Kill Code

by Joseph Collins

  “How does this affect us?”

  “I don't have enough information to even begin to form the picture. I'm a detail guy—just give me one very tiny aspect of a problem to deal with and I'll excel. I'm not used to caring about the bigger picture. I got my targets, eliminated them and went home. I didn't care why or even who.

  “I recall reading about riots all throughout a country over the death of someone who looked like someone I had taken out. Several hundred died, and all I had to do with it was three and a half ounces on a trigger.”

  “How'd that make you feel?”

  What a strange question. Probably it was why he'd never discussed his past with anyone.

  “How do you feel about two thousand people dying in an earthquake in China?”

  She shrugged.

  “Same here. I did my job, the targets were dead, and I was alive. I didn't care why, didn't know much more than that and was happy to spend the money. I'd been so numbed by my childhood and any thread of humanity was carefully excised by my training, so all I could feel was that I did what I was supposed to do. Money is the ultimate in praise if you have nothing else in your life to live for.”

  “That's sad.”

  “No, it's not. You can read about ten-year-old soldiers in Africa. If all you know is violence in the midst of chaos, how can you know what is considered normal by society's standards? How do you find out how to live? It's not TV or books, and the people that I worked for gave me all that I was looking for. I created my own world and lived by rules created in that world.

  “Someone has to be able to do the dark things that need to get done.”

  She cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “Most of those people that have been killed by the Children of the Constitution probably deserved it in one way or the other. I've never really met a fed or government official that I much liked, good riddance to all of them.”

  She stood with a tense expression.

  “Well, one of those people you said 'good riddance' to was one of my friends, a dear sweet man, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Turning, she walked to the door. “I'm going to get some fresh air. It's getting too stuffy in here.”

  He watched her go, wondering what the hell he had said to upset her and why.

  Chapter 21

  Tyrannicide's analysis of media broadcasts revealed the general public was in a barely concealed state of panic. The collateral damage so far had been minimal, with few in non-government positions being hurt or killed and the basic infrastructure was still intact—street lights works, food was being delivered to grocery stores and most people could go about their daily lives without much worry. But all it would take was one event to turn the city into riots.

  There was a delicate balancing act that must be maintained, otherwise there would be armed soldiers in the streets, shooting at frightened citizens.

  It sent out several more targets for its special operators, then settled into wait for further developments.

  ###

  Matthew Tudor was delighted at his new assignment—destroy, hopefully without harming anyone, the Denver Police Department’s Armored Personnel Carrier. Yes, they called it a 'Peacekeeper,' but a tank was still a tank, no matter if you painted it pink and hung flowers off of it. It was a LAV-300, a six-wheeled vehicle built by Cadillac Gage, Textron Marine and Land Systems. This particular one had been one of at least six captured by the US Army during their invasion of Panama.

  Armored only to stop 7.62 bullets, it was vulnerable to any number of weapons, including grenades. It had all sorts of fancy sensors including thermal sensors, computerized tracking devices, night vision, tear gas launchers and probably even a doughnut and coffee dispensing system. It had blue high output LED lights on it and was painted jet black with 'POLICE' on the front and 'SWAT' on the side.

  Powered by a V-6 turbo-diesel engine and transmission, it could do sixty miles per hour on roads and could hold up to nine SWAT officers plus the driver. Some variations included water jets underneath that allowed amphibious operations.

  They had gotten the vehicle from a DHS grant, the same nitwits who had provided snowmobiles to a Texas police department—their city had gotten maybe a half-an-inch of snow in ten years, but they said they really needed them.

  The difficult thing for him was going to be taking out the vehicle without taking out the driver, who sat next to the engine and transmission. Yes, he could probably get the diesel tank to light up somehow—diesel was hard to get going, but once you got it burning, it was a major pain to put out. However, he didn't know if the fire suppression system that was usually standard equipment on this vehicle was still active. Yes, enough fire could overwhelm such a system, as they were only designed to give the crew enough time to evacuate the vehicle. But it did add another complication to the picture.

  Thank goodness they hadn't upgraded the thing to dual self-sealing tanks, rather than the standard single tank.

  Another complication was that the damn thing didn't get out much. After the initial public fury when they had purchased the vehicle and that they had to pay $50,000 to refurbish the thing, it had not been seen very often on the streets of Denver. That was the nice thing about the city, there were enough bleeding heart liberals to make life interesting for those trying to militarize the police.

  They had promised that the APC would be used at least fifty times a year, all for SWAT call outs and for dangerous situations to protect the officers. He wondered why they needed such protection. It had only been seen in parades and while he had searched for news articles about it being used, the press was strangely silent about it when it was used, if at all.

