Kill Code (13 page)

###

Leo wasn't happy about having to use Jackie as
sniper bait, but was impressed with her solution to the problem.
She would sneak into the building using a back entrance that wasn't
on any of the blueprints—Nathan had it built as part of his
paranoia. It looked like a broom closet in a storage room in the
business behind White Hat Enterprises, but if you pressed on a
panel, it would open a door leading into Nathan's office.

She planned to hook up a web camera, tie it into a
monitor or projector and then move that around under Leo's
direction in front of the windows. Hopefully, the sniper would take
a shot at the monitor, missing her completely. He planned to take
out the sniper. It was a difficult project. His training had
focused on being a sniper, not the counter-sniper role. But he'd
been reading and studying for years on the subject, besides being
one hell of a shot with top notch equipment, so he figured on
having better than even odds.

They had checked out of the room that Leo had rented
under the name of the guy who tried to kill him. They drove for a
while and found a hot sheet hotel and rented a room. Both of them
got a little rest by sleeping on the floor, not being willing to
trust the beds or strange smelling sheets.

After breakfasting at a fast food restaurant, Leo
found a secluded parking lot where he could get ready to work.

He dug out ten of his specially loaded rounds of
ammunition. He made sure his dope sheet was securely taped to the
stock of the rifle, not that he would need it as he knew the
trajectory of his ammunition like he knew his right hand. If there
was a thirty-five mile an hour gusting wind, in seventy-six percent
humidity and with an ambient air temperature of eighty-two degrees,
at a range of five hundred yards, he would be able to take the shot
without thinking about it.

This is the kind of thing that he relished, him
against another person. Yes, there was that sometimes in the coin
business while you were trying to buy or sell coins for the right
price, but here the stakes were of a magnitude higher.

He cleaned the lenses of his spotting scope, checked
the batteries of his laser range finder and his Kestrel wind and
humidity gauge. After setting the gear out that he would need, he
carefully packed everything else away.

Where he was sitting, on the roof of a building
perpendicular to Jackie's business, wasn't the best place to be,
but given the choices, it was the only option. He was far enough
back that he wouldn't be seen, but he still had a decent field of
view of where, if there was one, a sniper could take a shot at
Jackie. If it was a more up close and personal hit, he could take
out the assassin before they got too close.

It had been hell lugging all of his equipment up to
the roof, using a ladder purchased at a hardware store. It was
laying next to the roof, hidden from view on the other side of the
building he was currently hiding on.

The only problem would be aerial observation.
Luckily, where Jackie had her business was within a mile or so of
the Rocky Mountain Arsenal—which was now basically a wildlife
preserve—so hopefully no one would have much of an excuse to fly
over his position. If so, he was prepared to duck into an air
conditioner unit on top of the building—he had taken off an access
panel and there was more than enough room in the industrial-sized
device for him and all of his equipment.

He had considered that someone might have booby
trapped the office, with a bomb or fire, but beyond some detailed
instructions to Jackie, he couldn't protect her for very long. The
idea was that she would sneak in, get the information that the
accountant had set aside for her, and then set up as bait for a
half an hour or so. If nothing happened, she would sneak back out
and meet him behind the building.

They would communicate via portable radios that Leo
had purchased at a local Radio Shack. But, because he was afraid of
being tracked and of breaking his concentration when he was trying
to take a shot, communication would be kept to a bare minimum.

Jackie was silent on the drive to the office.

When he pulled up, he put the truck in park. He
grasped her hand and said, “Good luck.”

She looked him in the eye and said, “If you're good
enough, you don't need luck. But the same to you.”

He watched her walk towards the building and then
put the truck into drive. It was time to go hunting.

FBI Agent Jeff Silver wasn't having a good day. He
had several investigations going, including a bank robbery ring
that had hit five banks in the past two weeks. The robbers had a
sense of humor, wearing Ronald Reagan masks, and were very well
organized. They were polite, appeared to male, but other than that,
no one had much of an idea as to who they may be. He suspected that
it was a roving band that would hit a city for a couple of weeks
and then disappear, only to pop up again in some other part of the
country.

Then he had the mystery man found in the trunk of
the car. The device used to conceal the crime with fire was a type
of super thermite. It appeared to be based on military Thermate-TH3
with a couple of interesting variations. Conventional thermite was
hard to reliably ignite; the Thermate-TH3, while easier to light,
was still difficult. The arsonist had tweaked the recipe to make it
more stable, longer lasting and lowering the ignition
temperature.

Figuring out where the arsonist had gotten the
recipe wasn't easy—between sorting through World Trade Center
Conspiracy Nut Jobs who claim that military grade thermite was used
to knock down the towers on 9/11, and the stupid teenage boys
videotaping themselves burning up things and posting them on the
web site, he wasn't having much luck.

That it wasn't apparent where the arsonist obtained
the information was, in itself, a clue. They were dealing with a
smart crook.

Looking for similar crimes didn't yield anything
either. This stuff could be used to burn the locks off safes and
doors, and any number of things that a clever criminal could use it
for.

Yes, thermite had been used in crimes, and even
stolen military Thermate-TH3 grenades, but none in this manner.

He expanded his search to anything involving murder,
fire and cars. The computer spent a while chewing on it. Then it
popped out a long list of crimes. He reorganized the list based on
the most recent being first.

What the hell was going on in
Denver?
There had been an attempted car
bombing, another one that had succeeded and then someone cooked in
their car.

The FBI/police liaison officer in Denver was out to
lunch so he left a message in the voicemail. Maybe he would hear
from the guy today. Glancing down at his watch, he saw that it was
that time and his stomach grumbled—breakfast had been a while
ago.

