"Why would anyone need that much bullet to kill a man?" Cornell asked.
"The sniper may have been anticipating the need to shoot through cover," Arkin said. "He knew Egan's compound was surrounded by walls. He probably knew Egan's car was armored. Or maybe the .50 caliber is just what he was trained on and is most comfortable with. Who knows?"
"Well, it certainly got the job done."
"Dr. Hubbard, you have alarmed the peasants," Morrison said.
"Sorry about that."
"It's okay," Arkin said, "as long as you don't tell us the bullet was fired from a Zastava rifle."
Hubbard went quiet.
"Dr. Hubbard? You still with us?"
"Who said that? About the gun, I mean. Arkin?"
"Yes, sir."
"There are dozens of widely available weapons, long guns and handguns, capable of firing the .50 BMG round. May I ask what on Earth would make you guess it was fired from something as uncommon as a Zastava rifle?"
"You don't want to know."
"Well, it was."
Arkin barely nodded as Morrison and Pratt turned and stared at him, their mouths hanging open, their eyebrows furrowed. Then Morrison looked over at Pratt and mouthed the word, "clairvoyance."
"My colleague came to the same conclusion independently," Hubbard continued. "Given the twist as well as the number and dimensions of the land and groove impressions—that is to say the combination of these characteristics unique to the model of gun—we can say with utter certainty that the bullet was fired from a Zastava M93. The 'crna strella,' or 'black arrow' in English. A bolt-action sniper rifle of Serbian manufacture, in service since 1998, mostly used by special units of a handful of militaries, including those of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Like most heavy sniper rifles, it is designed to be fired from the prone position, supported by a folding bipod. Unaltered, the variant designed to fire the .50 BMG round has an effective range of more than 5,000 feet, weighs in at over 35 pounds, and is damn near 5 ½ feet long. An absolute monster of a gun."
Morrison, again staring at Arkin, couldn't hold back. "How the fuck did you—"
"Did you run it through Drugfire?" Arkin asked.
"I did. In fact that's where I obtained the general rifling characteristics for the Zastava. I'd never encountered the handiwork of one before."
"I should think not. Did Drugfire give you any matches for your striations?"
"No, it didn't. But I sent our scans of the fragments off to the Bureau's Firearms/Toolmarks Unit. They may still come up with something that isn't in their database as yet."
"If you forward copies to me, I'll direct them to the appropriate officials with Defense Intelligence as well. Sometimes their records include—well, sometimes they have data that supplements that of the Bureau."
Five minutes later, Pratt, Morrison and Arkin hung up and faced each other across the conference room table.
"So what does all this titillating information tell us that we hadn't yet deduced, neophyte Pratt?" Arkin asked.
"Hey, I've been in this job for years now."
"It tells us that our shooter, in addition to being a professional, is quite possibly a veteran of a Balkan military, trained therein as a sniper, and discharged no earlier than 1998. There's a chance, albeit a slim one, that our Belgrade station can obtain a copy of the rolls of their special forces and snipers active in the 1990s."
"So, are you finally going to let us in on the big secret?" Morrison asked.
"Big secret?"
"Don't play dumb with me, you boarding school degenerate."
Arkin smiled. "Maybe we should brew another pot of coffee first."
*****
Back in the conference room after their pause, Arkin and Morrison sipped hot coffees, Pratt a bottle of SunnyD, as Arkin explained how he'd anticipated the make of the murder weapon.
"About six months before I quit DCI, maybe five months before they moved me to Durango, I was assigned a 'go nowhere' case. A dog. At the time I was given the file, the only real witness was already dead. Killed. Worse, the leads provided in the transcript of the half-assed and only interview of the deceased witness, conducted by an uninspired Customs agent, largely involved information and events that were already more than thirty years old."
"Why did DCI even have a case like that?" Pratt asked.
"An excellent question. It was of interest to the agency for two reasons. First, because it allegedly involved an international terrorist group—in this case one that was orchestrating philosophically motivated assassinations, and second—"
"Philosophically motivated?" Pratt asked.
