Play To Kill

by P. J. Tracy

  They found Harley at the eight-burner stove in the kitchen, dumping canned chili in a pot with one hand, holding a beer with the other. Charlie was already next to him, nose up to a skillet of warming breakfast sausage. 'Just for you, buddy.' He tossed a link into the air and Charlie rose on his hind legs to catch it.

  Grace leaned an elbow on a counter, chin in her hand, and watched the pair of them. The really amazing thing about this vagabond dog was what he taught you about the people he interacted with. Harley, for instance, oblivious to his own great value, bought affection shamelessly. Charlie was the easiest mark. One sausage, and he was yours for life. Where's Roadrunner?' she asked.

  'In the shower. He made a new land speed record biking over here this morning, and I had to wring him out before I'd let him in the house.'

  Annie peered into the mess in the pot and punched her hands into her pillowy hips. 'Nobody's going to eat that crap. And why are you drinking at eight o'clock in the morning?'

  'Technically, since I didn't sleep last night, it isn't really morning. It's just a continuation of the dark time, only with light.' '

  Grace smiled at him. You're really shook up about this, aren't you?'

  You're goddamned right I'm shook up about it. We're going to have a Fed in this house for God knows how long, watching over our shoulders, looking at every move we make.'

  'So?'

  'So? So? Are you kidding me? We break about a hundred Federal laws every day when we work. We bust into secured sites - hell, we hack into the FBI like it was our own e-mail. They're going to wait until they get the software program they want from us, then they're going to throw us in the pen for about four hundred years. Christ. We beat these guys black and blue for ten years. They hate our guts, so what do they do? They ask permission to send this Trojan horse asshole right into our office and we open the door.'

  'Are you talking about John Smith?' Roadrunner ducked through one of the kitchen doorways in his perpetual uniform of bicyclist Lycra. Even though the entire house was built on a grand scale, at six-foot-seven his head nearly brushed the lintel. 'Hi, Grace, Annie. Sounds like you're getting the four-hundred-years-in-prison lecture.'

  Harley scowled at him. 'Very funny, dipshit. And that damn well better not be the same suit you were wearing when you got here, because I just got the chairs reupholstered to match the koi.'

  'I'm not an animal. I put the sweaty one under your bed. And all your koi are dead, anyhow.'

  Annie's bow lips turned down in a troubled pout as she focused on the disturbing possibility of wearing a prison- orange jumpsuit for any length of time. 'They wouldn't do that, would they, Grace?'

  'Do what?'

  'Throw us in jail for a teeny-weeny bit of computer mischief.'

  'No, of course not. Harley's just being paranoid. The Feds know all about us working under the table every now and then…'

  'Right,' Harley grumbled. 'They just haven't been able to prove it.'

  Grace rolled her eyes. 'They asked for our help, and they're going to cut us some slack. Besides, Smith is the new FBI, not the Hoover archetypes we were dealing with back in Atlanta.'

  'Are you kidding me? Did we meet the same guy? He had the suit, he looked like a Feeb, he talked that stupid Feeb talk, shit. The only thing that wasn't Hoover archetype about Smith was that he wasn't wearing a dress.'

  Grace shook her head. 'They're desperate, Harley. They tried tracing this network and they can't do it. Not legally, anyway. So they bring in us and a bunch of hackers so we can do what the law keeps the Feds from doing themselves. You can't stick religiously to every letter of the law when lives are at stake, and maybe they're starting to get that. Sometimes you have to bend some rules. Hack into private phone records and save a life, or respect privacy laws and let somebody die. There's no choice if you're a human being.'

  Harley nodded. 'Exactly my point. Who ever said the Feds were human beings?'

  Grace shrugged. 'We had a choice. An office of our own in D.C., or D.C. came to us.'

  Yeah, well, I agreed to that before they told us they were sending a full-time spy.'

  'Liaison,' Grace corrected him. 'He's here to help us.'

