Kill Code (22 page)

He stepped around in front of her and got down on
his knees. Taking the Kleenex, he gently wiped the tears from her
cheeks.

“I mean it, I'm sorry. You don't deserve any of
this. I'll do my best to make those responsible pay the check in
full.”

Her sobbing intensified for a moment. Then it
started to subside. He needed another couple of tissues to stem the
tide of tears.

Leo was way the hell beyond his comfort zone. Yes,
he had spent the last two days narrowly missing death, and dashing
between hiding places, all spent in the same four-square feet or so
of space. Emotions were something that he really didn't want to
have to deal with right now—not only did they make him
uncomfortable, he did not think he even had the programming to
handle them in any appropriate manner.

Then, as suddenly as it started, the crying stopped,
replaced with quiet sobs.

With nothing else to do, he reached up to hug her.
As he wrapped his arms around her, their lips touched. She moved so
that they could stay touching. Her lips were smooth, warm,
inviting. He felt himself drawn deeper in to the embrace.

Leo could feel her touching him and pulling at his
clothes. He did the same, marveling at her body and her touch.

He broke the kiss and said, “Do you really want to
do this?”

“God, yes.”

He said, “Same here.” He kissed her again and felt
himself letting go of all of his being. It was scary and
exhilarating. He didn't know where this would lead, but sure as
hell wanted to find out.

As she slipped off her bra, she said, “One
question—what do we do with our guns?”

###

You couldn't swing a dead mouse in the conference
room and not hit a bigwig fed of some sort or another. FBI Agent
Jeff Silver had met the power brokers from DHS, FBI, BATF, FEMA and
probably other unnamed agencies. They were all fighting to have the
center stage. It was beyond full blown crisis into complete and
utter chaos.

Never mind that it was his case, his conference
room, in the FBI's office. All they were doing was trying to see
who's dick was bigger and should have control of this case along
with all of the press sucking glory from it. No one cared that he
had been working on it for a week solid with more than enough
resources to help and only had stumbled upon one puzzle inside of
another with answers only leading to many more questions.

He sat in the corner and reviewed his notes. The
field agent that had trained him pounded into his head that when a
case dead ended, go back to the beginning and look for something
that you missed.

His secretary, a matronly woman who dressed and
acted like a nun, brought in a slip of paper and handed it to
him.

He nodded his thanks as she looked at the shouting
matches echoing throughout the room.

Pushing her dark rimmed glasses back up on her nose,
she said, “Should I call the medics?”

Jeff grinned and said, “No. But I'd have their
number of speed dial.”

Shaking her head, she left, leaving Jeff to realize
that she had just delivered what he was looking for.

Making his way to the front of the room, he took a
phone book from by the phone and slammed it down on a table until
he had a stunned silence.

“Thank you. Please have a seat and we'll get
started.”

The DHS representative said, “But ...”

Jeff said, “Not now. I'll tell you what we have and
we can go from there.”

There were some grumbles, but everyone seemed okay
with it for the most part. He put a jump drive in the computer
feeding the overhead projector. He started from the beginning with
the body of James Phillips/Brent Foster found well cooked in the
trunk of a car. The pictures caused more than one of his audience
to gag, but at least they weren't yakking on the floor yet.

He continued, using slides occasionally to stress a
point or two, all the way up to the press release sent to thousands
of members of various news media ranging from bloggers to the New
York Times. What had started as a local problem had focused the
entire world in on Denver in a media firestorm of epic
proportions.

“So far, we’ve been able to link at least ten
victims to this organization, if that's what it is, and haven’t had
much luck going from there. But with the amount of resources we’re
throwing at the problem, I feel we should have some sort of break
very quickly.”

He held up his hands as a barrage of questions flew
at him.

“I didn't say we didn't have any leads.”

Switching the projector over from computer to
scanner, he displayed the sheet he had gotten from his secretary on
the overhead.

It was a driver's license picture of an unassuming
looking man, early thirties, staring into the camera.

“This is Leo Marston. He is co-owner of a coin store
in Albuquerque, and disappeared about the time we figure that James
Phillips/Brent Foster was killed. He has no bank accounts, pays
taxes on a modest income from the coin store, no cell phone, no
e-mail address that we can find, few friends, no politics one way
or the other and, more importantly, his only vice is that he is a
long-distance shooter of some regard in that community. These are
the top shooters in the world transcending the science of precision
long distance shooting way into the black arts.”

An FBI supervisor stood up and said, “What do you
mean black arts?”

“Leo doesn't compete any more, but one shooter we
talked to said that he regularly shot sub-three inch groups during
competitions.”

He posted a picture of Leo holding a trophy, a heavy
barreled rifle with a huge scope on it tucked under his arm.

“At what range?”

“A mile.”

The FBI supervisor sat down with a heavy thump.

There was a flurry of activity as several people
left the room, dialing on their cell phones as fast as they could.
Jeff figured that the president was probably going to be spending a
very uncomfortable night in an underground bunker.

“That's not even the real kicker. We uncovered
something else—Leo Marston isn't even his real name, not by a long
stretch. He didn't even exist until a little over ten years ago.
Then he appeared on the radar, paying taxes, getting a driver's
license and all the trappings of a regular citizen.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“The passport and Social Security Number were both
part of a group devoted to a government project, throw away IDs for
an assassination team.”

“Who the hell issued them?”

“I don't have any idea. My agents have tried to
track it down and have run into brick walls to the point where some
of them are in fear of their lives for even asking.”

Pandemonium broke out that made the earlier
arguments seem laid back and calm in comparison. He let it go on
for a minute or two, and then slammed the phone book again.

