Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel by Scott McEwen Read Free Book Online

office, he switched off the television and squatted down, using the man’s jacket from the back of the chair to wrap up his head, tying it tight with the sleeves to keep what was left of his gray matter from oozing out onto the floor. Then he carried the body across the hall and dumped it in the janitor’s closet.
    Within a few minutes, he’d swept the broken glass into a dust bin and mopped up most of the gore. The crime scene was by no means spic and span, but with the light turned off, it would easily pass the cursory inspection of a late-night traveler standing outside the window. He tookthe ledger and a copy of the floor map into the dining room, where he wouldn’t likely be bothered by anyone looking for the dead man. There were seventy-two beds in the hostel, and just as Gil suspected, there was no record of two males having checked in within the last couple of hours.
    He sat studying the map, checking off the occupied beds against the guest ledger. Thirty-three of the beds were occupied, with roughly a fifty-fifty split between males and females, the hostel providing separate dorm rooms for men and women. There were a number of two-bed rooms set apart from the dorms, normally reserved for married couples, and Gil guessed that Bashwar and Koutry would be in one of those.
    He put the ledger back on the manager’s desk and made his way up the stairs with his hand inside his jacket. At the landing atop the stairs, he oriented himself with the map and made a right down the hall, deciding to check the most isolated room first. Halfway down the hall, he came to a rusty chain stretched across the corridor where he was supposed to make a left. A battered tin sign hanging from the chain read No Admittance, in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Light shown beneath the door at the end of the short hallway.
    Gil drew the USP and stepped carefully over the chain. A washstand stood against the wall, and a black daypack sat on the floor beneath it. He knelt low in the shadowy light to spot the monofilament line running across the corridor from inside the pack to a rusty screw set knee high in the opposite wall. He knew better than to mess with a booby trap unnecessarily, but he didn’t want his line of retreat obstructed in the event things went bad and he needed to egress in a hurry. Besides, this chintzy black-bag affair looked more to him like a Columbine High cum wannabe warrior booby trap than a device rigged with anything as sensitive or complex as a mercury switch.
    So he pulled the bag gently from beneath the washstand to release the tension from the monofilament line. Then he checked to be sure that there was no second line attached to the bag before sliding it across and up against the opposite wall, where both bag and trip line would be clear of his path. He stepped to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, listening for movement or conversation from within the room. Hearing nothing, he turned the knob and stepped smoothly inside with the pistol before him.
    Koutry looked up in complete shock from where he lay in bed. Gil shot him dead center between the eyes, blowing blood, brains, and bone fragments all over the white pillowcase.
    Bashwar was not in the room. This meant he had either stepped out of the hostel while Gil was eating or had gone to take a shower. Koutry had obviously not been expecting him to return so soon. Gil checked the map and moved out down the hall toward the bathrooms.
    The showers were empty, but in the next room he saw a pair of feet beneath one of the stall doors in the lavatory, easily recognizing the same Nike basketball sneakers he had seen from beneath the van. A towel and a bar of soap sat waiting on the sink. Gil put five quick rounds through the stall door. The only sound was that of the pistol cycling the rounds and the 230-grain bullets striking the tiled wall after they passed through Bashwar’s body.
    Bashwar toppled off the toilet and his feet sprawled out beneath the