Lincoln Rhyme 10 - The Kill Room

by Jeffery Deaver

  Spent three days in NYC, April 30–May 2. Purpose? May 1, used Elite Limousine.

  Driver Tash Farada (regular driver Vlad Nikolov was sick. Trying to locate).

  Closed accounts at American Independent Bank and Trust, prob. other banks too.

  Collected woman Lydia, at Lexington and 52nd, accompanied him all day. Prostitute? Paid her money? Canvassing to learn identity.

  Reason for anti-U.S. feelings: best friend killed by U.S. troops in Panama invasion, 1989.

  Moreno’s last trip to U.S. Never would return.

  Meeting in Wall Street. Purpose? Location?

  Victim 2: Eduardo de la Rua. COD: Loss of blood. Lacerations from flying glass from gunshot.

  Supplemental information: Journalist, interviewing Moreno. Born Puerto Rico, living in Argentina.

  Victim 3: Simon Flores. COD: Loss of blood. Lacerations from flying glass from gunshot.

  Supplemental information: Moreno’s bodyguard. Brazilian national, living in Venezuela.

  Suspect 1: Shreve Metzger. Director, National Intelligence and Operations Service.

  Mentally unstable? Anger issues.

  Manipulated evidence to illegally authorize Special Task Order?

  Divorced. Law degree, Yale.

  Suspect 2: Sniper. Code name: Don Bruns. Information Services datamining Bruns. Results negative.

  Possibly individual at South Cove Inn, May 8. Caucasian, male, mid 30s, short cut light brown hair, American accent, thin but athletic. Appears “military.” Inquiring re: Moreno.

  Possibly individual with American accent who called South Cove Inn on May 7 to confirm arrival of Moreno. Call was from American area code.

  Voiceprint obtained.

  Crime scene report, autopsy report, other details to come.

  Rumors of drug cartels behind the killings. Considered unlikely.

  Crime Scene 2. Sniper nest of Don Bruns, 2000 yards from Kill Room, New Providence Island, Bahamas.

  May 9.

  Crime scene report to come.

  Supplemental Investigation. Determine identity of Whistleblower. Unknown subject who leaked the Special Task Order.

  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.”

  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?”

  CHAPTER 26

  S O, THIS IS THE CARIBBEAN.”

  His hand on the joystick of his candy-apple-red wheelchair, Lincoln Rhyme steered out a door at Lynden Pindling Airport in Nassau into an atmosphere hotter and more dank than he could recall experiencing in years.

  “Takes your breath away,” he called. “But I like it.”

  “Slow down, Lincoln,” Thom said.

  But Rhyme would have none of that. He was a child on Christmas morning. Here he was in a foreign country for the first time in many years. He was excited at the prospect of the trip itself. But also at what it might yield: hard, physical evidence in the Moreno case. He’d decided to come down here because of something he was nearly ashamed to admit: intuition, that fishy crap that Amelia Sachs was always going on and on about. He had a feeling that the only way he was going to get that million-dollar bullet and the rest of the evidence was to wheel right up to Corporal Mychal Poitier and ask him for it. In person.

  Rhyme knew the officer was genuinely troubled by the death of Robert Moreno and troubled too that he was a pawn being used by his superiors to marginalize the case.

  There wasn’t a single inspection or license I handled that was not completed in a timely, thorough and honest manner…

  He didn’t think it would take much to convince the corporal to help them.

  And so Thom had thrown himself upon the sword of airline and hotel reservation telephone hold, listening to bad music—the aide announced several times—to arrange the flight and motel, an assignment made complicated by Rhyme’s condition.

  But not as complicated as they’d thought.

  Certainly some issues had to be contended with when traveling as a quad—special wheelchairs to the seat, particular pillows, concerns about the Storm Arrow in storage, the practical matters of the piss and shit details that might have to be attended to on the flight.

  In the end, though, the journey wasn’t bad. We’re all disabled in the eyes of the Transportation Security Administration, all immobile, all objects, all baggage to be shuffled about at whim. Lincoln actually felt that he was better off than most of his fellow travelers, who were used to being mobile and independent.

  Outside the baggage claim area, on the ground floor of the airport, Rhyme motored to the edge of the sidewalk filled with tourists and locals bustling for cars and taxis and mini vans. He looked at a small garden of plants, some of whose varieties he’d never seen. He had no interest in horticulture for aesthetics but he found flora extremely helpful in crime scene work.

  He’d also heard the rum was particularly good in the Bahamas.

  Returning to where Thom was standing, making a phone call, Rhyme phoned Sachs and left a message. “Made it okay. I…” He turned, hearing a caterwauling screech behind him. “Christ, scared the hell out of me. There’s a parrot here. He’s talking!”

  The cage had been placed there by a local tourist commission. Inside was an Abaco Bahamian parrot, according to the sign. The noisy bird, gray with a flourish of green on the tail, was saying, “Hello! Hi! ¡Hola!” Rhyme recorded some of the gre
eting for Sachs.

  Another breath of the dank, salty air, tinged with a sour aroma, what he realized was smoke. What was burning? No one else seemed alarmed.

  “Got the bags,” came a voice from behind them.

  NYPD patrolman Ron Pulaski—young, blond, thin—was wheeling the suitcases on a cart. The trio didn’t expect to be here long but the nature of Rhyme’s condition was such that he required accessories. A lot of them. Medicines, catheters, tubes, disinfectants, air pillows to prevent the sores that could lead to infections.

  “What’s that?” Rhyme asked as Thom retrieved a small backpack from one bag and slung it on the back of the wheelchair.

  “It’s a portable respirator,” Pulaski answered.

  Thom added, “Battery-powered. Double oxygen tank. It’ll last for a couple of hours.”

  “What the hell did you bring that for?”

  “Flying with cabin pressure at seven thousand feet,” the aide replied as if the answer were obvious. “Stress. There’re a dozen reasons it can’t hurt to have one with us.”

  “Do I look stressed?” Rhyme asked petulantly. He had weaned himself off the ventilator years ago, to breathe on his own, one of the proudest achievements possible for a quad. But Thom had apparently forgotten—or disregarded—that accomplishment. “I don’t need it.”

  “Let’s hope you don’t. But what can it hurt?”

  Rhyme had no answer to that. He glanced at Pulaski. “And it’s not a respirator, by the way. Respiration is the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Ventilation is the introduction of gas into the lungs. Hence, it’s a ventilator.”

  Pulaski sighed. “Got it, Lincoln.”

  At least the rookie had stopped his irritating habit of calling Rhyme “sir” or “captain.”

  The young officer then asked, “Does it matter?”