When he had their attention again, he said, “We
don't know if Leo, or whatever his name is, has anything to do with
this, but we'd sure like to talk to him. But the only glimpse we've
had of him was his license plate showed up on a traffic camera
where we had a mysterious shooting.”

The DHS agent stood up. “Which victim was this
shooting? I don't recall any sniper shootings from your list of
murdered people.”

“Hold on a second.” He flipped back to his computer
and selected another picture. It was a badly burnt piece of
equipment.

“This is, according to what my lab guys have been
able to figure, a remotely controlled rifle platform. They were
able to salvage enough of the barrel for a ballistics check and
came up with a couple of political assassinations in Central
America. The damage was done with a rather sophisticated
self-destruct system, and we are lucky that the whole building
didn't also burn down or we wouldn't have found it.” He flipped to
the next slide showing two bullet holes through a window, then
another picture showing two holes in a wall. Then there was a
picture of two very mangled bullets.

“These were dug out of the wall. They were
handmade—all of the components, the jacket and the core, are at
least .30 caliber. The closest shooting site was over six hundred
yards away. From this, we can project that there was probably a
sniper and someone counter-sniping him.”

He flipped back to the entrance holes. “At six
hundred yards, the group is two inches apart, and we think that it
was deliberate, designed to take out whoever was sniping.”

Moving back to the first picture of the remote
rifle, he said, “We found a slug from this in the doorway of a
software company. We’re still working on any links between Leo and
this company, but their accountant was killed in car bomb very much
like what took out three IRS agents and two FBI agents. A similar
device was used to attempt to kill the co-owner of the company, a
Jackie Winn. Since then, she has disappeared, not that she had much
of a presence in the world anyway.”

“What about the other owner of the company?”

“Nathan White. He died a week and a half ago of
pancreatic cancer.”

There was stunned silence. Then the FBI supervisor
said, “So, what is your investigative focus?”

He shut down the projection system and brought the
lights up in the room while he framed his answer.

“Trying to find out who is behind this 'Children of
the Constitution.' Everything is focused on that. But we will be
keeping our eye out for Leo and Jackie as we really want to talk to
both of them. We're not even sure that they are involved, but to
have a guy who can hit you in the head with a rifle at a mile with
all this going on is someone we really, really need to talk
to.”

Allan Wells, the Black Hand's sniper, was up to his
elbows in a servo pad framework when his Blackberry buzzed.

He extricated himself and checked his e-mail. He had
a job. Glancing down at the carcass of his new remote controlled
rifle, he knew that he couldn't get it done in time by a long shot.
Despite spending huge amounts of money to get the parts he needed,
he still had a number of bugs that he needed to work out.

Paging through the targeting package, he decided
that he would do this the old-fashioned way, with a rifle against
his shoulder and the victim not realizing that his next breath
would be his last.

He patted the framework, “Next time, boy.”

Then he made a list of things he would need to do
before he could take the target out. The Blackberry was so handy
for this ....

###

Jackie woke and stretched, careful not to disturb
Leo. They'd made love for hours, and she was sore in all the right
places and feeling quite content, like an elderly cat laying in a
sunbeam. Leo had been magnificent—giving, caring, gentle and he had
a body to die for—solid muscle, calluses and some scars that he
promised he'd explain later. When this was all over, she was going
to have to get him a more fashionable haircut and some decent
clothes on the man and see how he cleaned up—she suspected that
even her rich bitch sister would approve.

They had changed the dynamic of their relationship
in so many ways that she wasn't sure where her feelings were. Yes,
she had lost almost everything else in her life, but had gained
something that made life worth living.

Leo had told her about how it felt to almost die—to
feel death brush its hands through your hair, and yet survive; that
the air smelled better, food tasted wonderful and the sky was
brighter. She hadn't had that feeling much before, even after her
car had been blown up, her friend Patrick Lackey killed and being
shot at, but this ratty hotel room, twenty feet from a busy road
with threadbare carpet, wash worn sheets, 1970s era pine paneling
and cheesy art screwed to the walls in cheaply painted frames, was
now a castle in the clouds.

She'd read somewhere, a long time ago, that addicts
often don't ask for help until they've hit bottom, and then were
ready for help. She felt that same way now, that she was on her way
out of the bottom, with Leo at her side.

That he had killed people for money and was matter
of fact about it, without justification or excuses, was something
that she'd have to deal with. But, where she was at right now, she
knew that he'd kill or die for her without question or qualm.

Leo stirred in his sleep and then his eyes popped
open. He leaned over her and said, “Hi.”

She kissed him, and then said, “Hi back to you.”

Crawling out of bed, he said, “You want the bathroom
first? I need to exercise. Then we'll figure out what we have to
get done today. Like track down your hacker buddy.”

She quickly cleaned up. Living in hotel rooms was
starting to be a grind. Hopefully, they could figure out how to
extricate themselves from this mess and she'd never have to spend
another night in a nameless hot sheet hotel.

While Leo was showering, she considered joining him,
but decided that she really needed to get some things done.

She fired up her laptop and ran the software that
hid that she was accessing a wireless network. This secret squirrel
stuff was tiring, yet exhilarating, and she knew that she was in
the top of her game where the stakes might cost them their
lives.

There was no e-mail from her hacker acquaintance.
Damn. She should have heard from him by now—he usually replied in
minutes, rarely over an hour. The man was connected in ways that
she couldn't even understand and had sources for information on
systems security that bordered almost on magical.

She sent him another e-mail, marking it high
priority and that she really needed his help.

An instant message window popped up her screen.
Funny, she'd deliberately deleted that software since she never had
any use for it.

It was her hacker friend. She quickly explained that
she needed to find out where money was coming from and going to and
who was manipulating it.