Cold Barrel Zero Read Free Page A

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