"I'll get back to that. And second, because one of the group's victims was being watched by one of our own surveillance teams at the very moment he was assassinated. Suffice it to say, the Agency's curiosity was piqued by the group's apparent ability to go utterly undetected in both tracking and killing someone who was under surveillance by the agency's own specialized and highly trained personnel."
"I heard something about this," Pratt said.
"So, backing up a bit, more than two years before this dog of a case landed on my desk, there was an Egyptian national, a person of interest to us, named Hassan al Nefud. Big-mouthed, self-described imam who had a sizeable and growing following back home, as well as a few obnoxiously vocal disciples in some strip-mall shithole neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. The usual thing—bunch of mopes spooked by their insignificance in the universe, thinking that the louder they shout about their beliefs, the likelier it will be that theirs encompass the one true path."
"Path to what?" Pratt asked.
"Paradise," Morrison said.
"You mean Newark isn't?"
"Al Nefud's rhetoric bordered on the edge of an outright call to arms against the United States, and was already well over the line with respect to Israel. Nevertheless, to the considerable surprise of the press and great consternation of the Embassy of Israel, the State Department granted him a visa, ostensibly because he'd been invited to address the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Johns Hopkins. In truth, Johns Hopkins only extended their invitation after being prodded to do so by Homeland Security, which had, with the help of Treasury and NSA, uncovered a suspicious flow of money—from Geneva to cities including Cairo, Newark, and Islamabad—for which al Nefud appeared to be the facilitator. Bottom line, several agencies wanted to take a closer look at al Nefud to see what he was up to. And what better way to do that than give him a hall pass in a very closely watched hall. Hence, the invitation from Johns Hopkins."
"So, DCI is assigned point. That is to say, we had the primary responsibility to watch al Nefud from the moment he unbuckled his seatbelt at Dulles Airport to the moment he re-buckled it three days later on his way home. We even had agents sitting in front of and behind him on his flight from Cairo. Anyway, the whole time he's in the U.S., we have the dogs on him. A 14-person surveillance team. Big operation. Full eavesdropping. Full surveillance. Eyes and ears, 24/7. Of course, we're hoping he'll make contact with someone here so we can flush out any related homegrown threat. He never does. He goes straight from Dulles to his Baltimore hotel, orders room service, and turns on pay-per-view."
"Porn, right?" Pratt said.
"No—a Victorian period romance film, of all things. Anyway, the next day, he goes to Johns Hopkins to make his speech, then goes right back to his hotel room and more pay-per-view. Doesn't even make a phone call. Then, on the morning of his third day here, just as he's leaving his hotel to head back to Dulles Airport, walking to his limo while we have no fewer than five personnel with eyes on inside a 60-foot radius of this asshole, somebody blows his head off with a high-powered sniper rifle. All those eyes, and not one of our people sees the shooter or so much as a puff of smoke. Nobody even hears the shot until half the contents of al Nefud's skull are already decorating the stucco walls of the hotel's carport."
"And he was shot by a Zastava," Morrison said.
Arkin turned
to Pratt and grinned. "Check out Morrison trying to think." Then, turning back to Morrison, "My hat, sir. He was indeed shot by a Zastava. A different model that time. Still a sniper rifle, but a smaller, older design called the M91, firing a 7.62 x 54 round. Like the M93, it's used by a handful of two-bit Balkan armies. So, long story short, to DCI's considerable embarrassment, their quarry was sniped right out from under their noses, and they never found the shooter. Best they were able to do was locate the spot from which the sniper shot al Nefud and identify the make and model of the gun based on a bullet fragment they found lodged in a floor joist supporting the mezzanine above the hotel's lobby. Otherwise, they never found jack for evidence, aside from a single long, black, moderately curly hair stuck on a bush the shooter hid behind. Needless to say, our deputy director for surveillance was sacked shortly thereafter. And all we ever put together was that one other person of similarly surging popularity and extreme views, a right-wing Odessa, Texas, radio host, was sniped by a Zastava M91 shooter a year earlier. Curiously, in that case, the shots were fired by a different M91, indicating either that the shootings were done by different killers, or by a single killer with a personal stockpile of Serbian guns. The other thing was that in each case, there were certain things—fingerprints, shall we say—indicating the involvement of particular groups. But it was odd."
