The Edge

Chapter 21

Devine drove back to the inn and hurried through the rain to his cottage. He checked his little booby traps and they were, once again, undisturbed. He sat down at the small desk by the window, clicked on the lamp, which had been set off to one side to provide some illumination against the gloomy day, and opened up his laptop.

He needed to dig deeper into Jenny’s CIA career. Devine had attained top-secret clearances in the military, then reupped those and supplemented them with SCI-level security clearances after joining Campbell at the Office of Special Projects.

Since his time in New York while working at the investment firm Cowl and Comely, Devine, in his new role with Campbell’s outfit, had traveled to five countries on three separate missions over the course of several months. In China he had used his business analytical skills to help bring down a shadowy cryptocurrency trader whose ties to the communist government had alerted U.S. intelligence services. Devine had learned a little about crypto while laboring on Wall Street. Now he felt as though he were a full-fledged expert.

His next mission, in the Middle East, had involved an Arab state that was doing its level best to crash the U.S. economy. It was forcing its fellow petrochemical-producing states to agree on a three-million-barrel-a-day pullback in oil production. That would have sent oil prices soaring, crippled the U.S. and other Western countries dependent on oil, and added hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth to the rogue oil producer, while inducing misery across the globe in the form of higher energy prices. It wasn’t simply to make money, Devine and his colleagues had discovered; it was to promote unrest in western democracies, as citizens there protested against higher prices. The weaponization of everything seemed to be in vogue these days.

Devine had worked with a team of intelligence and financial specialists to counter that effort, including using denial of access to international lending facilities and wire rooms, along with walling them off from banking support and multinational monetary commissions. This would have made the rogue player a pariah in the global financial community. And even with the trillions of dollars in petrochemical dollars it commanded, such status would have been devastating to the country’s future business well-being. They had backed down as a result.

In Geneva, Devine had set his financial background aside and picked up his gun. The result had been another victory for his country, and a target on his back during the train ride to Milan.

Devine read slowly and methodically over Silkwell’s CIA career, making more notes as he did. Then he pulled up and read through a psych eval of Silkwell that had been done about two months before.

The blunt conclusions on the eval were not personally flattering: controlling, manipulative, secretive to the point of mild paranoia, with an all-encompassing drive for mission success regardless of who or what got in the way. But for an ops officer, it was the perfect formula. She had leapfrogged over several of her colleagues, mainly due to the results derived from her bevy of recruited spies and intel leveraged from those relationships. Being a White House liaison for Central Intelligence hadn’t hurt, he knew. And he wondered if her father being a war hero and beloved senator had helped with that assignment.

Of course it did. That’s how DC operates, at least in the shadows.

He turned off his computer and sat back. The weather did not appear to be getting any better. He might have to start doing his early morning workout in the dry and warmer environs of the cottage.

He made sure the damper was open and laid some of the stacked wood in the fireplace. He got it to draw using some strips of paper provided by the inn for this purpose. He knelt in front of the opening and let the warmth embrace him. He had been trained to withstand the rigors of intense heat and cold, but he’d always been able to handle the heat better than the cold. And that was despite having grown up with bitter Connecticut winters.

He drew his desk chair up to the flames and sat down, letting his mind go over each conversation he’d had about the case so far, starting with Emerson Campbell, then Clare Robards, and ending on his talk with Earl Palmer.

He next envisioned the crime scene, the shooter prone on the ground, firing at the standing Jenny Silkwell, the Norma round blowing a hole through her head fore and aft, the bullet lost to the Atlantic.

Then there was the angle of entry of the bullet as calculated by the medical examiner during the postmortem; that was the most troublesome of all in some ways.

Ninety-three degrees.

And it had come out of her head at a descending angle of 102 degrees, probably due to the impact with the skull.

The only problem with all of that was a shooter aiming from a prone position could never have fired a round that would have entered Silkwell’s brain at that angle. It would have defied the laws of physics. Forty degrees, maybe forty-five. But a bullet couldn’t bend itself downward before entering its target, not even with gravity.

At long distances the rotation of the earth’s axis would impact the flight of the bullet. This was known as the Coriolis effect, and it differed depending on what hemisphere you were operating in. Snipers in the northern hemisphere would see their bullets drift to the left, and those in the southern hemisphere to the right. And at such distances one had to also account for the vertical tilt of the earth’s axis. The calculations for such shooting used to be done manually; now they were done by ballistic apps. All one had to do was enter the requisite data and the algorithm would dial up the proper shooting coordinates. And sniper teams deployed spotters as well who fed data and observations to the actual shooters. In fact, the spotter was usually more experienced than the one holding the gun because spotting was, in certain important respects, more difficult than pulling the trigger.

The bottom line was her killer had not shot Silkwell from a distance of slightly over three hundred yards with a sniper rifle. She might have been shot with such a rifle, although other weapons would chamber the Norma round, but the shooter had definitely been standing and not lying prone. And he would have been far closer to Silkwell to achieve pretty much a level shot into her brain. The entry angle also told Devine that her killer was taller than she was, which accounted for the slightly descending entry into her head. A taller person would obviously aim down when shooting a shorter one.

Had the killer marched her to the edge of the bluff, made Silkwell turn around, and shot her? Like a firing squad? That seemed highly unlikely.

But Jenny had been found on the boulders at the spot indicated. Many people had helped get her up from that spot. They could not all have been in on some grand conspiracy.

So it seemed reasonable to conclude that Silkwell had been killed elsewhere, and her body had been transported and then placed on the rocks where Palmer found her.

The Norma casing could easily have been dropped where it was found to give off the appearance of a long-range sniper shot. Which would have also bolstered the argument that Silkwell’s death was tied to her career at CIA and not the act of a local person from Putnam.

But what if she had been killed by someone here and it had been made to look like something else? Who had the motive? And the resources to pull it off?

Unfinished business. That was what Clare Robards had said her daughter had told her was the reason for Jenny visiting her old hometown.

So what was the unfinished business, Jenny? And did it get you killed?

Devine moved his chair back over to the desk and looked out the window right as the rain stopped and sun broke through the clouds and shone down on Maine once more.

The light played over the metal roof of the inn and sparkled off the windows.

It made for a good feeling, he thought, like when you saw a hummingbird hovering over a flower. Some warmth and sun always buoyed the human spirit.

As he glanced farther down the path he saw what looked to be a starburst resting just above a bush, a flash of light as the sunbeams encountered a reflective surface. It was fairly dazzling, to those of the casual observer variety, of which Travis Devine was not a member and never would be.

He dove sideways a split second before the window glass of his cottage exploded as the bullet powered through it, lodging into the far wall instead of Devine’s head.

He pulled his gun and edged next to the shattered window. He heard what sounded like footsteps running away. He got to the door and did a turkey peek, and when he saw no one he jumped out, did a roll, and came up in a kneeling firing position. He heard a vehicle start up. By the time he got to the street, he could see nothing or no one in either direction. He hurried back to the spot where he’d seen the flash of light coming off the rifle scope. He stooped and ran his fingers through the grass. They stopped when he felt it. He saw the special marking on the head stamp of the casing.

It isn’t a .300 Norma. It’s a NATO round.

What the hell is going on?