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“Yes, sir.”
“His wife, Clare, divorced him right after he won his last reelection. Between you and me, I think she could see what was coming and decided to bail. So much for ‘in sickness and in health.’”
“Where is she now?”
“Already remarried to some rich guy in DC who isn’t worthy of polishing Curt’s combat boots.”
“So, the case?” prompted Devine, wanting to push Campbell off the personal edge and back onto the mission-driven one.
“Go to page five of your briefing. Jennifer is the eldest daughter of Curtis and Clare. She worked for CIA, mostly in field operations, though she once served as a liaison to the White House for Central Intelligence. She was a quick climber and incredibly talented, and she will be sorely missed.”
Devine scanned page five. “What happened to her?”
“Someone killed her, four days ago. Up in Maine where she was visiting her old hometown.” The man’s voice cracked before he finished speaking.
Devine lifted his gaze. Campbell’s face was flushed and his bottom lip was trembling.
“I held her in my arms when she was a baby. I was her damngodfather.” He swiped tears away and, composed, he continued. “Curt got started late on his family. He was nearly forty when Jenny was born. Clare was a lot younger. She was still in college when they got married.”
“They have any leads on who might have killed her?”
“None that we know of.”
“And our interest?”
“Jenny Silkwell was a valuable asset of this country. She was privy to many of our most precious national secrets. We need to know if her death was connected to that, and whether anyone was able to gain any information that would jeopardize our interests. Her personal laptop has been found at her home, and her government-issued phone was there as well. But her CIA laptop was not found at her office or her home, and neither was her personal phone. The geolocators on the devices have been switched off. That’s normally the case for people like Jenny, unless she’s in an operational area where orders or logistics require she keep them on. The data is mostly cloud based now, but she might have something on her hard drive or on her phone that is sensitive. And we don’t want anyone using her devices to backdoor into our clouds.”
“So I’m heading to where she was killed in Maine?”
“Yes. Putnam, Maine. But not yet. I want you to talk to Clare first in DC. She may know something helpful.Thenyou head to Maine. The details of Jenny’s death are contained in your briefing book, pages eight through ten.”
Devine read quickly, but comprehensively, just as the Army had trained him. In combat, time was not on your side. But neither was skipping over something in a briefing that might prove catastrophic later.
“The shooter didn’t police their brass?”
“Right. And, technically, the casing was polymer, not brass.”
Devine looked surprised because he was. “Apolymercasing?”
“Yes. It expands and then contracts in the chamber immediately. Brass just expands, as you well know. Less degradation on the equipment, because the polymer insulates the heat from the chamber.”
“And less heat and friction reduces choke rate,” said Devine, referring to the hesitation of the weapon in firing due to those factors.
“The Army’s been slowly moving away from brass. Hell, they’ve been wedded to it since before the Spanish-American War, so it’s about damn time. And the Marines are testing polymer casings for their .50-cal. M2 machine gun. And the Brits are looking at polymer too, for their 5.56 mm rounds.”
“A good thing, too. Brass adds a lot of weight to your gear pack.”
“That’s why they’re making the switch. What with smartphones and handheld computers and more weaponry and optics, the Army carry load is up to about a hundred pounds now for each soldier. Switching from brass to polymer is a cost-effective way of lightening the load. For the Marines, a forty-eight-box pallet of the .50-cal. in polymer weighs nearly seven hundred pounds less than brass. And there’s even the possibility of 3D-printing repair parts in the field because the casings are recyclable.”
As he’d been speaking Devine had continued to read. He looked up. “It was a .300 Norma mag round.”
“Yes,” replied Campbell.
“And the head stamp shows it’s a U.S. military round.”
“Army snipers and special ops guys chamber the Norma in the Barrett MK22 rifle.”
Devine nodded. “They switched from the 6.5 Creedmoor roundafterI mustered out. But does the Army already use polymer casings for the .300 Norma?”
