The Kill List

Chapter 3

About the only unconventional or audacious thing Lt. Col. Musharraf Ali Shah of the Pakistan regular army had ever done was marry. It was not the fact of marriage but the girl he wed.

In 1979, at the age of twenty-five and single, he had been briefly posted to the Siachen Glacier, a bleak and wild zone in the far north of his country where the border abutted Pakistan’s mortal enemy, India. Later, from 1984 to 1999, there would be a low-level but festering border war in the Siachen, but back then it was just cold and bleak, a hardship posting.

The then-lieutenant Ali Shah was a Punjabi, like the majority of Pakistanis, and presumed, as did his parents, that he would make a “good” marriage, possibly to the daughter of a senior officer, which would help his career, or a rich merchant, which would help his bank balance.

He would have been lucky to do either, for he was not an exciting man. He was one of those obeyers of orders to the letter, conventional, orthodox, with the imagination of a chapati. But in those jagged mountains, he met and fell in love with a local girl of startling beauty named Soraya. Without the permission or blessing of his family, he married.

Her own family was pleased, thinking a union with a regular army officer would bring elevation in the great cities of the plain. Perhaps a large house in Rawalpindi or even Islamabad. Alas, Musharraf Ali Shah was one of life’s plodders, and, over thirty years, he would plod up the rankings to finish as lieutenant colonel, clearly going no higher. A boy was born in 1980, to be named Zulfiqar.

Lieutenant Ali Shah was in the Armored Infantry, getting his commission at twenty-two in 1976. After his first tour on the Siachen, he returned with his heavily pregnant wife and was promoted to captain. He was allocated a very modest house on the officers’ patch in Rawalpindi, the military concentration a few miles from the capital of Islamabad.

There were to be no more behavior shocks. Like all officers in the Pakistani army, fresh postings came up every two or three years and were divided into “hard” and “soft.” A posting to a city like Rawalpindi, Lahore or Karachi counts as soft and is “with family.” Being sent to the garrison of Multan, Kharian, Peshawar in the throat of the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan or the Taliban-infested Swat Valley counted as hard and are for unaccompanied officers only. Through all these postings, the boy Zulfiqar went to school.

Every Pakistani garrison town has schools for the offspring of officers, but they come in three levels. At the bottom come the government schools, then the army public schools and, for those with family funds, the elite private schools. The Ali Shahs had no money outside the very modest salary, and Zulfiqar went to army schools. They have the reputation of being well run, employing many officers’ wives as teachers, and they are free.

The boy matriculated at fifteen and passed on to army college, taking engineering on his father’s orders. This was the skill that would grant automatic employment and/or a commission in the army. That was in 1996. The parents began to notice a change in their son in his third year.

The now-major Ali Shah, of course, was a Muslim, practicing but not passionately devout. It would have been unthinkable not to attend mosque every Friday or join in the ritual prayers as and when required. But that was all. He habitually dressed in uniform for prestige reasons, but if he had to dress in mufti, it would be the national dress for males: the leg-tight trousers and long, front-buttoned jacket that altogether make up the shalwar kameez.

He noticed his son began to grow a straggly beard and wear the fretted skullcap of the devout. He prostrated himself the required five times a day and snapped his disapproval when he saw his father taking a whisky, the tipple of the officer corps, and stormed out of the room. His parents thought the devotions and intense religiosity were a passing phase.

He began to steep himself in written works about Kashmir, the disputed border territory that has poisoned relations between Pakistan and India since 1947. He began to veer toward the violent extremism of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group later responsible for the Mumbai massacre.

His father tried to console himself with the thought that his son would graduate in a year and either enter the army or find a good job as a qualified engineer, a talent always sought after in Pakistan. But in the summer of 2000, he flunked his finals, a disaster his father put down to abandoning his studies and poring over the Koran; that and learning Arabic, the only permitted language in which the Koran may be studied.

