Lynch was halfway through the people the uniforms had penned up in the next couple of suites. The rich and powerful and their friends, most of them not taking kindly to being detained. Nothing useful from any of them, most of them so self-absorbed that they probably never noticed anything that wasn’t going in or out of their own pockets.

McCord stepped out of the bathroom while the uniform went to fetch the next asshole. “You want the quick and dirty?”

“Sure,” said Lynch. “What’ve you got?”

“Three entrance wounds, small caliber, probably a .22. No exit wounds, so the slugs bounced around inside the skull like lotto balls, figured to puree the brain pretty good. Mob likes to do that, but it’s been on every CSI episode since the dawn of time, so it’s not like it’s a secret. No sign the body’s been moved. Perp made the victim kneel by the toilet and put his head down on the floor, then popped him. Evidence points to pretty much a contact wound, but we got less singeing in the hair than usual, which means something trapped some of the gas, so you’re probably looking at a suppressor. We’ll see what’s left of the slugs when we get him in to the shop, but they’ll be a mess.”

“Suppressors usually don’t work that good,” said Lynch. “Not to where you wouldn’t hear something in the next box.”

McCord shrugged. “With a .22, you can silence it up pretty good, especially if you load shorts. For this kind of work, you’d want shorts. Just enough to punch through the skull, not enough to punch back out again. Game going on, you’d have a fair amount of background noise here. I could see it.”

“Three shots? That over the top at all?”

Another shrug from McCord. “With a .22, you can put a lot of holes in somebody and leave ’em breathing. Better safe than sorry, I guess. What’s a .22 short cost you? A dime, maybe? Not like a little insurance is gonna break the bank.”

“So a pro. You got anything else?”

“Got a shitload of prints in there,” said McCord. “Some from the victim; mess of others. Got at least ten different sets in the can so far, who knows how many out here in the suite. It’ll take a while to sort that out. Have to get prints from whatever guests we can track down, from the staff. Gonna be a hairball.”

“Plus, if we got a pro who can get in and out of here without being seen, has a .22 with a suppressor that actually works, then he’s probably not leaving prints anyway.”

“Probably not,” said McCord. “But we’ll run it out. One other thing that’s a little weird. Stein’s got some kind of dirt rubbed into the right leg of his pants. His suit costs more than my car, so you gotta figure he keeps it clean. Dirt looks fresh. We’ll see what that’s about, just in case. Listen, I’m gonna have to let the techs wrap up here. Somebody popped some guy a couple of blocks west up Madison. Drive-by or something. I’m not gonna get any sleep tonight. You either, from the looks of it.”

“Job security, McCord.”

“Damn straight,” said McCord. “World ain’t ever gonna run out of evil.”

CHAPTER 3

Two days earlier, Dr Mark Heinz rode his horse on his New Mexico ranch, guiding it into the narrow arroyo that led from the higher country down toward the stables next to his home. He had purchased the land five years ago, built his dream house. Every morning, he rode the palomino for an hour, enjoying the early morning, the solitude, the views.

Time to think. He had always been a man of thought.

Today, he thought about whether his conscience should bother him. Well, not his conscience, he supposed. He’d realized long ago that he didn’t have one of those. Not didn’t have, really. Didn’t need. He was a creature of pure intellect and understood that one shouldn’t base ethical reasoning on feelings. One considered the facts of each situation, the causes and effects of each potential course of action, and one acted accordingly. Right or wrong should be the product of thought, not emotion. On the current matter, his thoughts were this:

Yes, the devices he had sold could, and in all likelihood would, result in great harm. And yes, selling those devices, even for the considerable sum he had received, would, by most standard definitions, be considered evil.

But he had invested the early part of his career in defining exactly this evil. In warning against its dangers. And he had been ignored.

And yes, those to whom he had sold the devices were agents of an anachronistic pox on the peace and order of the human society. They had repeatedly demonstrated their implacable intent to impose their horrid, backward barbarism on the rest of the world, to plunge mankind back into superstitious medieval suffering. And how had the world responded to this virulent threat? How had his own country responded? With half measures and the weak will of a society that elevated tolerance and political correctness to the level of policy.

So Heinz had acted for them. With his devices, these barbarians could finally commit an act of such magnitude and horror that the civilized world would have no choice but to respond decisively, in similar magnitude, as it should have long ago. The morally insane leaders who thought it God’s will that they infect the world with their inane philosophies would die, and those few adherents who remained would be so devastated that they would hide and quake in fear for generations.

In the end, Heinz’s act, one that those with no moral courage would consider evil, would preserve a millennium of human progress at the cost of a fraction of the number of human lives that its enemies would take in any event. By that calculus, by virtue of reason, he was not evil. He was a hero, if an anonymous one. And a rich one. Now a very rich one. That he would also profit from saving mankind, no thinking man would call that fault.

The horse shied, startled by something. Heinz sensed motion to his left, turned and saw just a blur of movement, the sense of a man, before he felt the blow to his forehead. Then he was on his back, on the ground. He had no memory of falling, and he was in no real pain, but he felt blood pouring from just under his hairline, down his face, down the sides of his head.

He heard footsteps and looked up.

It was the man who had paid him for the devices the day before. Heinz tried to rise, to turn, but his limbs were sluggish. Was the man after the money? He must know he would never get the money back with Heinz dead, not without the account numbers and the access codes. To ensure the secrecy of his mission? Surely this man and his masters must understand that Heinz could never reveal his actions. He would be jailed as a traitor, enshrined in the pantheon of evil with the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Heinz was suddenly furious. To kill him? To still his facile mind? This act served no purposed, followed no logic.

But then he realized the flaw in his own argument. He was dealing with ignorant men who were driven not by reason but by fear. As they lived in fear of their own god, they also ruled by fear, acted from fear and sought to kill anything that made them afraid. Now they were afraid of him.

The man grabbed Heinz by the left shoulder and rolled him onto his stomach, and then pulled his head up by the collar of his jacket. Looking down, Heinz could see a large rock, perhaps a foot wide, with a sharp ridge running along its length. Heinz tried to resist, but could only weakly flail his arms. The man dragged Heinz forward positioned his head over the rock and drove it down onto the sharp, jagged edge.

Heinz didn’t think anything after that.

CHAPTER 4

Shamus Fenn sat in his suite at the Peninsula Hotel off Michigan Avenue and slammed another scotch. Just not working anymore; might as well be water. It had started out as a good night. He was in Chicago shooting the next film, Lakers in town; producers got him a courtside seat, so that was cool. And then he’d seen that fucker Hardin.