He’d heard construction jobs were still plentiful in New Orleans after Katrina. And people, desperate for workers, didn’t ask for tricky things like Social Security numbers and permanent addresses. At this point in his life Stone did not like questions or numbers that would lead anyone to know who he really was. His plan was to lose himself in a mass of humanity trying to rebuild from a nightmare not of its own making. He could relate to that very well, because he was basically trying to do the very same thing. Except for those two final shots. Those he’d intended with every pulsating nerve of anger and sense of justice denied he possessed.
As the train bumped along in the darkness Stone sat in his chair and stared out the window. In the reflection he studied the young woman who sat next to him holding a baby, her feet perched on a battered duffel bag and a pillowcase crammed with what looked to be bottles, diapers and changes of clothes for the infant. They were both asleep; the child’s chest nestled against its mother’s swollen bosom. Stone turned to look at the child with its triple chins and doughy fists. The baby suddenly opened its eyes and stared at him. Surprisingly it didn’t cry; it didn’t make one sound, in fact.
Across the aisle a rail-thin man was eating a cheeseburger he’d bought in the station, a bottle of Heineken cradled between bony knees covered by patched denim. Next to him was a young, tall, good-looking man with brown, tousled hair and a few days’ worth of stubble on his unmarked face. He had the lean, lanky build and confident moves of a former high school quarterback not yet run to fat. This was not exactly a guess on Stone’s part, because the kid was wearing his high school varsity jacket dripping with medals, letters and ribbons. The year stitched on the jacket told Stone that the kid had been out of high school for a few years. Long time to be holding on to the glory days, Stone thought, but maybe that was all the kid had.
To Stone’s eye the young man also had the look of someone who was certain that the world owed him everything and had never bothered paying its bill. As Stone watched, he rose, climbed over the cheeseburger man and headed to the rear of the car and through the door into the next train car.
Stone reached over and gently touched the baby’s fist, receiving a barely audible coo in return. While the infant’s life was all in front of him, Stone’s was drawing closer to the end.
Well, they would have to find him first. He owed that to an authority that was often callous to the people who served it with the greatest loyalty, with the most quietly suffered sacrifice.
He leaned back in his seat and watched Washington disappear as the train rattled on.
CHAPTER 3
JOE KNOX HAD BEEN READING in the small library of his town house in northern Virginia when the phone rang. The speaker was economical with his words and Knox, from long experience, did not interrupt. He hung up the phone, laid aside his novel, pulled on his raincoat and boots, grabbed the keys to his scuffed up ten-year-old Range Rover and headed out into the foul weather for an equally foul task.
An inch over six feet with the thick, muscular build of the undersized linebacker he had once been in college, Knox was in his fifties with thinning hair that he still had barber-shop cut and then slicked back. He also possessed a pair of pale green eyes that were the human equivalent of an MRI: they missed nothing. He gripped the wheel of the Rover with long fingers that had pulled just about every trigger there was while in service to his country. From his secluded, forested neighborhood he turned on to Chain Bridge Road in McLean, Virginia. The traffic would still be heavy on the Beltway this time of morning. Actually, there was really no longer a time when the asphalt noose around the capital city’s neck wasn’t strangled with cars. He pointed his SUV toward the District and backtracked his way to eastern Maryland from there. Eventually he smelled the sea, and with it he envisioned the murder scene. All in a day’s work.
Three hours later he was walking around the truck as fat raindrops pelted down. Carter Gray still sat in his seat-belt harness, his head destroyed and his life ended by what appeared to be a long-range rifle round, although the postmortem would confirm that. While police, FBI and forensic teams buzzed everywhere like bluebottle flies, looking for some place to land and do their business, Joe Knox squatted in front of the white grave marker and small American flag planted in front of it by the side of the road. It was on a curve. The motorcade would have slowed here. A curious Gray had obviously seen these two items and rolled down his window—a fatal mistake.
