Zero Day

The cloud of coal dust driven deeply into his lungs nearly caused Howard Reed to pull his mail truck off the road and throw up onto the stunted, burnt grass. But he coughed and spat and tightened his gut. Reed worked the accelerator and raced past the haul roads where dump trucks lumbered across, spewing black grit into the air like burning confetti. That same air was filled with sulfur dioxide because a coal waste pile had caught on fire, as they often did. These elements would drift up into the sky, react with oxygen to form sulfur trioxide, and then clamp onto water molecules to create a potent compound that would later fall back to earth as toxic acid rain. None of it was a trusty recipe for environmental harmony.

Reed kept his hand tightly on the special mechanism, and his  eighteen-year-old
Ford Explorer with the rattling tailpipe and shuddering transmission stayed on the cracked asphalt. His mail truck was his personal vehicle and had been modified to allow him to sit in the passenger seat and pull up flush to the mailboxes on his route. This was accomplished in part by an apparatus that looked like the fan belt in a car. It allowed him to steer, brake, and accelerate from the right side of the car.

After becoming a rural mailman and learning to drive from the “wrong” side of the vehicle, Reed had wanted to travel to England and try his newfound skill on the roads there, where every motorist drove on the left. He had learned that this dated back to the days of the jousters. Most folks were right-handed, and back then a man wanted to keep his sword or jousting pole closest to his enemy. His wife told him he was an idiot and would most likely end up dead in a foreign land.

He moved past the mountain, or where the mountain had once been before the Trent Mining and Exploration Company had blown it up in order to get to the buried rich coal seams. Large tracts of the area looked like the surface of the moon now, cratered and denuded. It was a process called surface mining. To Reed a better term was surface annihilation.

But this was West Virginia, and coal provided the bulk of the good-paying jobs. So Reed didn’t make a fuss about his home being flooded by a fly ash sludge storage pond giving way. Or about well water that turned black and smelled like rotten eggs. Or about air that was routinely full of things that did not mix well with human beings. He didn’t complain about his remaining kidney or his damaged liver and lungs from living around such toxic elements. He would be viewed as anti-coal and thus anti-jobs. Reed just didn’t need the added grief.

This is an excerpt from ZERO DAY by David Baldacci. Copyright © 2011 by Columbus Rose, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

HELLS CORNER

Oliver Stone was counting seconds , an exercise that had
always calmed him. And he needed to be calm. He was meeting
with someone tonight. Someone very important. And Stone didn’t quite know how it was going to go. He did know one thing for certain. He was not going to run. He was through running.

Stone had just returned from Divine, Virginia, where Abby
Riker, a woman he’d met, lived. Abby had been the first woman
Stone had feelings for since he’d lost his wife three decades prior. Despite their obvious fondness for one another, Abby would not leave Divine, and Stone could not live there. For better or worse, much of him belonged to this town, even with all the pain it had caused.

That pain might become even more intense. The communication
he’d received an hour after returning home had been explicit. They would come for him at midnight. No debate was allowed, no negotiation suffered through, no chance of any compromise. The party on the other end of the equation always dictated the terms.

A few moments later he stopped counting. Car tires had bitten
into the gravel that lined the entrance to Mt. Zion Cemetery. It was a historical if humble burial site for African Americans who’d gained prominence by fighting for things their white counterparts had always taken for granted, like where to eat, sleep, ride in a bus or use the bathroom. The irony had never been lost on Stone that Mt. Zion rested high above fancy Georgetown. It was not all that long ago that the wealthy folks here only tolerated their darker brethren if they wore a maid’s starched uniform or else were handing
out drinks and finger foods and keeping their obedient gaze on the polished floors.

Car doors opened and car doors closed. Stone counted three
clunks of metal against metal. So a trio. Of men. They wouldn’t send a woman for this, he didn’t think, though that might simply have been the prejudice of his generation.

Glocks or Sigs or perhaps customized models, depending on
whom they’d sent to do the deed. Regardless, the weapons would be chambering efficiently lethal ordnance. The guns would be holstered under nice suit jackets. No black- clad storm troopers rappelling from the skids of go- fast choppers in quaint, well- connected Georgetown. The extraction would be quiet, no important person’s sleep interrupted.

They knocked.

Polite.

He answered.

To show respect.

These people had no personal grudge against him. They might
not even know who he was. It was a job. He’d done it, though he’d never knocked beforehand. Surprise and then the millisecond- long pull of a trigger had been his MO.

A job.

At least I thought that, because I didn’t have the courage to face the truth.

As a soldier, Stone had never had any qualms about ending the
life of anyone who was trying to terminate his.

This is an excerpt from HELL’S CORNER by David Baldacci. Copyright © 2010 by Columbus Rose, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.