Kill Code

by Joseph Collins

  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.

  All she had wanted to do was run the company that was now hers, but that might not ever happen. After Nathan's death, her whole world had come crashing down and she may not even live to see the setting sun.

  She took a deep breath and focused on the task at hand. Usually, she would have been able to open this lock with her picks in not much more time than it took to use a key.

  Finally, she felt the last tumbler snick into place. Rotating the tension bar, the lock opened up. Taking one last look around, she saw that there was no one around to see her.

  She'd already looked for surveillance cameras pointing at the front of where she was standing, but didn't see any—not that there weren't any, just that they were probably well hidden and directly wired into someplace. Before approaching, she had used her packet sniffer to see if there was any unusual Internet traffic—which would have been if someone had web-based surveillance set up. There was a huge amount of traffic from the front of the building and she wondered what the hell was happening there.

  The printing company didn't have an alarm system and was almost on the verge of going out of business anyway. She slid into the front office of the business and carefully pulled the door shut, re-locking it. The place reeked of ink, paper and cleaning solvent.

  Making her way around through the darkened machines, she accessed the broom closet that was built into the common wall between the buildings. It was full of clutter and she risked using the LED light she kept on her key chain to make her way through it.

  She found the hidden catch and pushed on it. A panel slid open leading into the back of the workshop of Nathan's office. The familiar hum of the air conditioning blew around what should have been the comforting odors of his office that instead made her heart thump in her chest.

  Securing the hidden panel, she put her fingers on the release on this side. She didn't know if she was going to have to go out this way or not. In fact, Leo, the spooky dude, didn't much elaborate beyond her being used as a target so he could shoot someone with his rifle. The man was so single minded that whatever would happen after he killed the sniper that may or may not have been targeting her, probably never crossed his mind.

  Staying low, she made her way out of Nathan's office—the room still smelled of him and it gave her a pang of heartache.

  Patrick's office was between hers and Nathan's. As she passed by her door, she wondered if there was anything she would want out of there. Everything that she had built up in life was in that room. Right now, she couldn't think of anything that was worth the effort it took to open the door and find it.

  Leo had shown her how to check for booby traps around doors, so she carefully unlocked his door and felt for any resistance. Nope. Then she ran her fingers around the slightly opened door, looking for any wires. Still nothing. She carefully opened the door, her senses straining in the silence to feel for anything that was wrong and could literally blow up in her face. If need be, she was prepared to cut through the Sheetrock between her office and Patrick's, but that would take a lot of time and had its own difficulties.

  When the door was fully open, she took a careful look around. The cup full of pencils, each sharpened to the same length, sat on his desk along with an ancient adding machine. Off on one side was a computer. File cabinets lined the back wall. Everything appeared to be where it needed to be and in perfect order. Patrick had been anal about neatness and Nathan had insisted that he probably needed to be on some sort of medication. Based on what she had learned in the last day or so, it should have been Nathan on the psych meds, not Patrick.

  She stepped into the room. Where would he have kept the information for her?

  “Damn it Patrick, where the hell did you hide it?”

  Nothing answered in the silence. Making her way over to the desk, still wary of any possible booby traps, she sat down at his desk. Every drawer was locked. While Patrick had known about her skills with lock picking, he had made her promise never to violate his trust by using her talents on any locks in his office.

  Would he have locked it up someplace? She didn't know.

  She sat at his desk, the leather chair creaking.

  Looking around, she didn't see any obvious place. It was as though her brain was locked up and she couldn't think.

  Then she saw the desk blotter. Usually, it was perfectly aligned with the edge of the desk and didn't have anything written on it. Patrick seemed to change out the backing about once a week when it got worn or stained—though his definition was probably a great deal more precise that hers was.

  There was a bump on one edge. She flipped it up off the desk. Nothing under it. She pulled the backing out, and there it was, a file folder.

