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“Witnesses?”
    â€œThe café owner saw what happened, but only from inside the building. We’re working on tracing some of the regular customers who were eating at the tables outside.”
    â€œAny description of the shooter?”
    â€œMale, medium height, dark hair that’s graying at the temples. No facial details because he was wearing a mask.”
    Lopez . Was it possible? “Security tape footage?”
    Herschel had backed off a step. “Yes, sir, from two angles. A bank across the road and a traffic camera.”
    â€œI’ll need to see both, now. And talk to the café owner.”
    The quick tap of heels was followed by the muted swish of the doors swinging open. Jennifer Corcoran, accompanied by a uniformed policewoman, stepped into the morgue. Her face was white, her eyes stark and already red rimmed and swollen from crying.
    When she saw Marc, her mouth trembled. He reached her in two strides and held her tight, while Bridges cleared the room. The M.E. stepped back but didn’t leave, her face apologetic. Marc didn’t labor the point. As private as this moment was, there were formalities to be completed; she had to stay.
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    Two hours later, Marc stepped into his office, dropped his briefcase on his desk and jerked at the knot of his tie.
    Both tapes and the café owner’s recollection had been inconclusive. The tapes had been blurred by distance and obscured by traffic and passersby. The mask the shooter had been wearing had successfully blanked out his features. Aside from the fact that he was approximately five-ten, dark-haired and no longer young, they had nothing.
    Bridges’s jaw was grim as he strolled over to the coffee machine in the corner of his office. “So, what now?”
    Marc shrugged out of his jacket and peeled off the shoulder rig. A raft of paperwork, a press release, sat on his desk: damage control. “I’m pulling my people off the team.”
    Two agents dead within a fortnight wasn’t enough to establish that Lopez was systematically killing men Marc had handpicked. A third killing would cement the pattern, but damned if he would risk losing anyone else.
    The first, Powdrell, had been an experienced field agent. Corcoran had been a step up into the executive ranks. The disparity in rank aside, both of the men had been ex-FBI, headhunted by Marc. He had known them personally, and they had both chosen to move from the Bureau to National Intelligence on the strength of that personal loyalty. Maybe it was just a coincidence that “his” people were being targeted, but Marc didn’t think so.
    Lopez was cold and methodical. Aside from the seemingly random killing of his own bodyguard at age twelve in Colombia, to Bayard’s knowledge, Lopez hadn’t made one move withoutgood reason. In light of his consistent methodology, he was certain that first killing hadn’t been carried out in a psychotic fit of rage, either. At age twelve, Lopez—then known as Alejandro Chavez—had been experimenting with execution.
    The unprovoked killing had set off a chain of events that still reverberated. In order to extract Alex from prison, his father, Marco Chavez, had literally held the country to ransom, machine-gunning three villages then manipulating a pardon for Alex with the donation of a hospital. Following the wave of hatred for the Chavez cartel, and the death threats that had followed Alex’s release, Marco had been forced to remove his son from the country. Courtesy of the power and influence of the Nazi cabal, which had strong links with Marco, Alex had started a new life in the States under the name Lopez.
    Once in the States, protected and bankrolled by the cabal, Alex had thrived, heading up the American branch of the Chavez cartel and expanding into the international terrorism market. Until that point the relationship between the cartel and the Nazi cabal had been stable and mutually