his disabled hand. A scar that looked like the result of a gunshot wound covered the back of it. “This was their work.”
    Hall started a kettle and poured a foil packet of coffee crystals into a Fort Campbell mug.
    “Colonel,” I said. “I don’t have anything to do with any armored truck or any of these men you’re after. My bank accounts are frozen. I can’t fly. Could you tell me what’s going on?”
    “Standard procedure when we find someone with a nexus to terrorism.”
    Hall poured the water and set the mug on a wooden table beside me. “Sit down.”
    I took a chair. “Terrorism? Come on. This is obviously a mistake. If you keep coming after me with this stuff, you’re only going to hurt your own career—”
    “My career is already over, Dr. Byrne. So you can save the threats. They’re pretty weak anyway. I’m retired, though DOD calls me in to consult fairly often. Most of my time is spent on a project I have that provides employment opportunities to warriors after their service. I wish I were done with the Pentagon, but they can’t seem to let me go.”
    “I had nothing to do with this.”
    He lifted a stack of papers on the side table and let them fall. “You seem to check out.”
    “What is that?”
    “Your past.”
    “Good. I’m cleared. So I can go home.”
    “That’s out of my hands. And besides, these papers could be the dog that didn’t bark.”
    “Whose hands is it in? Because I’d like to talk to them instead of wasting my time here.”
    Riggs stepped next to me, put his face close to mine. “No more bullshit. Did you help him attack that truck?”
    “I told you, no. I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”
    “Come off it. You know who he is. You’re helping him. You’re in over your head. Come clean now and save yourself the pain.”
    I took a deep breath. “Baiting me isn’t going to work. I don’t know anything.”
    He let the aggression drop, deflated slightly. I gathered it had been his last stab at me, and he seemed to accept the truth of what I was saying. “So you really were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You poor bastard.” He shook his head. “Well, whether you make it home depends entirely on the soldiers hunting you.”
    “Who are they?”
    “You saw one today, tailing you at the hotel. Their leader sometimes goes by the name John Hayes.”
    I looked down and put my hand to my forehead, trying to make sense of it. I hadn’t heard that name in more than a decade. Hayes had been my sergeant when I was attached to a Marine squad. I could see Riggs trying to read something into my look of recognition.
    “I served under him when I was a corpsman. But I haven’t seen him or talked to him in years. Why would Hayes ambush a truck inside the U.S.?”
    “Revenge,” Riggs said. “That’s the least worrisome motive.” He pulled a chair out and sat next to me.
    “Let me tell you what we’re up against here. Captain Hayes was the leader of a task force under my command. We were deployed overseas; doesn’t matter where. He and his team came from Joint Special Operations Command’s special missions units. Those are all classified, black.
    “We train them to go behind enemy lines, to disappear, to survive indefinitely with no