Jack drew his weapon and got out of the machine. He left the engine running in case he had to make a quick getaway. He dropped into a crouch, sheltering behind the SUV.
It wasn’t bulletproof, but at least it provided some cover. Not only from any ambusher who might be lurking in or around Rhee’s car, but also from any lurkers in the restroom facility.
Jack’s outfit included a long-billed baseball cap and sunglasses. Long experience in desert conditions at home and abroad had taught him not to go out under the naked sun bareheaded or without eye protection. The sunglasses, a wraparound polarized pair, were particularly essential. The pitiless desert sun, especially at these high altitudes, could easily affect the eyes of unacclimated outsiders, quickly inducing vision problems and even sun blindness.
The air was perfectly still, without a breath of wind. The heat was broiling. The temperature must have been crowding the hundred-degree mark, a relatively moderate temperature for the area at this time of the day and season.
Jack circled around the front of the SUV, gun leveled, approaching in a low crouch Rhee’s car from the driver’s side. He kept the car between himself and the restroom blockhouse. Nearing it he saw that the interior and windows were sprayed red.
He went down on one knee beside the car, keeping his head below the cover of the top of the door line. He peeked under the vehicle, making sure that no one was hiding beneath or in front of it.
He popped up, gun pointing through the open driver’s side at the interior. Its sole occupant was the corpse that lay crumpled in the front seat.
Jack kept moving, circling the car to rush the concrete blockhouse of the restroom facility. A door in the north wall was marked “Ladies.” He flattened his back against the wall to the left of the door.
Crouching low to present a minimal target, he ducked around the northeast corner, ready to put the blast on any hostiles who might be lurking behind the back of the building. The area came up empty.
He padded soft-footed to the southeast corner and ducked around it to come up on the building’s east side where the men’s room was located. No one on that side, either.
Next came the nerve-racking task of clearing the inside of the facility. He probed the men’s room first, not neglecting to check the stall. It was clean, stark, and functional, smelling of disinfectant and flinty dust. Unoccupied, save for himself.
The ladies’ room came up clear, too, and he went back outside. A blur of motion approached from the south driving north. It was the first vehicle to pass either way in the last ten minutes. It was moving along at a nice clip, about sixty miles an hour. A light blue pickup truck.
As it neared, Jack realized he was standing there with his gun in hand. He lowered it to his side and turned so that his body shielded it from the oncoming vehicle’s occupants.
The pickup truck drove by without slowing. Jack caught a glimpse of a man in a cowboy hat behind the wheel and a woman seated beside him. A couple of young men in work shirts and jeans sat in the hopper behind the cab, talking and laughing.
One of them waved to Jack and he raised a hand back in friendly greeting.
A rancher and his wife and some hands going into town on a Saturday afternoon, Jack guessed. A vignette of everyday normality that made the murder scene seem even more macabre by comparison.
The pickup dwindled to a dot in the northbound lane and winked out of sight.
Jack glanced at the picnic tables under a handful of thin, threadbare trees whose leaves were filmed with dust. No place for anyone to hide there. He couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to picnic at this forlorn locale; it would be like picnicking on Mars.
Jack holstered his weapon and went to the driver’s side of the car. He walked carefully, watching his step. The un-paved rest area consisted of dirt and gravel. There was a chance that the loose-packed dirt might contain the killer’s footprints or the tire tracks of his vehicle.
Or her vehicle. Why should the killer be a man? The assassin who’d tried for Jack was a woman. To assume that the killer was male was to disarm one’s suspicions by half and allow for a possibly fatal mistake. Had Peter Rhee made such a fatal assumption?
In any case, the ground might hold valuable clues that could be picked up by forensics experts. Jack wanted to leave as minimal a footprint as possible while still surveying the scene.
Nearing the car, Jack noticed something so significant that it brought him to a sudden halt. The ground around the car had been smoothed out to destroy any telltale marks. Sanitized by the killer to erase all traces of evidence.
Regular swirl patterns disturbed the gravel-strewn, reddish-brown dirt, indicating that it had been raked or smoothed over. Not just the immediate area surrounding the car but an extensive patch to the left of it.
Car-sized? Could that be where the killer had parked his vehicle? It, too, had been smoothed over, obliterating not only any footprints but also any telltale tire tread marks as well.
Jack walked in a straight line to Rhee’s car and peered through the open driver’s side window. The interior resembled a slaughterhouse. Blood splattered the roof, windows, windshields, dashboard, and seats.
Peter Rhee didn’t have much of a face left. Not much of a head left, either.
He lay sprawled across the front seat of his parked car. He must have been sitting behind the wheel when the blast got him, and the impact had blown him out of the driver’s seat, leaving him contorted in the throes of sudden, violent death.
His upper body lay on its side on the passenger seat. His legs were together and bent at the knees and his feet were on the floor on the driver’s side. His head and shoulders were wedged against the passenger side door. His right arm hung down off the edge of the seat cushion, his hand dangling a few inches above the passenger side floor mat.
Jack Bauer’s estimate that the delays at the motel would cause him to be about ten minutes late for his noontime meeting with Peter Rhee had been just about right.
Once he’d gotten off the highway trip and onto the open road he’d made good time getting to the rendezvous. But a killer had gotten there before him.
Peter Rhee had been shot in the face at point-blank range. And not with any mere handgun, either, not even a big-caliber job like a .357 or .44 Magnum. From the looks of the devastation he must have been on the receiving end of a shotgun blast.
No question that the dead man was Peter Rhee, though. The Korean-American counterintelligence officer had had a distinctively shaped hairline and ears that Jack had taken note of during earlier meetings.
Jack tried to put himself in the killer’s head. Why a shotgun? Even a sawed-off job had a certain unwieldiness compared to a handgun. It was pointless to destroy the victim’s face to conceal his identity because that could be determined by a simple fingerprint check.
Terror? That was a possibility. A shotgun was an intimidating weapon that made a real mess. Maybe the kill had been handled that way to terrorize, to throw some fear into anyone foolish enough to get mixed up in the action. Bauer had seen the tactic before from professional killers like Annihilax.
Another question: How had a shotgun-wielding killer gotten the drop on a veteran operative like Peter Rhee?
Jack stuck his head through the open window. Not so pleasant but he found out a few things. Rhee was armed. The bulge of his shoulder-holstered gun was visible beneath his jacket. Why hadn’t he used it?
There were no car keys in the ignition. Rhee’s jacket and pants pockets were turned out, indicating they’d been searched. The glove compartment was open — also searched?
Jack stepped back, taking a few deep breaths. The super-heated air rasped in his lungs. Absently glancing down, he noticed something: a circular hole had been punched into the ground near the undercarriage between the driver’s side door and rear door.