CHAPTER 29
THE FBI’S DENVER FIELD OFFICE, located in the Federal Building at 1961 Stout Street, wasn’t particularly imposing, especially compared to the majestic State Capitol and other Corinthian-style government buildings a few blocks away. It looked somber, elephantine, and antiquated—a throwback to the bygone Hoover era. But what the office lacked in aesthetic grandeur, it more than made up for in the ability of its personnel. The playground of the Rockies appealed to many an FBI careerist, and the Denver office tended to attract a disproportionate share of the best and brightest from other field divisions and residencies around the country.
On the eighteenth floor, Special Agent Kenneth Patton was giving instructions to an FBI computer expert with an exquisite complexion and silver tongue ring named Lorrie Elert. There were now more than a hundred individuals in the Denver office working full-time to solve the triple homicide. The team—officially dubbed the Assassination Task Force—had set up shop in what was affectionately known as the “bullpen,” the only conference room large enough to house the myriad of computers, wall boards, maps, phones, video machines, and working tables required for a fully operational command-and-control center. In addition to Patton and the three other supervisors, there were fifty-seven agents from Domestic Terrorism and thirty-five from the Reactive squad on the task force, as well as two dozen Secret Service agents working on the case in a supporting role. Another three hundred FBI agents had been assigned out of the Washington, New York, and San Francisco field offices to look into the Green Freedom Brigade and other terrorist cells.
Patton was disappointed that no viable suspect had been apprehended after the shooting and that the campaign buttons seemed to be a dead end lead. But there was plenty of other physical evidence, and, in the end, he felt it would be the key to the case. With physical evidence, he could establish an MO and build a profile. And once he did that, the assassin’s days would be numbered. Even Carlos the Jackal hadn’t stayed anonymous forever.
“What I need is a program that allows us to interface between two separate databases,” he said to Lorrie. “One containing all assassinations of prominent figures in the last ten years. The other for all known or suspected professional assassins in the world.”
“Okay, I’ll start with NCIC,” she said, referring to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., a massive computerized information system that constituted the world’s largest collection of data on known criminals. “But NCIC won’t have everything if the shooter’s international so I’ll also need access to Interpol and CIA records. By the way, who’s going to access the electronic files?”
“Gillin and Pinkerton. You’ll be working with them.”
“Tweedledee and Tweedledum? They’re complete losers, you know, but I suppose I can live with it.” She glanced down at the three hand-painted lead miniatures on his desk. “Hello,” she said, picking one up and looking it over with apparent amusement.
The military figure with the green uniform and helmet, brace of ivory-handled Colt .45 pistols, and loyal Bull Terrier at his feet named after William the Conqueror was a nearly exact reproduction of his great-grandfather: hard-fighting, controversial World War II tank commander General George S. Patton.
“You like playing with toy soldiers, Special Agent?”
“Sometimes. I like painting them more.”
“You a World War II buff?”
“Let’s just say I’ve always liked The Great Escape , Von Ryan’s Express , and The Big Red One better than anything Martin Scorsese’s ever done. And I’ve been to Sicily and Normandy in the exact spot where the Allied Forces landed and read over a thousand books on the war by authors not named Stephen Ambrose. Some people might call it an obsession. By the way, that little bugger you’re holding is my great-grandfather, General Patton.”
“The General Patton? Now I am impressed. How come you weren’t named after him?”
“I don’t know. My grandfather and father were. I guess that’s enough George S. Pattons for one family. My grandfather was a two-star general and, believe it or not, was probably a better commander than my more famous great-grandfather. He died in 2004. I worshipped the old bastard and was lucky enough to reenact the D-Day Omaha Beach landing at the pond on his farm in Massachusetts every summer for a decade.”
“That must have been something.”
“It was. I loved that cantankerous son of a bitch.”
“Aren’t all Pattons cantankerous sons of bitches?”
“Why I believe they are.”
“So let me get this straight. You were not only a blue chip quarterback at Michigan, but you are the direct descendent of two legendary American generals named George S. Patton. You’re quite the All-American, Special Agent. I’ll bet you were a Boy Scout too.”
“Yup.”
“I got kicked out of the Girl Scouts.”
“For what?”
“For kissing another girl…on the lips.”
“What, they don’t give out merit badges for that?”
“No siree. The funny thing is Donna Lance and I were just fooling around—we wanted to see what it was like so we knew what to do when we kissed a boy—and our group leader just happened to catch us. We were both sent home that night.”
“And here you are today a top analyst with the FBI.”
“I’m a junior programmer, Special Agent. Top isn’t exactly the word I would use.”
“Well, you’re smarter than anyone else in this office. That’s tops in my book.” He winked at her playfully. “Sorry, Lorrie, but we’ve got to stop flirting and get back to work now. We’ve got a political assassination case to solve, remember? Now where were we?”
“You were telling me about those two losers, Gillin and Pinkerton.”
“Oh yeah. Your first order of business will be to have them pull together files on anyone who fits the profile of an assassin. Terrorists, independent contractors, government sharpshooters, especially deep-cover operatives who’ve had fallings-out with their governments. They’ll also get you police and intelligence reports on every assassination of an important figure in the last ten years. Once they’ve pulled it all together for you, I want you to build the database.”
