Rising Tiger: A Thriller (47)

The man approached the ME, thanked her, and they traded business cards. He told her that someone from the U.S. Embassy would be in touch to arrange repatriation of Mr. Ritter’s body to the United States.

They didn’t linger. There was no small talk to be made nor anything further they could learn from the ME. Harvath was glad to leave the building.

“I want to extend my condolences once more,” said Vijay. “To know a friend has passed is one thing. To have to identify, much less examine, his remains is something quite different. I’m sorry.”

Harvath held up his hand. “It’s okay. Thank you. I’m good.”

“If you want, there’s a tea shop nearby. We can take a cup before we meet with the DST people. It’s up to you. There’s no rush.”

“Let’s keep moving. I want to dig into the rest of the evidence.”

“Understood. Let’s do it.”

They walked back to Vijay’s car and drove to the DST’s office, but made the trip with the CD player off.

Harvath wasn’t in the mood for music. In light of Ritter’s service and his having made the ultimate sacrifice, it felt like some respectful silence was in order. Vijay, to his credit, could read the mood and remained quiet during the drive.

When they arrived at their destination, the ex-cop did all the talking, presenting his identification and asking Harvath for his diplomatic passport so he could demonstrate that they were who they said they were. Vijay had had a high-ranking friend in the Indian Police Service in Delhi call ahead so that there would be no runaround when they arrived.

They were shown to a small lab where an evidence tech was waiting, along with the few pieces of physical evidence they had gathered. Because chain of custody needed to be preserved, it was agreed to that Harvath wouldn’t touch anything, but he could request that things be put under a magnifying camera, which would help him get a better view.

The first thing they examined was the round itself. It was a 9mm hollow point and had, as it was designed to do, “petaled,” opening up like a flower as it passed through the skull and bored through Ritter’s brain.

Next was the shell casing, which had been retrieved from the sidewalk, not far from Ritter’s body. It showed signs of above-average “fouling,” which was consistent with a round that had been fired from a suppressed weapon.

The suppressor succeeds in dampening the sound of the discharge by trapping the gases inside and forcing them back down into the breech of the weapon. Those gases are what cause the fouling or “dirtying up” of the shell casing.

In addition to the cigar he had been smoking, they had a bag with Ritter’s password-protected phone, a few minor pieces of unhelpful pocket litter, matches, a cigar cutter, and his keycard from the Fairmont.

None of it was useful, and so Harvath thanked the DST personnel and asked if they could move on to the CCTV footage.

A conference room had been prepared for them. All the footage had been uploaded to a tablet in a series of folders. After explaining how to access the files and play them on the monitor in the corner of the room, Harvath and Vijay were left in private.

“Do you want one?” Vijay asked as he approached the room’s coffee station and fixed himself a tea.

“I’m fine for right now,” Harvath replied, holding up his half-empty water bottle. “Thank you.”

The files on the tablet were organized chronologically. Opening the first one, he could see Ritter walking through the lobby of the hotel. The next one showed him exiting the main entrance and getting into the cab. Then the cab could be seen driving out the enormous gates, headed toward the main road.

After that, the footage was a hodgepodge of images captured by the cameras of homes and private businesses. Every once in a while, a feed from a city traffic camera popped up.

Ritter’s journey played out just like Vijay had described. Harvath could not make out anyone who might have been following him.

He wondered if maybe someone had bumped Ritter at some point, sliding a tracking tag into his pocket or hiding one somewhere else on his person. But no sooner had the thought entered Harvath’s mind than he discarded it. Ritter was highly skilled and very well trained. Not that it couldn’t have happened, but the odds were so low that it wasn’t worth too much thought. At least not right now.

He watched in jump cuts from different security cameras as Ritter wove his circuitous route from Mahatma Gandhi Nagar Park to the Tansukh restaurant. It was clear to Harvath that the man wasn’t burning time, afraid to be early to his dinner appointment. He was running an SDR, making sure that he didn’t have a tail.

The fact that Ritter went ahead with his meeting confirmed that he felt he didn’t have anyone following him. What’s more, his judgment was backed up by the CCTV footage.

Harvath then watched the footage gathered after Ritter’s dinner and his exit from the restaurant. When he saw the motorcycle and the helmeted assassin, he stopped and zoomed in.

He rolled the footage forward and back, looking for anything that might help them ID or track down the killer. After several minutes, Vijay stood up and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Harvath asked.

“I’m going to look under some other stones.”

Harvath nodded and went back to poring over the video footage.

He slowed it down to frame-by-frame and then, once he had gone through all of it, went back to the very first file from the hotel and started all over again.