  Harley snorted. 'That's what they say to the mental patients when the guy comes in to give them electric-shock therapy. Christ, Grace, you're talking about the same agency that set you up to bait a serial killer, and now all of a sudden you think they've got scruples?'

  'Harley.' Grace took in a breath and exhaled noisily; one of those secret signals that told people who knew her they should pay attention. 'There are creeps out there filming fake murders to get their fifteen minutes on the Web; but there are other creeps filming real murders for the same kind of celebrity. The FBI wants them all shut down, and the first warrant step is a software program that can tell the difference between something staged and something real. They're doing the right thing, Harley, trying to nail the real killers fast, and scaring the creep idiots straight. And it's simple for us. Software 101.'

  Harley snorted. 'I'm glad you're so optimistic. Even if we use one of our existing software platforms, we're talking a week, minimum, just to get an idea if this is doable. It's going to be a ton of extra work, and my point is, we've got a lot on our plate right now. We're staring down deadlines on security software for three of the biggest corporations in the world, which, incidentally, is going to make us filthy, stinking rich…'

  Annie cocked a brow at him. 'We're already filthy, stinking rich. Half the computers in the world run at least one of our software apps or games.'

  'Besides, the security software is already in beta version,' Grace reminded him. 'We'll be finished by the end of the month, easy.'

  'Okay, but we still have to finish the updates for all the educational software…'

  Roadrunner lifted his hand and waved. 'I finished those this morning.'

  Harley folded his big arms across his chest and grunted. 'All right, all right, so maybe we can squeeze this in. Big whoop. The bottom line is, I do not trust the guy, I do not want to work with him looking over my shoulder, I do not want him in my house.'

  Roadrunner shrugged. 'I kind of liked him.'

  Yeah, but you're a dipshit.'

  'Besides, we've got more bad-guy radar in this room than all of MPD, and if he is one, we'll know it after the first hour.'

  Harley blew a raspberry. 'Oh yeah? It took us ten years to figure out who was trying to kill us. Our record for reading people isn't exactly sterling.'

  Grace didn't exactly make a face. The one she already had just went very still and stayed that way. For a woman who had spent her entire life anticipating and preparing for danger, she didn't like reminders that she had locked out the world and locked in the most dangerous people of all. It had almost cost all of them their lives, and it was her fault, no one else's. 'When's he coming?'

  'In an hour.' Harley grabbed a manila folder off the counter by the stove and slid it over to Annie. 'In the meantime, Roadrunner and I did a little surfing on some of the websites the Feebs red-flagged for us at the seminar. This came off one of them this morning'

  Annie opened the folder and pulled out a photo. 'Oh Lord, is this a real dead person?'

  Roadrunner shrugged. 'No way to tell. We scanned it for Photoshop-type alterations and couldn't find any, but that doesn't mean it wasn't staged and posed. Heck, we did that for the Serial Killer Detective game and even the cops thought it was the real thing. We called Smith to have the thing pulled and passed to Cyber Crimes and the recruited geeks, but it doesn't look good. The ISPs are shifting too fast to trace.'

  'Just like the posts of the five city murders,' Roadrunner said.

  Grace shrugged. 'That doesn't make this one real. The fetish and porn sites get better at hiding every day. Some of those networks are so sophisticated they make the military's system look bad.'

  Annie passed the photo to Grace as if it were a poison mushroom. 'Real or not, this is sick. Somebody has to stop this.'

  Grace nodde
d. 'That would be us.'

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  When the doorbell rang at 9:05 a.m., Harley Davidson was out of his chair like an ICBM, cruising fast to intercept the Federal bogeyman at his front door.

  'For God's sake, Harley, settle down,' Annie sniped behind him. 'You're as jittery as a long-tailed cat under a rocking chair. He's going to think you're on meth.'

  Harley shot her a nasty look over his shoulder. 'Don't mention drugs,' he whispered.

  'You have unequivocally lost your mind. There isn't even a bottle of aspirin in your medicine cabinet, you idiot, and, last time I checked, possessing multivitamins wasn't a felony.'

