Chapter 16
Tyrannicide knew there was a problem. The Blackberry issued to James Phillips had been powered up, briefly, and then powered down. The logical explanation was law enforcement, either local, or, more likely, federal as they had the funding able to purchase the software to make a copy of the internal data contained on a Blackberry for further analysis.
Minutes later, the HTTP server containing the targeting packages was accessed without using the Blackberry, first to look at Max Jennings' information, then the rest of the web site was copied someplace else.
It was apparent that the data contained on the HTTP server was compromised.
The software traced back the connection to which computer was accessing the now compromised data. It took microseconds to crack through the corporate firewall and locate the exact computer, and the user of that computer. This was followed up by accessing the computer and slipping in a piece of software that would worm its way into the operating system and forward all relevant data back to the software for further analysis.
In a few minutes, it had determined the name, address, driver's license picture and a complete credit, tax and medical history of the computer user—Ryan Rees.
Slipping through some subroutines, it executed the relevant code and created a targeting package using an alternative HTTP server for Ryan—he was a threat to the Program and would be eliminated.
###
Jill Ringler was annoyed. Three-fourths of the Denver City Council was dead or dying, including the detestable Phil Van Wyk, and she had just used alpha-Amanitin, a toxin found in the Death's Head and the Destroying Angel mushrooms, on John Halbrook, soon to be late of the Colorado House of Representatives. He would be dead within ten days of acute liver failure. It would be a brutal and prolonged death, but her black bag of tricks and poisons was rapidly emptying.
She had just gotten a page on her Blackberry that she had one more job to do before she could stand down. As she turned the rented BMW around, she considered her options.
According to the information she had received, the target suffered from asthma. That would have been perfect to try out her sarin gas modified inhaler—the canister would emit sarin rather than albuterol—one whiff of it and you'd be dead before you hit the floor. But that particular item was back at her lab. She longed to be back at her lab, playing with chemicals rather than these interactions with the public—particularly men she detested. It was nice that she got to kill many of them—the last leer of their life would be at the person who had just killed them.
Her exotic poisons supplies were all but depleted which left some of the old standbys like cyanide. Yes. She had a couple of ounces of Potassium Cyanide and the neat thing about it is that it looked exactly like sugar and she had it packaged in a sugar packet. It was even as soluble in water as sugar although it might give off an odor of bitter almonds when it was put in water. However, most people couldn't smell it and those who could probably wouldn't recognize the significance of the odor.
Pulling off the side of the road, she called the airport where the private jet she had booked was parked and let them know that she would be delayed by a couple of hours.
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 f
uel, 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 Colorad
o 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.”
Jeff glanced at list. There must have been three hundred names there. Nothing stood out. Registered to a coin store out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. That was where the man found in the trunk of the car had been found. It was a thin and fragile thread, but some days, you just had to run with what stuck out with your guts hoping for a break.
Circling the plate number, he said, “Run the particulars on this plate and anyone from out of state. I want this information ten minutes ago and don't care who the hell you have to kill to make this a priority.
The agent nodded and slipped out of the room.
His phone buzzed. He picked it up and said, “What?” It was a senator from Colorado and what that man had to say didn't improve Jeff's day at all.
Chapter 17
Leo and Jackie, after their tasteless fast food meal, headed back towards Nathan's office. Jackie was amazed that you could have so many calories, plug up your arteries and still be eating cardboard. Naturally, Leo had only eaten a salad without dressing and had bottled water with his meal. How the man could survive on so little solid food was beyond her. He seemed to suck energy and strength from the surroundings. She was going to have to ask him how he could continue to function after all that they had done today—starting just before dawn and it now looking like it was going to be a very late night.
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