Free Extraordinary Powers by Joseph Finder

at home earlier that morning. She opened her eyes, red-rimmed. “I got out of work a couple of hours early, thanks to Burton, and decided to just crash,” she said slowly, thickly. “I couldn’t sleep. Too wired. I … decided to pay some bills, and I couldn’t find the phone bill. I looked in your briefcase … “
    The photograph that I was now holding was of Molly’s father, after his death.
    I had tried to protect her as much as possible from the horrible details of her father’s death. So badly burned was Harrison Sinclair’s body that an open coffin was out of the question. In addition to the terrible mutilation caused by the explosion of the gas tank, his neck had been nearly severed (during the crash, the forensic pathologist explained to me). I saw no reason for Molly to see her father this way; both she and I preferred that she remember him the way he was when they were last together, hale and ebullient and strong. I remember weeping in the morgue in Washington, seeing what was left of my father-in-law.
    Molly certainly didn’t need to go through it But she insisted. She was a physician, she insisted; she had seen mutilation. Still, it’s different if it’s your own father, the sight had been, naturally, deeply traumatic. Mangled though her father’s body was, she had been able to identify it, pointing out the faded blue tattoo of a heart on his upper shoulder (which he’d gotten one drunken night in Honolulu during his service in World War II), his college class ring, the mole on his chin.
    And then she entirely fell apart.
    The photograph Ed Moore had given me had been taken after Hal’s death but before the car crash. It was proof of his murder.
    It was a neck-and-shoulders shot of Hal Sinclair, eyes wide and staring, as if fiery with indignation. His lips, abnormally pale, were slightly parted, as if he were about to speak.
    But he was unquestionably dead.
    Immediately beneath his jawline, reaching from ear to ear, was a large horrid gaping grin, from which protruded tissue of red and yellow.
    Sinclair’s neck had been deftly sliced from left carotid to right carotid. I knew the procedure well; we had been taught to recognize it at a glance. The flesh wound was accomplished with one quick stroke, prompting a sudden loss of arterial blood pressure in the brain.
    To the victim it was as if someone had suddenly shut off the water. You collapsed almost instantly.
    They had done this; they had murdered Hal Sinclair, they had for some unfathomable reason snapped a photo, and then they had put him in a car, and … They.
    I knew right away, of course, who they were.
    In the trade, this was what is known as a “signature,” or “fingerprint,” killing, a type of murder preferred by a particular group or organization.
    The carotid-to-carotid slice was a specialty of the former East German intelligence service, the Ministerium filr Staatssicherheit, also known as the Staatssicherheitsdienst.
    The Stasi.
    That manner of execution was their signature, and this photograph was their calling card.
    But it was the calling card of an intelligence service that no longer existed.
    SEVEN.
    She wept silently, her shoulders shaking, and I held her. I kissed the nape of her neck, speaking softly. “Molly, I’m sorry you had to see this.” She grabbed a pillow with both fists, scrunched it up into her face, muffling her words. “It’s a nightmare. What they did to him.”
    “Whoever did it, Mol, they’ll catch them. They almost always do. I know that’s no consolation.” I didn’t believe it either, but Molly needed to hear the words. I didn’t tell her my suspicions about how the house had been searched.
    Now she turned over, her eyes searching my face. My heart squeezed.
    “Who would do this, Ben? Who?”
    “Everyone in public office is vulnerable to crazy people. Especially in a position as sensitive as Director of CIA.”
    “But … it means Dad was killed first, doesn’t it?”
    “Molly, you