The Kill Room lr-10 Read online

Rhyme saw a brief smile on Sachs’s face. Fred Dellray was one of the bureau’s best agents, a renowned runner of confidential informants and a family man and father…and amateur philosopher. But his years as an undercover agent on the street had given him a unique speaking style, as bizarre as his fashion choices.

  “The perp’s your boss, the federal government.”

  A pause. “Hm.”

  Sachs glanced at Laurel, who debated a moment and then took over, reiterating the facts they knew so far about the Moreno killing.

  Fred Dellray’s waiting state was calm and confident but Rhyme detected unusual concern now. “NIOS? They’re not really us us. They’re in their own dimension. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way.”

  He didn’t elaborate, though Rhyme wasn’t sure he needed to.

  “I’ll check out a few things now. Hold on.” The sound of typing flew from the speaker like nutshells on a tabletop.

  “Agent Dellray,” Laurel began.

  “Call me Fred. An’ don’tcha fret. I’m as encrypted as can be.”

  A blink. “Thank you.”

  “Okay, just looking at our files here, our files…” A lengthy pause. “Robert Moreno, aka Roberto. Sure, here’s some notes on APDR, American Petroleum Drilling and Refining…Looks like our Miami office was scrambled on a potential terrorist incident but it turned out to be a big false a-larm. You want what I got here on Moreno?”

  “Please, Fred. Go ahead.” Sachs sat at a computer and started a file.

  “Hokay, our boy left the country over twenty years ago and only comes back once a year or so. Well, came back. Let’s see…Watchlisted but never in any active-risk books. He was mostly all talk — so we didn’t pri-oritize him. Hobnobbed with al-Qaeda some and Shining Path, folk like that, but never actually shouted out for an attack.” The agent was whispering to himself. Then he said, “Note here says that the official word is some cartels might’ve been behind the shooting. But that couldn’t be verified…Ah, here’s this.”

  A pause.

  “Fred, you there?” Rhyme asked impatiently.

  “Hm.”

  Rhyme sighed.

  Then Dellray said, “This could be helpful. Report from State. Moreno was here. New Yawk City. Arrived April thirty, late. Then left May second.”

  Lon Sellitto asked, “Anything specific about what he did here, where he went?”

  “Nup. That’s gotta be your job, friends. Now, I’ll keep on it from my end. Make some calls down to my folks in the Caribbean and South America. Oh, I got a picture. Want it?”

  “No,” Laurel said abruptly. “We need to minimize any communication from your office. I’d prefer phone calls to me or Detectives Sellitto and Sachs or Lincoln Rhyme. Discretion is—”

  “The better part of valor,” Dellray intoned cryptically. “Not a single problem in the world on that. But broachin’ that subject: You sure our friends don’t know anything yet? At NIOS?”

  “No,” the ADA said.

  “Uh-hum.”

  Rhyme said, “You don’t sound convinced.”

  He chuckled. “Good luck, one and all.”

  Sachs clicked the phone off.

  “Now, where can I work?” Laurel asked.

  “How’s that?” Sachs wondered aloud.

  The ADA was looking around. “I need a desk. Or table. It doesn’t need to be a desk. Just something big.”

  “Why do you need to be here?”

  “I can’t work out of my office. How can I?” As if it were obvious. “Leaks. NIOS’ll eventually find out we’re running the investigation but I need to delay that for as long as possible. Now, that looks good. Over there. Is that all right?”

  Laurel pointed to a worktable in the corner.

  Rhyme called Thom in and had the aide clear the surface of books and some boxes of old forensics gear.

  “I have computers but I’ll need my own line and Wi-Fi router too. I’ll have to set up a private account on it, encrypted. And I’d prefer not to share the network.” A glance toward Rhyme. “If that can be arranged.”

  Sachs clearly didn’t like the idea of this new member of the team. Lincoln Rhyme was by nature a solitary person but at least when a case was ongoing he’d come to tolerate, though hardly relish, the presence of others. He had no particular objection.