  Harley made a face, then pulled open the big double doors. John Smith was wearing the standard-issue blue suit and an all-business countenance. He had a craggy face that hadn't aged well, making him look a little scary and a lot older than the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven. 'Good morning, Mr. Davidson.' His eyes drifted down to the empty beer bottle in Harley's hand, but he didn't comment. Harley hated that about cops and Feds - their eyes were always too damn busy.

  Harley jerked his thumb down the broad hall. 'We're in the breakfast room, looking at some of the crap we pulled off those red-flagged sites you turned us on to.'

  Smith stepped inside and followed what looked like a mountain of leather to a room where the others waited around a table. 'Good morning, Ms. MacBride, Ms. Belinsky, Mr. Roadrunner.'

  The two women nodded from their chairs, but the man in the body stocking jumped up, smiled, and actually shook Smith's hand. It was like stepping into a circle of reserved adults who just happened to own a cocker spaniel puppy. 'Just Roadrunner,' he said, grinning. 'Mr.: Roadrunner. Jeez, that's funny. You want some coffee?'

  'Thank you, no, I've had breakfast. Once again, on behalf of the Bureau, I'd like to thank you for your generous offer of help.'

  Grace had to concentrate to keep from rolling her eyes. Everything Feds said sounded like it came off a script. She nodded an acknowledgment. 'Shall we go up to the office and get started?'

  'There are a few ground rules to cover before we do that…'

  You got that right,' Harley interrupted. 'So let's get it all on the table. We break more laws in one day than any hacker at that seminar breaks in a year. Developing the software you want is no problem; but if we're going to try to trace these guys, we're going to have to break a ton more just to get started, and I'm not about to do that with you looking over our shoulders so somewhere down the road you can testify against us.'

  Smith nodded. 'Understood.'

  'I don't think you get how fast we could rack up a few hundred years on our sentences for -' Harley stopped and blinked. 'What do you mean, understood,?'

  'I am not here to interfere with your work. My role here is primarily to liaise between you, Washington, and other law enforcement agencies, to keep you briefed on new developments, and to make suggestions as to the direction of your work as I see fit. I am also required to stay with these files at all times' - he patted his briefcase - 'and when I leave for the day, I will take them with me. There is sensitive, classified information about Cyber Crimes' procedures that under no circumstances are you to copy to your hard drives.'

  'We work strange hours, Agent Smith,' Grace said. 'Sometimes around the clock.'

  'I'm prepared to be on duty twenty-four hours a day, if necessary. I will be as unobtrusive as possible, but I will be present.'

  Annie smiled at him sweetly. 'How computer savvy are you?'

  'Fairly.'

  'Well, then you know that any one of us could copy these files right under your nose.'

  He nodded. 'I know that. I'm asking you not to. Those files contain detailed records of the tracking formulas we've developed over the last several months…'

  'Did any of them work?' Grace asked.

  'Uh… no…'

  'Then why on earth would we want to download them?'

  A muscle in Smith's jaw tightened. 'For one thing, to give you a template of things that have already been tried so you don't waste time. More importantly, having this information on another computer system just increases the odds of a breach.'

  'No one hacks into our stuff,' Harley grumbled.

  'That may be, but if we limit the computers this information is on, any breach will be easier to trace.'

  Annie gave him the kind of sweet smile you gave to the mentally deficient. 'So, the criminals you tapped at the seminar to do your dirty work for you aren't getting a look- see at this stuff?'

  Smith's spine straightened imperceptibly. Apparently the Feds didn't mind encouraging law-breaking when it suited their purpose; they just didn't like to hear it spoken aloud.

  'Oh, come on. Let's cut to the chase here. You've got posts of real live murders the FBI can't track, at least not legally, because the servers are registered in countries where U.S. access is denied. So what do you do? You call in a bunch of salivating hackers and tell them that if they try to access these foreign server accounts they will be in violation of international law. Good grief. Talk about dragging a slab of bacon in front of a bunch of wild dogs.'

  'I can assure you that was not the Bureau's intention.'

