“Maybe he doesn’t know,” Sellitto said.
Sachs: “Looks like he knows everything else. His conscience extends up to a certain point. He’ll dime out the head of the organization but he’s sympathetic toward the guy who got the assignment to shoot.”
Laurel said, “I agree. The whistleblower has to know. I want him too. Not to prosecute, just for information. He’s our best lead to the sniper — and without the sniper there’s no conspiracy and no case.”
Sachs said, “Even if we find him he’s not going to tell us willingly. Otherwise he already would have.”
Laurel said absently, “You get me the whistleblower…and he’ll talk. He’ll talk.”
Sachs asked, “Any consideration about going after Metzger for the other deaths, the guard and that reporter, de la Rua?”
“No, since only Moreno was named in the kill order and they were collateral damage we didn’t want to muddy the waters.”
Sachs’s sour expression seemed to say: even though they were just as dead as the target. Can’t confuse the precious jury, can we?
Rhyme said, “Give me the details of the killing itself.”
“We have very little. The Bahamian police gave us a preliminary report, then everything shut down from them. They’re not returning calls. What we know is that Moreno was in his suite when he was shot.” She indicated the STO. “Suite twelve hundred. The Kill Room, they’re calling it. The sniper was shooting from an outcrop of land about two thousand yards from the hotel.”
“Well, that’s one hell of a shot,” Sachs said, eyebrows rising. She was quite a marksman, competed in shooting matches often and held records in the NYPD and in private competitions, though she favored handguns over rifles. “We call that a million-dollar bullet. The record for a sniper’s about twenty-five hundred yards. Whoever it was, that shooter’s got some skill.”
“Well, that’s good news for us,” Laurel continued. “Narrows down the field of suspects.”
True, Rhyme reflected. “What else do we have?”
“Nothing.”
That’s all? Some emails, a leaked government document, the name of one conspirator.
And notably absent was the one thing Rhyme needed the most: evidence.
Which was sitting somewhere hundreds of miles away, in a different jurisdiction — hell, in a different country.
Here he was, a crime scene expert without a crime scene.
CHAPTER 9
Shreve Metzger sat at his desk in lower Manhattan, motionless, as a band of morning light, reflected off a high-rise nearby, fell across his arm and chest.
Staring at the Hudson River, he was recalling the horror yesterday as he’d read the encrypted text from NIOS’s surveillance department. The outfit was no more skillful than the CIA’s or NSA’s, but wasn’t quite so visible, which meant it wasn’t quite so hobbled by the inconvenience of FISA warrants and the like. And that in turn meant the quality of its information was golden.
Yesterday, early Sunday evening, Metzger had been at his daughter’s soccer game, an important one — against the Wolverines, a formidable opponent. He wouldn’t have left his seat in the stands, dead center on the field, for anything.
He trod lightly when it came to the children, he’d learned all too well.
But as he pulled on his light-framed glasses — after cleaning the lenses — and read the perplexing then troubling then shattering words, the Smoke formed, fast and unyielding, more a gel than vapor, and it closed around him. Suffocating. He found himself quivering, jaw clenched, hands clenched, heart clenched.
Metzger had recited: I can handle this. This is part of the job. I knew there was a risk of getting found out. He’d reminded himself: The Smoke doesn’t define you; it’s not part of you. You can make it float away if you want. But you have to want. Just let it go.
He’d calmed a bit, unclenched fingers tapping his bony leg in dress slacks (other soccer dads were in jeans but he hadn’t been able to change between office and field). Metzger was five ten and three-quarters and clocked in about 150 pounds. Formerly fat, as a boy, he’d melted the weight away and never let it return. His thinning brown hair was a bit long for government service but that’s the way he liked it and he wasn’t going to change.
Yesterday, as he put the phone away, the twelve-year-old midfielder had turned toward his section in the stands and smiled. Metzger had grinned back. It was fake and maybe Katie knew it. Wished they sold scotch but this was middle school in Bronxville, New York, so caffeine was the strongest offering on the menu, though the Woodrow Wilson PTO’s kick-ass cookies and blondies gave you a high of sorts.
Anyway, liquor was not the way to defeat the Smoke.
Dr. Fischer, I believe you. I think.
He’d returned to the office last night and tried to make sense of the news: Some crusading assistant district attorney in Manhattan was coming after him for Moreno’s death. A lawyer himself, Metzger added up the possible counts and knew the biggest, bluntest truncheon would be conspiracy.
And he’d been even more shocked that the DA’s Office had learned of Moreno’s death because the Special Task Order had been leaked.
A fucking whistleblower!
A traitor. To me, to NIOS, and — worst of all — to the nation. Oh, that had brought the Smoke back. He’d had an image of himself beating the prosecutor, whoever he or she was, to death with a shovel — he never knew the themes his rage would take. And this fantasy, particularly bloody and with a gruesome soundtrack, both mystified and viscerally satisfied with its vivacity and persistence.
When he’d calmed, Metzger had set to work, making calls and sending texts wrapped in the chrysalis of sublime encryption, to do what he could to make the problem go away.
Now, Monday morning, he turned from the river and stretched. He was more or less functioning, after a grand total of four hours’ sleep (very bad; fatigue gives the Smoke strength) and a shower in the NIOS gym. In his twenty-by-twenty office, bare except for safes, cabinets, computers, a few pictures, books and maps, Metzger sipped his latte. He’d bought his personal assistant the same — Ruth’s had been assembled with soy milk. He wondered if he should try that. She claimed the substance was a relaxer.
He regarded the framed picture of himself and his children on a vacation in Boone, North Carolina. He recalled the horseback ride at the tourist stable. Afterward an employee had taken this souvenir snap of the three of them. Metzger had noted that the camera the cowboy-clad employee had used was a Nikon, the same company that made the scopes his snipers used in Iraq. Thinking specifically of one of his men firing a Lapua.338 round 1,860 yards into the shoulder of an Iraqi about to detonate an IED. It’s not like the movies; a round like that will kill you pretty much anywhere it strikes. Shoulder, leg, anywhere. That insurgent had simply come apart and fallen to the sand, as Shreve Metzger exhaled with warm peace and joy.
Smile, Mr. Metzger. You have wonderful children. Do you want three eight-by-tens and a dozen wallet pictures?
There was no Smoke inside him when he was planning and executing the death of a traitor. None at all. He’d told that to Dr. Fischer. The psychiatrist had seemed uneasy and they didn’t explore that theme further.
Metzger glanced at his computer and at his magic phone.
His pale eyes — a hazel color he didn’t care for, yellowish green, sickly — looked out his window again at the slice of Hudson River, the view courtesy of a handful of psychotic fools, who, one clear September day, had removed the buildings that interfered with that vista. And who had inadvertently, to their surviving compatriots’ loss, driven Metzger into his new profession.