  Nance Laurel hefted her briefcase and the heavy litigation bag onto the table and began unpacking files, organizing them into separate stacks. She looked as if she were a student moving into a dorm on the first day of freshman year, placing her few possessions on the desk and bedside table for most comfort.

  Then Laurel looked up to the others. “Oh, one thing: In working the case I need you to find everything you can to make him look like a saint.”

  “I’m sorry?” From Sachs.

  “Robert Moreno — a saint. He’s said a lot of inflammatory things. He’s been very critical of the country. So I need you to find what he’s done that’s good. His Local Empowerment Movement, for instance. Building schools, feeding third-world children, that sort of thing. Being a loving father and husband.”

  “You need us to do that?” Sachs questioned. The emphasis pointed the question in the direction of disbelief…and gave it a nice tidy edge, to boot.

  “Correct.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just better.” As if obvious.

  “Oh.” A pause. “That’s not really an answer,” Sachs said. She wasn’t looking at Rhyme and he didn’t want her to. The tension between her and the ADA was simmering just fine on its own.

  “The jury again.” With a glance toward Rhyme who’d apparently fueled her argument earlier. “I need to show he was upright and a good, ethical man. The defense is going to paint Moreno as a danger — like lawyers try to portray a rape victim as somebody who was dressing provocatively and flirting with her attacker.”

  Sachs said, “There’s a big difference between those scenarios.”

  “Really? I’m not so sure.”

  “Isn’t the point of an investigation to get to the truth?”

  A pause for digesting these words. “If you don’t win in court, then what good does having the truth do?”

  Then, for her, the subject was settled. Laurel said to everyone, “And we need to work fast. Very fast.”

  Sellitto said, “Right. NIOS could find out about the case at any time. Evidence could start disappearing.”

  Laurel said, “That’s obvious but it’s not what I’m talking about. Look at the board, the kill order.”

  Everyone did, Rhyme included. Yet he could draw no immediate conclusion. But he suddenly understood. “The queue.”

  “Exactly,” the prosecutor said.

  RET — TOP SECRET — TOP SECRET — TOP SE

  Special Task Orders

  Queue 8/27

  Task: Robert A. Moreno (NIOS ID: ram278e4w5)

  Born: 4/75, New Jersey

  Complete by: 5/8–5/9

  Approvals:

  Level Two: Yes

  Level One: Yes

  Supporting Documentation:

  See “A”

  Confirmation required: Yes

  PIN required: Yes

  CD: Approved, but minimize

  Details:

  Specialist assigned: Don Bruns, Kill Room, South Cove Inn, Bahamas, Suite 1200

  Status: Closed 9/27

  Task: Al-Barani Rashid (NIOS ID: abr942pd5t)

  Born: 2/73, Michigan

  Complete by: 5/19

  Approvals:

  Level Two: Yes

  Level One: Yes

  Supporting Documentation:

  N/R

  Confirmation required: No

  PIN required: Yes

  CD: Approved, but minimize

  Details: To come

  Status: Pending

  She continued, “Now, I can’t find out anything about this Rashid or where he is. Maybe his kill room’s a hut in Yemen, where he’s selling nuclear bomb parts. Or given Metzger’s zeal, maybe
it’s a family room in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where Rashid is blogging against Guantánamo and insulting the president. But we do know that NIOS’s going to kill him before Friday. And who’ll be the collateral damage then? His wife and children? Some passerby? I want Metzger in custody before that.”

  Rhyme said, “That won’t necessarily stop the assassination.”

  “No, but it’ll send a message to NIOS and Washington that somebody’s looking very carefully at what they’re up to. They might delay the attack and have somebody independent review the STO and see if it’s legitimate or not. That’s not going to happen with Metzger in power.”

  Like counsel in a closing argument Laurel then strode forward and dramatically tapped the kill order. “Oh, and these numbers at the top? Eight/twenty-seven, nine/twenty-seven? They’re not dates. They’re tasks in the queue. That is, victims. Moreno was the eighth person NIOS killed. Rashid’ll be the ninth.”

  “Twenty-seven total,” Sellitto said.

