Kill Code (19 page)

She hoped Ryan Rees liked sugar in his coffee
....

###

Jackie was stunned. There was no way that Nathan
could have been running an assassination company out of their
office. Or could he? There were aspects of Nathan's life that she
probably had no understanding.

They were walking out the back door of the cell
phone shop. Ryan had insisted that they go around the back way and
would have to walk around the rear of the strip mall. It didn't
matter much as she was so numb that she could barely put one foot
in front of the other.

“Tell me what you know about Nathan and his
business,” Leo asked.

“I met him five years ago. I was a student at school
on a computer science track and was bored out of my head with the
mindless class work and projects.”

“What was his company like?”

“It was a computer security consulting business.
Nothing much to it, a couple of small contracts and we were working
out of a spare bedroom in his house. He was never very good with
the technical part of it, and when I came on board, he was able to
focus on the business while I built up our technological base.”

They stepped around a pile of empty cardboard boxes.
She saw that Leo's eyes were constantly moving, checking out
everything, even scanning the roofs and windows of nearby
buildings. Probably expecting an attack. She was tired of being a
target and wondered what she could do to change the situation.

“Do you have any idea what he was doing before?”

She shrugged. “Not really. College dropout,
marketing I think. Inherited some but not much money from his folks
when they died.”

“How'd they die?”

“I don't know. He never talked much about his
past.”

“Anything strange going on in the business when you
joined or since?”

“You have to understand something; Nathan wasn't
that much of a computer guy. What he could do was sell and he knew
enough to ask the right questions and who to pay to answer them.
What are you trying to find out?”

“I'm trying to get a better feeling for what he was
involved in. As an example, how hard is it to change the address of
a web site?”

“I wouldn't know. No. I actually have an idea. See,
that data is stored in a WHOIS database. That can be found on the
American Registry for Internet Numbers.”

“So, it's a database? Stored on a computer?”

“Yes.” She didn't know what he was getting at, but
had a glimmer of understanding.

“Can that database be changed? How hard would it
be?”

She thought about it a minute. “I suppose so. Though
it would probably be pretty difficult. What are you thinking?”

He stopped and she turned to face him.

“I was hired ten years ago as an assassin. They sent
us the targeting package via US Mail and paid with wire transfers.
When I joined, I learned that the company that I worked for, whose
name I never knew, had been working that same way for a number of
years, probably since the end of World War II. Given Nathan's age,
there is no way that he could have been running a company that
assassinated people since the end of the war.”

Then another thing hit her, that the man standing
before her was a professional killer and hadn't made any point of
trying to hide it.

“Was it true what the targeting package said about
you?”

He shrugged. “That was then; I was young, stupid and
easily impressionable. Now, I simply want to get back to the coin
store that I co-own and spend my free time perfecting the ultimate
rifle, bullet and load and punching them into targets at longer and
longer ranges. I will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.

“Anyway, getting back to the subject, suppose that
Nathan was running a company specializing in assassination. How or
why, we won't worry about. There have been several killings since
he died, so who the hell is running it now? And how can we find
them and make them stop? Or at least take us off the damn list so
we can get on with our lives?”

She found the questions perfectly logical,
appropriate and disconcerting. And she didn't have any idea how to
find the answers.

###

Tyrannicide, following its set routines, sent out
another set of e-mails. One, a targeting package of sorts, cleaning
up some loose ends, and another much more complex and ominous.

###

Matthew Tudor was bored. He'd much rather be sitting
in his lab, playing with some new chemicals that should be showing
up in a couple of days. They would enable him to take arson to
completely new levels; creating fires that simply couldn't be put
out using conventional firefighting techniques and were very
difficult to detect as arson. Basically, it was a highly modified
version of a solid rocket fuel, specifically a composite recipe
based on ammonium perchlorate, an aluminum fuel, and
Hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) as a binder. Considered a
high performance rocket fuel, the stuff would burn a hole through
concrete without a problem. Most importantly, if you put water on
it to try and put out the fire, the heat from the combustion would
liberate the hydrogen and oxygen from the water explosively, making
that much more of a mess. 

Instead of developing his new rocket fuel/arson
tool, he was sitting around in a hotel room in Boulder, Colorado,
waiting for further instructions.

His Blackberry buzzed. About damn time. He paged
through the information. It wasn't an assassination, but an arson
job on a building. It didn't matter much to him as the money was
the same.

Checking out the blueprints, he saw that it was a
steel-framed building. That made it easier as the steel used in
girders would collapse at 500C and would be greatly weakened at
anything about 190C and would be likely to collapse given the
weight of the roof.

A number of firefighters had been seriously injured
or killed when buildings with steel supported roofs had collapsed
on them. He would make sure that by the time that the firefighters
showed up to put the fire out, they wouldn't even be tempted to
make entry and put themselves in danger. Not that he really had a
problem in killing a firefighter or two, but they weren't the
target here. Besides, he had a grudging respect for the people that
put their lives on the line fighting what he knew intimately and
loved—fire.

###

They got into the truck. Both Jackie and Leo were
thoughtful after their discussion. Leo didn't know what to think
about what he had seen in Ryan's office. Not only did he see his
name and that of Jackie, his own father's name was also there.

As a trained sniper, he had learned to pick up
minute details very quickly. This had been reinforced by his years
of peering at coins—often he would have to sort through hundreds of
coins in minutes while hiding an expression of glee at finding an
unexpected treasure so he could buy them at the right price.

His father had been killed by someone. It wasn't an
accident, and Leo hadn't had anything to do with it like the
authorities had suspected.

