Free The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth

Dearborn police. Taking two trash bags full of books, texts and the laptop, he returned to police HQ.
    There were other things on the computer, including a search of Craigslist for a man with a handgun for sale. Clearly the paperwork had not been completed, which would lead to a serious charge for the vendor, but that would come later.
    It was eight p.m. when his cell phone rang and a voice introduced himself as the son of the stricken general. He did not say where he was, only that he had received the news and was on his way by helicopter.
    Darkness had fallen; there was an open space behind police HQ but no floodlights.
    “Where is the nearest Navy base?” asked the voice.
    “Oceana,” said Hall. “But can you get permission to land there?”
    “Yes, I can,” said the voice. “One hour from now.”
    “I’ll pick you up,” said Hall. While he waited out the first half hour, he consulted police records nationwide for any similar assassinations in the recent past. To his surprise, there had been four. The golf course slaying made the fifth. In two of the previous four cases, the killers had immediately taken their own lives. The other two had been taken alive and even now were awaiting trial for murder one. All had acted alone. All had been converted to ultra-extremism by online sermons.
    He picked up the general’s son at Oceana at nine and drove him to Virginia Beach General. On his way, he described what had happened since seven-thirty that morning.
    His guest questioned him closely on what he had discovered in Mohammed Barre’s dorm room. Then he muttered: “The Preacher.” Det. Hall thought he was referring to a profession, not a code name.
    “I guess so,” he said. They reached the hospital main entrance in silence.
    The reception desk alerted someone to the arrival of the son of the man in ICU, and Alex McCrae came down from his office. As they went up to the intensive care floor, he explained the seriousness of the wound, which had precluded surgery.
    “I can hold out only slim hopes for recovery,” he said. “It’s touch-and-go.”
    The son went into the room. He drew up a chair and gazed in the dim light at the rugged old face, locked away in a private place, kept alive by a machine. He sat there throughout the night, holding the sleeping man’s hands in his own.
    Just before four in the morning, the eyes opened. The heartbeat quickened. What the son could not see was the glass jar on the floor behind the bed. It was rapidly filling with bright red arterial blood. Somewhere, deep inside the chest, there had been a rupture of a major vessel. The general was bleeding out too fast to save.
    The son felt a tiny pressure on his own hands from those he held. His father stared at the ceiling and his lips moved.
    “Semper Fi, son,” he murmured.
    “Semper Fi, Dad.”
    The line on the screen went from mountain peaks to flatline. The bleep converted to a single wail. A “crash” team appeared at the door. Alex McCrae was with them. He strode past the seated figure of the general’s son and glanced at the bottle behind the bed. He held up an arm at the crash team and gently shook his head. The team withdrew.
    • • •
    A fter a few minutes, the son rose and left the room. He said nothing, just nodded to the surgeon. In the ICU, a nurse drew the sheet up over the face. The son walked the four flights down to the parking lot.
    In his car twenty yards away, Det. Hall sensed something and awoke from a light sleep. The general’s son walked across the parking lot, stopped and looked up. Dawn was still two hours away. The sky was black, the moon had set. Far above the stars glittered; hard, bright, eternal.
    Those same stars, unseen in a pale blue sky, would be looking down on another man, lost to sight in a wilderness of sand. The standing man looked up at the stars and said something. The Virginia detective did not catch it. What the Tracker said was: “You just made this very personal,