  Yes. Flipping it open, she saw that it was she had been looking for—half a dozen sheets of paper filled with numbers, account information, names and addresses. None of it looked familiar to her at all. There was one name that stood out—precisely highlighted in yellow—Alamut Enterprises.

  She put everything back in its place and stuffed the contents of the folder into her back pocket.

  Stepping in the same footprints that she had used on the way in, she glanced at her watch. It had seemed like hours, but had only taken ten minutes. She still had a little while before she had to play target and was curious about what was generating all that network traffic from in front of the building.

  She made her way back to the workshop. There was a much better packet sniffer in there than the portable one she had built into her laptop.

  Settling behind the machine, she booted Linux and accessed the Network Security Toolkit. After making sure that no one else was logged into the network, she plugged in the wireless card and started scanning. In a couple of seconds, it detected the transmitter and receiver and started intercepting the raw data dump.

  “What do we have here?”

  She grabbed a big block and started looking through it. Nothing familiar. On a whim, she dumped it through a video player. After a bit of massaging, she saw a picture of the front window of a building. The building she was sitting in. What did this mean?

  Someone was spying on the building. But there was some other noise in the picture that caused static. She isolated it and dumped a copy to a nearby laser printer.

  It was time for her to play bait for whoever was watching her.

  Chapter 13

  Ken Brody, the accident specialist and Fifth Finger of the Black Hand, sat in his van and watched the car of US House of Representative Russel Willis, a Colorado democrat, home for the weekend. Never mind that it was parked in front of the lavishly decorated condo he had purchased for his mistress in Boulder. His wife and children, who lived with him in Denver, wouldn't see him until tomorrow. Such were the perks of the leader of the House Finance Committee.

  He checked the canister of weaponized fentanyl—usually fentanyl was a very powerful analgesic. It was suspected that the Russians had used a version of it to knock out the terrorists who were responsible for the October 2002 Moscow Theater siege. Several years ago, Brody had read about it and found a pharmacy student who could be bribed to develop it for him. It was too bad that he later died after experimenting with a hallucinogenic compound that he had also brewed up and had walked off the top of a sixteen-story building.

  Both compounds were tools of the trade for what he did, and with ten operational kills over the past year, he figured that he only had half a dozen more years to work before he could retire to the villa in the South of France he had his eye on.

  The front door of the condo building opened. There he was, the fat fuck representative, adjusting his skewed tie.

  I hope it was good for you, because you are soon gonna be bait for the mountain lions.

  He climbed out of his car and looked around. There wasn't anyone else around. People paid for their privacy around here and during his earlier surveillance of the area, he figured he could cut Willis up with a chainsaw in the middle of th
e street and no one would pay attention.

  Settling his nose plugs in, he took a deep breath. Putting his thumb on the trigger of the canister, he walked briskly up towards Willis like he was going into the building.

  As he walked past, he held the canister up and gave Willis a full five-seconds spray of it in the face. There was a grunt as he passed out, crumbling to the ground in a heap.

  Brody looked around to see if anyone had noticed. No one. He was prepared to administer fake first aid to an apparent heart attack, but it looked as though he wouldn't need to do mouth to mouth to this filthy bastard.

  He first checked for a pulse. It was there, weak, but it was there. Based on his past experience and the representative's body weight, he would be out for at least three hours.

  As he hoisted the inert form over his shoulder, he thought about how this particular assassination would be unique to the wild back country of Colorado—being left out to die hundreds of miles from any help, alone, hungry and hallucinating. No one would ever find the body.

  Besides, the rough country was beautiful this time of the year.

  He staggered under his burden, hurrying as best he could—this was his first congressman and if he accomplished this job quickly and well enough, he might to get to kill a senator.

  ###

  Leo had settled down to wait, crawling completely inside himself. His binoculars never stayed very long in one place, but constantly moved, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He had already drawn a picture of the surrounding terrain on a piece of notebook paper in front of him, with the appropriate distances marked as he had determined using his laser rangefinder.