He hadn't really known his father that well. He was
a traveling salesman—or so he said—and was gone a great deal of the
time. When he was home, it was hell on earth for all involved as
his father was a heavy drinker and would take out his various rages
on whomever was handy. Often it was Leo and occasionally it was his
mother.

Had his father been a professional killer? From the
perspective of this new information, it was entirely probable. He
really did want a closer look at the data that Jackie had copied
from Ryan with the targeting packages.

He was familiar with all the information contained
on one of them, as it only contained the who, how and information
on finding them, not anything on why. The jobs that he had done, he
didn't often realize that he had killed someone important or a
motive as to why until the press had gotten a hold of the story.
All the targets were, for him, flickering images in the scope's
cross hairs.

But the targeting package may contain something more
that could help him figure out why his father had been killed. He
doubted it, but even a thread to hold onto might provide an answer
or two, maybe even some more questions to ask and where to find
them.

He had also recognized several of the targets that
he had taken out on the list.

Something did stick out—was this a working piece of
software or an archive? Even more ominous, it could be a plant,
giving enough information that Leo and Jackie would stick their
heads out enough so that they could be killed.

Yes, there could be some important information
there, but in a list of several hundred names, how to find it?

Leo considered what to do next. Finding the owner of
Alamut Enterprises looked to be a dead end. Maybe there was more
information about what Nathan had been up to at the office where he
and Jackie worked.

He wondered how the assassins were being controlled
and paid. It couldn't be Nathan any more, but someone, somewhere
was pulling the strings, and if they could find that out, they
could interrupt that chain causing the whole works to collapse. At
the very least, they could get their own names taken off the hit
list.

He wondered how his partner was getting along with
the coin store. Rob Gates must be going quietly nuts running it by
himself. Leo was the one who had the touch with the difficult
buyers and sellers—Rob had said that Leo could sell you back your
coat and hat if you left them in the store, and the customer would
feel great about the transaction. It might have been an
exaggeration, but Leo felt good about his sales skills.

He stopped himself from drifting. He needed to be
focused on the here and now—any deviation from that would result in
his death.

Pulling out into traffic, he said, “Let's get
something to eat and then figure out where we’re going from
here.”

Jackie nodded. It was apparent that she had been hit
hard with the recent revelations about Nathan.

Over dinner at a fast food restaurant, Jackie was
eating mechanically, putting food into her mouth and chewing
listlessly.

“I think we need another look at Nathan's office,”
Leo said.

“I was thinking the same thing. The problem is that
I've been through it pretty well and didn't find anything.”

“What about where he lived?”“He lived with me. I've
been through all of his stuff—he wasn't much for possessions
anyway. They're all boxed for charity. Just some clothes and stuff
like that.”

“We need to figure out who is controlling this
operation.”

“I agree. Then what are we going to do?”

“Find some way to convince them to stop. Or make
them.”

“Like kill them?”

“Yes.”

She held his gaze and nodded. “I can go along with
that.”

###

FBI Agent Jeff Silver wasn't having a good day at
all. Something big was going on in Denver. The FBI field office was
overwhelmed with ominous events including the poisoning of the
Denver City Council, the disappearance of a member of the House of
Representatives, and a Colorado State Representative dying of liver
failure, probably poisoned. Mix in some car bombings, suspicious
fires and other strange events, something big was definitely going
on.

The local law enforcement on a good day could barely
deal with the ordinary crimes and criminals and had basically
turned the whole thing over to the FBI. In relinquishing their
responsibility and information, a lot of garbage had been thrown
into the mix. Since Jeff was the lead on the case, it was his task
to sort through the piles of information in search of a common
thread.

Then there were the usual nutcases calling in,
trying to be helpful. No one was saying that Elvis was responsible,
but Osama bin Laden had been mentioned several times. The media
fanning the flames of panic and paranoia made everything that much
more difficult.

Spooks and people in power from all over the country
were constantly calling, looking for updates. He'd already pissed
off several such time-wasting leaches and was just waiting for
headquarters in DC to call and rip a flap off his ass for doing
it.

Police officers and detectives were also calling,
hoping that they could get leads on cold cases or, better yet, dump
the whole thing into the lap of the FBI and let them take it off
their books.

For this crap, he got $36,000 a year and semi-crummy
government benefits. It made him think that he should call up a
buddy of his who was working in Iraq and take him up on the job
that he had been offered several months ago. Yes, it was more
dangerous, but at $17,000 a month, 90% tax free, he could put up
with some occasional danger and not have to deal with all of this.
What the hell, he was single, no other real family, and this was
getting too old, too quick for his taste, chasing from one crisis
to the next. It made it difficult to give a shit about the next
potentially world changing event.

An agent with his tie askew, dark five-o'clock
shadow and sweat-stained shirt came in and set a folder on his
already stuffed desk. It caused a cascade of folders to slide off
onto the floor.

As the agent tried to pick up the mess, Jeff said,
“What do you have for me?”

“A list of Colorado militias and their members.
We're running their names through the databases to see if there are
any hits. But computer time is at a premium, so it'll be slow
going.”

He flipped open the thick folder. “Can any of these
misfits be counted on to do anything with any sophistication? I
doubt it. Besides, after the Oklahoma City bombing, we put so many
agents into these groups that you are more likely to find a deeply
placed undercover agent than someone with the brains to pull off
this kind of operation. Anything else?”

The agent handed him a piece of paper. “We ran the
surveillance cameras close to where the building was started on
fire with thermite. Here's a list of the license plates and the
names associated with them.”