Kill Code (14 page)

All she had wanted to do was run the company that
was now hers, but that might not ever happen. After Nathan's death,
her whole world had come crashing down and she may not even live to
see the setting sun.

She took a deep breath and focused on the task at
hand. Usually, she would have been able to open this lock with her
picks in not much more time than it took to use a key.

Finally, she felt the last tumbler snick into place.
Rotating the tension bar, the lock opened up. Taking one last look
around, she saw that there was no one around to see her.

She'd already looked for surveillance cameras
pointing at the front of where she was standing, but didn't see
any—not that there weren't any, just that they were probably well
hidden and directly wired into someplace. Before approaching, she
had used her packet sniffer to see if there was any unusual
Internet traffic—which would have been if someone had web-based
surveillance set up. There was a huge amount of traffic from the
front of the building and she wondered what the hell was happening
there.

The printing company didn't have an alarm system and
was almost on the verge of going out of business anyway. She slid
into the front office of the business and carefully pulled the door
shut, re-locking it. The place reeked of ink, paper and cleaning
solvent.

Making her way around through the darkened machines,
she accessed the broom closet that was built into the common wall
between the buildings. It was full of clutter and she risked using
the LED light she kept on her key chain to make her way through
it.

She found the hidden catch and pushed on it. A panel
slid open leading into the back of the workshop of Nathan's office.
The familiar hum of the air conditioning blew around what should
have been the comforting odors of his office that instead made her
heart thump in her chest.

Securing the hidden panel, she put her fingers on
the release on this side. She didn't know if she was going to have
to go out this way or not. In fact, Leo, the spooky dude, didn't
much elaborate beyond her being used as a target so he could shoot
someone with his rifle. The man was so single minded that whatever
would happen after he killed the sniper that may or may not have
been targeting her, probably never crossed his mind.

Staying low, she made her way out of Nathan's
office—the room still smelled of him and it gave her a pang of
heartache.

Patrick's office was between hers and Nathan's. As
she passed by her door, she wondered if there was anything she
would want out of there. Everything that she had built up in life
was in that room. Right now, she couldn't think of anything that
was worth the effort it took to open the door and find it.

Leo had shown her how to check for booby traps
around doors, so she carefully unlocked his door and felt for any
resistance. Nope. Then she ran her fingers around the slightly
opened door, looking for any wires. Still nothing. She carefully
opened the door, her senses straining in the silence to feel for
anything that was wrong and could literally blow up in her face. If
need be, she was prepared to cut through the Sheetrock between her
office and Patrick's, but that would take a lot of time and had its
own difficulties.

When the door was fully open, she took a careful
look around. The cup full of pencils, each sharpened to the same
length, sat on his desk along with an ancient adding machine. Off
on one side was a computer. File cabinets lined the back wall.
Everything appeared to be where it needed to be and in perfect
order. Patrick had been anal about neatness and Nathan had insisted
that he probably needed to be on some sort of medication. Based on
what she had learned in the last day or so, it should have been
Nathan on the psych meds, not Patrick.

She stepped into the room. Where would he have kept
the information for her?

“Damn it Patrick, where the hell did you hide
it?”

Nothing answered in the silence. Making her way over
to the desk, still wary of any possible booby traps, she sat down
at his desk. Every drawer was locked. While Patrick had known about
her skills with lock picking, he had made her promise never to
violate his trust by using her talents on any locks in his
office.

Would he have locked it up someplace? She didn't
know.

She sat at his desk, the leather chair creaking.

Looking around, she didn't see any obvious place. It
was as though her brain was locked up and she couldn't think.

Then she saw the desk blotter. Usually, it was
perfectly aligned with the edge of the desk and didn't have
anything written on it. Patrick seemed to change out the backing
about once a week when it got worn or stained—though his definition
was probably a great deal more precise that hers was.

There was a bump on one edge. She flipped it up off
the desk. Nothing under it. She pulled the backing out, and there
it was, a file folder.

Yes. Flipping it open, she saw that it was she had
been looking for—half a dozen sheets of paper filled with numbers,
account information, names and addresses. None of it looked
familiar to her at all. There was one name that stood out—precisely
highlighted in yellow—Alamut Enterprises.

She put everything back in its place and stuffed the
contents of the folder into her back pocket.

Stepping in the same footprints that she had used on
the way in, she glanced at her watch. It had seemed like hours, but
had only taken ten minutes. She still had a little while before she
had to play target and was curious about what was generating all
that network traffic from in front of the building.

She made her way back to the workshop. There was a
much better packet sniffer in there than the portable one she had
built into her laptop.

Settling behind the machine, she booted Linux and
accessed the Network Security Toolkit. After making sure that no
one else was logged into the network, she plugged in the wireless
card and started scanning. In a couple of seconds, it detected the
transmitter and receiver and started intercepting the raw data
dump.

“What do we have here?”

She grabbed a big block and started looking through
it. Nothing familiar. On a whim, she dumped it through a video
player. After a bit of massaging, she saw a picture of the front
window of a building. The building she was sitting in. What did
this mean?

Someone was spying on the building. But there was
some other noise in the picture that caused static. She isolated it
and dumped a copy to a nearby laser printer.

It was time for her to play bait for whoever was
watching her.

Ken Brody, the accident specialist and Fifth Finger
of the Black Hand, sat in his van and watched the car of US House
of Representative Russel Willis, a Colorado democrat, home for the
weekend. Never mind that it was parked in front of the lavishly
decorated condo he had purchased for his mistress in Boulder. His
wife and children, who lived with him in Denver, wouldn't see him
until tomorrow. Such were the perks of the leader of the House
Finance Committee.

