Kill Code (24 page)

“What am I looking at?”

“The list of people killed so far. Except for a
couple of minor instances, they have all been members of the
government.”

He looked at it. She was right.

“About time.”

“What do you mean?”

“It makes each IRS, DEA, BATF agent accountable for
their every action. Adding in politicians effectively shuts down
our government—everyone would be so afraid of doing something that
could get them killed that they wouldn't do a damn thing. About
fucking time.”

She leaned back into his chest. He stroked her hair,
reveling in the smoothness.

“You sound like you like that idea.”

“In some ways. I firmly believe in something that I
read a number of years ago, that the only function of government
should be to provide for the common defense and repair the roads.
They can do that without zillions of laws, regulations and taxes.
Hell, I earn enough that forty percent of my income goes to taxes
that pay for crap that I wouldn't want anyway. Why should I bust my
ass to pay for politicians to line their own pockets?”

“So, you agree with this?”

“Not by any stretch of the imagination. Through
years of coddling, at least ninety-seven percent of our population
wouldn't be able to survive in a world where their lives weren't
supported by the government in one form or another. There has to be
some sort of middle ground, and stacking bodies of politicians high
and deep isn't the way to do it.”

“How does this affect what we are doing?”

He considered what he had learned in the last couple
of minutes.

“I don't know. But I think it's another cog in the
bigger plan that someone has for this country. Just imagine what
would happen if what happened in Denver happened throughout the
country. Building inspectors, Congress critters and others in
politics being killed or simply disappearing—there would be chaos.
We'd all have to be responsible for our actions and lives and most
people would rather riot than deal with that.

“I know that there are only five fingers in the
Black Hand, so that means, in order to accomplish their apparent
goals, they’re going to have recruit a bunch of amateurs.”

“Amateurs?”

“Yes. It costs a lot of money to train, equip,
support and pay a professional killer. There are thugs out there
that will kill for a couple of thousand dollars or a pat on the
head from the right person, but killers on the level of the Black
Hand receive at least $50,000 a hit, sometimes have support teams,
and those don't come cheap, and that doesn't include training
costs—who knows how many they recruit who can't drop the hammer
when the time comes. As an example, when I was learning my trade,
the rifle that they built me cost at least $10,000. And that was
eleven years ago. That robot rifle that cooked itself must have
cost a bunch more than that.”

“How does this affect us?”

“I don't have enough information to even begin to
form the picture. I'm a detail guy—just give me one very tiny
aspect of a problem to deal with and I'll excel. I'm not used to
caring about the bigger picture. I got my targets, eliminated them
and went home. I didn't care why or even who.

“I recall reading about riots all throughout a
country over the death of someone who looked like someone I had
taken out. Several hundred died, and all I had to do with it was
three and a half ounces on a trigger.”

“How'd that make you feel?”

What a strange question. Probably it was why he'd
never discussed his past with anyone.

“How do you feel about two thousand people dying in
an earthquake in China?”

She shrugged.

“Same here. I did my job, the targets were dead, and
I was alive. I didn't care why, didn't know much more than that and
was happy to spend the money. I'd been so numbed by my childhood
and any thread of humanity was carefully excised by my training, so
all I could feel was that I did what I was supposed to do. Money is
the ultimate in praise if you have nothing else in your life to
live for.”

“That's sad.”

“No, it's not. You can read about ten-year-old
soldiers in Africa. If all you know is violence in the midst of
chaos, how can you know what is considered normal by society's
standards? How do you find out how to live? It's not TV or books,
and the people that I worked for gave me all that I was looking
for. I created my own world and lived by rules created in that
world.

“Someone has to be able to do the dark things that
need to get done.”

She cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“Most of those people that have been killed by the
Children of the Constitution probably deserved it in one way or the
other. I've never really met a fed or government official that I
much liked, good riddance to all of them.”

She stood with a tense expression.

“Well, one of those people you said 'good riddance'
to was one of my friends, a dear sweet man, who just happened to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Turning, she walked to the door. “I'm going to get
some fresh air. It's getting too stuffy in here.”

He watched her go, wondering what the hell he had
said to upset her and why.

