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.