  So it was either figure out some way to get the thing out on the streets, and take his chances that he could kill the crew with one of his devices, or figure out where it was stored and take it out there. He wondered if there was a bonus if he took out other interesting police vehicles—rumor had it that they also kept an ambulance and fire truck to trick people into thinking that they weren't the police. He'd love to burn up a fire truck, the irony in that act was something that would make him feel all warm inside.

  He found a copy of the plans for the police garage and set to work on figuring out how he was going to pull this off.

  ###

  Leo knew that he needed to set aside what was going on with Jackie and find a new approach to the problem of figuring out who was pulling the strings and why.

  He tried going back to his past and his current skill set to get an idea as to what to do and how. Nothing he could think of regarding shooting seemed to work. Putting bullets into small groups at enormous ranges didn't much tie into anything that seemed to be able to help him.

  Then he considered his coin skills. Yes, he could tell you which coins had strong strikes, what years they were made and what the rare dates were. But his specialty, if you could have such a thing in such a broad area such as coins, was US coins. There were plenty of people that specialized in one particular type of coin, say Indian Head pennies, and some even went down to knowing and collecting all that they could regarding a small number of years and strikes.

  He had the books and the knowledge to look in the right places to get his questions answered, but other than that, he could care less. The magic in coin collecting had pretty much been replaced with the pragmatism of someone who bought and sold valuables—anything in the store was up for sale for the right price. In fact, you could probably walk in with enough money and buy the whole place, lock, stock and barrel.

  So, was there something that he could use that he had seen before?

  Then it hit him; his partner in the coin store dabbled in ancient coins. It was a tricky business because such coins were much easier to fake than more modern coins. What had helped was if the coin had providence—documentation showing where and how it had been found, testifying to its authenticity. Even such paperwork could be faked, but it was something that many buyers
of high-value ancient coins insisted on examining often even before they looked at the coin. Yes, there were plenty of gray market buyers out there that just wanted to fill their collection with a coin that no one else had, but the vast majority of the collectors that Leo's partner dealt with were way above legit.

  Given the providence concept, showing how and where it got to its current location, how could that be applied to what was going on now?

  He realized that he lived in a vacuum, doing his own thing, not really influenced by outsiders. Every day the coin store was open, he went to work. He spent his evenings working on his rifle or researching the history of assassination. He didn't even think that Rob, his partner, knew what he did with his free time, not that he even cared what Rob did when not at the store.

  But had Nathan White lived the same way? You just don't spring from the womb with the ability to manage a team of professional killers. And it wasn't something that you could pick up by reading. Someone had to determine that you had the right mindset and morals to do the job and then teach you to how to handle a stable of very highly trained and paid professional killers.

  He considered the skills needed including recruiting, training and equipping the assassins. Then you had to have work for them—offering to kill someone wasn't something that you could just post an ad in a phone book. Even word of mouth would draw the attention of too many feds, cops and whack jobs wanting their wife killed.

  So how would you come up with people willing to pay for the support team, equipment and the assassin? Maybe large businesses, but definitely governments. Yes, all of his jobs had been outside the country. And it had been shockingly easy to get in and out of the country. He imagined some rogue government agency, not necessarily based in the US, running the entire operation for their own ends. What those ends were, he had no idea.

  Returning to his original problem, who had been Nathan's teacher? That's under the huge assumption that Nathan hadn't been set up to take the fall—real difficult to talk to a dead person. In both cases, someone was still calling the shots—no matter if Nathan had been in charge of running it until his death.

  Damn, there were too many questions to be answered. All he wanted to do was go back to his old life, but that was probably going to be too much to ask. Adding what he may feel about Jackie was another complexity that he didn't want to have to deal with.

  Somewhere was the Schwerpunkt—the center point of all this that was going on. The term came from Blitzkrieg, where the enemy line may be pierced by an explosive combination of multiple weapon systems. Once the line is pierced, armored forces dive deep into enemy territory to disrupt command, control and logistics systems. Once these systems are disrupted, the top-heavy military units they support collapse in confusion. The same thing could be found in many dynamic systems, including societies. If you wanted to collapse an organization, you looked for where you could expend your resources the most efficiently to cause the most chaos.

  The Children of the Constitution, whoever the hell they were, obviously had identified what they considered the Schwerpunkt and were working to disrupt society by taking out key individuals to achieve their goals. He thought that most people wouldn't be able to function without the embrace of government controlling their every action.

  Leo had little or no use for government in any form. He was responsible for his own actions and just wanted to do his own thing without interference from agencies like the IRS, OSHA, and most importantly, the BATF. There was a concept for a rifle sound suppressor that he would have liked to develop, but he didn't want to jump through all of the government mandated hoops to do it.

