Killer Focus

by Fiona Brand

  The reason he hadn’t removed the clip from the Bernadelli now also made sense. At the time she had thought he was on edge because of the possible threat to her, but it was more straightforward than that. There was no way a trained professional like Fischer would disarm himself while traveling in the presence of someone who was armed.

  The door opened and the woman popped her head inside. “I checked down the street. They’re both gone.”

  Taylor let out a breath. “Thanks. You saved my life.”

  Twenty minutes out of town, she turned down a side road and pulled over in a shady spot where her vehicle wouldn’t be visible from the highway.

  She picked up her cell phone, found the speed dial for Dana’s number, and stopped. She needed to calm down, to think.

  Dana wasn’t safe. Taylor needed to talk to her, to get her out of San Francisco as soon as possible, but she had to assume that Lopez had both Dana’s cell phone and her home and work numbers tapped. After what had happened in Cold Peak, he would also have Taylor’s under active surveillance. She couldn’t afford to call Dana.

  They would be waiting for her to do just that.

  She turned the cell phone off, put the car in gear and headed back toward the highway.

  She would buy another cell phone when she changed vehicles, but even then she couldn’t afford to make the call herself. She would have to find another way.

  Twenty

  Steve caught the urgency of the traffic on the police band the second he climbed into his truck. A body had been found on the reserve behind Taylor’s place. Muir and the evidence techs were already there; the coroner was on his way.

  Slamming the truck into gear, he pulled out onto Cold Peak’s main road. The gender of the body hadn’t been specified and there was no reason to assume that it was Taylor, but after more than twelve years working undercover operations, he was short on optimism. And Taylor hadn’t turned up at the gym.

  He braked for an intersection. While he waited for the lights to change, he picked up his cell phone and called the gym. Mandy answered. Taylor still hadn’t come in, and she hadn’t phoned.

  When he arrived at Taylor’s house, several police cruisers were parked along the road. A news van was just nosing into a space across the street and a group of bystanders and neighbors were gathering on the sidewalk. An ambulance was standing by.

  Driscoll was on guard at the front gate, his face green.

  “Male or female?”

  For a split second, Driscoll didn’t respond. “Male.”

  Some of his tension dissolved. “I need to talk to Muir.”

  Driscoll was reluctant, but Steve was banking on the fact that because he had called in Letty’s murder, Muir would see him. The second killing had raised the stakes. Driscoll had to know that if Steve had information that would help with the inquiry and he blocked him, Muir would go ballistic.

  Driscoll spoke into his radio. A split second later, he jerked his head. “You can go in.”

  Muir glanced up as he walked toward the house. Steve reached into his pocket, slowly, because Muir looked pissed and Hart looked almost as green as Driscoll, and produced his ID.

  Muir glanced at Steve, his expression mild, considering the information on the ID. “Now what does the death of an elderly lady and a lawn-mowing contractor have to do with the CIA?”

  Steve supplied him with a copy of the letter that went with the ID. It didn’t contain much more than a list of the agencies that had agreed to cooperate with his investigation, but it was written on Office of the Director of National Intelligence letterhead and signed off by Saunders.

  Muir took his time reading it. “I’m going to need a copy of this.”

  “Be my guest.” He nodded toward the backyard. “Has the body been identified?”

  Briefly, Muir filled him in on the details. Hansen had been dead for two, maybe three days. He had been on their list of suspects for the appliance thefts and they’d had an APB out on his truck ever since his girlfriend had called the previous night to say that he had gone missing.

  “Who found the body?”

  “An anonymous female caller, but my money’s on your girlfriend.”

  “Mind if I take a look in the house?”

  Muir still didn’t look happy. “Hart goes with you. The body is out-of-bounds.”

  Hart led the way into the house.

  As Steve passed the sunroom with its empty computer desk, he took his cell phone out of his pocket, stabbed the speed dial, spoke briefly then hung up. Taylor must have come back here shortly after he had left for work to look for the cat, found the body, reported it and left town. He was willing to bet that she had also found the cat, which meant her first stop would be a cattery.

