The Kill Room (12 page)

R
HYME WHEELED FROM THE
front sitting room of his town house into the marble entryway near the front door.

Dr. Vic Barrington, Rhyme’s spinal cord injury specialist, followed him out, and Thom closed the doors to the room and joined them. The idea of physicians’ making house calls was from another era, if not a different dimension, but when the essence of the injury makes it far easier to come to the mountain, that’s what many of the better doctors did.

But Barrington was untraditional in many ways. His black bag was a Nike backpack and he’d bicycled here from the hospital.

“Appreciate your coming in this early,” Rhyme said to the doctor.

The time was six thirty in the morning.

Rhyme liked the man and had decided to give him a pass and resist asking how the “emergency” or the “something” had gone yesterday when he’d had to postpone their appointment. With any other doc he would have grilled.

Barrington had just completed a final set of tests in anticipation of the surgery scheduled for May 26.

“I’ll get the blood work in and look over the results but I don’t have any indication that anything’s changed over the past week. Blood pressure is very good.”

This was the nemesis of severely disabled spinal cord patients; an attack of autonomic dysreflexia could spike the pressure in minutes and lead to a stroke and death if a doctor or caregiver didn’t react instantly.

“Lung capacity gets better every time I see you and I swear you’re stronger than I am.”

Barrington was no-bullshit all the way and when Rhyme asked the next question, he knew he’d get an honest response. “What’re my odds?”

“Of getting your left arm and hand working again? Close to one hundred percent. Tendon grafts and electrodes’re pretty surefire—”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about surviving the operation or not having some kind of cataclysmic setback.”

“Ah, that’s a little different. I’ll give you ninety percent on that one.”

Rhyme considered this. Surgery couldn’t do anything about his legs; nothing ever would fix that, at least not for the next five or ten years. But he’d come to believe that with disabilities hands and arms were the key to normal. Nobody pays much attention to people in wheelchairs if they can pick up a knife and fork or shake your hand. When someone has to feed you and wipe your chin, your very presence spreads discomfort like spattered mud.

And those who don’t look away give you those fucking sympathetic glances. Poor you, poor you.

Ninety percent…reasonable for getting a major portion of your life back.

“Let’s do it,” Rhyme said.

“If there’s anything that bothers me about the blood work I’ll let you know but I don’t anticipate that. We’ll keep May twenty-sixth on the calendar. You can start rehab a week after that.”

Rhyme shook the doctor’s hand and then, as he turned toward the front door, the criminalist said, “Oh, one thing. Can I have a drink or two the night before?”

“Lincoln,” Thom said. “You want to be in the best shape you can for the surgery.”

“I want to be in a good mood too,” he muttered.

The doctor appeared thoughtful. “Alcohol isn’t recommended forty-eight hours before a procedure like this…But the hard-and-fast rule is nothing in the stomach after midnight the day of the operation. What goes in before that, I’m not too concerned about.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

After the man had left, Rhyme wheeled into the lab, where he regarded the whiteboards. Sachs was just finishing writing what Mychal Poitier had told him last night. She was editing, using a thicker marker to present the most recent information.

Rhyme stared at the boards for some time. Then he shouted, “Thom!”

“I’m right here.”

“I thought you were in the kitchen.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m here. What do you want?”

“I need you to make some phone calls for me.”

“I’m happy to,” the aide replied. “But I thought you liked making them on your own.” He glanced at Rhyme’s working arm.

“I like making the calls. I dislike being on hold. And I have a feeling that’s what I’d be doing.”

Thom added, “And so I’m going to be your surrogate hold-ee.”

Rhyme thought for a moment. “That’s a good way to put it, though hardly very articulate.”

S
HREVE 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.”

At NIOS and its affiliated organizations, all photocopying and logging on were automatically recorded.

“Kinko’s. Jesus.”

The administrations director continued, “And I went back and looked over the vetting assessments here. Not a hint that anybody’d have a problem with STO missions. Hell, most of our people knew what we were up to before they joined.”

NIOS was created after 9/11 largely for the purpose of targeted remedies, along with other extreme operational activities, like kidnappings, bribery and other dirty tricks. Most of the office’s specialists had a history of military service and had taken lives in the course of their careers before joining NIOS. It seemed inconceivable that any of them would have a change of heart and try to bring down his operation. As for the other staff, Boston was right, most applicants knew what the organization was up to before they signed on.

Unless, of course, that was why they joined in the first place. Moles. Despicable.

Metzger: “We’ll have to keep looking. And for God’s sake, there can’t be any
more
leaks.
He
already knows too much.”

Wizardly.

Boston’s white eyebrows furrowed. He whispered, “They’re not…This isn’t going to knock us out, is it?”

Metzger was painfully aware that he didn’t have a clue what Washington was thinking, since he hadn’t heard a word from the man after the initial phone call.

It turns out some Intelligence Committee budget discussions have come up. Suddenly. Can’t understand why …

“Jesus, Shreve. They
can’t
. We’re the best ones suited for this kind of work.”

True. But apparently not the best suited for keeping this kind of work secret.

Which Metzger didn’t say.

Boston asked, “What more do you know about the investigation, the police?”

Now Metzger grew cautious. He said, “Not much. Still circling the wagons. Just to be safe.” And glanced at his magic phone, the red one, which happened to contain an acid capsule that would melt the drive in a matter of seconds. The screen reported no messages.

He exhaled. “Fact is, I don’t think it’s moving very quickly. I got the names of the investigators and’ve checked them out. The cops’re using a skeleton crew to stay under the radar, not standard NYPD. Keeping it quiet. It’s really just Nance Laurel, the prosecutor, and two others and some support staff. The main cop’s a detective named Amelia Sachs and, get this, the other guy is a consultant, Lincoln Rhyme. Retired from the force a while ago. They’re operating out of his apartment on the Upper West Side. A private residence, not police headquarters.”

“Rhyme, wait. I’ve heard of him,” Boston said, frowning. “He’s famous. I saw a show on him. He’s the best forensic scientist in the country.”

Metzger knew this, of course. Rhyme was the “other” investigator gunning for him, the intel memo had reported yesterday. “I know. But he’s a quadriplegic.”

“What does that matter?”

“Spencer, where’s the crime scene?”

“Oh, sure. The Bahamas.”

“What’s he going to do, roll around in the sand looking for shell casings and tire prints?”