This event marked the first of a series of blazing quarrels between the son and his father. Maj. Ali Shah pulled such strings as he was able to in order to plead that his son had been unwell and deserved a chance to take the finals again. Then came 9/11.

Like virtually the entire world in possession of a television set, the family watched in horror as the airliners slammed into the Twin Towers. Except their son Zulfiqar. He rejoiced, he noisily jubilated, as the TV station repeated the spectacle over and over again. That was when his parents realized that along with extreme religious devotion, a constant reading of the original Jihadist propagandists Sayyid Qutb and his disciple Azzam, and a loathing of India, their son had developed a hatred of America and the West.

That winter the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and within six weeks the Northern Alliance, with enormous U.S. Special Forces help and American air power, had toppled the Taliban government. While the Taliban’s guest Osama bin Laden fled over the Pakistan border in one direction, the Taliban’s one-eyed and bizarre leader Mullah Omar fled into the Pakistani province of Balochistan and settled with his high council, the Shura, in the city of Quetta.

For Pakistan this was a long way from an academic problem. The Pakistani army and indeed all the armed forces are effectively ruled by the Inter-Services Intelligence branch, simply known as the ISI. Everyone in uniform in Pakistan walks in awe of the ISI. And the ISI had created the Taliban in the first place.

More, an unusually large percentage of ISI officers were of the extremist wing of Islam and were not going to abandon their creation, the Taliban, or al-Qaeda guests, to become loyal to the U.S., though they would have to pretend to. Thus began the running sore that has bedeviled U.S.-Pakistan relations ever since. Not only did the senior ranks of the ISI know that bin Laden was in that walled compound in Abbottabad; they built it for him.

In the early spring of 2002, a high-ranking ISI delegation went to Quetta to confer with Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura. They would normally not have deigned to invite the humble Maj. Ali Shah to accompany them but for one thing. The two senior ISI generals spoke no Pashto; the mullah and his Pashtun followers spoke no Urdu. Maj. Ali Shah spoke no Pashto either, but he had a son who did.

The major’s wife was a Pathan from the wild mountains of the north. Her native tongue was Pashto. Her son was fluent in both tongues. He accompanied the delegation, intoxicated by the honor. When he returned to Islamabad, he had the last of the furious rows with his ultra-conventional father who stood ramrod-backed, staring out of the window, as his son stormed out. The parents never saw him again.

The figure that confronted Mr. Kendrick Sr. when he answered his front door was dressed in uniform. Not full dress, but neatly pressed camouflage, with unit flashes, rank tabs and decorations. He could discern that his visitor was a colonel in the Marines. He was impressed.

That was the idea. Working at TOSA, the Tracker hardly ever wore full kit because it drew attention, and in his new environment that was something he avoided at all costs. But Mr. Jimmy Kendrick was a janitor for a local school. He tended the central heating system and swept corridors. He was not accustomed to Marine colonels on the doorstep. He had to be overawed.

“Mr. Kendrick?”

“Yes.”

“Colonel Jackson. Is Roger at home?” James Jackson was one of his frequent aliases.

Of course he was at home. He never left home. Jimmy Kendrick’s only son was a grievous disappointment to him. Suffering from acute agoraphobia, the boy was terrified of leaving the familiar embrace of his attic hidey-hole and his mother’s company.

“Sure. He’s upstairs.”

“Could I have a word with him? Please?”

He led the uniformed Marine upstairs. It was not a large house; just two rooms down, two up, and an aluminum ladder to a loft space. The father called up into the void.

“Roger, someone to see you. Come on down.”

There was a shuffling, and a face appeared in the aperture atop the ladder. It was a pale face, like that of a night creature accustomed to half-light; young, vulnerable, anxious. About eighteen or nineteen, nervous, with eyes that did not make eye contact. He seemed to be looking at the landing carpet between the two men below.

“Hello, Roger. I’m Jamie Jackson. I need your advice. Can we talk?”

The boy considered the request seriously. There appeared to be no curiosity, just acceptance of the strange visitor and request.

“OK,” he said. “Do you want to come up?”

