Intrusion (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 2)

by Reece Hirsch

  She wasn’t quite sure how bad Geist’s drinking really was, so there was the possibility that he might have had too much hair of the dog and ended up passed out in his apartment. Maybe his editor buddy had returned and the revelries had resumed.

  As the day progressed in the computer forensic lab without any word from Geist, Zoey grew more worried. Geist had seemed genuinely excited about the story, so it seemed unlikely that he would flake out.

  “You seem preoccupied,” Chris said. “Everything okay?”

  He was one to talk. Chris had been immersed all day in studying the mechanics of how the Chinese hackers had gotten behind Zapper’s firewall.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Zoey said. She knew that she needed to tell Chris about her disclosure of the flash drive, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it just yet.

  When Zoey still hadn’t heard from Geist at the end of her workday, she set out for his apartment. It was a breezy early evening—jacket weather—as she retraced her path to the apartment building on Hoff Street.

  She felt a foreboding as she climbed the steps to the second floor. Zoey knocked tentatively on the door. There was no sound from inside the apartment.

  “Geist! It’s me, Zoey.”

  No response. After rapping on the door and waiting, Zoey tested the doorknob. It wasn’t locked, and that made Zoey even more worried.

  She stepped into the apartment, which was dark except for the pale-red light from a liquor store’s neon sign across the street, which filtered through thin curtains. The first thing she noticed was the smell. Zoey had never been at a crime scene, but she recognized the smell of blood. She had just never experienced it so intensely.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she made out the figure bound to the chair in the center of the living room.

  It was Geist, and he wasn’t moving.

  “Matt.” Again, louder: “Matt!”

  Zoey fought back a gag impulse and managed to avoid throwing up. She thought that maybe the red light through the curtains was playing tricks on her vision, so she turned on a lamp.

  With the lights on, she could see that Geist’s right leg was a bloody mess. It looked like someone had tried to perform major surgery on him with a hacksaw and without removing his pants. She now saw that a large pool of blood surrounded Geist, and she jumped backward to get away from it.

  She tried to calm herself enough to look again and saw the bullet wound in his chest. He had been tortured, then killed.

  His leg was in the shape it was in because he had refused to give up the flash drive—for as long as he could stand it anyway. It had been Geist’s shot at big-time journalism, and he had clung to it for as long as he could.

  Zoey instantly recognized that someone had followed her from the office to Geist’s apartment that morning. Maybe that same person was following her now.

  She rushed to the door, locked it, and put on the chain. However, that wasn’t going to be enough to deter anyone who was capable of this carnage. Zoey dialed the San Francisco Police Department on her cell, her trembling fingers fumbling the numbers.

  After she hung up the phone, it dawned on her that the man who had done this must have hacked her work phone or email. Why else would he kill Geist? He must have known that she had given Geist the flash drive. There was only one way that he could have known that.

  She stood frozen, staring at Geist’s body, until the police arrived, knowing that he would be alive if she hadn’t offered him the story. She could have looked away, but she felt that she deserved to have this grotesque image seared into her memory. She was going to have to carry it with her for a long time to come, and she was going to suffer for that—and she knew she deserved to suffer for that.

  27

  Tao knew exactly how he was going to kill Chris Bruen. In fact, he had gone over the plan in his mind so many times that he was able to visualize it as if it had already happened. It was called positive visualization.

  Bruen would be walking home to his apartment from the law firm’s offices. He would be south of Market on a deserted stretch of Beale Street. There would be few passing cars and even fewer pedestrians on the sidewalk. The night would be falling, but the streetlights wouldn’t be on yet. It would be that half-light time of day when the moon was already bright in the sky even though it wasn’t yet dark.

  Tao would be wearing jeans, a gray hoodie pulled up over his head, and a Giants cap. He had followed the route several times, looking for CCTV cameras, and there were none that should pick him up. Even if he had missed one, his face would be obscured.

  He would be carrying his Beretta in the pouch in the front of his sweatshirt. He would walk quickly up to Bruen from behind, his hands buried in the sweatshirt’s front pocket. When he was just a couple of feet from his target, he would draw the Beretta in a smooth motion.

  Bruen would be nearing the corner of Beale and Howard Streets, very close to an alley that opened to the right. Tao would stride up and speak Bruen’s name. When he turned around, Tao would shoot him in the chest.

  A bullet in the back would be easier, but that wouldn’t look like a failed robbery. In a robbery attempt, the victim faced the thief. And Tao couldn’t follow his customary practice of putting a bullet in the target’s head once he was down for the coup de grâce. That would also look too much like an execution.

  It was important to be accurate with the placement of the bullets. Or artfully inaccurate.

  First, there would be one bullet straight to the heart. Then a shot to the gut. Just to make sure that he bled out. And finally one wild shot to Bruen’s foot, which would convince the police that the assailant was a street robber who had just gotten lucky with that first shot to the heart.