The Albuquerque FBI office was pretty much off on a
road of its own and literally across the street from an empty
field, so there were no restaurants close to the building. Rather
than taking a chance with the awful food in the vending machines in
the basement, he reached in his drawer and pulled out his lunch.
Biting into his warm ham and cheese sandwich, he contemplated the
evidence he had accumulated.

The lab rats were still working on finding the
identity of the victim. Even if they had dental records of missing
people, it wouldn't do much good because the arsonist had melted
the teeth out of the victim. Same thing for the fingerprints.
Nothing was found in the car. He was waiting for results of the DNA
analysis—they had extracted some from the marrow of a femur.

He didn't hold out much hope for that. There were
over twenty thousand samples of DNA waiting to be processed in the
state of California alone associated with criminals.

Seeing that he didn't have much else to do, he
called the lab.

The tech who answered the phone spent a few minutes
tracking down the information. Yes, they all were short handed,
overworked and definitely underpaid for the job they had to do.

Eventually, the tech came back on the line and said,
“They have a hit on the Military DNA Database. A guy by the name of
Brent Foster.”

He wrote down the particulars on
the victim. He first checked the
National Crime Information
Center (NCIC) database. Sometimes it ran slow, sometimes glacially
slow, and without having much more than a name, it could take a
while. While it ran, he went and got a Diet Coke from the pop
machine. Cracking it open, he took a sip as he chewed on his
sandwich. He was able to finish his first sandwich and was halfway
through his second when the information popped up.

Whoever had killed Mr. Foster had done the world a
service. He was a “person of interest” in half a dozen contract
style killings, and suspected of being part of a larger
organization that murdered people for very large sums of money.

He opened another window and accessed the Sentinel
case management system. It was due to be replaced, and/or upgraded
again, soon, but was a great deal better than the old IBM terminal
based ACS—Automated Case System—in which it took the navigation of
over thirty pages to be able to input one page of information.

Shuddering to think of how much the Sentinel system
cost and how much it would be to replace it again, to maybe bring
it up to the year 2000 in technology, much less anything better
than that, he typed in the particulars about the assassination
organization. He wasn't looking for solid details as much, but more
likely the contact information of someone he could call or e-mail
and find out information on the group. Yes, it was almost like
wasting time, following links, but when he closed this, he wanted
everything lined up and ready to go for prosecution. While his case
closure rate wasn't the same as many of the other investigators, he
almost always got convictions.

As he paged through the rather incomplete
information, he didn't learn much more than he already knew. The
organization worked mostly internationally, and while they did
charge a great deal of money, they had a very good success rate. It
appeared as though, if you were targeted, it would be best to make
your peace with your higher power because you were as good as
dead.

At the bottom of the file, he found that further
inquiries were to be directed to the CIA. He sighed. Dealing with
the CIA, even before 9/11, was difficult and now was even more like
having to drive dirty pins into your eyes. Robert Hanssen, God rot
his twisted, greedy soul, made the already paranoid agency even
more so. As a result of Hanssen's spying for Russian and Soviet
intelligence agencies, the CIA wouldn't tell you the time of day
without it being triple checked, audited, analyzed and weighed
against any possible repercussions.

There was a way around that, as he liked to say, “It
wasn't who you knew, but what you knew on who you knew that got
things done.”

He dropped a quick e-mail to a friend in the DC
field office. Maybe they had something more than appeared in
Sentinel. The vast majority of information the FBI accumulated was
still kept on paper somewhere, not accessible by any computer.

His phone rang and he answered it. It was the
FBI/police liaison officer in Denver. He quickly explained the
nature of his inquiry. As usual, Denver PD was overwhelmed with the
usual crimes, murder and mayhem so all he could was illicit was
that someone would forward the case files to him as soon as they
could.

The only thing that he had left to do was put in a
request for Brent Foster's military records. He filled out the
necessary information, hoping that it would come back to him before
he retired.

Then his pager went off. The Ronald Reagan Bandits
had hit another bank. Shit. He grabbed his gun out of his drawer
and clipped to his belt as he ran out of the door, his half-eaten
sandwich still sitting on his desk.

###

Tyrannicide was starting to meet its goals. In a few
days, more targets would be assigned, and then it would release its
communique and start the next phase of the project. It had already
constructed a list of new targets and was, using an adaptive
neuronet subroutine, assigning them to resources to be
eliminated.

Funding was accumulating and would soon be at the
threshold required for the next phase. More and more credit card
machines had upgraded their software and were now sending thousands
of dollars an hour into various accounts a fraction of a cent at a
time. This money was moved around electronically and mimicked the
transactions of usual electronic commerce. Tripwires had been set
up so that if anyone took a close look at any of the accounts, the
money would be moved out microseconds later and disappear overseas.
It would then be moved back into other operational accounts in
smaller chunks.

Everything wasn't completely going to plan though.
One of the targets on the initial list was still alive—Jackie Winn.
Leo Marston had disappeared, but the person assigned to either
recruit or kill him—Brett Foster—had recently used a credit card to
rent a hotel room in Denver. An inquiry into the military
databases, the FBI's Sentinel system and NCIC had been placed by
the Albuquerque FBI field office. This was a data set that didn't
have any possible programmed routines. Tyrannicide made the
decision to gather more information before proceeding with
Foster—but it was highly probable that if he was still alive, he
would need to be eliminated.

Jackie Winn was another problem. But there was
already an appropriate response on site, ready to deal with her
with a very high probability of success.

###

Jackie's fingers shook as she slid the tension bar
and pick into the door lock of the printing company that occupied
the space behind White Hat Enterprises. She had never been a target
before and didn't know if she might be shot down in the next
instant, blown up, burnt to death or any other horrible
outcomes.