“There’s no room up there.” The father spoke out of the side of his mouth. Then louder: “Come on down, son.” And to the Tracker: “You’d better talk in his bedroom. He doesn’t like to come down to the living room except when his mom’s here. She works at a grocery store checkout.”

Roger Kendrick came down the ladder and into his bedroom. He sat on the edge of the single bed, gazing at the floor. The Tracker took the upright chair. Aside from a small closet and chest of drawers, that was about it. His real life was in the roof space. Tracker glanced at the father, who shrugged.

“Asperger’s syndrome,” he said helplessly. It was clearly a condition that defeated him. Other men had sons who could date girls and train as car mechanics. The Tracker nodded at him. The meaning was clear.

“Betty will be back momentarily,” he said. “She’ll make some coffee.” Then he left.

The man from Fort Meade had used the word “peculiar,” but he had not specified how much and in what way. Before coming, the Tracker had researched both Asperger’s syndrome and agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces.

Like Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, both conditions varied in form from mild to severe. After several minutes talking in general terms with Roger Kendrick, there was no need to treat him like a child; no cause for baby talk.

The young man experienced extreme shyness in person-to-person terms, intensified by his fear of the world outside his home. But the Tracker suspected that if he could shift the conversation back to the teenager’s comfort zone — cyberspace — he would meet a quite different personality. He was right.

He recalled the case of the Scottish cyberhacker Gary MacKinnon. When the U.S. government wanted to put him on trial, London maintained he was too fragile to travel, let alone take jail. But he had invaded the inner sanctums of NASA and the Pentagon, slicing through some of the most complicated firewalls ever devised like a knife through butter.

“Roger, there’s a man out there, somewhere, hiding in cyberspace. He hates our country. He is called the Preacher. He gives sermons online, in English. He asks people to convert to his way of thinking and kill Americans. It’s my job to find him and stop him.

“But I cannot. Out there, he’s cleverer than me. He thinks he is the cleverest operator in cyberspace.”

He noticed the shuffling had stopped. For the first time, the teenager raised his eyes and made contact. He was contemplating a return to the only world a cruel Nature had ever destined him to inhabit. The Tracker opened a pouch and took out a memory stick.

“He transmits, Roger, but he keeps his Internet protocol address very secret, so nobody knows where he is. If we knew, we could get him to stop.”

The teenager toyed with the memory stick in his fingers.

“What I’m here for, Roger, is to ask if you would help us find him.”

“I could try,” said the teenager.

“Tell me, Roger, what equipment do you have up there?”

The teenager told him. It was not the worst on the market, but it was run-of-the-mill, store-bought stuff.

“If someone came and asked you, what would you really like? What would be your dream setup, Roger?”

He came alive. Enthusiasm flooded his face. He made eye contact again.

“I would really love a dual six-core processor system with thirty-two gigs of RAM, running a Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution version, six or higher.”

The Tracker did not need to take notes. The tiny microphone in his medal display was picking up everything. Just as well; he had not a clue what the lad was talking about. But the eggheads would.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and rose. “Have a look at the material. It may be you cannot crack it. But thanks for trying.”

Within two days, a van with three men and some very expensive cyberequipment arrived at the backstreet house in Centerville. They crawled around in the loft until they had installed it all. Then they left a very vulnerable nineteen-year-old, staring at a screen and believing he had been wafted to heaven. He watched a dozen of the sermons on the Jihadi website and began to tap.

The killer crouched low over his scooter and pretended to tinker with the engine as, down the road, the state senator left his house, tossed his golf clubs into the trunk and climbed behind the wheel. It was just after seven on a brilliant early-summer morning. He did not notice the man on the scooter behind him.

The killer did not need to stay close for he had made this run twice before, not dressed as now but in jeans and a hooded jacket, much less noticeable. He followed the senator’s car the five miles through Virginia Beach to the golf course. He watched the senator park, take his clubs and disappear into the clubhouse.