"How?" Morrison asked.
"Like in the case of al Nefud, there was certain peripheral evidence that suggested the involvement of a particular foreign intelligence service. In the case of the right-wing radio guy, there were fingerprints—literally fingerprints, on the victim's car door—of a rather militant homosexual rights advocate who'd recently disappeared. Yet in each of these cases, the evidence just didn't smell right, and what there was of it was never enough to lead us anywhere."
"What are you saying?"
"Somebody was leaving us red herrings. Throwing us off the scent. Somebody with an exceedingly rare knowledge of the methods of certain foreign intelligence services, for example."
"Hey," Pratt said, "that reminds me—in the Eureka investigation, they found a piece of notebook paper bearing the logo for the local timber mill with the victim's license plate number written on it in the tank of a portable toilet at the trailhead near where he was shot."
"And Cornell will probably end up finding a threatening but curiously untraceable email sent to Egan from an anonymous user of a militant immigration, gay rights, or Islamist web site, or something like that," Arkin said. "And as with the sheet of timber mill notebook paper, it will seem just a hair too obvious vis-à-vis the otherwise thoroughly professional appearance of the shootings."
"So what does all that mean?" Pratt asked.
"One thing it means is that someone involved had, at least at one time, access to high-level intelligence information. That whoever is behind these killings is sophisticated."
"Not that sophisticated if they're killing people with the same model of an unusual Serbian gun," Morrison said. "Any idiot could see that a pattern like that would jump right off the page if anybody ever looked in the right places and began connecting the dots."
"I agree," Arkin said. "Using Zastavas is curiously sloppy tradecraft. But maybe the shooter is set in his ways. Maybe it was the gun he was trained on. Or maybe the shooter or his masters are confident nobody would ever be able to trace them anyway. Regardless, the al Nefud case went stone cold and was soon put in mothballs. At the time, everyone figured that was the end of the story. But a couple of years later, the case came back on us through an improbable channel. Exactly two weeks before al Nefud was killed, an illegal alien from Belize was caught jaywalking, of all the trivial things."
"They still cite people for jaywalking?" Pratt asked.
"In Seattle they do. Guy has a funny accent and no ID, so the street cop grabs him and SPD eventually turns him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The guy tells ICE he has information on an international terrorist group. Nobody takes him seriously. ICE assumes from the start, and quite understandably, that the guy is just grabbing at straws, looking for leverage to avoid deportation. Nevertheless, they're obliged to at least interview him because of his claim. So they put some overworked probationer on it, he takes the interview, and this Belizean jaywalker proceeds to tell him that an unnamed 'international terrorist group' has penetrated the upper echelons of the intelligence and law enforcement communities of numerous countries, including the United States, that they are in the business of assassinating political, religious, and social extremists, and that their leader is, of all things, a former Catholic priest from Baltimore, Maryland."
"A priest?" Pratt asked.
"A Jesuit priest."
"A lapsed Jesuit priest running a star chamber type of thing," Morrison said in a tone of wonder. "A star chamber targeting hatemongers. That would make a damned good movie."
"Or novel," Arkin said.
"Please. Who reads anymore?"
"Point. Anyway, the probationer ICE agent writes his report of the interview, which is graded as bullshit by their analysts before the ink has even dried, and promptly files the paperwork to deport this nut job back to Belize. Customs probably wouldn't have given it another thought, and would never have forwarded the laughable report of interview to us—allegations of terrorism or not—."
"Except," Morrison said.
"Except that 10 months after he was sent home to Belize, someone blew his head off with a high-powered rifle as he stood at a bus stop in Belmopan."
"With a Zastava?" Pratt asked.