  Tao sat on a bench outside the Reynolds Fincher offices, waiting for Bruen as he had before, running the scenario through in his mind. He knew that thinking too much could be counterproductive. Planning and positive visualization were fine, but if you became too fixated, then you wouldn’t be adaptable enough when things went wrong or differently.

  Once more Bruen pushed through the revolving door, heading home. Tao rose and walked away in the opposite direction, then doubled back to follow Bruen once he’d passed. The target descended the escalator to the ground floor, then proceeded through the shops, heading south toward Market Street and his apartment. Tao’s pulse quickened as he moved through the shoppers and office workers, feeling the excitement of the hunt.

  While standing at a crosswalk at California Street, Bruen looked backward in Tao’s direction. Did he know that he was being followed? Tao didn’t see how that could be the case. Was someone else following Bruen or meeting him? Tao scanned the streets for anyone who might be there for Bruen but saw no one with eyes locked on the attorney.

  The streets of the Financial District all ran down to the waterfront in a series of long corridors. The orange glow of sunset cast into the open sky to the left, and to the right it was obscured by office towers. But the traffic was largely headed south, the cars filled with East Bay commuters stacked in long lines, waiting to ascend onto the Bay Bridge. Beale Street was not one of the streets that turned into a parking lot at rush hour, so it was vital that Bruen followed his usual route home.

  Bruen crossed Market Street, the broad thoroughfare that cut across San Francisco from the Embarcadero to the Castro, and headed down Beale Street, which was a mix of three- and four-story offices and sleek, new high-rise condo towers. There were few pedestrians on the street and Tao stood out, but thankfully Bruen didn’t look back again.

  Tao gripped the gun in the pouch of his sweatshirt and quickened his pace. Bruen was nearing the alleyway that would provide his escape route after the shot. He drew his Beretta and held it down at his side, but just as he did so he heard a car engine approach from behind him with a tubercular rattle.

  An ancient, sky-blue VW Beetle raced up the street, passe
d Tao, and came to a stop beside Bruen.

  “Get in!”

  It was Doucet. She leaned across and opened the passenger-side door.

  Tao’s window of opportunity was slipping away, and he was prepared to let it go. You couldn’t force these things.

  But before Bruen could climb into the VW, he looked back down the street and saw Tao—and the gun dangling at his side.

  Bruen jumped inside the car and shouted, “Go! There’s a man with a gun.”

  Tao stepped into the middle of Beale Street so that he would have a straight shot through the rear windshield.

  The first bullet shattered the glass. The second and third struck metal with the clanking, empty sound of tin-can target practice.

  If they had driven straight up Beale Street, there would have been ample opportunity to kill them both. They would have been dead before they reached the cross street. But Zoey jerked the steering wheel to the right and drove down the alleyway that Tao had intended to use as his escape route.

  He ran up to the entrance to the alley and fired a couple more shots, but it was too late. He watched the VW drive away, sputtering like a glorified lawn mower, until it turned onto First Street, merging into the traffic waiting to get on the Bay Bridge.

  For a moment, he considered walking up the street and shooting them while their car was stalled in traffic, but he quickly dismissed that as a foolish move. If he shot two people in the middle of a line of a hundred cars, he would be seen by many, and there was no telling how many people might decide to climb out of their cars and pursue him. He would probably have to kill several bystanders in the process, and that was simply not professional.

  He cursed softly, then walked away. Residents of the nearby apartment and condo towers would have heard the shots, so the police would be arriving soon.

  When Tao reached the Embarcadero, he removed his sweatshirt and baseball cap and tossed them in a garbage can. He untucked his shirt and placed the gun in the small of his back. As he got lost in the crowds out for an evening stroll beside the bay, Tao knew that his job had just grown much more complicated.

  28

  Zoey screamed as the front and rear windshields blew apart in a shower of bright fragments. She hunched down over the steering wheel but kept her foot on the gas. The VW swerved and scraped against the wall of the narrow alley, sending up sparks.

  Chris could hear the bullets clanking as they struck the car. Glancing back over the front seat, he saw the figure in a hooded sweat shirt and Giants cap standing in the middle of the alley, legs braced in a Weaver stance and calmly firing away. He ducked down behind the seat.

  They were almost out of the alley. Almost at First Street. Chris’s pulse raced and strained as erratically as the VW’s engine.

  The car emerged from the alley, and Zoey had to slam on the brakes as they faced a stream of bumper-to-bumper traffic headed for the Bay Bridge. Zoey forced the car into the traffic to a fanfare of car horns.

  “Should we get out of the car and run?” Zoey asked.

  Chris had a better view back down the alley. “No. He’s gone. I don’t think he’ll follow into a crowd like this.”

  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Chris said.

  Zoey was gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white. “We need to get out of here!”

