“Do you see a pattern here we’ve missed?” It was Dubnyk, asked without challenge.
“You’ve already considered the absence of a pattern to be a pattern, itself,” Mathias said matter-of-factly. “So, I don’t believe I do.”
No one argued the point.
“In Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mathias continued, “the mandate was to terminate insurgents. Men, women, children, anyone who posed a potential threat. Some wore burqas, some hijabs, some wore military fatigues, some balaclavas to hide their face. Many wore western-style clothing. Outwardly, they had little in common; to us, they were equally anonymous. But inside, they burned with a singular desire to rid their country of Americans. What I’m saying is, you can’t always tell an insurgent by looking at them.”
A man in his twenties, a data analyst, said, “I take your point, Captain.”
“I’m no longer military. Mathias will do.”
“Well, okay, sir, Mr. Mathias.”
“Just Mathias.”
“Yes, well, right: Mathias. But no matter how many times we run the data—age, gender, race, sexual preference, occupation, political and religious affiliation, location, time-of-day, phases of the moon, and a hundred other known variables—we can’t extract a co-relation or a pattern that reliably predicts or identifies his next target or location.”
“And you won’t,” said Mathias. “To The Shooter, the target is selected at random. He doesn’t know, himself, who the next target will be or where he’ll find them. He could be throwing darts at a map.”
“How is this not indiscriminate?” Dubnyk said.
“It does seem at odds with your assessment, Mathias. Care to explain?” said Resnick.
Standing to release the kinks from his joints, Mathias stretched. He said, “The target is no less indiscriminate than the pawn on a chess board, a sacrifice made to satisfy an outcome.”
“Can we not refer to them as targets? These people are victims.” The speaker was one of a team of Special Agents assigned to Mathias, a severe-looking dark haired woman looking half his age.
“You’re thinking like a cop,” said Mathias.
“I am a cop.”
“Maybe so. But you’re not hunting a criminal.”
Eyebrows raised, she said, “The targets’ families might disagree.”
“I’m not callous. I’m telling you, to The Shooter, the victims are no more consequential than an outline on a piece of paper at a shooting range. He doesn’t see them as victims. To him, they’re a means of keeping score and, to him, it’s the score that counts.”
“You mean to him, this is a game?” said Dubnyk, alarmed.
“Some records are meant to be broken, Special Agent.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the young female Agent said.
“Chris Kyle put down a hundred fifty targets; he wrote a best-selling book, and they made a hit movie. No one labeled Kyle a mass murderer.”
“Kyle was a patriot,” Dubnyk said as if offended. “The targets he eliminated were enemy combatants.”
“One man’s enemy combatant is another man’s freedom fighter is another man’s way of keeping score.”
“Are we chasing a terrorist or a psychopath, Mathias?” asked Resnick.
Mathias shrugged. “Disgruntled ex-military, radical Muslim out to avenge what we did to his people in Iraq, a nut-job who hates the U.S. Post Office; either way, a man out to make history, ma’am.”
“You’re awfully glib,” the young Agent said.
“If it seems so, I apologize.”
To Resnick, Mathias looked anything but apologetic.
Eyeing his taut, two hundred pound frame speculatively, she said, “This is not particularly helpful, Mathias. Tell me why you’re here? What makes our mutual friend so certain you, of all people, can apprehend this man?”
Thoughtful, Mathias said, “The community of men that can hit a target at twenty-five hundred yards in an uncontrolled environment is limited, Madam Deputy Director. To do so without logistics and support is more difficult, still. Aside from having the proper tools and the knowledge to use them, the psychological and physical demands required to do so is unique. I’m pretty sure I know this man.”
The analyst, before he could think, blurted: “You know who it is? That would be helpful!”
“No,” said the Deputy Director, annoyed. “What Mathias means is that he knows this man, or men like him, either by repute or from a past life where their paths may have crossed. Is this what you’re telling us, Mathias?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And how does this help us to find him?” Dubnyk wanted to know.