Grave marker and American flag. Just like at Arlington National. An interesting and perhaps telling choice.
The fact that the windows rolled down showed Knox that the vehicle wasn’t armored. Such vehicles’ windows were phone-book thick and did not move. Gray had made his second mistake there.
Should’ve asked for the armor, Carter. You were important enough.
This wasn’t baseball, Knox knew. In his business, it never took more than two strikes to finish you.
Knox looked off into the distance, tracing in his mind the trajectory of the lethal round. None of the protection detail had seen any sign of a shooter, so he had to cast the potential flight path out farther where the optic and muzzle signatures would be nearly invisible to the naked eye.
Thousand yards? Fifteen hundred? To a target inside a vehicle revealed only through a barely two-by-two-foot opening in the dark and drizzle. And planted the bullet right in the brain.
Remarkable shot any way you look at it. No luck there. A pro.
Revealing again.
He rose and nodded at one of the uniforms. Knox wore his ID badge on a lanyard around his neck. When everyone had seen what his official ties were they had been deferential and also given him a wide berth, like he had an incurable and contagious disease.
And maybe I do.
The cop opened the door of the Escalade and Knox peered inside. The shot had hit dead center of the right temple. There was no exit wound. The round was still in the brain. The postmortem would dig it out. Not that he needed the autopsy report to tell him what had killed the man. Blood and bits of flesh and skull had embedded in parts of the SUV’s interior. Knox doubted the government would be reusing this ride. It would probably go the way of JFK’s limo. It was bad luck, bad karma, call it what you would, but no other VIP would want to rest his butt in the dead man’s seat, sterilized or not.
Gray didn’t appear as though he were sleeping. He simply looked dead. No one had bothered to close the man’s eyes. His glasses had been blown off on impact from the kinetically energized round. The result had Gray perpetually staring at whoever looked back at him.
Knox lifted one of his gloved hands and shut the eyelids. It was out of respect. He’d known Gray well. He hadn’t always agreed with the man or his methods, but he’d respected him. If their positions were reversed, he hoped Gray would’ve done the same for him.
The briefing papers Gray had been reading had been collected already by the CIA. National security trumped even homicide. Knox highly doubted that whatever the CIA chief had been reading at the moment of his death would be connected to his murder, but one never knew.
Yet if they could have read the man’s mind in his last moments of life? When he stared out at that grave marker and that flag?
Knox’s gut was telling him that Gray knew exactly who had killed him. And maybe others at the Agency did too. If so, they were letting him go through the motions on his own. He wondered why for a second and then stopped. It was tricky business trying to figure out what the hell went on behind closed doors at Langley. The only thing you could count on as the real truth was as convoluted as anything you’d find in popular fiction.
He left the corpse and mentally processed the facts as he stared off toward the Atlantic.
Gray’s home had been blown up over six months ago, the man barely escaping with his life. Knox had been briefed via secure phone on the drive over. Any suspects involved in that matter were not to be considered to be involved in Gray’s murder, he’d been told. This directive had come from the high
est levels and he had no choice but to defer to it. Yet, still, he filed that away in the back of his head. For him the truth should not come with qualifiers or conditions, if for no other reason than that he might need it as ammo to cover his own ass at some point.
He drove to Gray’s home, made a brief inspection of the interior, found nothing of interest there, and then walked toward the cliff at the rear of the property. He stared down at the thrashing water of the bay below before glancing out at the fully formed storm front that was not making the nearby murder investigation any easier. Knox eyed the fringe of woods that ran by the right side of the house. He walked through the trees and quickly calculated that a path through here would take one up to the gravel road that Gray’s motorcade had used.
He looked back at the cliffs.
And wondered if it was possible.
With the right man there was only one answer to that question.
Yes.
He climbed back in his Rover and headed to the second murder scene.
Roger Simpson.
The great state of Alabama was suddenly one senator short.
And without even seeing the circumstances of Simpson’s death, Knox instinctively knew he was looking for only one killer.
Just one.