Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

As they drove, Det. Hall conferred on the police band with his captain. HQ would take care of the media, even now arriving with a barrage of questions to which no one yet had the answers. HQ would also take care of the miserable business of informing the late senator’s wife before she learned it on the radio.

He was told a second, more basic ambulance, the body wagon, was on its way to bring the two cadavers to the hospital morgue, where the medical examiner was preparing himself.

“Priority to the killer please, Captain,” said Hall into the mic. “That outfit he was wearing looks like the dress of a Muslim fundamentalist. He acted alone, but there may be more in the background. We need to know who he was — a loner or one of a group.”

While he was out at the general’s home, he wanted the killer’s prints taken and checked against AFIS — the automated fingerprint identification system — and the motor scooter checked with the Virginia state vehicle-licensing bureau. Yes, it was a weekend; people would have to be roused and brought in. He disconnected.

At the gated compound designated by the golf club records, it was clear no one had yet heard of the events on a fairway called Bald Cypress, alias the fourth hole. There were some forty retirement bungalows set among lawns and trees with a small central lake, and the community manager’s house.

The manager had finished a late breakfast and was about to mow his lawn. He went white as a sheet, sat down heavily on a garden chair and muttered, “Oh, my God,” half a dozen times. Eventually, taking a key from a board in his own hallway, he led Det. Hall to the general’s bungalow.

It stood trim and neat amid a quarter acre of mowed lawn, with some flowering shrubs in earthen jars; tasteful without being too labor-intensive. Inside, it was tidy, shipshape, like the abode of a man accustomed to good order and discipline. Hall began the distasteful business of rifling through another person’s private affairs. The manager was as helpful as he could be.

The Marine general had come to live at the community some five years earlier, just after losing his wife to cancer. Family? asked Hall. He was going through the desk, looking for letters, insurance policies, some evidence of next of kin. The general seemed to be a man who kept his most private documents with his lawyer or bank. The manager called up the wounded general’s closest friend among the neighbors — a retired architect who lived there with his wife and often had the general over for a real home-cooked meal.

He took the call and listened with shocked horror. He wanted to drive straight to Virginia Beach General, but Det. Hall persuaded him there was no chance of visiting. Next of kin? he asked. There is a son, said the architect, a serving Marine officer, a lieutenant colonel, but as to where, he had no idea.

Back at HQ, Hall was reunited with Lindy Mills and his own unmarked car. And there was news. The scooter had been traced. It belonged to a twenty-two-year-old student with a name that was clearly Arabic or a variant of it. He was an American citizen hailing from Dearborn, Michigan, but presently an engineering student at a high-tech college fifteen miles south of Norfolk. The vehicle bureau had sent through a picture.

It had no bushy black beard and the face was intact; not quite what Ray Hall had seen on the grass of the fairway. That face belonged to a head with no back and distorted by the blast pressure of the exploding shell. But close enough.

He put through a call to the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters, next to Arlington Cemetery, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. He insisted on holding the line until he was speaking with a major from Public Affairs. He explained who he was, speaking from where, and briefly what had happened five hours ago on the Princess Anne golf course.

“No,” he said, “I will not wait until after the weekend. I don’t care where he is. I need to speak with him now, Major, now. If his father sees the sun rise tomorrow, it will be a miracle.”

There was a long pause. Finally, the voice said simply: “Stay by that phone, Detective. I or someone else will be back to you in short order.”

It took only five minutes. The voice was different. Another major, this time from Personnel Records. The officer you wish to speak to cannot be reached, he said.

Hall was getting angry. Unless he is in space or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he can be reached. We both know that. You have my personal cell number. Please give it to him and tell him to call me, and fast. With that, he put the phone down. Now it was up to the Corps.

Taking Lindy with him, he left HQ for the hospital, grabbing an energy bar and a fizzy soda for lunch. So much for healthy eating. At First Colonial, he pulled down the side road, the oddly named Will O Wisp Drive, and around the back to the ambulance entrance. His first stop was the morgue, where the ME was finishing up.

There were two bodies on steel trays, covered by sheets. An assistant was about to consign them to the cooler. The ME stopped him and pulled back one sheet. Det. Hall stared down at the face. It was now scarred and distorted but still the young man in the photo from the vehicle bureau. The bushy black beard jutted upward, the eyes closed.

“Do you know who he is yet?” asked the ME.

“Yep.”

“Well, you know more than me. But maybe I can still surprise you.”

The ME pulled the sheet down to the ankles.

“Notice anything?”

Ray Hall looked long and hard.

“He has no body hair. Except the beard.”

The ME replaced the sheet and nodded to the assistant to remove the steel tray and its cargo to the cooler.

“I’ve never seen it in person, but I’ve seen it on camera. Two years ago at a seminar on Islamic fundamentalism. A sign of ritual purification, a preparation for passage into Allah’s paradise.”

“A suicide bomber?”

“A suicide killer,” said the ME. “Destroy an important national of the Great Satan and the gates of immortal bliss open for the servant passing through them as shahid , a martyr. We don’t see much of it in the States, but it is very common in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was a lecture on it at the seminar.”

“But he was born and raised here,” said Det. Hall.

“Well, someone sure converted him,” said the ME. “By the by, your crime lab people have already taken the fingerprints away. Other than that, he had nothing on him at all. Except the gun, and I believe that is already with Ballistics.”

Detective Hall’s next stop was upstairs. He found Dr. Alex McCrae in his office, lunching off a very late tuna melt from the cafeteria.

“What do you want to know, Detective?”

“Everything,” said Hall. So the surgeon told him.

When the badly injured general was brought into the emergency room, Dr. McCrae ordered an immediate IVI — an intravenous infusion. Then he checked the vital signs: oxygen saturation, pulse and blood pressure.

His anesthesiologist searched for and found good venous access through the jugular vein, into which he inserted a large-bore cannula and immediately started a saline drip followed by two units of type O rhesus-negative blood as a holding operation. Finally, he sent a sample of the patient’s blood for cross-matching in the laboratory.

Dr. McCrae’s immediate concern, with his patient stabilized for the moment, was to find out what was going on inside his chest. Clearly there was a bullet lodged there because the entry hole was in view, but there was no exit wound.

He debated whether to use an X-ray or a CT scan, but chose not to move the patient from the gurney but to settle for an X-ray by sliding the plate beneath the unconscious body and taking the X-ray from above.