“It doesn’t,” Mathias replied. Then, as if it was apparent, he added, “But if I know of The Shooter, The Shooter knows of me.”
Realization dawning, Resnick said, “So that we’re absolutely clear on your meaning, Mathias, spell it out for me, please.”
With a lift of his shoulders, Mathias said, “We don’t go after The Shooter, Deputy Director, we make The Shooter come after me.”
“And this is your bright idea? Not a hairbrained scheme concocted by our mutual friend?”
“All me, ma’am.”
For the first time since arriving, Mathias’s lip cracked into a tight grin. Or was it a sneer. Resnick said, “And how do you propose we do this?”
Before Mathias could respond, the door to the conference room burst open. A young woman entered in a rush.
She said, “Sorry, ma’am. I know you said no interruptions. But this can’t wait. It was all over YouTube. Video posted last evening, ten-oh-two p.m., ET. They’ve since pulled it down, but we managed to download the original.”
“This had better be good, Agent Walsh.”
With a nod, Walsh indicated the Deputy Director would not be disappointed.
Within seconds, Walsh accessed a file folder on a laptop she’d connected to a fifty-inch flat-screen television monitor. She double-clicked a video icon captioned whitney white runs red with blood. In seconds, a video opened showing a group of twenty-something African American women dressed in white climbing an elevated outdoor stage led by a much younger girl of eleven to twelve years in age. An audience of approximately one hundred fifty spectators—also dressed head-to-toe in white—clapped, hollered, and hooted a warm welcome.
To Mathias, it looked like a typical amateur music video recorded with a mobile phone, one of the thousands posted to YouTube each day. The girls opened with a decent cover of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
“Viewed almost a million times before they shut it down,” said Walsh.
At the forty-six second mark, Resnick turned impatient. “They’re no Aretha Franklin, Walsh. Why are we still watching?”
“Wait for it,” said Walsh, raising her hands in anticipation. “Wait for it…wait for it…here it comes…now!”
What followed next was as unexpected as it was horrific.
“Goddamn,” Resnick said, ironically. “Our Shooter has just gone postal.”
THIRTY
New Orleans, Louisiana
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SHAWNA Gourlay was a last minute addition to the program selected by the Committee for having been short-listed to appear on the television program America’s Got Talent. If the youngster was sufficiently talented for Howie, Heidi, Simon, and Mel B, who was the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans to reject her.
Shawna had been performing on stage from an early age; church choir, amateur recitals, competitions, and county fairs. Her voice was described as a cross between Aretha Franklin and Patti La Belle, her unique phrasing considered a gift in one so young. In fact, after hearing the youngster’s audition tape, Mel B, herself, had called Shawna to inform her of the producer’s decision.
So, with dreams of an AGT Golden Buzzer dancing like sugar-plum fairies in her head, twelve-year-old Shawna Gourlay stepped to the small stage at The Whitney White Linen Afterparty event.
THIRTY-ONE
New Orleans, Louisiana
FROM
THE WATERFRONT, the man walked north on St. Peter Street until he reached Jackson Square. Here, he sat alone on a concrete stoop. He admired the scenery. He admired the architecture. He enjoyed the music of a live band playing Dixieland-style jazz. The sun was hot, the humidity thick enough to chew.
To him, it was no matter. He’d served time in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Eight p.m. in the shadow of a dying sun. The man hoisted his backpack exiting Jackson Square onto Chartres Street, walking west. He arrived at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum five minutes later, located in a four-level building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum is a nineteenth-century apothecary featuring exhibits of old medicines, bloodletting paraphernalia, superstitious cures, medicinal herbs and gris-gris, and potions used by Voodoo practitioners.
Open late to accommodate a surprisingly brisk tourist trade, the man browsed the odd collection. He remained until a quarter of nine. From the Pharmacy Museum, the man walked five hundred yards southwest on Chartres to Canal where he entered the Sheraton New Orleans from a side door on Camp Street.