The killer cruised past the club entrance, turned left up Linkhorn Drive and disappeared into the woods. Two hundred yards up Linkhorn, he turned left again into Willow Drive. A single car came the other way but took no notice of him despite his garb.

He was dressed from neck to ankles in a snow-white dishdash with a crocheted white skullcap on his shorn head. Passing several rural residences on Willow Drive, he emerged from the trees into the morning sunshine at the point where the tee shot of the fifth hole, known as Cascade, crosses Willow Drive. Here he pulled off the road and dumped his scooter in the tall undergrowth by the side of the fairway of the fourth hole, called Bald Cypress.

There were a few golfers already on other holes, but they were engrossed in their games and took no notice. The young man in white walked calmly down Bald Cypress fairway until he was close to the bridge over the stream, then stepped into the bushes until he was invisible and waited. He knew from earlier observations that anyone playing a round would have to come up the fourth fairway and cross the bridge.

He had been there half an hour, and two pairs had completed Bald Cypress and moved on to the Cascade tee. Watching from deep cover, he let them pass. Then he saw the senator. The man was in a twosome with a partner of similar age. In the clubhouse, the senator had pulled on a green windbreaker, and his opponent wore one of similar color.

As the two elderly men crossed the bridge, the young man emerged from the bushes. Neither golfer paused in his stride, though both glanced at the young man with passing interest. It was the clothes he wore, and perhaps his air of calm detachment. He moved toward the Americans until, at ten paces, one of them asked: “Help you, son?”

That was when the man brought his right hand from inside the dishdash and held it out, as if to offer them something. The something was a handgun. Neither golfer had a chance to protest before he fired. Slightly confused by the similar long-peaked baseball caps and green windbreakers, he fired two shots at each man, at almost point-blank range.

One bullet missed completely and would never be found. Two struck the senator in the chest and throat, killing him instantly. The remaining slug hit the other player mid-chest. The two shot men crumpled, one after the other. The shooter raised his eyes to the duck’s egg blue morning sky, murmured, “Allahu-akhbar,” put the barrel of the handgun into his mouth and fired.

The players in the foursome were clearing the green of the fourth hole, Bald Cypress. They would say later they all turned at the sound of the shots in time to see the suicide’s head spray blood into the sky, then his body slump to the ground. Two began to run to the scene. A third was already on his cart; he turned it around and gunned the quiet electric engine toward the double murder. The fourth stared for several seconds, mouth agape, then pulled out a cell phone and dialed 911.

The call was taken in the communications center behind the police HQ on Princess Anne Road. The duty telephonist took basic details and alerted the HQ across the compound and the Department of Emergency Medical Services. Both were staffed by experienced local people who needed no directions to the Princess Anne Country Club.

The first to the scene was a police patrol car that had been cruising down 54th Street. From Linkhorn Drive, the officers could see the growing crowd up on the fourth fairway and, without ceremony, drove across the hallowed turf to the crime scene. From police HQ, duty detective Ray Hall arrived ten minutes later to take control. The uniformed men had already secured the scene when the ambulance from the Pinehurst Center on Viking Drive three miles away drove up.

Detective Hall had established that two men were stone dead. The senator he recognized, both from his picture in the papers from time to time and from a police awards ceremony six months back.

The young man with the bushy black beard, identified by the horrified golfers from the foursome as the killer, was also dead, his gun still in his right hand, twenty feet from his victims. The second golfer appeared very badly wounded, with a single gunshot wound, center chest, but still breathing. Hall stepped back to let the paramedics do their job. There were three of them, and a driver.

A glance told them there was only one of the three bodies on the still-dew-flecked grass needing their attention. The other two could wait for transportation to the morgue. Nor was there any cause to waste time attempting to resuscitate, as with a drowning or gassing. This was what paramedics call a load ’n’ go.

They were equipped with ALS — advanced life support system — and they were going to need it to stabilize the shot man for the three-mile dash to Virginia Beach General. They loaded the wounded man aboard and raced away, siren wailing.