  “As of a week ago,” Laurel said briskly. “Who knows how many it is today?”

  CHAPTER 11

  A human form, like an unflappable, patient ghost, appeared in Shreve Metzger’s doorway.

  “Spencer.”

  His administrations director — his right-hand man around headquarters — had been enjoying the cool blue skies and quiet lake shore line in Maine when an encrypted text from Metzger had summoned him. Boston had immediately cut short his vacation. If he’d been pissed off, and he probably had been, he’d given no indication of it.

  That would be improper.

  That would be unseemly.

  Spencer Boston’s was a faded elegance, a prior generation’s. He had a grandfatherly face, creases bracketing his taut lips, and thick, wavy white hair — he was ten years older than Metzger. He radiated an utterly calm and reasonable demeanor. Like the Wizard, Boston wasn’t troubled by the Smoke. He now stepped into the office, shut the door instinctively against prying ears and sat opposite his boss. He said nothing but his eyes dipped to the mobile in his boss’s hand. Rarely used, never to leave the building, the device happened to be dark red in color, though that had nothing to do with its top-secret nature. That was the shade that the company had had available for immediate delivery. Metzger thought of it as his “magic phone.”

  The NIOS director realized his muscles were cramping from the pressure on the unit.

  Metzger put the phone away and gave a faint nod to the man he’d worked with for several years, ever since Metzger had replaced the prior head of NIOS, who’d disappeared into the vortex of politics. An unsuccessful vanishing.

  “Thanks for coming in,” the director said quickly and stiffly, as if he felt he should make some reference to the ruined vacation. The Smoke affected him in many different ways. One of which was to muddle his mind so that, even when he wasn’t angry, he’d forget how to behave like a normal person. When an affliction rules your life, you’re always on guard.

  Daddy, are you…are you okay?

  I’m smiling, aren’t I?

  I guess. It just looks, you know, funny.

  The admin director shifted. The chair creaked. Spencer Boston was not a small man. He sipped iced tea from a tall plastic cup, lifted his bushy brows.

  Metzger said, “We’ve got a whistleblower.”

  “What? Impossible.”

  “Confirmed.” Metzger explained what had happened.

  “No,” the older man whispered. “What are you doing about it?”

  He deflected that incendiary question and added, “I need you to find him. I don’t care what you have to do.”

  Careful, he reminded himself. That’s the Smoke talking.

  “Who knows?” Boston asked.

  “Well, he does.” A reverent glance at the magic phone.

  No need to be more specific than that.

  The Wizard.

  Boston grimaced, troubled too. Formerly with another government intelligence agency, he’d been a very successful runner of assets throughout Central America — his region of choice — in such fulcrum countries as Panama. And his specialty? The fine art of regime change. That was Boston’s milieu, not politics, but he knew that without support from Washington, you and your assets could be hung out to dry at the worst possible moment. Several times he’d been held captive by revolutionaries or insurgents or cartel bosses, he’d been interrogated, he’d probably been tortured, though he never talked about that.

  And he’d survived. Different threats in DC; same skills at self-preservation.

  Boston’s hand brushed his enviable hair, gray though it was, and waited.

  Metzger said, “He—” Wizard emphasis again. “—knows about the investigation but he didn’t say a word about any leaks. I don’t think he knows. We have to find the traitor before word trickles down to the Beltway.”

  Sipping the pale tea, Boston squinted more furrows into his face. Damn, the man could give Donald Sutherland a run for his money in the distinguished older power-broker role. Metzger, though considerably younger, had a much more sparse scalp than Boston and was bony and gaunt. He felt he looked weaselly.

  “What do you think, Spencer? How could an STO have gotten leaked?”

  A look out the window. Boston had no view of the Hudson from his chair, just more late-morning reflected light. “My gut is it was somebody in Florida. The next choice would be Washington.”

  “Texas and California?”

  Boston said, “I doubt it. They get copies of the STO but unless one of their specialists is activated, they don’t even open them…And, as much as I hate to say it, we can’t dismiss the office here completely.” The twist of his impressive head indicated NIOS headquarters.