"We don't know. The locals never recovered the bullet. At any rate, as a courtesy, the Belizean government sent ICE the locals' report of investigation a couple of months after the fact so that ICE could close their file. ICE eventually forwarded a copy of their file to us because of the dubious reference to terrorism. At DCI, the case rang old bells. Eventually, someone noticed the similarities with the killing of al Nefud. Then it landed on my desk. And to my absolute astonishment, this dead Belizean had, in his ICE interview, specifically named al Nefud as a target for imminent assassination by the group. Again, the ICE interview was conducted two weeks before Nefud was killed."
"Holy fuck," Morrison said.
"Indeed. That little tidbit, considered in light of the method by which the Belizean himself was later killed, gave him a new smell of legitimacy to say the least."
"So what did you do?"
"The ICE report of the interview was painfully light on detail. The guy was probably holding back on his good stuff until ICE took the bait and offered him asylum. Of course, that never happened. So all I had to go on was a few scraps of information on a Jesuit priest from Baltimore who supposedly faked his own death in Kentucky in 1974."
"Did the guy at least give you a name?"
"Father Collin Bryant."
"Did the name check out?"
"There was such a man at one time."
"And?"
"And he grew up in Baltimore. Born Saint Agnes Hospital, July 20, 1941. Color of hair, black. Color of eyes, blue. Height, 6-foot-4. Weight, at the time he renewed his last known driver's license, 240 pounds."
"You really remember all this?" Pratt asked. "Like, from your memory?"
"You want to know something strange?" Arkin said, ignoring Pratt's question. "Half the background section of Bryant's dossier reads just like Osama bin Laden's. You could switch their names and religions around on their files and fool half the profiling unit. Guy from a huge family, starved for love and attention from his absentee father, predictably ends up wrapped around the axle over his existential anxieties and runs straight for the comfort of the nearest available black-and-white fundamentalism, right?"
"If you say so."
"Collin was the eighth of ten children of the owner of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old family-owned commercial fishing company based in Baltimore. Grew up working summers on the family's long-liners, up and down the Atlantic seaboard, from the Grand Banks to the Outer Banks. At age seven,
he lost his older sister, Mary, after her grueling three-year battle with leukemia. Mary was, by all accounts, the Bryant sibling he was closest to. His best friend. Just three years his senior, and despite her own illness, she was credited by their other siblings as doing more to take care of young Collin than his own parents did. At any rate, after Mary's death, Collin fell into a depression that his mother described as lasting an unnaturally long time. Given that his mother grew up in a generation that just didn't talk about this sort of thing, it must have really been something for her to think it was worth mentioning to me decades later. By his 8th birthday, at his mother's insistence, he began an on-again-off-again pattern of psychiatric treatment—to match his on-again-off-again bouts with what would these days be diagnosed as acute depression—that would last until, at age 15, he declared his intent to enter the priesthood. At that point, his disposition, from his psychiatrist's point of view, seemed to stabilize rather abruptly. And he began to thrive."
"During his junior year, he won a State of Maryland essay contest with a wave-generating story about the unequal treatment of African Americans at the hands of the Baltimore Police Department. He was valedictorian of Mount Saint Joseph High School and captain of the football team as a senior. A handsome fellow. One acquaintance even described him as having, quote, fashion model good looks, unquote. In a nutshell, your stereotypical apple pie eating, all-American young man, at least on the surface. Went to Jesuit seminary straight from high school. Following ordination, his first assignment took him to Appalachia. A small coal town, up-hollow in a forgotten corner of the Maryland panhandle. After he cut his teeth there for two years, he was sent to start a new parish in Royburg, Kentucky—a small, dirt poor black town on the Mississippi River, near the Tennessee border. A town that happened to be just across the river and downwind from what was, at the time, a secret factory that manufactured HD for artillery shells."
"HD?" Pratt asked.
"Distilled mustard agent. A chemical weapon of biblically horrific effect. Like something out of the dark ages. Anyway, Father Bryant, being a bright and charismatic young priest, got his new parish up and running in short order. Holy Trinity Catholic Church. The community embraced him. They celebrated mass in a borrowed elementary school cafeteria. He heard confessions in the kitchen, set up his rectory in a little shotgun house next door, and things were going along swimmingly."
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