They covered the miles to First Colonial Road in less than five minutes. Early-morning traffic was light — being a weekend, there were no commuters — the siren cleared the few other vehicles out of the road and the driver kept his foot to the floor all the way.

In the back, two paramedics stabilized the near-dead man as best they could while the third radioed ahead every detail they could discover. At the emergency ambulance entrance, a major trauma team assembled and waited.

Inside the building, a surgical theater was prepared and a surgical team scrubbed up. And cardiovascular surgeon Alex McCrae hurried from a half-eaten breakfast in the cafeteria to the emergency room.

On the fairway of the fourth hole, Det. Hall was left with two bodies, a milling throng of bewildered and horrified Virginia Beach citizens and a hatful of mysteries. As his partner, Lindy Mills, took names and addresses, he had two things going for him: The first was that all eyewitnesses were adamant there had only been one killer and he had committed suicide immediately after the double shooting. There seemed to be no call to go looking for an accomplice. A single-seat scooter had been discovered in the bushes farther up the fairway.

His second plus was that the witnesses were all sensible mature people, levelheaded and likely to give good and reliable evidence. At that point, the mysteries began, starting with the first: What the hell had just happened and why?

Whatever it was, nothing like it had ever happened in quiet, sedate, law-abiding Virginia Beach before. Who was the killer and who was the man now fighting for his life?

Detective Hall took the second question first. Whoever the wounded man was, he would be likely to have a home somewhere, perhaps a wife and family waiting there, or somewhere a next of kin. Given what he had seen of the chest wound, that next of kin might be urgently needed by nightfall.

No one outside the scene-of-crime tape seemed to know who the senator’s partner had been. The wallet and billfold, unless they were in the clubhouse, had gone off with the ambulance, leaving Lindy Mills and the two uniforms to carry on with the routine name taking. Ray Hall asked for and immediately got a lift on a cart back to the clubhouse. There the ashen-faced club professional solved one of his problems. The partner of the dead senator had been a retired general. He was a widower and lived alone in a gated retirement community several miles away. The membership list provided the exact address in seconds.

Hall called Lindy on his cell phone. He asked one of the uniforms to stay with her and the other to bring him the squad car.

As they drove, Det. Hall conferred on the police band with his captain. HQ would take care of the media, even now arriving with a barrage of questions to which no one yet had the answers. HQ would also take care of the miserable business of informing the late senator’s wife before she learned it on the radio.

He was told a second, more basic ambulance, the body wagon, was on its way to bring the two cadavers to the hospital morgue, where the medical examiner was preparing himself.

“Priority to the killer please, Captain,” said Hall into the mic. “That outfit he was wearing looks like the dress of a Muslim fundamentalist. He acted alone, but there may be more in the background. We need to know who he was — a loner or one of a group.”

While he was out at the general’s home, he wanted the killer’s prints taken and checked against AFIS — the automated fingerprint identification system — and the motor scooter checked with the Virginia state vehicle-licensing bureau. Yes, it was a weekend; people would have to be roused and brought in. He disconnected.

At the gated compound designated by the golf club records, it was clear no one had yet heard of the events on a fairway called Bald Cypress, alias the fourth hole. There were some forty retirement bungalows set among lawns and trees with a small central lake, and the community manager’s house.

The manager had finished a late breakfast and was about to mow his lawn. He went white as a sheet, sat down heavily on a garden chair and muttered, “Oh, my God,” half a dozen times. Eventually, taking a key from a board in his own hallway, he led Det. Hall to the general’s bungalow.

It stood trim and neat amid a quarter acre of mowed lawn, with some flowering shrubs in earthen jars; tasteful without being too labor-intensive. Inside, it was tidy, shipshape, like the abode of a man accustomed to good order and discipline. Hall began the distasteful business of rifling through another person’s private affairs. The manager was as helpful as he could be.

