Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

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.