Conspiracy by Stephen Coonts

address. He’s apparently somewhat well-known to the homeless community. He seems to have been approached by a man who called himself John a few days ago. The man befriended him bygiving him money, and eventually asked him to show up with the gun in front of the hotel.”
    â€œAnd he didn’t have a problem with that?” asked Lia, sitting to Dean’s right. She’d already been here when Dean arrived, and seemed quiet, almost contemplative. They’d barely had a chance to say hello before the briefing began.
    â€œMr. Findley appears to have the mental age of a five-year-old,” said Jackson. “He clearly didn’t understand the implications. We have a sketch of the man, based on Mr. Findley’s descriptions.”
    A nondescript computer-generated face appeared on the screen. He was white, of average height, maybe middle-aged.
    â€œNeedless to say, the FBI has come up with no real information about this person, John. There’s nothing in the Secret Service files, either.”
    â€œWhat about the real shooter?” asked Lia.
    Jackson shook his head. “Nothing. He appears to have used a stock Remington rifle with store-bought ammunition. They have that from the bullet. The thinking is the shooter wasn’t a professional. The shot was taken at eighty-five yards.”
    Dean grunted. On a range, eighty-five yards was nothing, not for a sniper or even a well-trained Marine. But in real life, with adrenaline flowing like beer in a biker bar, it could feel like miles.
    Jackson said that the FBI was working to attempt to identify where the bullet had been purchased. But tracking ammunition wasn’t easy, especially when the ammo was relatively common, and so far the efforts had proved fruitless.
    â€œThe FBI identified the office from the trajectory of the shot,” continued Jackson. “There was nothing there—no spent shell, no trace of anything. All of the windows in that floor were open. The building has been vacant for about five months. No eyewitness has come forward. Two people in the area believed they saw an Asian man in the building a few days before.”
    â€œNot much of a description,” said Lia.
    â€œIt may be significant,” said Jackson. “Which brings me to the second half of our briefing.”
    â€œLet me preface the ambassador’s brief by saying that the relationship of this incident to Special Agent Forester’s death has yet to be determined,” interrupted Rubens. “There may in fact be no relationship at all. The only point of connection is that Forester was tracking down threats against the senator when he died. It is that investigation that concerns us.”
    Jackson flashed a picture of a Secret Service agent named Gerald Forester on the screen, explaining who he was and the fact that he had died about a week before the attempt on McSweeney. While the state police and the FBI had initially concluded that McSweeney had committed suicide, the head of the Secret Service had pressed his own agency to check into other possibilities.
    â€œThe lead investigator, an agent by the name of Mandarin, has also been assigned to this case,” said Jackson. “That’s not necessarily a coincidence, though Mandarin is regarded as one of their top investigators.”
    Jackson added that Mandarin had told him that he thought Forester had killed himself because “that’s where the evidence is,” but that the agency wasn’t going to close out the case any time soon.
    â€œPrior to his death, Agent Forester made some inquiries by e-mail to a person in Vietnam. He wanted to talk to someone there, though it’s not clear why. We don’t know what he intended to ask or hoped to find out. We don’t even know for sure who it was he was trying to talk to. We have narrowed down the number of possibilities to three, all of whom both have a connection to the present government and were involved