“Once it’s populated, what do you want to query for?”
“I want global flags for long-distance killings similar to the Kieger assassination. Cases involving military-style infiltration tactics, glass-cutting, heavy-caliber rifles, or explosive cartridges.” He handed her a sheet of paper. “These are the keywords. Once you’ve flagged the data, I want you to sort it by date, beginning with the most recent record.”
She was writing notes furiously, eager to perform the task. Most people thought building databases and analysis tools amounted to pointing and clicking a mouse, but it involved far more than that. To query a vast data set and perform a trends analysis, as Patton was having Lorrie do, required the system to be programmed to ask the right questions and to sort the data in an easily recognizable format. The custom-designed analysis tool Lorrie would build would help Patton sort through thousands of records and come up with something meaningful, a pattern, an MO used over and over again. With a recurring MO, he stood a much better chance of catching the killer.
“How soon can you have it done?” he asked.
She gave a mock salute. “Thursday, General Patton. I’ll have it done by Thursday.”
He saluted back. “That’ll be just fine, Commander Elert,” he said with a smile. “You are dismissed. Now get to work.”
“Roger that, General.”
She smiled and walked off. Looking back at his desk, he saw his computer screen blink. There was a report flagged as URGENT in his email inbox.
CHAPTER 30
IT WAS THE PRELIMINARY FORENSICS REPORT from the FBI Crime Lab he had been expecting. After decrypting the file, he launched it in Adobe Acrobat and scrolled to the first page until he came to the heading FORENSIC MICROSCOPY RESULTS. He began reading.
/> According to the report, the two hair samples he had found in Lee Wadsworth Brock’s office, and a third strand recovered in the elevator by the ERT, belonged to a single individual. Based on the racial characteristics of the hair and the presence of fluorochrome staining in the follicular tissue, which was used to differentiate sex, the subject was a blond Caucasian male. The hairs contained no dyes and showed no evidence of having been cut, though it could not be ruled out whether they had been forcibly removed. Chemical and mitochondrial DNA analyses would also be performed on the samples, but the results wouldn’t be available until later in the week.
Patton leaned back in his chair to ponder the significance of the findings. There were two main questions in his mind. First, who did the hair belong to, the shooter or an innocent party? And second, if the hair did belong to the shooter, how could the guy have been so careless?
Patton didn’t think the samples belonged to anyone who worked at Front Range Investment Advisors. From the security people, he had learned that no one from the company had come in to work over the weekend and that the cleaning staff had vacuumed Friday night, two days before the assassination. Assuming the cleaning crews had vacuumed thoroughly, it was unlikely that three hair strands from the same person would remain behind. However, the cleaners were still being interviewed, so it was premature to draw any conclusions.
Because of the close proximity of the blond hair strands to the cut window, Patton had already assigned several agents to collect samples from all fair-haired male employees in the company, as well as from all maintenance, cleaning, and security staff matching the description. If no match was found with any of the individuals sampled, there was a decent chance the hairs belonged to the shooter. But Patton would just have to wait and see.
Returning to the report, he scrolled to the next section prepared by the forensic firearms examiners. The projectile that had killed the governor was identified as a .50-caliber HEIAP, or hi-explosive-incendiary-armor-piercing bullet. Because it had exploded into more than twenty fragments, the examiners had had a hell of a time analyzing the rifling impressions and other properties, though they were still confident they had a positive ID. Normally, they could obtain meaningful data on the bullet length, nose and base shape, and other rifling characteristics, including the number and width of land and groove impressions and direction of twist. These properties would, in turn, help determine the bullet manufacturer and caliber of the weapon that fired it. But in this case, because of the fragmentary nature of the bullet, they had been forced to rely as much on chemical composition and color banding as surficial striations.
Using the lab’s Standard Ammunition File, the examiners had narrowed the list of candidates to four .50-caliber HEIAPs manufactured in Norway by Raufoss. From the small slivers of metal, they had identified a silver-and-green tip, a portion of a copper jacket, and two unique surface markings. They had also recovered particles of a tungsten carbide penetrator, some lead, and a trace residue of zirconium incendiary. With this information, they checked the general rifling characteristic (GRC) database for a listing of firearms that could have fired the bullet.
What they came up with told an interesting story.
There were numerous .50-caliber rifles on the commercial market, but when the GRCs on the bullet were compared to the database, only one firearm matched a specific manufacturer, model number, and type of weapon. Reading through the description of the rifle, Patton saw that the Barrett M82A1 semiautomatic rifle was a serious piece of hardware. Fully assembled, the rifle was five feet long, weighed in at almost thirty pounds, and discharged its lethal load at nearly 3,000 feet per second. It was one of the most accurate long-distance sniper rifles in existence, credited with upper body hits beyond a mile. The weapon was used primarily by elite outfits of the U.S. Military—Marine Corps, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs—but it was also the long-distance weapon of choice of both Israeli and Islamic-terrorist snipers in the Middle East.
