The Kill Room (27 page)

S
HREVE METZGER TILTED HIS HEA
D
back so the lower lens of his glasses brought the words on his magic phone better into focus.

He thought to the Wizard, And what the hell am I supposed to do with this bit of fucking non-information? Get my résumé in order or not? Tell everybody here that they’re about to be punished for being patriots and saying no to the evil that wants to destroy the greatest country on earth? Or not?

Sometimes the Smoke could be light, irritating. Sometimes it could be that inky mass of cloud, the sort you see rising from plane crashes and chemical plant explosions.

He digitally shredded the message and stalked downstairs to the coffee shop, bought a latte for himself and a soy-laced mochaccino for Ruth. He returned and set hers on her desk, between pictures of soldier husband one and soldier husband two.

“Thank you,” the woman said and turned her stunning blue eyes on him. The corners crinkled with a smile. Even in her advanced decade Ruth was attractive in the broadest sense of the word. Metzger did not believe in souls or spirits but, if he did, that would be the part of Ruth that so appealed.

Maybe you could just say she had a good heart.

And here she is working for someone like me…

He brushed aside the Smokey cynicism.

“The appointment went okay,” she told him.

Metzger replied, “I was confident. I knew it would. Could you have Spencer come in, please?”

Stepping into his office, he dropped into his chair, sipped the coffee, angry at what he felt was the excessive heat radiating through the cardboard. This reminded him of another incident: A street vendor selling him coffee had been rude. He still fantasized about finding the man’s stand and ramming it with his car. The incident was three years ago.

Can’t tell which way the wind is blowing.

He blew on the coffee—Smoke exhaling, he imagined.

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-
forwar
d.”

“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.

But he’d known from the beginning that LRR drones wouldn’t always work. For Rashid, with no visible target the only option was a missile, with its twenty-pound high-explosive warhead.

Boston’s long face was aimed out the window. He brushed his white hair absently with his fingers and played with a stray thread escaping from a cuff button. Metzger wondered why he always wore a jacket in the office.

“What, Spencer?”

“Is this a good time for another STO? With the Moreno fallout?”

“
This
intel’s solid. Rashid is guilty as sin. We have assessments from Langley and the Mossad and the SIS.”

“I just meant we don’t know how much of the queue got leaked. Maybe it was just Moreno’s order; maybe it was more, Rashid’s included. His was next on the list, remember? His death’ll make the news. Maybe that damn prosecutor’ll come after us for this one too. We’re on thin ice here.”

These were all obvious considerations but Metzger had the
need
inside his gut and, accordingly, was free of the Smoke.

He absolutely didn’t want this relief, this sense of comfort, of freedom, to go away.

“And if we don’t take him out, you know what Rashid’s got planned for Texas or Oklahoma.”

“We could call Langley and arrange a rendition.”

“Kidnap him? And do what? We don’t need information from him, Spencer. All we need from Rashid is no more Rashid.”

Boston yielded. “All right. But what about the collateral damage risk? Firing a Hellfire into a residence with no visual reference?”

Metzger scrolled down the intel assessment until he found the surveillance report. Current as of ten minutes ago. “Safe house is empty, except for Rashid. The place’s been under DEA and Mexican Federales surveillance for a week for suspected mules. Nobody’s gone inside until Rashid this morning. According to the intel, he’ll be meeting the cartel man anytime now. Once that guy leaves, we’ll blow the place to hell.”

A
L-BARANI RASHID LOOKED OVER
his shoulder a great deal.

Figuratively and literally.

The tall, balding forty-year-old, with a precise goatee, knew he was in danger—from the Mossad, the CIA and that New York–based security outfit, NIOS. Probably some people in China too.

Not to mention more than a few fellow Muslims. He was on record as condemning the fundamentalists of his religion for their intellectual failings by blindly adhering to a medieval philosophy unsustainable in the twenty-first century. (He had also publicly excoriated moderates of the faith for their cowardice in protesting that they were misunderstood, that Islam was basically Presbyterianism with a different holy book. But
they
simply blogged insults; they weren’t going to fatwa him.)