  He noticed that the photos in the sitting room were gone, along with a sampler that had been on the wall. Apart from taking these few personal items, it appeared that she had packed just the necessities.

  When he walked out of the bedroom, Hart was waiting in the hall. “Where’s the body?”

  Hart looked wary. “Over the fence in the adjoining park.”

  “Mind if I take a look from the backyard?”

  “Just as long as you don’t go over the fence. After the rain last night, the evidence techs are going crazy trying to find anything but mud.”

  Steve stepped out of the back door just as Muir cleared the two ambulance officers carrying a stretcher and a body bag to hand the equipment over the fence. “How did he die?”

  Hart watched in mute fascination as two uniformed officers disappeared with the stretcher into the overgrown reserve. “Two in the back of the head. That’s a first for Cold Peak.”

  The tension in Steve’s stomach intensified. The sniper who had shot Taylor in D.C. had fired at least four rounds and only one of them had hit the target. The attempt in Wilmington had been a clear shot from an apartment window that had also been bungled, leaving Taylor with a grazed arm. This guy had made sure.

  The shooting was different; connected, but different. Maybe it was simply that the killing had been so neatly executed; no mess on either Letty or Taylor’s properties, no sloppy marksmanship, just bad luck that Taylor had climbed over the fence and gone looking for her cat.

  A burst of static erupted out of Hart’s radio. “It’s Harris. They’ve found the truck. It’s in a ravine on Herbert Pierce’s place, just off Highway 103. There’s a television and a VCR in the rear.”

  Muir swore. “Tell Harris not to touch a thing and don’t let anyone near it.”

  Muir issued orders, but Steve already knew the truck was another dead end. He’d been trailing this guy for months. If Muir thought he would find anything to hang a case on in the ravine, he was going to be disappointed. The only piece of information that was of real interest to him was that Harris hadn’t reported another body.

  Just after twelve, Taylor used the new cell phone she had bought in Springfield, a town thirty minutes south of Cold Peak, and dialed Jack Jones’s number.

  He picked up almost immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  The sound of her father’s voice loosened off some of her tension. At this time of day he could have been out on his launch with clients and out of cell phone range, and right now every second counted. “I’ve left the Witness Security program. I need your help.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Nowhere yet, I’m driving. Don’t worry, I’m safe. There’s something I need you to do. It’s important.”

  There was a brief silence. He said something sharp and succinct. “Dana.”

  Relief made her feel weak. The conversation had been conducted in a weird short code, but they were on the same wavelength.

  “Why didn’t they go for Dana before?”

  “Because they had a line on me. Now that’s gone.”

  There was a dull clunk, as though he’d set a plate down. “What happened?”

  Briefly, she filled him in on the murders, the shot that had narrowly missed her and the fact that s
he had been followed to Cold Peak.

  “Damn it. Where are you?”

  “That’s not important. All I need is for you to get Dana out of San Francisco and keep her safe.”

  “She isn’t going to like it.”

  “She’ll understand. You’re the only one I trust to do it.”

  There was a tense silence. She heard background noises, the sound of canned laughter. She had a sudden mental picture of her father watching TV while he ate lunch alone and she experienced an unexpected, vivid sense of connection. Jack Jones hadn’t lived the life she’d wanted him to live, but he was alive and, right now, he was the only person she trusted to help her.

  “I’ll get a flight out this afternoon. As it happens, I was on my way to the West Coast. I’ve got a lead on the hit man and a contact who’s willing to talk.”

  “Forget the hit man. Just get Dana out.”

  At ten o’clock Taylor turned into a popular motel chain just off Highway 91 on the outskirts of Northampton, Massachusetts. She paid for a room with cash and parked the rental she’d picked up in Springfield outside the unit.

  The motel room was sparse but comfortable. After depositing a change of clothes and toiletries in the bedroom, she dialed Burdett.

