FBI Field Office Basement, Chicago
Agent Scott Lewis kept his face only eight inches from his desktop monitor, a bad habit that had already earned him a thick pair of glasses and a perpetually sore neck. But it was one he had been unable to break; it was simply where his eyes wanted to be, where he could wholly surround his vision with the tasks to hand.
Special Agent Laura Marsh was going to be intrigued, to say the least, by what he had discovered. The telephone numbers and locations reinforced her suspicions, but went a hell of a lot further than she’d anticipated.
He made an additional annotation in his file.
Through the intensity of his labours, Lewis did not hear the door to his underground office creak open. Only a footstep in the room itself caught his attention, and he turned a moment too late. A second earlier, he might have avoided the blow that cracked against his brow with what seemed a superhuman force. As it happened, his whole body flew back against his desk, thrown out of his chair. He could hear his ribs crack as his upper torso collided with the edge of the desk’s surface, and he fell to his knees with a thud.
Before his body could topple forward, an unhesitating grip pulled at his hair and angled his head upwards.
‘Have you reported any findings?’ a voice thundered at him. With the swirling of his vision, together with the blue-white light of the fluorescent bulbs above his attacker’s head, he couldn’t make out the face.
‘What findings?’ he gasped in terror.
‘Anything. Have you reported anything at all up the chain of command?’ The hand yanked back hard on Lewis’s hair, sending spasms of pain through his neck.
‘No! I haven’t got far enough for a report!’ He struggled for breath, the angle of his neck making it hard to take in air. ‘I was just assembling data.’
His eyes widened as he saw his attacker reach beneath a jacket and draw out a handgun with a silencer already affixed.
‘No, don’t, I—’
‘Are you sure,’ the attacker demanded, holding the gun against Lewis’s temple, ‘absolutely certain that nothing has been passed along?’
‘I’m sure!’
The attacker looked at him, nodded, then acted.
A pin-prick of light flashed from the end of the gun’s suppressor, disappearing as quickly as it came.
Lewis’s body seemed to hover a moment in suspended animation before collapsing to the floor. The temple where the bullet had entered was disfigured by only a tiny hole of red. The other side of the agent’s head was completely gone.
As his body rocked to the ground, his attacker stepped around him and grabbed the CPU from his desktop, yanking it forcibly from its cables and tossing it into a large duffle bag.
Before the long exhalation of Lewis’s final breath was fully complete, his killer was gone.