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

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.