The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

After the door closed Rashid stepped to the window and looked out. The man climbed into a Mercedes, which sagged port side. The diesel purred to life and the black vehicle bounded down the drive, leaving a dust cloud.

Rashid remained at the window for ten minutes. No sign of surveillance, no neighbors glancing uneasily as they passed by. No curtains dropping back over windows. Dogs stood about unsuspicious and no disembodied barks suggested intruders in unseen places nearby.

From the bedroom suite he heard voices. And then a soft noise he couldn't place at first, uneven, rising, falling in volume and tone. It grew regular and he knew the sound was a child's crying. The little girl. She'd been told she was going home but she wouldn't appreciate that. She wanted to be there now, with her stuffed toy, her bed, her blanket.

Rashid thought of his sister, who, with two schoolmates, was killed in Gaza. His sister...not much older than this girl. She hadn't had a chance to cry.

Rashid sipped more tea and examined the diagrams, listening to the mournful sound of the girl, which seemed all the more heart wrenching for being muted by the walls, as if she were a ghost trapped forever in this dusty tomb.

CHAPTER 69

THE PHRASE "KILL ROOM" suggested something out of a science-fiction movie or the operations center in the TV show 24.

But the National Intelligence and Operations Service's Ground Control Station was a dingy space that looked like a storage area in a medium-sized insurance business or ad agen

cy. It was housed in a fifteen-by-forty-foot trailer and was divided into two rooms. The office area was where you entered from the NIOS parking lot. Lining the wall were cardboard cartons of varying ages, cryptic writing on them, some empty, some containing documents or paper cups or cleaning supplies. A communications center, unoccupied at the moment. Computers. A battered gray desk and brown chair were in one corner and old, unclassified files littered it, as if a secretary had grown tired of finding the right drawer for them and had just given up. A broom, a box of empty Vitaminwater bottles, a broken lamp sat on the floor. Newspapers. Light bulbs. Computer circuit boards. Wires. A Runner's World magazine.

For decorations, maps of the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada and Central America, as well as of Iraq, and several OSHA posters warning about the dangers of lifting heavy loads with a bent back and not drinking enough water on hot days.

The place was dim; the overheads were rarely on. As if secrets kept better in hinted light.

You tended not to notice the shabbiness of the office, however, because of the other half of the trailer: The UAV operations station, visible through a thick glass wall.

Men and women like Barry Shales, the pilots and sensor operators, tended to refer to the operations station as a cockpit, which nobody seemed to mind, though the word "drone" was discouraged. Maybe "unmanned aerial vehicle" sounded more sophisticated or sanitized. This term was certainly better--from a public relations view--than what UAVs were called among those who flew them: FFAs, or Fuckers From Above.

Wearing dress slacks and a tie-less short-sleeved blue plaid shirt, slim Barry Shales was sitting in a comfortable overstuffed tan leather chair, which was more like Captain Kirk's in Star Trek than a seat in a jet's cockpit. Before him was a three-foot-by-eighteen-inch tabletop metal control board, bristling with dozens of knobs and buttons, switches and readouts, as well as two joysticks. He was not touching them at the moment. The autopilot was flying UAV N-397.

The computer's being in charge was standard procedure at this point in a Special Task Order operation, which involved just getting the bird in the general area of the target. Shales didn't mind being copilot for the moment. He was having trouble concentrating today. He kept thinking about his prior assignment.

The one NIOS had gotten so wrong.

He recalled the intel about the chemicals for Moreno's IED--the nitromethane, the diesel fuel, the fertilizer--that were going to reduce the oil company's headquarters in Miami to a smoking crater. The intel about Moreno's vicious attacks on America, calling for violent assaults on citizens. The intel about the activist's reconnaissance of the embassies in Mexico and Costa Rica, planning to blow them to kingdom come too.

They'd been so sure...

And they'd been so wrong.

Wrong about avoiding collateral damage too. De la Rua and the guard.

The primary point of the Long-Range Rifle program at NIOS was to minimize, ideally eliminate, collateral, which was impossible to do when you fired missiles.

And the first time it had been tried in an actual mission, what had happened?

Innocents dead.

Shales had hovered the UAV craft perfectly over the waters of Clifton Bay in the Bahamas, sighted through the leaves of a tree outside with a clear infrared and radar vision of Moreno, double-confirmed it was he, compensated for wind and elevation and fired shots only when the task was standing alone in front of the window.

Shales knew in his heart that only Moreno would die.

But there was that one little matter that had never occurred to him, to anyone: the window.

Who could have thought that the glass would be so lethal?

Wasn't his fault...But if he believed that, if he believed he was innocent of any wrongdoing, then why had he been in the john last night puking?

Just a bit of the flu, honey...No, no, I'm okay.

And why was he having more and more trouble sleeping?