  And don't even get him started on the IRS. As the coin store was largely a cash business, they were under constant scrutiny and had been audited the past three out of four years. Nothing out of the ordinary had been found, but it had taken many hours to straighten out the mess generated by the IRS.

  There were people who were probably cheering the demise of all the government workers, feds and other power hungry leeches. He didn't feel sorry for those killed. They had taken the money to do their jobs and had finally been called accountable for their actions.

  He looked up and saw the time on the clock ... almost noon.

  Where the hell did Jackie go and how long did she figure to be gone?

  Settling his pistol into the holster, he set off to look for her.

  Chapter 22

  Jackie was exhausted to her very soul. Since Nathan’s death, her world had been essentially destroyed and despite finding Leo—which may or not have been the best thing to do—what he did to her left her unsettled and uncertain.

  She settled into the coffee shop next to the hotel. The triple espresso latte seemed to help. Perhaps that was it; she usually drank two or three of these coffees a day and she was way down on her caffeine consumption. She could feel the stimulant surge through her.

  She looked around the coffee shop and noted the people hunched over their laptops. They were probably watching the headlines and reading alternative versions of the news.

  Taking another sip of her coffee, which had turned cold the way she liked it, she considered what to do next. Authorities had apparently come to a dead end as far as finding out who was behind the Children of the Constitution. That the attempts on her life and they were tied together, there was no doubt. There wasn't any direct evidence tying the two neatly into a bow, but her problems started about the same time that the Children began their reign of terror. Adding to the evidence was that, according to Leo, professional killers had been sent after her, and had probably killed Patrick Lackey, her accountant, in almost exactly the same way that politicians and power brokers had been killed. They could all be attributed to the Children.

  So she was a target of the Children of the Constitution. What had she done to deserve this? She had never even registered to vote, and while she did tend to agree with some of Nathan's anti-government rantings, she never took it to the extreme that Nathan had suggested—the destruction of every government function not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.

  He was behind it, enacting his revenge from the grave. And he had been responsible for the deaths of perhaps hundreds of people over the years—that is, if had been behind the assassination organization. Someone must answer for all of those deaths.

  According to the news report, only one or two 'innocents' had been killed since the Children launched their campaign. The rest had been government workers all with lengthy histories of violating civil rights, ranging from the EPA to the IRS to OSHA and city, state and federal government workers. They had died by poisoning, fire, sniper, explosions and strange accidents. Somewhere, someone was taking stock of government workers and measuring them to a standard—if they failed, they died.

  Government at all levels in Denver and the surrounding areas was essentially shut down through fear. Meanwhile, most people seemed to be continuing on with their lives.

  There had been some civil unrest, but it had been quickly and quietly put down. Details weren't well known, but rumored through various blogs were hints that the citizens took care of their own problems and the police stood aside and watched.

  Then it hit her. Had she had something to do with the start of this mess? The DVD she had loaded into the network. What had been on it? Was there someone running the Children of the Constitution, or was it something? The more she thought about it, the more the evidence seemed to add up. But there were still some pieces that needed to be filled in. She knew who she needed to talk to.

  She gulped down the rest of her coffee. As she stood, a large black van, blue and red lights flashing, tore around the corner accompanied by half a dozen squad cars.

  They pulled in front of the hotel. She stepped onto the street and moved back behind a mail box to watch what happened.

  A dozen heavily armed and armored police officers jumped from the van and shuffled over to a hotel room. They knocked the door in with a large battering ram. Then she recogniz
ed the door—it was where she and Leo had been staying.

  She couldn't break away, watching the door that the police had stormed. Deep down, she knew that she should do her best to put some distance between her and police, but she was stunned into inaction.

  A few minutes later, the door opened and Leo was led out in handcuffs.

  She slipped back into the gathered crowd of spectators. She had to talk to a couple of her old employees.

  ###

  Matthew Tudor had come up with a truly interesting way to destroy the police department's armored vehicle. It was stored in a very secure building and with all the recent problems, it had more security than made him comfortable.

  A scouting mission had given him an idea. The building was simply a large concrete warehouse structure. As a warehouse, it didn't have great ventilation, but did have automatic carbon monoxide detectors that started fans if there was too much exhaust gas present in the air—say if they were running a vehicle without the doors open.

  He surprised himself on how clever his attack was going to be in making a gas enhanced explosive to take out the whole building.

  When most people thought of using gas to take out a structure, they tried to use propane or natural gas, thinking that any amount could be set off. Well, the Lower Explosive Limit on propane was 2.1% and the Upper Explosive Limit was 10.1%. Below or above those percentages, all you would get was a very interesting fire. Yes, there may be an explosion, but it could simply blow out the fire. Besides, propane was heavier than air and tended to sink into basements and such, completely screwing up the desired effect. He could use propane in a pinch, but the calculations required were quite difficult to pull off.