He checked the canister of
weaponized fentanyl—usually fentanyl was a very powerful analgesic.
It was suspected that the Russians had used a version of it to
knock out the terrorists who were responsible for the October 2002
Moscow Theater siege. Several years ago, Brody had read about it
and found a pharmacy student who could be bribed to develop it for
him. It was too bad that he later died after experimenting with a
hallucinogenic compound that he had also brewed up and had walked
off the top of a sixteen-story building.

Both compounds were tools of the trade for what he
did, and with ten operational kills over the past year, he figured
that he only had half a dozen more years to work before he could
retire to the villa in the South of France he had his eye on.

The front door of the condo building opened. There
he was, the fat fuck representative, adjusting his skewed tie.

I hope it was good for you, because you are soon
gonna be bait for the mountain lions.

He climbed out of his car and looked around. There
wasn't anyone else around. People paid for their privacy around
here and during his earlier surveillance of the area, he figured he
could cut Willis up with a chainsaw in the middle of the street and
no one would pay attention.

Settling his nose plugs in, he took a deep breath.
Putting his thumb on the trigger of the canister, he walked briskly
up towards Willis like he was going into the building.

As he walked past, he held the canister up and gave
Willis a full five-seconds spray of it in the face. There was a
grunt as he passed out, crumbling to the ground in a heap.

Brody looked around to see if anyone had noticed. No
one. He was prepared to administer fake first aid to an apparent
heart attack, but it looked as though he wouldn't need to do mouth
to mouth to this filthy bastard.

He first checked for a pulse. It was there, weak,
but it was there. Based on his past experience and the
representative's body weight, he would be out for at least three
hours.

As he hoisted the inert form over his shoulder, he
thought about how this particular assassination would be unique to
the wild back country of Colorado—being left out to die hundreds of
miles from any help, alone, hungry and hallucinating. No one would
ever find the body.

Besides, the rough country was beautiful this time
of the year.

He staggered under his burden, hurrying as best he
could—this was his first congressman and if he accomplished this
job quickly and well enough, he might to get to kill a senator.

###

Leo had settled down to wait, crawling completely
inside himself. His binoculars never stayed very long in one place,
but constantly moved, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He
had already drawn a picture of the surrounding terrain on a piece
of notebook paper in front of him, with the appropriate distances
marked as he had determined using his laser rangefinder.

The only problem he could see was the angles
involved. If he had to shoot into a building from where he was
located, at a target that was a great deal higher than him, that
could add a serious complication. The best place to have been was
hidden in one of the buildings that looked down on the front of the
business—that way he could have a decent chance of being at the
same level.

He had no doubt that he could quickly calculate the
cosine of the angle and figure that into any shot he needed to
take, but he might have to shoot through building materials to
reach the sniper. The bullets he had designed were very stable over
extremely long range, but he had never shot them through the side
of a building to see how that affected their trajectory and
penetration. And at an extreme range, it might not even have enough
energy to reliably kill what he was shooting at.

The idea was to put a very large hole in whatever
you were shooting and let the air out. He had experimented with
hyper-velocity, small caliber bullets, but too often they
disintegrated on the way to the target, leaving merely a lead spray
in the air—pretty, but not very accurate or effective.

The recoil of his rifle was beyond brutal and his
shoulder still ached from his shooting session yesterday. But he
hoped that all he would need to take was only one shot.

The only other vehicle in the lot was a fiberglass
bodied van that said “Peerrman Plumbing” on the side. Leo had
watched it carefully—what the hell was a plumbing truck doing
sitting in an empty parking lot? But there was no movement from the
vehicle and it looked to have been parked there all night. It was
suspicious enough that he made special note of it on his shooting
diagram including the range and where he would shoot if someone
emerged from it. Maybe there was someone inside it, watching
him—he'd read that some surveillance vehicles had special
mechanisms that would lock the suspension so that you could
practically Disco in the back and not have it move at all.

He wished that he had a thermal imager—not that it
might not penetrate the sides of the fiberglass van, but it had
other possible uses. It could also show any place in the nearby
offices that were occupied—and could contain a sniper who was
gunning for Jackie.

Speaking of Jackie, this must be one hell of a shock
for her, being the hunted. Leo really didn't know what that felt
like, always having been on the other side of the rifle. He figured
that the cops or feds would figure out who James Phillips really
was and then someone would put two and two together along with the
hotel credit card usage in Denver and start asking the right
questions.

He planned to be long gone before that happened. He
could live so far off the grid that he didn't exist. Hidden in his
truck was over fifty thousand dollars in well-used bills and three
times that amount in untraceable gold bullion. Food and ammo was
all he needed to be happy and mostly that came cheap.

Would Jackie want to join him? She was pleasant
enough of a companion—mostly quiet, which is what he, a man who
spent most of his life inside his own head, liked. Maybe she would
be completely different when the weight of people trying to kill
her was lifted.

Hell, he had gone his entire life alone and any
change would have to be carefully considered, weighed and
calculated, very much like a thousand yard rifle shot in gusting
winds.

Forcing himself back to the task at hand, he took
another sweep around the area with his binoculars. When was Jackie
going to present herself as bait?

###

Allan Wells peered into the laptop's screen. For
fourteen hours of sitting, the only thing stirring was some plastic
grocery sacks and an old newspaper blowing in an ill breeze. The
targeting computer had locked onto them, but quickly discarded them
as the possible target. He was proud of his software and hardware.
Ideally, and someday, he could hire some throwaway minion to set up
the rifle system while he sat on a beach somewhere getting ripped
on drinks with flowers and umbrellas in them. But that was still at
least two versions away.