The Marine general had come to live at the community some five years earlier, just after losing his wife to cancer. Family? asked Hall. He was going through the desk, looking for letters, insurance policies, some evidence of next of kin. The general seemed to be a man who kept his most private documents with his lawyer or bank. The manager called up the wounded general’s closest friend among the neighbors — a retired architect who lived there with his wife and often had the general over for a real home-cooked meal.

He took the call and listened with shocked horror. He wanted to drive straight to Virginia Beach General, but Det. Hall persuaded him there was no chance of visiting. Next of kin? he asked. There is a son, said the architect, a serving Marine officer, a lieutenant colonel, but as to where, he had no idea.

Back at HQ, Hall was reunited with Lindy Mills and his own unmarked car. And there was news. The scooter had been traced. It belonged to a twenty-two-year-old student with a name that was clearly Arabic or a variant of it. He was an American citizen hailing from Dearborn, Michigan, but presently an engineering student at a high-tech college fifteen miles south of Norfolk. The vehicle bureau had sent through a picture.

It had no bushy black beard and the face was intact; not quite what Ray Hall had seen on the grass of the fairway. That face belonged to a head with no back and distorted by the blast pressure of the exploding shell. But close enough.

He put through a call to the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters, next to Arlington Cemetery, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. He insisted on holding the line until he was speaking with a major from Public Affairs. He explained who he was, speaking from where, and briefly what had happened five hours ago on the Princess Anne golf course.

“No,” he said, “I will not wait until after the weekend. I don’t care where he is. I need to speak with him now, Major, now. If his father sees the sun rise tomorrow, it will be a miracle.”

There was a long pause. Finally, the voice said simply: “Stay by that phone, Detective. I or someone else will be back to you in short order.”

It took only five minutes. The voice was different. Another major, this time from Personnel Records. The officer you wish to speak to cannot be reached, he said.

Hall was getting angry. Unless he is in space or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he can be reached. We both know that. You have my personal cell number. Please give it to him and tell him to call me, and fast. With that, he put the phone down. Now it was up to the Corps.

Taking Lindy with him, he left HQ for the hospital, grabbing an energy bar and a fizzy soda for lunch. So much for healthy eating. At First Colonial, he pulled down the side road, the oddly named Will O Wisp Drive, and around the back to the ambulance entrance. His first stop was the morgue, where the ME was finishing up.

There were two bodies on steel trays, covered by sheets. An assistant was about to consign them to the cooler. The ME stopped him and pulled back one sheet. Det. Hall stared down at the face. It was now scarred and distorted but still the young man in the photo from the vehicle bureau. The bushy black beard jutted upward, the eyes closed.

“Do you know who he is yet?” asked the ME.

“Yep.”

“Well, you know more than me. But maybe I can still surprise you.”

The ME pulled the sheet down to the ankles.

“Notice anything?”

Ray Hall looked long and hard.

“He has no body hair. Except the beard.”

The ME replaced the sheet and nodded to the assistant to remove the steel tray and its cargo to the cooler.

“I’ve never seen it in person, but I’ve seen it on camera. Two years ago at a seminar on Islamic fundamentalism. A sign of ritual purification, a preparation for passage into Allah’s paradise.”

“A suicide bomber?”

“A suicide killer,” said the ME. “Destroy an important national of the Great Satan and the gates of immortal bliss open for the servant passing through them as shahid, a martyr. We don’t see much of it in the States, but it is very common in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was a lecture on it at the seminar.”

“But he was born and raised here,” said Det. Hall.

“Well, someone sure converted him,” said the ME. “By the by, your crime lab people have already taken the fingerprints away. Other than that, he had nothing on him at all. Except the gun, and I believe that is already with Ballistics.”

Detective Hall’s next stop was upstairs. He found Dr. Alex McCrae in his office, lunching off a very late tuna melt from the cafeteria.

“What do you want to know, Detective?”

“Everything,” said Hall. So the surgeon told him.

When the badly injured general was brought into the emergency room, Dr. McCrae ordered an immediate IVI — an intravenous infusion. Then he checked the vital signs: oxygen saturation, pulse and blood pressure.

