Net Force - Tom Clancy [6]
He made it. Somebody tagged one of the assassins, despite the armor, Alex said. Day would have known to shoot for the head. But the killers took the body.
D.C. Police have set up roadblocks.
He waved this off. This was a professional hit. The shooters wont get caught in a roadblock. What else?
She shook her head. Until we get the lab work, Im afraid thats about it. No witnesses have come forth. Im sorry, Alex.
He nodded. All right. Steve-Commander Day-ran Organized Crime for a long time. Crank up the system, Toni. I want to know everything about everybody Day ever talked to in his tenure at OC, anybody who had a grudge. And anything current we are working on. This looks like a New Mafia operation, its their style, but we dont want to overlook anything.
Ive already got teams on it, she said. Jay Gridley is running the system stuff.
Good.
He stared at the street, but his eyes were focused on something a million miles past it.
She wanted to reach out, to put her hand on his arm, to help him carry the sudden load of pain she knew he shouldered, but she held her ground. It would not be appropriate here and now, she knew, and she did not want him to close that door, to turn away from her if she offered comfort. He was a good man, but he kept himself bottled up, never let anybody get too close. If she was ever going to slip past his iron wall, it would have to be with the greatest of care and subtlety. And, she knew on some level, it would be unfair to use the death of his friend to do it.
Ill go with Porter to the lab, she said.
He nodded, but otherwise did not respond.
Michaels stood in the middle of a run-down street in the middle of a run-down night, beset with the stink of burned gunpowder, hot camera lights and death, the sounds of police radios and working investigators, the buzz of onlookers held at bay by bored street cops. In the background in the distance, the whine of a maglev passenger train passing at speed, dopplering its way toward Baltimore.
Steve Day was dead.
It hadnt really sunk in yet. Hed seen the body, seen that the light behind Days eyes was gone, leaving nothing but a shell, a hollow form where nobody lived any longer. Intellectually, he knew it, but emotionally, he was numb. Hed known other people who had died, some of them close to him. The reality of it never became true until days, weeks, months later, when you realized they were never going to call or write or laugh or show up at your door with a bottle of champagne again.
Dammit, somebody had put out a good mans lights, snuffed him like a blown-out match, and all Alex Michaels was left with at this moment was the heat of his own anger. Whoever had done it was going to pay-he was going to make it happen if it was the last thing he ever did!
He sighed. There was nothing else to be done here. The killers would be a long way away by now, and all the door-knocking and witness-interviewing wouldnt turn up anything immediately useful. The shooters werent hiding in one of the run-down buildings, and even with a photographically accurate description of the assassins, it wouldnt do the investigators much good-they wouldnt be locals. The public didnt know it, but professional killers seldom got caught. Nine out of ten icemen who were caught were turned in by the people whod hired them, and Michaels didnt see that as very likely in a high-profile operation such as this. Those responsible would know the authorities would not be satisfied merely with locking up triggermen. Nobody would be giving up anybody in this kind of deal. If this was a mob job and the bosses got nervous, the shooters would likely disappear into a lime pit two kilometers past the end of the road in Nowhere, Mississippi. And maybe the guys