Rashid wanted a new order, a complete reimagining of faith and society. If he had any model, it wasn’t Zawahiri or Bin Laden. It would be a hybrid of Karl Marx and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who happened to have attended his own school—the University of Michigan.

But as unpopular as he was, Rashid believed in his heart he was right. Remove the cancer and the world will right itself.

The metastasizing cells were, of course, the United States of America. From the subprime crisis, to Iraq, to the insulting carrot of foreign aid, to the racist diatribes of Christian preachers and politicians, to the deification of consumer goods, the country was a sea anchor on the progress of civilization. He’d left the country after a graduate degree in political science, never to return.

Yes, enemies were eager as wolves to get to him because of his views. Even those countries that didn’t like America
needed
America.

But he felt more or less safe at the moment, presently in a sprawling ranch-style house in Reynosa, Mexico, as he awaited the arrival of an ally.

He couldn’t say “friend,” of course. His relationship with the slick individuals of the Matamoros Cartel was symbiotic but their motives diverged considerably. Rashid’s was ideological, the war against American capitalism and society (and support for Israel, but that went without saying). The cartel’s purpose was, in a way, the opposite, making vast sums of money from that very society. But its goals were basically the same. Get as many drugs as you can into the country. And kill those who want to stop you from doing that.

Sipping strong tea, he looked at his watch. One of the cartel bosses was sending his chief bomb maker to see Rashid within the hour. He would provide what Rashid needed to build a particularly smart device, which would, in two days, kill a DEA regional director in Brownsville, Texas, together with her family and however many others happened to be nearby at the picnic.

Rashid was presently sitting at a coffee table, bent over a pad of yellow paper, and clutching a mechanical pencil as he drew engineering diagrams for the IED.

Although Reynosa was a thoroughly unpleasant town, dusty, dun-c
olored
and filled with small, sagging factories, this house was large and quite pleasant. The cartel had put some good money into maintaining it. It had decent air-conditioning, plenty of food and tea and bottled water, comfortable furniture and thick shades on all the windows. Yes, not a bad house at all.

Though occasionally noisy.

He walked to the back bedroom door and knocked, then opened it. One of the enforcers with the cartel, a heavyset unsmiling man named Norzagaray, nodded a greeting.

Rashid looked over the cartel’s hostages: The husband and wife, both native Mexican and stocky, their teenage son and little girl sat on the floor, in front of a TV. The father’s and wife’s hands were bound with bell wire, loose enough so they could drink water and eat. Not so loose they could attack their kidnappers.

In Rashid’s opinion, they should have bound the wife’s more tightly.
She
was the danger;
she
had the rage. It was obvious as she comforted her daughter, a slim child whose head was crowned with dark, curly hair. The husband and boy were more frightened.

Rashid had been told by his contacts here that he could use the house but he would have to share it with these hostages, who’d been here for eight or nine days. The man’s small business had been spending that time struggling to raise the two million dollars in ransom the drug lords had demanded—because of the man’s defiance of the cartel.

Rashid said to Norzagaray, “Could you turn the volume down please?” A nod at the TV, on which a cartoon was playing.

Their guard did so.

“Thank you.” He looked the family over carefully now, taking no pleasure in their terror. This was crime for profit; he didn’t approve. He regarded the teenager and then a soccer ball in the corner. The colors were those of Club América, the pro team in Mexico City.

“You like football?”

“Yes.”

“What do you play?”

“Midfield.”

“I did too when I was your age.” Rashid didn’t smile. He never did but his voice was soft. He looked at them a moment more. Though they did not know it yet, Rashid had been told the negotiations were nearly complete and the family would be released tomorrow. Rashid was pleased at this. These people were not the enemy. The father wasn’t working for an American company that was exploitative and amoral. He was just a small businessman who’d fallen on the wrong side of the cartel. Rashid wanted to reassure them that they would survive the ordeal. But this wasn’t his concern.

He closed the door and returned to the diagrams he was working on. He reviewed them for long moments. And finally concluded: First, no one could possibly survive being in the proximity of the device they described. And second—he allowed himself the immodest thought—the drawings were as elegant as the finest zellige terra-cotta tiles, a cornerstone of Moroccan art.