  The traffic advanced a bit, so that Chris could no longer see down the alley. He kept his eyes on the alley’s entrance. If the man in the sweatshirt came striding out, it would be all too easy to step up to the car window and gun them both down.

  “Is he coming?”

  “I can’t see now,” Chris said. “I’m going to get out and look. You stay here.”

  Chris opened the door and stepped out of the traffic and over to the entrance to the alley.

  He glanced around the corner, but the alley was empty now. He rejoined Zoey in the car, which had barely advanced in the traffic.

  “He’s not coming for us.”

  “Unless he’s looking for a place up ahead to take a shot.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Fifteen endless minutes later, they’d flowed with the heavy traffic onto the Bay Bridge, heading east, away from San Francisco. Chris looked at Zoey and saw the tension visibly drain from her body as she put distance between them and the shooter.

  “Did you get a look at him?” Zoey asked, nearly shouting over the wind whipping through the shattered windows.

  “Yeah. He looked Chinese. And he seemed very comfortable with a gun.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think this is a response to killing those two hackers?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I think.”

  Zoey pulled off the bridge at the first opportunity, exiting onto Yerba Buena Island, a green, rocky outcropping in the center of the Bay. They drove across the isthmus that connected to Treasure Island, a man-made island and former naval base built from landfill for the 1930s Golden Gate International Exposition. They parked the car beside the road that skirted the island. On one side were the apartments that had once been housing for naval staff. On the other was a stunning view of San Francisco, across the bay but improbably close at hand, the lights of the Embarcadero office towers winking in the gloaming. But they were in no frame of mind to admire the view.

  For a moment they just sat there, brushing glass fragments out of their clothes and off the seat. Chris felt a weariness settling over him, the aftereffect of the adrenaline spike.

  “We can’t go back to our apartments until we understand what’s happening,” Chris said. “That was not a random robbery. It seemed more like a professional hit. And if that’s true, he’s not going to give up.”

  “And if he was a professional, then someone hired him to do it.”

  “Right. Since this is probably about the hacking and the deaths of Owyang and Ma, then that killer was most likely paid by the Chinese government or some agency. Probably the PLA.”

  “Wait a second,” Zoey said. “Remember that connection I found between a Unit 61398 manager and Red Sun, that hit man working through Silk Road?”

  “Of course. That was a pretty thin thread—”

  “And the Zapper security team beat me up pretty good when I suggested it. But it looks a lot more plausible now, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. We need to revisit that theory, spend some time on Silk Road.”

  Chris sat quietly for a few long moments, contemplating their next move.

  Finally, he said, “We’re going to have to go to the State Department tomorrow morning. We can seek some sort of protective custody. Tell them what we think is happening.”

  “And you think that’s going to stop this?”

  “I think it’s our best shot. If the State Department communicates with the Chinese through diplomatic channels, lets them know that they know what they’re up to, then they’ll understand that there will be real consequences if they proceed.”

  “What if they don’t care what the State Department thinks?”

  “That’s a possibility. The Chinese might think that I was sent by the US government to begin with.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’re either going to need some serious protection, or we’re going to have to run.”

  “And what about tonight?”

  “Tonight we need to find someplace to hide out until we can go to the State Department.”

  “A hotel?”

  “I’m not even sure that’s a good idea. Remember how sophisticated those hackers on Datong Road are. If they can crack the security of a company like Zapper, and hundreds more like it, then I think they’re more than capable of tracking us down using our credit card and cell phone records.”

  Chris removed the SIM card fr
om his phone, and Zoey did the same.

  “What do you suggest?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to think of a place where we could lay low tonight.”

  Zoey nodded slowly, thinking. “I know a place that’s lower than low.”

  “You know, if you hadn’t come along when you did, I would be dead right now,” Chris said.

  “As you know, my timing is usually not that good,” Zoey said.

  “What were you coming to see me about anyway?”

  “We can talk about that later,” she said, shivering as a chill wind blew through the car. “Right now let’s get the hell out of here, okay?”

  29

  When Zoey and Chris entered the Bottom of the Hill that night, a boozy cheer rose from the bar crowd. Zoey had been a bartender at the grungy Potrero Hill music club off and on for years and was a favorite of both the bartending crew and the regulars. This was the place where Chris had first met her seven months ago while tracking down some hackers for a case.

  “I knew you couldn’t stay away,” said a woman behind the bar with short jet-black hair and tattoos up her right arm.

  “It’s either the stiff drinks or the weak company, I’m not sure,” Zoey replied. Then she broke into a smile, ducked under the wait stand and behind the bar in a move that was clearly still preserved in muscle memory, and gave the woman a hug.

  “Good to see you, K.”

  “Same here, Zed.”

  The other bartender on duty, a man in his midthirties with two-day stubble and an approximation of a haircut, stood patiently by, waiting for his turn. When Zoey turned and saw him, he simply extended his arms wide and smiled sheepishly.