  He picked up immediately, despite the fact that it was late, and he wasn’t happy. He’d had the Cold Peak PD, the FBI and the Attorney General’s office in his ear and he wanted her back in protective custody, ASAP.

  Cutting him short, Taylor supplied the address of the bank, and the time and date Fischer and his sidekick had been outside, talking. “If you get hold of the bank’s front door and ATM security camera tapes, you should be able to get clear footage of two men who followed me to Cold Peak. One of them, the guy with the glasses, was in Wilmington. I’ll be in touch.”

  Twenty-One

  Taylor strolled through a mall, a shopping bag filled with a few necessities—milk, fresh fruit, decent coffee and a blond wig. She’d only slept a couple of hours, but despite that she felt alert and in control.

  She was supposed to have felt this way in the Witness Security program but that hadn’t happened. She’d thought long and hard about exactly why the program had failed her. The problem could be as simple as the publicity surrounding her shooting in D.C. making her too visible. Either that, or someone powerful enough to circumvent WITSEC had betrayed her.

  She was betting on the second option. A mole who had eluded protection had disrupted the Morell/Lopez investigation. It was an uncomfortable notion to think that she had been personally targeted by the mole, but given that the information she’d had stored on the disks had pertained solely to the Lopez investigation, she had to consider it.

  The way she saw it she had two options. She could disappear, renege on her agreement to testify against Lopez and start a new life with a false identity, or she could find out who wanted her dead—and why—and stop them.

  With the contacts she had, and with Jack’s help, she could arrange a false identity. But if she took that route, Dana would have to come with her, which would mean a huge disruption in a life that had already been derailed by the Chavez cartel. It would also mean taking the coward’s way out. After all she and Dana had been through, after all the effort she’d put into catching Lopez, she was damned if she would roll over now.

  She turned down the street that led to her motel, her gaze watchful. Despite her tiredness, her stride was loose and her chest felt close to normal. The hours she’d spent at the gym and jogging around the streets of Cold Peak had paid off.

  When she reached her motel unit, she unpacked the groceries, had breakfast, pinned up her hair and tried on the wig. With her hair color changed from dark brown to honey-blond, she looked radically different. Satisfied, she changed clothes, collected the bag of disks and her purse, locked the unit and walked back to the mall, which had an Internet café.

  She hired a computer for the morning, sat down and placed the stack of disks beside the hard drive.

  There were twenty in all. Setting the disks in order of date, she inserted the first one and began to read. By the time she inserted the second disk, the noise of people checking mail and transacting business at the counter had faded and she was once more hotwired into the world that Lopez had locked her out of.

  As she worked, she made brief notes about the interweaving threads of the Chavez cartel and the wild card of the Nazi cabal that, according to Slater, had backed Alex Lopez. She had every confidence that if she searched long enough, she would find what it was that had pushed Lopez’s buttons.

  At eleven she stopped to stretch her legs and iron the cricks out of her neck and shoulder, then paid for the afternoon. The café was open until late, which suited her. If she had to stay until closing, she would.

  She slipped in another disk and the cadences of the investigation began to flow, the strange coincidences and seemingly unrelated incidents forming a pattern that had implications beyond the investigation into the Chavez cartel.

  She took a break from the screen to read the notes she’d made about the Nordika dive tragedy and Tito Mendoza, and suddenly the pattern made sense.

  There was a book. It was the last piece of information she had found while she was working on the case. Just days after e-mailing the file to her work computer, she had been shot.

  Maybe she was stretching things too far, but she didn’t think so. When she had read the Mendoza article months ago, she had connected it with Lopez, because Slater had said Lopez had made a trip to Bogotá to retrieve a book from a safe-deposit box. What she hadn’t focused on were the implications behind what the book Mendoza had had in his possession contained: names, dates, blood types and numbers tattooed onto German ex-nationals.

  If the articles about Stefan le Clerc were correct, SS officers had hijacked the Nordika and used it to transport so-called genetically superior children and a cargo of looted art and gold bullion to South America. If any of the SS officers were still alive, they would be elderly. The children would now be past middle age.

