The Kill Room

arrested for the murder of one. And then finding that Shreve Metzger had brought in a specialist to clean up after the operation, killing witnesses, setting that bomb.
    Which all brought home to him that fundamentally what he was doing for NIOS was wrong.
    Barry Shales had flown combat missions in Iraq. He’d dropped bombs and launched missiles and had some confirmed kills, supporting ground operations. When you were in live combat, even if the odds were in your favor, as with most U.S. military ops, there was still the chance that somebody could bring you down—Stingers, AK-47 fire. Even a single bullet from a Kurdish muzzle loader could do it.
    This was combat. That was how war worked.
    And it was fair. Because you knew the enemy. They were easy to identify: They were the ones who wanted to fucking kill you right back.
    But sitting in a Kill Room, thousands of miles away, padded by layers of intel that might or might not be accurate (or manipulated ), it was different. How did you know the supposed enemy really was just that? How could you ever know?
    And then you’d go back home, forty minutes away, surrounding yourself with people who might be just as innocent as the ones you’d just killed in a tenth of a second.
    Oh, and, honey, get some kids’ Nyquil. Sammy’s got the sniffles. I forgot to pick some up.
    Shales closed his eyes, rocked on the bench.
    He knew that there was something off about Shreve Metzger—the temper, those moments when control left him, the intel reports that just didn’t seem right, the lectures about the sanctity of America. Hell, when he started a pro-U.S. tirade he sounded an awful lot like the flip side of Robert Moreno.
    Only nobody pumped a .420 boattail into the NIOS director.
    And to order in a specialist for clean-up, to set IEDs and kill witnesses.
    Torture …
    Suddenly, sitting in this grim place, wafting of urine and disinfectant, Barry Shales realized he was overwhelmed. Years of hidden guilt were flooding in to drown him, the ghosts of the men and women in the infamous queue, people he’d killed, were swimming toward him now, to drag him under the surface of the inky blood tide. Years of being someone else—Don Bruns, Samuel McCoy, Billy Dodd…Occasionally, at the store or in a movie theater lobby, when Marg called his real name, he hesitated, not sure who she was talking to.
    Just give up Metzger, he told himself. There was plenty of information on his Don Bruns phone to put the NIOS head away for a long time—if it turned out he’d played with the evidence and hired a specialist to eliminate witnesses here. He could give Laurel the encryption code and the backup keyfile and the other phones and documents he’d kept.
    A memory of the lawyer came back. He didn’t like the man one bit. Rothstein had been retained by a firm in Washington, it seemed. But he wouldn’t say which one. When they’d met after Laurel had left, the attorney had suddenly grown distracted, taking and sending several text messages as he explained to Shales how the case was going to proceed. It seemed that his attitude had changed: as if whatever he said or did, Shales was fucked.
    It was odd that the man hadn’t known much about Shreve Metzger, though he was very familiar with NIOS. Rothstein seemed to spend more time in Washington than here. His advice at this point had been simple: Don’t say a word to anybody about anything. They would try to make him cave, Nance Laurel was a duplicitous bitch, you know duplicitous, you know what I mean, Barry. Oh, don’t trust a thing she says.
    Shales had explained that Metzger may have done some pretty bad things in trying to cover up the case. “Like, I think he might have killed somebody.”
    “That’s not our issue.”
    “Well, it is,” Shales said. “It’s exactly our issue.”
    The lawyer had received another text. He regarded the screen for a long moment. He said he had to go. He’d be in touch soon.
    Rothstein had left.
    And Barry Shales was brought down here and deposited, alone in the silent, pungent room.
    Moments passed, a thousand heartbeats, an eternity, when he heard the door at the far end of the corridor buzz open. Footsteps approached.
    Maybe it was a guard to summon him to another meeting. With whom? Rothstein? Or Nance Laurel, who would offer him a solid plea bargain.
    In exchange for giving up Shreve Metzger.
    Everything told him he should do it. His brain, his heart, his conscience. And think of the torture of living