Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

Let it go.

He began checking emails, extracted from the rabbit hole of encryption. One was troubling: Some disturbing news about the Moreno investigation, a setback. Curiously this just exhausted him, didn’t infuriate.

A knock on the jamb. Spencer Boston entered and sat.

“What’ve you got on our whistleblower?” Metzger asked without a greeting.

“Looks like the first round of polygraphs is negative. That was people actually signing off on or reviewing the STO. There are still hundreds who might’ve slipped into an office somewhere and gotten their hands on a copy.”

“So all the senior people in the command are clear?”

“Right. Here and at the centers.”

NIOS had three UAV command centers: Pendleton in California, Fort Hood in Texas and Homestead in Florida. They all would have received a copy of the Moreno STO, even though the UAV launched from Homestead.

“Oh,” Boston said. “I passed too, by the way.”

Metzger gave a smile. “Didn’t occur to me.” It truthfully hadn’t.

“What’s good for the asset is good for the agent.”

Metzger asked, “And Washington?”

At least a dozen people down in the nation’s capital knew about the STO. Including, of course, key members of the White House staff.

“That’s harder. They’re resisting.” Boston asked, “Where are they now in the investigation, the cops?”

Metzger felt the Smoke arising. “Apparently that Rhyme managed to get down to the Bahamas after all.” He nodded at his phone where certain emails used to reside. “The fucking sand didn’t deter him as much as we’d hoped.”

“What?” Boston’s eyes, normally shaded by sagging lids, grew wide.

Metzger said judiciously, “There was an accident, it seems. But it didn’t stop him.”

“An accident?” Boston asked, looking at him closely.

“That’s right, Spencer, an accident. And he’s back here, going gangbusters. That woman too.”

“The prosecutor?”

“Well, yes, her. But I meant that Detective Sachs. She’s unstoppable.”

“Jesus.”

Though his present plans would, in fact, stop her quite efficiently.

Laurel too.

Well, yes, her…

Boston’s concern was evident and the display angered Metzger. He said dismissingly, “I can’t imagine Rhyme found anything. The crime scene was a week old, and how competent could the police down there be?”

The memory of the coffee vendor came back, immediate and stark. Instead of ramming the stand, Metzger had thought about pouring hot coffee on himself and calling the police, saying the vendor did it and having him arrested.

The Smoke made you unreasonable.

Boston intruded on the memory. “Do you think you ought to give anybody else a heads-up?”

Heads-up . Metzger hated that expression. When you analyze it, the phrase could only mean that you should glance up in time to say a prayer before something large crushed you to death. A better expression would be “eyes-forward.”

“Not at this time.”

He looked up and he noted Ruth standing in the doorway.

Why the hell hadn’t he closed the door? “Yes?”

“Shreve. It’s Operations.”

A flashing red LED light on Metzger’s phone console.

He hadn’t noticed it.

What now?

He held up an index finger to Spencer Boston and answered. “Metzger here.”

“Sir, we have Rashid.” The OD was younger even than Metzger and his voice revealed that.

Suddenly the Smoke vanished. And so did Nance Laurel, Lincoln Rhyme and virtually every other blot on his life. Rashid was the next man in the Special Task Order queue, after Moreno. Metzger had been after him for a very long time. “Where?”

“He’s in Mexico.”

“So that’s his plan. The prick got closer than we thought.”

“Slippery, sir. Yes. He’s in a temporary location, a safe house the Matamoros Cartel has in Reynosa. We have a short window. Should I forward details to the GCS and Texas Center?”

“Yes.”

The operations director asked, “Sir, are you aware that the STO has been modified in Washington?”

“In what regard?” he asked, troubled.

“The original order provided for minimizing collateral damage but it didn’t prohibit CD. This one does. Approval is rescinded if anyone else present is a casualty, even wounded.”

Rescinded…

Which means that if anybody is killed with Rashid, even al-Qaeda’s second-in-command about to push a nuclear launch button, I’ve acted outside the scope of my authority.

And I’m fucked.

It didn’t matter that a pure asshole died and a thousand innocent people were saved.

Maybe this was part of the “budgetary” meetings.

“Sir?”

“Understood.”

He disconnected and told Boston the news. “Rashid? I thought that son of a bitch was going to hide out in San Salvador till the attack. He paid off members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang—aka the MS-13s—for protection. Had some place in District Six, near Soyapango. If you want to get lost to the world, that’s the place to do it.”

Nobody knew Central America like Spencer Boston.

A flag arose on his computer. Metzger opened his encrypted emails and read the new STO there, the death warrant for al-Barani Rashid, suitably modified. He read it again and added his electronic signature and PIN number, approving the kill.

The man was, like Moreno, a U.S.-born expatriate, who’d been living in northern Africa and the Gulf states until a few months ago.

He’d been on a watch list for several years but only under informal surveillance, not in any of the active-risk books. He’d never done anything overt that could be proven. But he was as vehemently anti-American as Moreno. And he too had been seen in the company of groups that were actively engaged in terrorist actions.

Metzger scrolled through the intelligence analysis accompanying the revised STO, explaining to Boston the details. Rashid was in the undistinguished town of Reynosa, Mexico, on the Texas border. The U.S. intelligence assets NIOS was using down there believed Rashid was in town to meet with a senior man in northeastern Mexico’s biggest cartel. Terrorists had taken to working closely with the cartels for two reasons: to encourage drug flow into America, which supported their ideology of eroding Western society and institutions, and because the cartels were incredibly well equipped.

“We’ll have him handle it?”

“Of course.” Him. Bruns, that is, Barry Shales. He was the best in the stable. Metzger texted him now and ordered him to report to the Kill Room.

Metzger spun the computer and together he and Boston studied the images, both on-the-ground surveillance and satellite. The safe house in Reynosa was a dusty one-story ranch structure, good-sized, with weathered tan paint and bright green trim. It squatted in the middle of a sandy one-acre lot. All the windows were shaded and barred. The car, if there was one, would be tucked away in the garage.

Metzger assessed the situation. “We’ll have to go with a missile. No visuals to use LRR.”

The Long-Range Rifle program, in which a specially built sniper gun was mounted into a drone, had been Metzger’s brainchild. LRR was the centerpiece of NIOS. The arrangement served two purposes. It drastically minimized the risk of innocent deaths, which nearly always happened with missiles. And it gave Metzger the chance to kill a lot more enemies; you had to be judicious about launching missiles and there was never much doubt after the fact where the Hellfire had come from: the U.S. military, CIA or other intelligence service. But a single rifle shot? The shooter could be anybody. Plant a few references to a gunman working for an opposing political party, a terrorist group, or—say—a South American cartel, and the local authorities and the press would tend not to look elsewhere. The victim could even have been shot by a jealous spouse.