  There were no actual estimates of the value of the art and gold bullion, but the le Clerc article suggested that it was enormous. More than enough to bankroll a new life in the United States and to form the financial base of an exclusive club based on a shared past and genetic heritage.

  And what better way to control the members of the cabal than through a book that had the potential not only to expose individual members but the entire cabal?

  According to Slater, the cabal was ordered, secretive and primarily in the business of making money through shareholdings in large corporations and manipulating lucrative defense contracts. The reason the CIA were involved in the investigation was clear. The cabal’s activities weren’t confined to the United States: they had political and terrorist affiliations and operated on a global scale. If Slater’s information was correct, their influence extended all the way to the White House, and the list of crimes perpetrated by members of the cabal included conspiracy and high treason.

  Tito Mendoza, a hit man, had gotten hold of the book right about the time the navy divers had disappeared. The close timing with the naval tragedy was what had drawn her attention to the news report about Mendoza in the first place. At a gut level, she had been certain that Mendoza and the book were linked to the Nordika dive tragedy.

  She inserted the disk with the article about the missing divers. Partway down the second page, the name of the SEAL team leader caught her eye: Todd Fischer.

  She stared at the name for long seconds, transfixed. She hadn’t paid the actual members of the dive team much attention before, because she had been focused on Lopez and the cabal.

  Pulse racing, she scrolled down the page. Todd Fischer’s next of kin were listed. His wife, Eleanor May Fischer.

  His son, Steven John Fischer.

  She searched through her disks and inserted one that had a grainy photograph of Todd Fischer. The family resemblance was clear. Steve was taller, his skin and hair a little darker, but h
e looked enough like Todd that the relationship was in no doubt.

  She went online and searched “Steve Fischer.” A number of hits came up, among them an article with a photograph of Lieutenant Commander Steve Fischer accepting a trophy on behalf of his naval shooting team. There were a number of official records cataloging medals and awards for tours of duty in the Middle East, and one brief article from an in-house naval magazine outlining Fischer’s secondment to the office of the Director of National Intelligence in a special projects role, reporting directly to RearAdmiral John M. Saunders.

  The report was more than a year old, and in that time he hadn’t changed much, except his job.

  She already knew he had followed her to both Wilmington and Cold Peak. He wasn’t Bureau. It was possible he was operating under the umbrella of the CIA. The office of the Director of National Intelligence oversaw the entire intelligence community and it had a wide reach. Special Projects threw it even wider.

  The reason Fischer had focused on her was clear. He had known she was being hunted. He had had her watched in D.C. Given that he had known she was researching Lopez and the cabal, the spyware on her computer had likely been his. Every time she had e-mailed files to her work address, he had received a copy. He had kept close but not too close, staking her out while she acted as a sacrificial goat. That wasn’t the act of a man falling in love, or even in lust. It was the act of a cold-blooded professional. It didn’t explain why he had risked his cover by getting so personally close to her, but she was certain there had been a net gain involved.

  He was good; he had fooled her. He had watched her and moved in close; he had even slept with her. He was on his own private mission, hunting his father’s killers.

  The government was paying him, but she was willing to bet that he would do it for free.

  Twenty-Two

  Dana Jones stamped a deposit book, slipped it across the counter, smiled at the client and checked her watch. Half an hour until her lunch break. The next customer wanted to cash in traveler’s checks. Tapping a key, she shuffled through the menu, found the requisite program, then entered the amount. Sliding a form from beneath the counter, she filled out the check details and the amount, routinely advising the customer of the cost of the transaction. Her hand was steady and her voice was smooth, but that didn’t change the fact that the transaction was an unwelcome reminder of her time in international banking. She no longer had a hankering for high finance, and the way she felt dealing with a minor two-bit transaction like this was the reason why. She had gotten burned so badly that even if anyone in international banking would give her a job, she wouldn’t take it.