His anesthesiologist searched for and found good venous access through the jugular vein, into which he inserted a large-bore cannula and immediately started a saline drip followed by two units of type O rhesus-negative blood as a holding operation. Finally, he sent a sample of the patient’s blood for cross-matching in the laboratory.

Dr. McCrae’s immediate concern, with his patient stabilized for the moment, was to find out what was going on inside his chest. Clearly there was a bullet lodged there because the entry hole was in view, but there was no exit wound.

He debated whether to use an X-ray or a CT scan, but chose not to move the patient from the gurney but to settle for an X-ray by sliding the plate beneath the unconscious body and taking the X-ray from above.

This revealed that the general had been lung-shot and the bullet was lodged very close to the hilum, the root of the lung. This gave him a three-choice gamble. An operation using a cardiopulmonary bypass was an option, but it would be likely to cause even further lung damage.

The second choice was to go for immediate invasive surgery with a view to extracting the bullet. But that, too, would be highly risky, as the full extent of the damage was still unclear, and it could also prove fatal.

He chose the third gamble — to allow twenty-four hours without further interference in the hope that, even though resuscitation so far had taken a huge toll on the old man’s stamina, he would achieve a partial recovery with further resuscitation and stabilization. This would enable invasive surgery to be undertaken with a better chance of survival.

After that, the general was removed to intensive care, where, by the time the detective conferred with the surgeon, he lay festooned with tubes.

There was one from the central venous line on one side of the neck and the intravenous cannula on the other. Oxygen tubes up the nostrils, known as nasal specs, ensured a constant supply of oxygen. Blood pressure and pulse were displayed on a bedside monitor that, at a glance, revealed the heartbeat.

Finally, there was a chest drain under the left armpit between the fifth and sixth ribs. This was to intercept the constant leakage of air from the punctured lung and guide it down to a large glass jar on the floor, one-third full of water. The expelled air could leave the chest cavity and emerge underwater and bubble to the surface.

But it could not then return to the pleura, for that would collapse the lungs and kill the patient. Meanwhile, he would continue to inhale oxygen via the tubes in each nostril.

Having been told there was not a chance in hell of talking to the general for days to come, Det. Hall left. Back in the parking lot behind the ambulance entrance, he asked Lindy to drive for him. He had calls to make.

His first was to Willoughby College, where the killer, Mohammed Barre, had been studying. He was patched through to the dean of admissions. When he asked for confirmation that Mr. Barre had been a student at Willoughby, she agreed without hesitation. When he told her what had happened on the Princess Anne golf course, there was a stunned silence.

The identification of the morning’s killer had not been released to the media. He would be at the college in twenty minutes, he said. He would need the dean to have available all records and access to the student’s private quarters. In the interim, she was to inform no one and that included the student’s parents in Michigan.

The second call was to Fingerprints. Yes, they had received a perfect set of ten from the morgue and had run them through AFIS. There was no match; the dead student was not in the system.

Had he been a foreigner, there would have been records with Immigration, dating from his visa application. But it was becoming clear Mr. Barre was a U.S. citizen of immigrant parents. But from where? Born Muslim or a convert who had changed his name?

The third call went to Ballistics. The gun was a Glock 17 automatic, Swiss made, with a nearly full magazine, five bullets fired. They were trying to trace the registered owner, whose name was not Barre and who lived near Baltimore, Maryland. Stolen? Purchased? They arrived at the college.

The dead student was of Somali extraction. Those who knew him at Willoughby declared he seemed to have had a change of personality around six months back, from a normal, outgoing, bright student to a silent, withdrawn recluse. The core reason seemed to be religious. There were two other Muslim students on campus, but they had experienced no such metamorphosis.

The dead man had taken to abandoning jeans and windbreakers in favor of long robes. He began to demand time out from studies five times a day for prayers. This was granted without demur. Religious tolerance was supreme. And he grew a bushy black beard.

