The fact that the windows rolled down showed Knox that the vehicle wasn't armored. Such vehicles' windows were phone-book thick and did not move. Gray had made his second mistake there.
Should've asked for the armor, Carter. You were important enough.
This wasn't baseball, Knox knew. In his business, it never took more than two strikes to finish you.
Knox looked off into the distance, tracing in his mind the trajectory of the lethal round. None of the protection detail had seen any sign of a shooter, so he had to cast the potential flight path out farther where the optic and muzzle signatures would be nearly invisible to the naked eye.
Thousand yards? Fifteen hundred? To a target inside a vehicle revealed only through a barely two-by-two-foot opening in the dark and drizzle. And planted the bullet right in the brain.
Remarkable shot any way you look at it. No luck there. A pro.
Revealing again.
He rose and nodded at one of the uniforms. Knox wore his ID badge on a lanyard around his neck. When everyone had seen what his official ties were they had been deferential and also given him a wide berth, like he had an incurable and contagious disease.
And maybe I do.
The cop opened the door of the Escalade and Knox peered inside. The shot had hit dead center of the right temple. There was no exit wound. The round was still in the brain. The postmortem would dig it out. Not that he needed the autopsy report to tell him what had killed the man. Blood and bits of flesh and skull had embedded in parts of the SUV's interior. Knox doubted the government would be reusing this ride. It would probably go the way of JFK's limo. It was bad luck, bad karma, call it what you would, but no other VIP would want to rest his butt in the dead man's seat, sterilized or not.
Gray didn't appear as though he were sleeping. He simply looked dead. No one had bothered to close the man's eyes. His glasses had been blown off on impact from the kinetically energized round. The result had Gray perpetually staring at whoever looked back at him.