  Granted. A co-worker in this office might have sold them out, as painful as it was to think about.

  Boston continued, “I’ll check with IT security about the servers, copiers and scanners. Polygraph the senior people with download permissions. I’d do a major Facebook autobot search. Well, not just Facebook but blogs and as many other social media sites as I can think of. See if anybody with access to the STO’s been posting anything critical of the government and our mission here.”

  Mission. Killing bad guys.

  This made sense. Metzger was impressed. “Good. A lot of work.” His eyes strayed to the vista. He saw a window washer on a scaffolding three or four hundred feet up. He thought, as he often did, of the jumpers on 9/11.

  The Smoke expanded in his lungs.

  Breathe…

  Send the Smoke away. But he couldn’t. Because they, the jumpers on that terrible day, hadn’t been able to breathe. Their lungs had been filled with oily smoke rising from the crest of the flames that were going to consume them in seconds, flames roiling into their twelve-by-twelve-foot offices, leaving only one place to go, through windows to the eternal concrete.

  His hands began to shake again.

  Metzger noted that Boston was regarding him with a close gaze. The NIOS head casually adjusted the photograph of him, Seth and Katie and a snorting horse, taken through a fine set of optics that happened, in that instance, to record a dear memory, but wasn’t dissimilar to a scope that could very efficiently direct a bullet through a man’s heart.

  “They have proof of completion, the police?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Status is closed, that’s all.”

  Kill orders were just that — instructions to eliminate a task. There was never any documentation that an assassination was actually completed. The standard procedure when asked was to deny, deny, deny.

  Boston began to ask, “Are we doing anything…?”

  “I’ve made calls. Don Bruns knows about the case, of course. A few others. We’re…handling things.”

  An ambiguous verb and object. Worthy of the Wizard.

  Handling things…

  Spencer Boston, of the impressive white mane and more impressive track record as a spy, sipped more tea. The straw eased farther through the plastic lid and gave a faint vibra
tion like a bow on a viola string. “Don’t worry, Shreve. I’ll find him. Or her.”

  “Thanks, Spencer. Anytime. Day or night. Call me, what you find out.”

  The man rose, buttoned his ill-tailored suit.

  When he was gone Metzger heard his magic red phone trill with a text from his surveillance and datamining crowd in the basement.

  Identified Nance Laurel as lead prosecutor. IDs of the NYPD investigators to follow soon.

  The Smoke diminished considerably at reading this.

  At last. A place to start.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jacob Swann approached his car in the lot of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia airport.

  He set his suitcase into the trunk of his Nissan sedan carefully — his knives were inside. No carry-on with them, of course. He dropped heavily into the front seat and stretched, breathing deeply.

  Swann was tired. He had left his Brooklyn apartment for the Bahamas nearly twenty-four hours ago and had had only three or so hours’ sleep in that time — most while in transit.

  His session with Annette had gone more quickly than he’d expected. But, after he’d disposed of the body, finding an abandoned trash fire to burn the evidence of his visit last week had taken some time. Then he’d had to take care of some other housekeeping, including a visit to Annette’s apartment and a risky but ultimately successful trip back to the site of Moreno’s shooting itself: the South Cove Inn.

  He’d then had to get off the island the same way he had last week: from a dock near Millars Sound, where he knew some of the men who clustered daily to work the ships or smoke Camels or ganja and drink Sands, Kalik or, more likely, Triple B malt. They would also handle various odd jobs. Efficiently and discreetly. They’d hurried him via small boat to one of the innumerable islands near Freeport, then there’d been the helicopter ride to a field south of Miami.

  That was the thing about the Caribbean. There was Customs and there was custom. And the lower-case version allowed for people like Jacob Swann, with a bankroll of money — his employer had plenty, of course — to get where he needed to be, unnoticed.

  After the scoring with the blade, after the blood, he was convinced that Annette had not told anyone about him, about the questions he’d casually asked her a week ago regarding the South Cove Inn, suite 1200, Moreno’s bodyguard and Moreno himself. All those facts could be bundled together, resulting in some very compromising conclusions.