For the second time that day, Ray Hall found himself going through the private possessions of another person, but there was a fundamental difference. Apart from the engineering textbooks, all the papers were Islamic texts in Arabic. Det. Hall understood not a word but collected them all. The key was the computer. With this, at least, Ray Hall knew what he was doing.

He found sermon after sermon, not in Arabic but in fluent, persuasive English. A masked face, two burning eyes, the calls for submission to Allah, for a completed preparedness to serve Him, fight for Him, die for Him. And, most of all, to kill for Him.

Detective Hall had never heard of the Preacher, but he closed the computer down and impounded it. He signed for everything he had confiscated, leaving the college with permission to inform the parents, to call him when they wished to come south to pick up their son’s effects. Meanwhile, he would personally inform the Dearborn police. Taking two trash bags full of books, texts and the laptop, he returned to police HQ.

There were other things on the computer, including a search of Craigslist for a man with a handgun for sale. Clearly the paperwork had not been completed, which would lead to a serious charge for the vendor, but that would come later.

It was eight p.m. when his cell phone rang and a voice introduced himself as the son of the stricken general. He did not say where he was, only that he had received the news and was on his way by helicopter.

Darkness had fallen; there was an open space behind police HQ but no floodlights.

“Where is the nearest Navy base?” asked the voice.

“Oceana,” said Hall. “But can you get permission to land there?”

“Yes, I can,” said the voice. “One hour from now.”

“I’ll pick you up,” said Hall. While he waited out the first half hour, he consulted police records nationwide for any similar assassinations in the recent past. To his surprise, there had been four. The golf course slaying made the fifth. In two of the previous four cases, the killers had immediately taken their own lives. The other two had been taken alive and even now were awaiting trial for murder one. All had acted alone. All had been converted to ultra-extremism by online sermons.

He picked up the general’s son at Oceana at nine and drove him to Virginia Beach General. On his way, he described what had happened since seven-thirty that morning.

His guest questioned him closely on what he had discovered in Mohammed Barre’s dorm room. Then he muttered: “The Preacher.” Det. Hall thought he was referring to a profession, not a code name.

“I guess so,” he said. They reached the hospital main entrance in silence.

The reception desk alerted someone to the arrival of the son of the man in ICU, and Alex McCrae came down from his office. As they went up to the intensive care floor, he explained the seriousness of the wound, which had precluded surgery.

“I can hold out only slim hopes for recovery,” he said. “It’s touch-and-go.”

The son went into the room. He drew up a chair and gazed in the dim light at the rugged old face, locked away in a private place, kept alive by a machine. He sat there throughout the night, holding the sleeping man’s hands in his own.

Just before four in the morning, the eyes opened. The heartbeat quickened. What the son could not see was the glass jar on the floor behind the bed. It was rapidly filling with bright red arterial blood. Somewhere, deep inside the chest, there had been a rupture of a major vessel. The general was bleeding out too fast to save.

The son felt a tiny pressure on his own hands from those he held. His father stared at the ceiling and his lips moved.

“Semper Fi, son,” he murmured.

“Semper Fi, Dad.”

The line on the screen went from mountain peaks to flatline. The bleep converted to a single wail. A “crash” team appeared at the door. Alex McCrae was with them. He strode past the seated figure of the general’s son and glanced at the bottle behind the bed. He held up an arm at the crash team and gently shook his head. The team withdrew.

After a few minutes, the son rose and left the room. He said nothing, just nodded to the surgeon. In the ICU, a nurse drew the sheet up over the face. The son walked the four flights down to the parking lot.

In his car twenty yards away, Det. Hall sensed something and awoke from a light sleep. The general’s son walked across the parking lot, stopped and looked up. Dawn was still two hours away. The sky was black, the moon had set. Far above the stars glittered; hard, bright, eternal.

Those same stars, unseen in a pale blue sky, would be looking down on another man, lost to sight in a wilderness of sand. The standing man looked up at the stars and said something. The Virginia detective did not catch it. What the Tracker said was: “You just made this very personal, Preacher.”