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Court smiled as he headed for the bathroom. He was shirtless and Zoya registered his lean but muscular back and arms, well pocked with scars—he had more blemishes than she did, but the way things had been going in the past couple of years, she wondered if she’d someday catch up.
He flashed a look back her way, gave a last little smile, then stepped into the bathroom. As he disappeared behind the closing door, the smile on Zoya’s face faded.
She felt absolutely certain he was keeping something from her, and almost certain that she knew what it was.
TWO
Between them, the foursome preparing to tee off at the eighth hole of Baylands Golf Links had a combined net worth of over six billion dollars, which necessitated the presence of three of the five bodyguards in the two carts parked near the eighth tee.
The other pair of bodyguards were Department of Defense employees, and while their protectee was a pauper when compared to the rest of the foursome, a meager government employee on a meager government salary, he was no less worthy of protection.
The weather in Palo Alto this May Saturday morning was characteristically exquisite, and the players had enjoyed nearly an hour of golf and conversation on the course within sight of the South Bay without any business creeping in.
And this was exactly the way Rick Watt liked it. The oldest of the players by nearly two decades, he’d invited the other three out for a relaxing morning, free of business. After golf, all four, plus their security, would head back to his office for a Saturday afternoon of meetings, and only then would he get down to the reasons he’d asked for this get-together.
And after work, the men and their wives would go to dinner at Taurus Steakhouse on the taxpayers’ dime, and here, again, no business would be discussed.
Richard Watt served as the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, a DOD initiative charged with obtaining and optimizing existing commercial technology for use by the military. Reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense, Watt had offices at the Pentagon, in Boston, in Austin, and here in Silicon Valley, and he had built a reputation in his tenure for being anywhere he needed to be to achieve the stated aims of his organization.
Today he found himself jovially golfing with the three young businessmen, not one of them yet forty, and all with advanced engineering or computer information degrees. The three also shared another trait: they ran companies racing up the ranks in the high-tech sector, specializing in the fields of automation, digital mapping, and videoconferencing.
And the director of the Defense Innovation Unit wanted their collaboration on multiple projects the DOD was undertaking.
But again, work would be this afternoon. Now it was play.
Rick Watt stepped up to the teeing area and placed his ball, and then he laughed off the digital mapping mogul when he asked if he wanted to put a grand on whether or not he’d keep it out of the nearby South Bay a few hundred yards away.
Everyone laughed, the security officers on the cart path included, and then Rick cleared his mind, took a moment to settle his stance, and raised into his backswing. At the apex he paused a moment, and then the club began arcing back down towards the ball.
The face of the driver made contact with a satisfying crack, the ball rocketed high and straight, and then Rick Watt’s golf club left his hands, spinning off to his left. The digital mapping mogul leapt to the side to avoid being struck by the twirling driver, and then Watt himself spun around in the same direction as his club.
He dropped hard to his knees, and then his body slammed face-first into the tee box.
“What the fuck?” the videoconferencing CEO shouted in surprise.
A low report broke the still air over the golf course. None of the three men in the tee box understood what was happening, but all five security men on the cart path did, and they raced onto the green, handguns drawn and sweeping all around.
Three of them shuffled their principals back to two of the golf carts and sped off.
The pair of security officers left behind were the DOD men charged with protecting Watt, so they were now committed to covering the lifeless man with their bodies as they searched for the origin of fire.
A suburban neighborhood sat to the west, office buildings behind it; shimmering San Francisco Bay was to the north, and Palo Alto airport to the east and south. Neither of the men saw any boats on the water, so they concentrated on the other compass points, but only for a moment, because then they saw what looked like a fat exit wound on their protectee’s back. They rolled Watt over and saw a small entry wound right in the center of his chest.
He’d been facing west as he teed off, so the shot had come from that direction.
The two security men were young and fit, but hefting the obviously dead protectee and moving him off the greens and back to a golf cart, all while potentially under the gun of a skilled assassin, proved to be an exceptionally stressful chore.
“Director Watt? Director Watt? Sir?” the man holding Watt’s arms called to him over and over as they lumbered back to the path, though he had the medical training and the common sense to clearly determine that the director was wholly incapable of responding.
At the cart the men lowered to their knees, hopefully moving themselves out of the line of fire, and they rolled the body onto a seat. One crawled behind the wheel as the other climbed onto the back, holding Rick Watt’s body in place.
They launched forward towards the clubhouse as the passenger pulled out his phone and hit a button.
Before bringing it to his ear, he said, “Had to have been five hundred yards.”
The driver said, “Twice that. There was a good two seconds from impact to the sound reaching us. That’s a thousand yards. The shot must have come from one of the high buildings behind.”
“Jesus Christ,” the driver added. “A sniper? Here? In Palo Alto?”