  Yeah, right. And these eyelashes are real. The point is, we don't give a gnat's ass about your text files. Don't even have to look them over. But if you want us to write software that differentiates real murders from staged ones, we need to download the videos of those bodies in the five cities.'

  'I am not authorized to give you permission to do that.'

  Harley moved the mass of his body a step closer to Smith. To his credit, the smaller man held his ground. We're going to download the videos. Are you going to fink us out?'

  It took Smith a minute to remember what jink meant. He had to go back several decades. 'I do not believe you will do that.'

  'I just told you we're going to do that.'

  Yes you did. But in my opinion, that was bravado. I do not think it was sincere; therefore I will not report it.'

  Annie tucked her hands into her hips and tapped a toe on the marble floor. Agent Smith watched the toe moving up and down, mesmerized. 'I can't decide if your instructions are to handle us just like those other poor fools at the seminar, or if you might actually be a good guy.'

  'I have never been accused of being a good guy.'

  'Uh-huh. You want some chili before we get to work, darlin'?'

  'No, thank you very much for the offer.'

  'How about a beer?' Harley raised his own bottle.

  'FBI agents do not drink alchololic beverages on duty, sir.'

  Yeah, yeah, and FBI agents are always on duty, right?'

  'Precisely.'

  'Well, I guess that makes my goals pretty clear here. Before you leave I'm going to see you totally snockered with three belly dancers sitting on your chest and a really great Cuban cigar stuck between your teeth. Let's get up to the office.'

  For the first time in his career, John Smith was conflicted. When you boiled it all down, this whole assignment required that he consort with the kind of criminals he'd spent his life trying to convict. Who knows how many laws these people had broken. Besides, they looked weird. And they all carried concealed weapons. On the other hand, they were totally up-front about who they were and what they did, which was more than he could say for the Bureau, and they helped law enforcement across the country free of charge. Hell, they were starting to look better than most of the agents coming up the ladder from some Shangri-la place where an Ivy League education counted for more than ground law enforcement and a cop's brain.

  What the hell do you think you're going to get from the Feds?

  That had been his dad, a D.C. beat cop for thirty years, totally psyched on instinct and puzzle-solving, totally down on a bunch of suits who thought academia trumped people skills.

  You got the Feds, who think those of us in the trenches are pretty much part of the trash they're trying to sweep under the rug, and then you got the cop
s, who know the people on the streets and do the hard work separating the bad guys from the good guys. And here you are, choosing the high road that doesn't know shit about what's real.

  His dad hadn't come to his graduation; hadn't even sent a card when he'd made agent, but he'd read his future in a bottle of Pabst when John had come home for his uncle's funeral.

  They'll eat you up for your first ten years, use you up for the next ten, then turn their back when you start to show gray. I'm telling you, Son, and I sure wish you would listen…

  'Agent Smith?'

  He came back from his reverie instantly. They were all sitting at a round table in the third-floor office, and now the skinny guy was shoving a mug of coffee under his nose.

  'Well. Thank you very much. Do you happen to have any sugar?'

  Roadrunner took a step backward. 'Are you kidding me? That's Jamaican Blue. Taste it first.'

  Agent Smith had no idea what Jamaican Blue was, but he complied, set his mug on the table, and looked down into the brew. 'My goodness.' He felt Harley's massive hand clap him on the shoulder.

  'Okay, Agent Smith. You've got a palate. You just went up a couple of notches. Now, we pulled something interesting off the Web this morning.'

  'Another murder scene?'

  'Maybe. You show us yours, we'll show you ours. So what have you got for us?'

  Smith started emptying his briefcase. 'These are the video films of the five murders. Cleveland, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and Los Angeles.' He dug deeper into the leather case and pulled out a bound folder of untold pages. 'This is a detailed record of our Cyber Crimes Division's failed attempts to trace the posts involving those murders. And these are the fringe sites we'd like you to monitor.' He slapped down a folder stuffed with printed pages.

  Annie pulled the folder toward her and started shuffling through them. 'My God. There must be hundreds of them.'