Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

Sent via anonymous email.

Traced through Taiwan to Romania to Sweden. Sent from New York area on public Wi-Fi, no government servers used.

Used an old computer, probably from ten years ago, iBook, either clamshell model, two tone with other bright colors (like green or tangerine). Or could be traditional model, graphite color, but much thicker than today’s laptops.

Individual in light-colored sedan following Det. A. Sachs.

Make and model not determined.

CHAPTER 25

SHREVE METZGER RETURNED TO the top floor of the NIOS building from the organization’s technical department—the snoops—in the basement.

As he strode through the halls, noting some employees avoid his eyes and make sudden turns into restrooms they undoubtedly didn’t need to use, he reflected on what he’d just learned about the investigation from his people, who’d been using some very sophisticated techniques for intelligence gathering—particularly impressive since they were, officially, nonexistent. (NIOS had no jurisdiction within the United States and couldn’t tap calls or prowl through email or hack computers. But Metzger had two words for that: back door.)

Observing employees dodge out of harm’s way, Metzger found his thoughts wandering. He was hearing voices in his head, no, not that kind of voices, more memories or fragments of them.

Come up with an image of your anger. A symbol. A metaphor.

Sure, Doctor. What do you recommend?

It’s not for me to say, Shreve. You pick. Some people pick animals, or bad guys from TV shows or hot coals.

Coals? he’d thought. That did it. He’d hit upon an image for the anger beast within him. He’d recalled an incident when he was an adolescent in upstate New York, before losing the weight. He was standing before an autumn bonfire at his middle school, shyly attentive to the girl beside him. Smoke wafted around them. A beautiful night. He’d moved closer to her on the pretense of avoiding the sting of the smoke. He’d smiled and said hello. She’d said don’t get close to the flames; you’re so fat you’d catch fire. And she walked away.

A story just made for a shrink. Dr. Fischer had loved it, much more than the tale about the anger going away when he ordered somebody’s death.

So “Smoke” it is, uppercase S…Good choice, Shreve.

As he approached his office he noticed Ruth inside, standing over his desk. Normally he would have been upset to see somebody in his private space without permission. But she was allowed here under most circumstances. He’d never had a single temper outburst against her, which wasn’t true of most other people he worked with at NIOS. He’d snapped or even screamed at them and thrown a report or address book occasionally, though most often not directly at the object of his fury. But never Ruth. Maybe that was because she worked closely with him. Then he decided that this theory didn’t work; Lucinda and Katie and Seth had been close yet he’d lost it with his wife and kids plenty of times and had the divorce decree and the memories of the scared eyes and tears to prove it.

Maybe the reason Ruth had escaped was simply that she had never done anything to make him angry.

But, no, that test didn’t work either. Metzger could grow infuriated at people simply by imagining they’d offended him, or anticipating that they might. Words still swirled through his mind—a speech he’d prepared if a cop had stopped him en route to the office after Katie’s soccer game on Sunday night.

You fucking blue-collar civil servant…Here’s my federal government ID. This is a national security matter you’re keeping me from. You’ve just lost your job, my friend…

Ruth nodded at a file, which apparently she’d just put down on his desk. “Some documents from Washington,” she reported. “Your eyes only.”

Questions about Moreno, of course, and how we fucked up. Goddamn, those pricks were fast, those fucking bureaucratic sharks. In Washington, how easy it was to sit in a cold dark office and speculate and pontificate.

The Wizard and his cronies had no clue what life was like on the front lines.

A breath.

The anger slowly, slowly went away.

“Thanks.” He took the documents, decorated with a stark red stripe. Much like the unaccompanied minor envelope containing the forms he’d had to prepare when he’d put Seth on a plane to go to camp in Massachusetts. “You won’t be homesick,” Metzger had reassured the ten-year-old, who was looking around with uneasy eyes. But then he noticed that, contrary to this worry, the boy seemed somber because he was still in his father’s presence. Once released into the company of the flight attendant the kid grew animated, happy.

Anything to be away from his time bomb of a parent.

Metzger ripped open the envelope, lifted his glasses from his breast pocket.

He laughed. He’d been wrong. The information was simply intelligence assessments for some potential STO tasks in the future. That’s another thing the Smoke did. You made assumptions.

He scanned the pages, pleased that the intelligence was about the al-Barani Rashid mission, next prioritized in the queue after Moreno.

God, he wanted Rashid. Wanted him so badly.

He set the reports down and glanced at Ruth. He asked, “You have the appointment this afternoon, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sure it’ll go fine.”

“I’m sure it will too.”

Ruth sat at her desk, which was decorated with pictures of her family—her two teen daughters and her second husband. Her first spouse died in the initial Gulf War. Her present one had been a soldier too, wounded and confined to a less-than-pleasant VA hospital for months.

The sacrifice people make for this country and how little they’re appreciated for it…

The Wizard should talk to her, learn what she’d given up for this country—the life of one husband, the health of another.

Metzger sat and read the assessment but found he wasn’t able to concentrate. The Moreno matter roiled.

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

The efforts were completely illegal, of course, but they were also proceeding well. The Smoke dissipated a bit more. He asked Ruth to summon Spencer Boston. He then read encrypted texts regarding the efforts to derail the investigation.

Boston arrived a few minutes later. He was wearing a suit and tie, as he always did. It was as if the old-school intelligence community had a dress code. The distinguished man instinctively swung the door shut. Metzger saw Ruth’s eyes gazing into the office for a moment before the heavy oak panel closed with a snap.

“What do you have?” Metzger asked.

Spencer Boston sat, removed a fleck of lint from his slacks that turned out to be a pill of cloth. He stopped pulling before a run appeared. Boston didn’t seem to have had much sleep, which, for someone in his sixties, made him seem haggard. And what the hell do I look like? Metzger wondered, brushing his chin to see if he’d remembered to shave. He had.

Despite Metzger’s reputation, Boston never hesitated to give him bad news. Running assets in Central America gives you a fortitude that won’t be scuffed by a younger bureaucrat, however ill-tempered. He said evenly, “Nothing, Shreve. Nothing. I’ve checked every log-in for the kill order files. And all the outgoing email and FTP and upload servers, had our IT security people see if they could find anything. And the security folks at Homestead. Nobody downloaded it except those on the list. That means somebody probably snagged it off a desk here, Washington or in Florida, smuggled it out and copied it or scanned it at home or a Kinko’s.”