He reached the lobby, but Scott wasn’t there. He ran out the double doors to the street, where he saw Scott crossing the road to his car.
Beck was about to yell something at him.
Then a black SUV came screaming around the corner. It was on top of Scott in seconds. Scott turned and saw it, and started to run.
But he wasn’t fast enough. The barrel of a gun emerged from the SUV’s open window, and Beck watched helplessly as Scott was cut down by a hail of bullets.
Chapter 4
Beck sat on the edge of the sidewalk and looked at the blood on his hands.
It had been a long time since he’d had blood on his hands.
As a med student, still doing his rotations in surgery and emergency medicine, he’d been up to his elbows in it, all the time. He’d seen his share of gunshot wounds in those days.
So when he saw Scott hit the ground he knew two things:
Scott was probably dead already.
He had to try to save him anyway.
The black SUV had peeled away, tires smoking as it rounded the corner. For an instant as the car approached, Beck made eye contact with the shooter. He wore a black ski mask. His eyes, the only part of him that was visible, stared coldly back at Beck, and then Kevin Scott was down and the SUV was gone.
And then Beck was tearing open Scott’s jacket and shirt, desperately trying to stop the bleeding.
But it was no good. Scott’s chest looked like raw meat, with multiple bullet wounds opening holes in his chest so that the life poured right out of him. There was a flicker of life left in his eyes as he looked up at Beck, unseeing.
He said one word. It made no sense.
“Damocles,” he gasped.
Then he choked and more blood poured from his mouth. The flicker in his eyes went out.
His chest stopped heaving.
Scott was dead.
The police and paramedics showed up fast. Beck’s office was on a quiet, upscale block, not far from several embassies. It was not the kind of neighborhood that got a lot of drive-by shootings.
The cops pulled Beck away from Scott’s body and sat him down. The paramedics took a look at Scott and didn’t even go through the motions. They just covered him up.
The police took Beck’s statement and asked him if he’d seen either the driver or the passenger. Beck told them about the ski mask.
But that was all he really knew. He was surprised at how useless he was as a witness. He shouldn’t have been. He knew that severe stress—like seeing a man gunned down in the street—makes it hard to notice details.
Still, he couldn’t remember if he’d seen a license plate, or what was on it. He didn’t know what kind of SUV it was. He couldn’t even remember the color of the gunman’s eyes, and he’d been looking right into them.
The cops left him sitting on the sidewalk while they went to look for other witnesses. And Beck looked at the blood on his hands.
He sat that way for what seemed like a long time. Trying to understand what happened. His mind kept racing. He didn’t like where it was leading him.
In his office, Kevin Scott had been scared. Scott had been anxious. And Scott had been hiding something, even from his wife.
His wife. Jennifer. With a guilty start, Beck realized someone would have to tell her about her husband.
He looked up from his bloody hands, to find one of the cops, to tell them.
But instead, he saw two men in dark suits with serious faces walking toward him.
Federal agents. Beck had met enough of them to recognize the look. They wore earpieces and off-the-rack suits with the jackets big enough to hide their holsters. You saw them all the time in DC—at lunch, in line at Starbucks, standing outside one event or another.
These two, however, were here for him.
“Doctor Beck,” the first one said, offering his hand. “I’m Agent Morrison. This is Agent Howard. We’re with the Secret Service. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Beck took his hand, and Morrison hauled him to his feet. He was about a head taller than Beck, who wasn’t short, with cold blue eyes and blond hair spiked straight up. Howard, his partner, was darker and wider—he looked like he put in serious hours at the gym—with his black hair slicked back and frozen in place.
They waved their badges at him. He barely got a look. They both