That didn’t guarantee the assassin was military or ex-military, Patton knew, but it did add weight to his working hypothesis that the guy came from at least a paramilitary background. If he wasn’t military or former military, he was damn sure a professionally-trained terrorist or government sharpshooter with a sound knowledge of military-style weaponry and sophisticated infiltration tactics. Only a true pro had the balls and expertise to sneak a thirty pound rifle undetected to the fiftieth floor of a major commercial building, decommission two security cameras, take out the president-elect from a half mile away, and escape into thin air without a trace.
So who in the hell is this guy?
The question was still ping-ponging through Patton’s mind when his phone rang.
He looked at the caller ID. It was Sharp. Feeling as though he had forgotten something, Patton looked at his watch.
Oh shit, the meeting!
A wave of anxiety shot through him and he cursed himself for his lapse. Picking up the phone, he braced himself for a severe scolding.
“My office now, Special Agent—you’re two minutes late, goddamnit!” the ASAC barked without preamble. “And bring your 302s!”
Patton snapped to attention like a footsoldier. “I’m on my way, sir.”
CHAPTER 31
WHEN PATTON ENTERED THE OFFICE, Sharp scowled at him like an Irish drill sergeant from behind his paperwork-filled desk. He felt himself involuntarily stiffen. Closing the door, he handed over his first batch of 302s to the ASAC and took his usual seat in front of the desk.
The 302 was the standard reporting form FBI field agents had to file to chronicle case developments and justify actions taken, which was of paramount importance to the U.S. Attorneys who might one day try the case if it went to trial. Without saying a word, Sharp looked over each form like an IRS auditor, as if checking them not for substance but completeness.
“This is all you’ve got?”
“At the moment. I realize we don’t have a suspect, but we are narrowing down the list of possible shooters who could have pulled this off. I’m having Lorrie Elert build an analysis tool so we can query the database for common MOs and—”
“Wait a second,” Sharp interrupted, glancing over the top 302 on his desk. “You’re telling me you’ve gotten nothing from the eyewitnesses? No physical description? Nothing?”
“No one questioned so far saw or heard anything. Whoever our guy is, he was in and out without being seen. We don’t have even a rough sketch.”
“What about the videotapes?”
“We’re still working on those. We’re IDing everyone who came into the building over the weekend. We’ve been through Sunday, and now we’re going through Friday and Saturday.”
Sharp pulled out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and stuffed the snot-caked handkerchief back in his breast pocket. “What about the Kieger campaign tapes?”
“Still working on them too.”
“What about the Brigade? We must have made some progress by now along that front.”
Patton groaned inwardly at the prickly tone, but let the affront pass. “We haven’t tracked down any members. But we have made some headway on Ares. One of our computer techs has found a name in the revision log of the source code. It’s an obscure feature in Microsoft that reveals the name of a person modifying a file. Apparently the code has been used before by some hacker who likes to spread nasty viruses. The name embedded in the code is ‘Rainbow Warrior.’”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“It’s the name of the ship Greenpeace planned to use to protest nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1985. But the French government blew it up in New Zealand, killing a Greenpeace photographer.”
“So the virus’s author could be connected to Greenpeace—where President Osborne used to work.”
“We’re not sure what it all means. What we have for sure is a name, albeit a code name, for the author of Ares. We also have the programmer’s source code signature. We’ve posted the code on the Net, which means we’v
e got a hundred cyber sleuths from the antivirus companies working on this thing.”
“I suppose this all could lead to something,” Sharp said, without much enthusiasm. He was old-style FBI, not very cyber savvy, and the vagaries of the Internet were still a mystery to him. “Tell me about the physical evidence. You must have something there.”
Again, Patton didn’t like the ASAC’s tone, or the implication, which seemed to be that he was not handling the investigation properly or producing the desired results. But again, he kept his emotions in check. “We know how the guy was able to cut through the glass. Hydrofluoric acid, HF, fifteen percent dilution. Lethal stuff, highly corrosive. It was likely sprayed from a polyethylene bottle into the initial cut. We believe that once the rough edges were dissolved, the glass was pulled free with a suction gadget of some kind. Unfortunately, hydrofluoric acid’s a standard lab product. Anyone can buy it in small quantities without any special requirements.”
“That doesn’t give us much, then.”
“It shows our guy knows how to handle a dangerous substance as well as how to apply it. It fits our profile of a highly-trained pro, with expertise extending beyond firearms.”
Sharp acknowledged this fine distinction with a slight dip of his chin. “What about the fingerprints? Anything on that?”
“We pulled seven usables, four from Brock’s office and three from the elevator. But none of them match anyone with a criminal record.”
“So no probables, then?”
“IAFIS kicked out two.” He was referring to the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. “The reliability factor for both was in excess of ninety-five percent. But when the two probables were manually checked, it was determined there wasn’t a match. Basically, the prints are useless until we find the perp.”
Sharp groaned. “Why don’t you have any fucking good news for me?”
Because this guy’s smart as a whip and not making it easy on us. Who do you think we’re dealing with here, an amateur? “We have several promising leads. We just need time to follow them up.”
The Coalition: A Novel of Suspense Page 12