In a public toilet off the lobby, the man relieved himself. In a stall, he removed the LSU tee shirt and cap, placing them in the backpack. From the backpack, he removed a crushable felt Pork Pie hat with a ribbon band and a multi-color feather, a dark button-down collar shirt, and a skinny black-leather Bolo tie.
Feeling suitably stylish, he exited the restroom, crossed the lobby to the nearest stairwell. From the lobby, he climbed forty-nine stories to the roof. Using a wafer of magnetized-metal the size of a credit card, he disabled the fire door alarm.
The man wondered at such simplicity and stupidity combined.
The roof was pebbled blacktop still throwing off heat from the late-day sun. The man crossed over the blacktop to a rusting metal frame-work tower bolted to the roof and once used to transmit signals from local radio. He climbed the tower. He settled himself in the frame-work six hundred feet above street-level selecting a vantage point looking west out over Camp and Common Street below.
The Contemporary Arts Center, home to the official Whitney White Linen Night Afterparty, was located eleven hundred yards away at the corner where Camp Street and St. Joseph Streets intersect. From his perch high in the disused radio tower, he had a clear view.
Using the Leupold Mark 4 spotting scope, the man scanned the intersection. For the Afterparty, he could see the roadway had been blocked-off to vehicular traffic. A stage had been erected. The street was now jammed with revelers. In keeping with the occasion, they dressed in white, the men in slacks, caps, and fedoras, the women in fancy dresses and hats. They milled about talking, smiling, laughing, sipping wine, and chowing-down on canape. To the man, they looked ridiculous. It would be a shame to soil their fine white linen, he thought.
Still, he scanned for potential targets among the crowd.
THIRTY-TWO
New Orleans, Louisiana
IN KEEPING WITH her pending nation-wide celebrity, the Committee suggested Shawna Gourlay lead the troupe onstage, creating no small measure of enmity toward her from the group’s founding members. For years, the Soul Sistas had performed at venues throughout the city of New Orleans never having had to rely on help from a social media upstart to draw or to satisfy an audience. While agreeing backstage not to sabotage the performance outright, once onstage the troupe planned to block Shawna out, much as an offensive lineman might do to a blitzing linebacker.
The Soul Sistas, fronted by twelve-year-old Shawna Gourlay, gained the stage at precisely nine-thirty-eight p.m., the third live performance of the evening. With only twenty minutes to shine over a five-song set, Shawna planned to Own it.
THIRTY-THREE
New Orleans, Louisiana
FIVE WOMEN AND A YOUNG GIRL climbed the stage like brides-to-be at an altar. Dressed in gossamer gowns of flowing white linen to honor the evening, they moved single-file to the raised platform, the youngest of the group leading the way. Through the Leupold Mark 4, the man could see the audience applaud, though from a thousand yards, the sound did not carry. For almost forty minutes he’d watched the party-goers bump, be-bop, and grind looking the more ridiculous for lack of a backing soundtrack.
The audience pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip in the snug confine of the intersection. They swayed to-and-fro like participants in a mass orgy. The man could not take out one without the risk of a through-and-through taking out two or more, a violation of his self-imposed Code of One Shot, One Kill.
The man watched the performers through the lens of the Leupold Mark 4. Despite having balanced himself in the tower for more than an hour, his muscles showed no sign of fatigue; his breathing remained unlabored and even. As he was trained to do, the man stayed patient, waiting for the ideal target to appear.
THIRTY-FOUR
New Orleans, Louisiana
CROWDING HER OUT, they used their body-mass and superior numbers to veer her subtly but surely off to the side of the stage. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right. She was the celebrity, here; an audition on national television proved it. Mel B said so! They were no more than a collection of twenty-something has-beens and wannabees playing to drunks and degenerates in juke-joints and honky-tonks in America’s crappiest city.
And Shawna Gourlay was having none of it!
