Verwandte Artikel zu Seven Grams of Lead

Seven Grams of Lead - Softcover

Thomson, Keith

 
9780307949905: Seven Grams of Lead
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307949907 ISBN 13: 9780307949905
Verlag: Anchor Books, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

When an ex-lover is murdered before she can reveal government secrets, hard-hitting journalist Russ Thornton goes on the run from a killer who is after the recording device implanted in his head. Original.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Keith Thomson played semipro baseball in France and drew editorial cartoons for New York Newsday before becoming a writer. He lives in Alabama.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Midazolam, a short-acting sedative, is usually administered orally or by hypodermic needle. Canning liked to use a remote-controlled robotic housefly. On this mild August night, as Canning hid behind the hedges between Lake Michigan and the Sokolovs’ heavily guarded house, his iPhone served as a remote control, sending the robofly darting through a partially open window and into a second floor bedroom. Canning had learned that when Leonid Sokolov was home alone, he favored the breeze off the lake to air-conditioning. All this week, Sokolov’s wife, Bella, and their daughters were vacationing at the Blue Harbor Resort, fifty miles up the coast.

An infrared camera within one of the fly’s bulbous eyes relayed real-time video to Canning’s iPhone. Sokolov lay beneath a quilt, eyes shut, mouth agape, his crown of white hair unmoving against a pillow. The fly would deliver enough midazolam to ensure that he remained asleep for ten minutes. In half that time Canning would climb to the second story and implant a subminiature device beneath the scientist’s scalp.

Canning guided the robofly to a hover over Sokolov’s upper lip. With a tap on the phone, the fly’s abdominal cavity opened and released a midazolam mist, the bulk of which Sokolov inhaled without disruption of his sleep. Canning preferred midazolam to more conventional sedatives because its subjects awoke without any memory of their procedures. He knew the drug occasionally caused abnormally slow respiration, but the risk was remote.

Yet that’s exactly what appeared to be happening now.

The iPhone showed Sokolov’s rate plummeting from a normal twelve breaths per minute to just four. Then he ceased breathing altogether.

Forget implanting the eavesdropping device, Canning thought. Death was certain unless he resuscitated the Russian immediately and then turned him over to paramedics. But the American had gone to extreme lengths to avoid detection, from coming here in a stealth one-man submarine to dressing hood to boots in black neoprene whose surface was electronically cooled to prevent thermal sensors from registering his presence. Saving Sokolov was out of the question. The operational objective was now getting away with killing him.

Canning had learned long ago not just that anything that can go wrong on an op will, but that anything that cannot go wrong will too. It was now second nature for him to plan for contingency upon contingency. From the pouch hanging from his belt, he produced a coil of lightweight climbing rope tipped by a miniature titanium grapnel with retractable flukes. He tossed the grapnel onto the roof as a wave crashed into the shore, obscuring the patter of the four flukes against slate tiles. A tug at the rope and three of the flukes grabbed hold of the far side of a brick chimney. After making sure that the rope would bear his weight, Canning began climbing, his split-toed boots gripping the knots tied every sixteen inches.

Seconds later, he pushed the window open and hoisted himself into the bedroom. He unholstered a Makarov pistolet besshumnyy—silent pistol—and its companion suppressor, then snapped the two together. The pistol was loaded with nine-millimeter bullets he’d cast by hand from soft lead. From the foot of the bed, he fired once into Sokolov’s forehead, the muted report no louder than the wind. Canning watched the Russian’s central nervous system fail. No drama, just a quick fade. Dead within seconds.

Canning hoped the lead bullet would turn the homicide investigation into a wild-goose chase. Toward the same end, on his way out, he drew a small envelope from his pouch and littered the floor with its contents, hairs and bits of skin belonging to other men, including two convicted felons. Over his neoprene gloves, he pulled on a latex pair whose fingertips would replicate a third felon’s prints. He touched the footboard and nightstand, then climbed out the window, slid down the rope, and dislodged the grapnel.

Before returning to his sub, he planted a biodegradable battery-powered directional pin microphone in the grass.

Thus, the following morning, in a motel room 200 miles north, he overheard one of Sokolov’s people knock on the bedroom door. No response, of course.

An FBI crime scene team arrived soon after, quickly concluding that an assassin had sprayed a sedative to subdue the burly scientist prior to shooting him.

Couldn’t have been scripted any better, Canning thought.

Later in the day, RealStory broke the news of the Wisconsin murder story as well as the news that “the Wisconsin murder story isn’t just any murder story.” Russ Thornton, the site’s authoritative blogger on current events, also wrote:

The lead bullet is odd. Outmoded as well as environmentally unfriendly, lead bullets haven’t been available commercially this century. The really odd part is the bullet’s weight, 108.0266 grains, according to the FBI. A grain is the smallest unit in the troy system, equal to .065 grams. Nine-millimeter bullets usually weigh well north of 125 grains, or eight grams. 108.0266 grains is seven grams on the nose. 7.00. As it happens, Joseph Stalin’s solution to a problem was “seven grams of lead to the head.” Sokolov is believed to have been imported to the United States to work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA—a Pentagon division whose successes include the global positioning system, the computer mouse, and ARPANET, which evolved into the Internet. So conceivably this bullet is a message to scientists still in Russia and thinking of leaving. A Kremlin spokesman insisted news of Sokolov’s death came as a shock. In any case, the U.S. Marshals Service has relocated Sokolov’s family to a secret location.

Not an entirely secret location, thought Canning, sitting back from his monitor. The second part of his contingency plan—hurrying to the Blue Harbor Resort in Sheboygan and implanting Bella Sokolova with the eavesdropping device originally intended for her husband—had gone without a hitch. Canning was able to hear the marshals whisk her and her two daughters to a safe house in Cleveland.

He returned to Thornton’s post. According to one of the blogger’s sources, the FBI was likening the Sokolov murder to the 2006 “neutralization” of Alexander Litvinenko, another Russian émigré.

Perfect, Canning thought.

From a computer in his New York apartment, Thornton managed to provide an inside view of the law enforcement and intelligence communities sharper than most insiders’. Canning’s own sources concurred with Thornton’s account of the Bureau’s misdirection. And the director of DARPA, whose post–Flight 89 accident conversation in the Oval Office Canning had listened to, was none the wiser.

Unfortunately, there was more to Thornton’s post. As Canning read on, his satisfaction turned to concern.

It’s also worth considering that the seven-gram bullet was a red herring. Murderers usually aren’t big on leaving clues to their identities. It might be worth taking a look at American operators with service time in Russia or other means of acquiring this bit of Soviet-era arcana.

Canning had indeed learned of “Uncle Joe’s remedy” while serving in Moscow.

The blogger was a loose end.

2

Two months later, the FBI closed the investigative stage of the Sokolov case.

That’s Public-Relations-ese for “hit a dead end,” Thornton tapped onto his keyboard. The development was no surprise to him. The Bureau’s success rate in bringing killers to justice was just 62 percent, a number...

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Verlag
Anchor Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307949907
ISBN 13 
9780307949905
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
446
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/

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