The Kill List Read Free Page B

through its cobbled seventeenth-century streets. Otherwise, being off all main roads to the beaches and coves of the Southwest, it was a quiet enough place. But it had a history and a royal charter and a town council and a mayor. In April of that year, he was His Worship Giles Matravers, a retired clothier, entitled to wear the mayoral chain, fur-fringed robe and tricorn hat.
    And that was what he was wearing as he opened a new Chamber of Commerce building just behind the High Street when a figure rushed out of the small crowd of onlookers, covered the ten yards between them before any of them could react and plunged a butcher’s knife into his chest.
    There were two policemen present, but neither was armed with a handgun. The dying mayor was tended by his town clerk and others, but to no avail. The policemen tackled the killer, who made no attempt to flee but repeatedly shouted something no one understood but which experts later recognized as
Allahu-akhbar
, or Allah is great.
    One officer took a slash to the hand as he lunged for the knife, then the assailant went down under two blue uniforms. Detectives duly arrived from the county town of Taunton to institute the formal inquiry. The assailant sat dumbly in the police station and refused to answer questions. He was dressed in a full-length dishdash, so an Arabic speaker was summoned from county police HQ, but he had no more success.
    The man was identified as a shelf stacker from the local supermarket, living in a one-room bed-sitter in a boardinghouse. His landlady revealed he was an Iraqi. At first it was thought his action might have stemmed from rage at what was happening in his country. But the Home Office revealed he had arrived as a refugee and been granted asylum. Youngsters from the town came forward to testify that Farouk, known as Freddy, had until three months earlier been a partygoer, drinker and dater of girls. Then he had seemed to change, becoming withdrawn, silent and contemptuous of his earlier lifestyle.
    His bed-sitter revealed little but a laptop, whose contents would have been very familiar to the police of Boise, Idaho. Sermon after sermon by a masked man sitting in front of a sort of backcloth inscribed with Koranic inscriptions urging the devout to destroy the
kuffar
s. Bemused Somerset police officers watched a dozen, for the sermonizer was speaking in virtually accentless English.
    While the killer, still silent, was being arraigned, the file and the laptop were sent to London. The Metropolitan Police passed the details to the Home Office, who consulted the Security Service, MI5. They had already received a report from their man in the British embassy in Washington about an event in Idaho.
    1996
    Back in the U.S., Capt. Kit Carson was assigned to Camp Pendleton for three years, the place where he was born and spent the first four years of his life. During those years, his paternal grandfather, a retired colonel of the Corps who had fought at Iwo Jima, died at his retirement home in North Carolina. His father was promoted to general with two stars, a promotion his own father was puffed with pride to witness just before his death.
    Kit Carson met and married a Navy nurse from the same hospital where he had been brought into the world. For three years, he and Susan tried for a baby, until tests showed she could not conceive. They agreed to adopt one day, but not just yet. Then, in the summer of 1999, he was assigned to the Command and Staff College back at Quantico and in 2000 was promoted to major. Following graduation, he and his wife were posted again, this time to Okinawa, Japan.
    It was there, many time zones west of New York, seeking to catch the late-night newscasts before turning in, that he witnessed, unbelieving, the images that would later simply be designated 9/11 in 2001.
    With others in the officers’ club, he sat out the night watching the slow-motion shots of the two airliners ploughing first into the North Tower and then the South,