Kill Shot. Don Pendleton

to computerized record keeping, so most of the VA information is likely in a filing cabinet at the VA hospital in Minneapolis. But if the guy was active military when he had the surgery, which seems likely, given his age, his records should be on file with the Pentagon.”

      “Can you hack into those records?” Bolan asked.

      “I already have,” Kurtzman replied, “or at least what’s left of them. They appear to have been altered.” He paused. “Well, altered isn’t exactly the correct word. Destroyed would be more accurate. I found a record of the hardware being delivered to Minneapolis, but no purchase order, no information on who ordered it and no information on the end user. All that information appears to have been purged from the system.”

      “How is that possible?” Bolan asked.

      “It’s not, at least in theory,” Kurtzman replied. “Whoever did this had some help in extremely high places.”

      “How high?” Bolan asked.

      “I’d almost have to say as high as the office of the President,” Kurtzman said, “but that’s highly unlikely.”

      “Where do we go from here?” Bolan asked.

      “We’ll start looking into possibilities at the highest level of government,” the computer expert said. “And I mean the highest.”

      “I’ll head to Minneapolis to see if I can learn anything at the VA hospital,” Bolan said. “The electronic records may have been destroyed, but maybe there’s still some information hidden in the physical records.”

      Bridgeport, Connecticut

      THE FEAR EVERYONE ACROSS the United States felt as noon approached the following day hung over the country like the shimmering haze created by the unseasonably warm spring weather. Much of the country had, in fact, shut down, and work ground to a halt because many people were too afraid to leave their houses.

      Jim Parkinson counted himself among the fearful who remained indoors as noon approached, though that wasn’t too difficult for him since he worked at home. Parkinson really wasn’t afraid of the squads of snipers that seemed to have descended on the entire nation. In fact, he was secretly grateful; the chaos couldn’t have come at a better time. For the previous decade Parkinson, a British expatriate, had been embezzling huge sums of money from the publishing house for which he worked, for which he’d been the CEO for twenty years. About ten years earlier he’d been punted aside, replaced by a much younger man and given the lofty title of “Senior Vice President of Global Publishing.”

      Senior vice president of nothing, Parkinson thought. If he went into the offices once per month it was a busy month, and if he skipped his monthly visit, he was dead certain that no one missed his presence. He’d been replaced because the then-new owners of the company had wanted to hire someone who was more resourceful. It was at that moment that Parkinson decided to show them the meaning of the word resourceful. No one knew the intricacies of the publishing house’s finances like Parkinson—he’d been the one who set up the system back when he’d been the company’s original comptroller. He was the only person who really understood how it worked, and he also knew how to skim large amounts of money without anyone ever finding out. For the past decade he’d been siphoning off over $1 million per year and laundering it through a dummy corporation in the Cayman Islands.

      Now, with the country roiling from the turmoil caused by the previous day’s sniper attacks, he had the perfect opportunity to bail out, go spend the rest of his days sipping icy rum cocktails on a sandy beach of his choosing. He was at that very moment checking flight schedules, planning to get out of the country before all flights in and out were canceled. In his address to the nation the previous night, the President had said that he intended for business as usual to continue, but there were rumors that the federal government was making plans very much counter to the President’s public statements. Parkinson had heard that those plans included shutting down all international airports.

      Parkinson looked at the clock on the right side of the lower toolbar on his computer screen and saw that it was one minute until noon. He sat at the kitchen table of his seventh-story apartment where he had a terrific view of Bridgeport Harbor, sipping a cup of coffee while he scheduled his flight. At exactly noon he looked outside to see if he could detect any action. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t see anyone dying, and he didn’t see any terrorist snipers. Most importantly for him, he didn’t see the man on the roof of the building across the street, aiming a high-powered rifle at his kitchen window. And he didn’t see the .30-caliber bullet that sped directly at his forehead, spraying his brains across the stainless-steel appliances and leaving more than $10 million orphaned in the account of a fictional company headquartered in the Caymen Islands.

      Kansas City, Missouri

      PETER SCHLETTY DOUBTED his career path. He’d wanted to be a cop since he was old enough to know what a cop was. He’d excelled in the police academy and had landed a sweet job with the Kansas City Police Department upon graduating. Up until a couple of days prior, it had been the job of his dreams. Schletty was an exceptionally intelligent person, with an IQ of 165. This made him smarter than ninety percent of the world’s civilians and smarter than ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of all police officers.

      In some ways his intelligence had been a hindrance in his career as an officer because it caused him to question exceptionally stupid orders, but overall it had put him on the fast track for advancement because, frankly, most of his colleagues could politely be described as dolts. In his less charitable moments, Schletty conjured the word retards, but his politic sensibilities kept him from ever uttering such insensitive terminology aloud.

      Instead, he just kept such commentary to himself and went about his work with the utmost skill and dedication. As a result, he’d found himself on the career fast track, rising through the ranks faster than most of his compatriots, earning their respect in the process. Until the past couple of days he’d felt he earned that respect, but the insane events of the past two days had caused him to doubt his own abilities.

      Yesterday there had been a murder in Kansas City. That was not unusual—the city had a fairly high murder rate, double the national average, in fact. But yesterday’s murder had been unlike any since Schletty had joined the force in that it had been part of a coordinated murder spree that had occurred across the entire country, from Maine to Hawaii.

      Yesterday’s murders had all occurred exactly at the stroke of noon, and at noon eastern time this day another wave of murders had occurred on the East Coast. In all, at least 127 people had been killed in the eastern time zone. Given that, it didn’t take an IQ of 165, Schletty knew, to predict that a whole shitload of people were about to be assassinated in the central time zone. It was 11:58 a.m. central time, meaning that Schletty had two minutes to identify possible perpetrators to be of any use at all to the people he was supposed to protect and serve.

      At that moment, Schletty wished he was an accountant or a store clerk instead of a cop.

      SCHLETTY RODE SHOTGUN in a squad car that at that moment was crossing the Interstate 435 Bridge over the Missouri River. He usually sat at a desk; these days his duties were mostly supervisory, but after yesterday’s shootings he ordered every officer on his staff out on the street, including himself. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew it was probably something he had never seen before. And that’s exactly what he saw. At first it looked like a lump of metal on the girder of the bridge, but on closer inspection, he realized it was a man wearing material designed to make him invisible against the bridge—he wore a gray duster decorated with rust-colored patches designed to blend in with the bridge’s girders.

      Schletty could make out some sort of long item in the man’s hands. Before he could point out the man’s location to the driver of the squad car, flame erupted from the item in the man’s hand. Schletty saw a car ahead of him careen out of control, crash into the guard rail and flip over into the Missouri River. Schletty watched the figure on the bridge rappel down the girder toward the base of the bridge. He lost sight of the figure.

      “Floor it,” he told the officer driving the car.