“Afraid not,” Kyle said. “This thing may just have jumped way above the pay grades of everybody here, including us.”
“Whoa up. You found something!” Payton exclaimed. “I know when somebody gets a hunch about a murder.”
Swanson looked at the cop. “This is a personal guess, with nothing to back it up, Detective Payton. Totally speculative, but based on my experience.”
“Talk to me, son.”
“You’ve got to make it plural now. There were two killers here tonight, not just one.”
“How’s that? The neighbors heard only one shot.”
“Glass does specific things to a bullet on impact,” Swanson said, falling unconsciously into his sniper-lecture mode. “It changes the trajectory, depending on the thickness of the glass, and causes the round to lose its point of aim. The first shot did nothing but blow out the window. Then a second shot was fired only a half second later. It would easily have blended into one noise for someone not paying attention. Witnesses really would believe they heard a single sound.”
Detective Jones interrupted. “Only one bullet was found.”
Kyle changed his angle to face the dock so he could use his hands to frame what happened. “A single bullet like a 7.62 would have just punched a hole in the glass before hitting the target, leaving the window intact. So Shooter One used a smaller round, like a 5.56 millimeter, to totally shatter the glass, which is why there are so many shards inside. That allowed a clear path for Shooter Two’s 7.62 round to impact the victim. Your forensic people saw only a single wound, therefore expected to find one bullet, and they found it.”
“Our crime scene people would not have missed something like that.” Jones put an edge on the comment.
“No criticism intended, Detective,” said Kyle. “But did they really conduct a detailed study of the entire room? Most likely, they will find the second bullet in there somewhere, probably imbedded in the wall behind that fiddle-leaf and the other big plants in the corner. Shooter One would have aimed at a place where the bullet would do its job of taking out the window but would neither cause the target to shift nor be easily found.”
“You know about this sort of thing?”
“Seen it once or twice.”
“So you think we’re dealing with some trained snipers?”
“Not really, but they were obviously good enough as marksmen with military training. Shooter Two actually missed his target. No sniper aims for the throat, because the target zone is too narrow. That’s movie stuff. And the bad weather would have affected the bullet’s path.” Kyle pounded his fist into his palm for emphasis. “A big round right into center mass, the chest, is much easier, and death is just as certain.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” said Jones, putting the picture together in his mind. “Suddenly, I’m wishing this was just a drug hit.”
Payton gave a long look to Sybelle and Kyle, and seemed to deflate. “Shit. Now I gotta call the FBI. You two might as well stick around. It’s gonna be a while.” He stomped through the snow back out to the comm center that was set up in the boathouse, muttering to himself.
3
Yahya Naqdi was running for his life. He was ten years old and scared. The sand and rock of the desert pulled at his sandals like a hungry thing holding him rooted to the spot, immobile on a plain of sudden, ugly death. Explosions and screams, shrapnel and fire, and dirt, dirt, dirt everywhere; it filled his nostrils and his eyes and his mouth. The voices of soldiers behind him were bellowing for him to run straight and hard at the enemy, for he was in the lead element of the Army of Twenty Million, and they were surging forward in a human wave attack against the entrenched Iraqis. Despite the religious cries of the mullahs, the threats of his own Iranian sergeants and the thrill of becoming a martyr and going to paradise, he had come to a halt in the middle of the screaming charge when his best friend, only twenty feet beyond, stepped on a land mind and was blown to pieces. The bloody head bounced back toward Naqdi like a soccer ball with white eyes. There was a thundering drum roll of explosions as dozens more mines were triggered. The concussion of another blast smacked the boy hard, knocking him to his knees. He bent forward and vomited, then fell into the bile when a piece of flying shrapnel knocked him on the back of the head and tore away a slice of scalp. More boys ran over him, calling at the top of their lungs that God was good. That was the plan: Thousands of boys would dash through the minefields to clear the way for the real attack. The last thing he had heard was the Iraqi artillery starting to fire to rain even more destruction on the charge of the children. While he lay unconscious on the battlefield, more sharp metal tore at his body.
He came out of the dream sweating and clutching the sheets in fear. He coughed once, twice, hacking to spit the dirt from his mouth, to breathe through clogged nostrils. For more than thirty years since the Iran-Iraq War, he had been haunted by the terrible dream of his friend’s head skidding along, bloody and sightless, and staring back at him from paradise.
He lay in bed as his breathing slowed and the terror faded. He had never married, for he would never let anyone detect this weakness. Better to be alone than pitied and ridiculed behind his back. He threw off the covers and began the daily ritual of again becoming Colonel Yahya Naqdi, the feared and mysterious intelligence officer who ran foreign clandestine operations for Iran’s Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.
He slid his feet into comfortable slippers and walked naked across the carpet of the comfortable hotel suite in downtown Cairo, avoiding looking in the mirror. A tiny refrigerator yielded a chilled carton of orange juice, which he drank while the shower warmed to the proper temperature. Within the glassed cubicle, clean water, foamy shampoo, and a good scrubbing sluiced away the filth that accumulated with the dream. He turned off the shower and dried with a soft towel, and only then allowed the mirror to throw his image back at him. It was a disturbing sight.
Two puckered scars were on his right shoulder from where bullets had struck him in an alley in Istanbul during a mission gone bad early in his career. A healed knife slash curled up from his left hip, another memory, this one from Beirut. The long, ragged one across his stomach dated back to when he had almost been gutted by shrapnel during the children’s charge. He did not bother to turn and see the others on his back. Fingertips traced the old scar in his scalp, and he turned away from the reflection.
He applied body powder and deodorant, then took his time shaving close to the skin. Other Muslims were sometimes offended by his not having a beard, but Naqdi ignored them, for he walked among the barbarians, and a long, unruly, dirty beard would be as good as a beaming light to identify him as a terrorist. Anyway, in his heart, he had no time for Allah, or God, or Buddha, or any other superstitious nonsense. Prayers were a waste of time. You are who you are, and when you die, you are dead, and that is truly the end. There is no paradise, no heaven, no afterlife. He still performed the ritual prayers to Allah if among Muslims, because not doing so would draw attention; he did not listen to the words he recited.
He carefully brushed his hair and energetically scrubbed his teeth, attacking his gums hard with the bristles. Personal hygiene was important, for details were important. He cleaned his manicured nails, then washed his hands again, and imaginary dirt still clung to him.