He looked over her shoulder at the screen.
“What am I looking for?”
“I've done an analysis of the targeting packages that we found. You were right, almost all of them were outside the country. There were two, until recently, that were in the continental US. One was a car fire in Indiana, a Phillip Jennings, and in Ohio, a poisoning of a Joe Taylor.”
“Bring up the information on Jennings.”
She brought up the targeting package on him. “He looks a lot like you.”
“Yes. He was my father.”
He scanned the background information. It looked like his father had been a professional killer, not an ordinary citizen who had gotten swept up in events beyond his control. The information didn't indicate this outright, but Leo knew enough to read between the lines. At some point his father had become a liability and was taken out—very much like what they had tried to do to him.
He wasn't sure if it was a shock, a relief or what to think. This organization had been fucking with his life since before he was born, and he'd fallen right in with them, doing their evil bidding. If his father hadn't been involved, would that have made a difference in the hell that was his childhood? How does being a killer for hire change you? He realized that in himself, he had seen some things that would normally concern others—like the inability to form close relationships, but Leo really didn't care for people anyway. Yes, there was that occasional pang of regret when he saw a couple walking hand in hand down the street in front of his coin store, and wondered what it would be like to be able to open yourself up to someone, letting yourself be vulnerable, but you can't really miss what you've never had.
“He was your father? Did you know that he was a professional killer?”
“No. I just thought he was a rat bastard and a drunk who beat on me and my mother for fun. I was happy when he croaked, but when the cops thought I was the one who had done it, that really messed with my life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was forced out of college and had to become an assassin. But it's too late to complain now.”
“So, you were manipulated into doing this for them. I never thought Nathan could do something like this.”
“How old was Nathan when he died?”
“Forty-three. Why?”
“My father was in his early fifties when he was murdered fourteen years ago. So, say he got into the business in his twenties, like I did. Do the math. Either Nathan was running this organization from the zygote stage, or something isn't right.”
“I see.”
“Also, what good would it do to keep all of this information around, even on a secured computer? It's incriminating to the owner of it and the assassins in your stable. Those people are very expensive to train and keep happy, why risk them being discovered by keeping around enough information to incriminate them once they were caught? Which you could do very easily given all the information you have on them here.”
“How would you catch them?”
“Each member of the Black Hand specializes in a way of killing. That's a pattern. Once you've locked onto the way and how they do things, all you have to do is look for specific markers and once one of them shows up, you have them.”
“I still don't get what you mean.”
He flipped through the files and found the targeting package for the city council. Then he found the Denver Sentinel story about the killing of pretty much the entire city council.
“Okay. Most of the dead and dying drank coffee at the meeting and that's what did them in—the update on the news story said it was thallium poisoning. But something else killed Councilman Van Wyk as he got sick after a meeting in a local bar.
“That leads me to think that the killer was a woman. How better to approach a fat-assed idiot like Van Wyk? Those in power think that despite their looks, their power is what draws in attractive women. Well, that may be true in their minds, and it was what got him killed. I think that if you broke down the killings by method, that you would find that most of those killed by poison were men. Besides, statistically, women are the ones to use poison to kill someone rather than a baseball bat like a man would do.”
“It makes sense. Do you think I should do an analysis of the methods by which these targets were killed?”
He shook his head.
“I don't think that it will help us for the amount of time and effort it will take. The targeting package just provides the particulars about the victim, not how it is to be done. But if you were sent on it, and it was within your skill set, you did it the way you knew how. For me, it was the long kill, which wouldn't work very well to take out a city council.”
“It wouldn't be that hard, just Google the names...”
“No. Do not do that.”
“Why?”
“We may have triggered something when we downloaded this information from the Blackberry. Hell, it still scares the crap out of me that we had to turn the damn thing on in an unprotected environment. Suppose someone has figured out we have this information? What would you watch for next? Someone trying to find out about the people listed in the files. You've established a pattern, and are now in line to get killed.”
“How would that be any different between what they’re trying to do right now?”
“I want to be able to pick and choose the place where I confront these assassins. It will be where I have the advantage. The only person that can even touch us is the sniper and I think that we've screwed him up for a bit by taking out his remote controlled rifle.”
“What about the other members of the Black Hand?”
A siren screeched by their window followed by another one.
Leo stepped up to the window and cracked the curtain open. Another siren passed.
“Fire trucks. Turn the news on, maybe we'll see what's going on.”
She flipped on the TV and found a local news station. Sure enough, a reporter was standing in front of a burning building with firefighters scurrying around in the background. It wasn't just burning, it appeared to be a blazing hell.
“That building next to the burning one looks familiar.”
He took a long look at it. Then it hit him. “It should, the burning building is where Nathan and you had your business. I guess we won't be able to search for any information that Nathan had squirreled away in it now.”
Jackie slumped onto the bed. Turning away from him, he saw that she was crying—her shoulders shaking.
He stepped up to her and put a hand on her shoulder, for the first time realizing how fragile she felt under his calloused grip.
“I'm sorry,” was all that he could think to say.
She made a grab at the tissues on the nightstand and tried to wash the tears away.
“I've lost everything—my boyfriend, my business and everything that I've spent years building. And I may be killed anyway.”
Leo couldn't think of anything to say. The stakes they were playing was something that he had prepared for all of his life, that there would be a knock on his door and he was taken into account, one way or another, for his past. But Jackie was an innocent bystander; she didn't deserve anything that had happened to her.
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 sta
rted, 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.”
Chapter 19
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.
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