THIRTY-FIVE
New Orleans, Louisiana
TURNING HIS ATTENTION from the audience, the man studied the five young women and one child performing on stage like ducks in a shooting gallery moving side-to-side in time with the beat. He could drop each one before the others realized. But the man wasn’t about multiple kills; in his mind, mass-shootings required zero precision and even less skill. Only a mix of insanity and rage and the man was neither angry nor insane.
After watching the first song in the set, it became apparent to the man the older girls were trying to box-out the youngest performer. The man reached for his backpack. He unfastened the left shoulder strap. Before releasing the right strap, he looped the left through a horizontal crossbeam of the radio tower. Once secure, the man removed the individual components of the CheyTac M300 from the pack.
The man assembled each piece in turn. Satisfied, he raised the weapon. He settled the buttstock to his shoulder. He fingered the trigger. Through the rifle scope, he reacquired the stage lit up like a Christmas tree. Breathing evenly, he played a game of eeny-meeny-miny-moe targeting the group on stage.
THIRTY-SIX
New Orleans, Louisiana
ON THE LETTER R, Shawna Gourlay made her move. Deftly, she navigated a gap off the left flank of the eldest and tallest Soul Sista anchoring the five-girl chorus. Like a jackrabbit, she stepped forward into the spotlight center stage. Stunned and slow to react, the Soul Sistas could only watch.
No doubt, now, who most deserved a record label contract, who most deserved an America’s Got Talent Golden Buzzer. God, Shawna thought, I hope Mel B is watching!
THIRTY-SEVEN
New Orleans, Louisiana.
THE MAN PRESSED the trigger at the letter E, the note after Shawna made her move. The .375 round entered Shawna’s skull traveling in a downward trajectory at more than three-thousand-feet-per-second. Though Shawna died instantly, it took a moment for her body to collapse, for muscle, bone, tissue, and nerve-endings to register the fatal impact.
By the time she collapsed, the tumbling projectile had entered the Soul Sista standing directly behind Shawna, the lead singer for who it was initially intended. Radiating outward from the first point of penetration, the resulting shock wave damaged her internal organs, including the large and small intestine, kidneys, liver, and bladder. Suffering catastrophic blood loss, the woman would die before reaching the hospital.
In a one-in-a-million fluke, the third victim—a sound stage technician—was hit in the throat by a sliver of shrapnel exiting the second victim’s body. Unable to call for help, he drowned in his own blood.
The audience did not instantly react to the scene
. When they did, fearing a repeat of the Las Vegas massacre, it was bedlam. People dropped to the pavement only to be trampled where they lay by a stampede of party-goers fleeing the carnage on stage. Regaining their senses, a few brave souls rushed the platform to help, slipping and sliding in a widening pool of blood vividly red against white, a tableau no less sublime for the sheer madness of it all.
“Oops,” said the man in the tower, cradling his weapon in his arms.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Georgetown, Washington DC
GEORGETOWN IS A CHARMING neighborhood located in northwest Washington DC with Federal-style architecture, cobblestone streets, fashionable shops, and nightlife that runs the gamut from boisterous college bars to more traditional taverns, upmarket restaurants, waterfront seafood spots, and lounges to enjoy live entertainment.
Populated by Washington insiders, lobbyists, political junkies, and media hacks, in Georgetown, it’s challenging to have a truly private conversation in public let alone a clandestine rendezvous. Understandable given its location on the Potomac River so near to the Nation’s penultimate seat of power.
For Dabney Berkshire, it was a convenient commute to his office at Langley and a leisurely stroll to Capitol Hill where the offices of the Undersecretary for State, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of Homeland Security were located. When necessary, both good news and bad could be delivered unvarnished and in-person.
Berkshire sat in the first-floor study of his century home surrounded by built-in bookcases on three sides containing valuable first editions. Economics by Friedman, Galbraith, and Keynes; political autobiographies by presidents, statesmen, bankers, dictators, and madmen; anthologies on great civilizations risen from the dust, returned to the dust; and numerous works on the more intricate, esoteric, and unapproachable concepts of advanced mathematical analysis.
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