Tyrannicide's analysis of media broadcasts revealed
the general public was in a barely concealed state of panic. The
collateral damage so far had been minimal, with few in
non-government positions being hurt or killed and the basic
infrastructure was still intact—street lights works, food was being
delivered to grocery stores and most people could go about their
daily lives without much worry. But all it would take was one event
to turn the city into riots.

There was a delicate balancing act that must be
maintained, otherwise there would be armed soldiers in the streets,
shooting at frightened citizens.

It sent out several more targets for its special
operators, then settled into wait for further developments.

###

Matthew Tudor was delighted at his
new assignment—destroy, hopefully without harming anyone, the
Denver Police Department’s Armored Personnel Carrier. Yes, they
called it a 'Peacekeeper,' but a tank was still a tank, no matter
if you painted it pink and hung flowers off of it. It was a
LAV-300, a six-wheeled vehicle built by
Cadillac Gage,
Textron Marine and Land Systems. This particular one had been one
of at least six captured by the US Army during their invasion of
Panama.

Armored only to stop 7.62 bullets, it was vulnerable
to any number of weapons, including grenades. It had all sorts of
fancy sensors including thermal sensors, computerized tracking
devices, night vision, tear gas launchers and probably even a
doughnut and coffee dispensing system. It had blue high output LED
lights on it and was painted jet black with 'POLICE' on the front
and 'SWAT' on the side.

Powered by a V-6 turbo-diesel engine and
transmission, it could do sixty miles per hour on roads and could
hold up to nine SWAT officers plus the driver. Some variations
included water jets underneath that allowed amphibious
operations.

They had gotten the vehicle from a DHS grant, the
same nitwits who had provided snowmobiles to a Texas police
department—their city had gotten maybe a half-an-inch of snow in
ten years, but they said they really needed them.

The difficult thing for him was going to be taking
out the vehicle without taking out the driver, who sat next to the
engine and transmission. Yes, he could probably get the diesel tank
to light up somehow—diesel was hard to get going, but once you got
it burning, it was a major pain to put out. However, he didn't know
if the fire suppression system that was usually standard equipment
on this vehicle was still active. Yes, enough fire could overwhelm
such a system, as they were only designed to give the crew enough
time to evacuate the vehicle. But it did add another complication
to the picture.

Thank goodness they hadn't upgraded the thing to
dual self-sealing tanks, rather than the standard single tank.

Another complication was that the damn thing didn't
get out much. After the initial public fury when they had purchased
the vehicle and that they had to pay $50,000 to refurbish the
thing, it had not been seen very often on the streets of Denver.
That was the nice thing about the city, there were enough bleeding
heart liberals to make life interesting for those trying to
militarize the police.

They had promised that the APC would be used at
least fifty times a year, all for SWAT call outs and for dangerous
situations to protect the officers. He wondered why they needed
such protection. It had only been seen in parades and while he had
searched for news articles about it being used, the press was
strangely silent about it when it was used, if at all.

So it was either figure out some way to get the
thing out on the streets, and take his chances that he could kill
the crew with one of his devices, or figure out where it was stored
and take it out there. He wondered if there was a bonus if he took
out other interesting police vehicles—rumor had it that they also
kept an ambulance and fire truck to trick people into thinking that
they weren't the police. He'd love to burn up a fire truck, the
irony in that act was something that would make him feel all warm
inside.

He found a copy of the plans for the police garage
and set to work on figuring out how he was going to pull this
off.

###

Leo knew that he needed to set aside what was going
on with Jackie and find a new approach to the problem of figuring
out who was pulling the strings and why.

He tried going back to his past and his current
skill set to get an idea as to what to do and how. Nothing he could
think of regarding shooting seemed to work. Putting bullets into
small groups at enormous ranges didn't much tie into anything that
seemed to be able to help him.

Then he considered his coin skills. Yes, he could
tell you which coins had strong strikes, what years they were made
and what the rare dates were. But his specialty, if you could have
such a thing in such a broad area such as coins, was US coins.
There were plenty of people that specialized in one particular type
of coin, say Indian Head pennies, and some even went down to
knowing and collecting all that they could regarding a small number
of years and strikes.

He had the books and the knowledge to look in the
right places to get his questions answered, but other than that, he
could care less. The magic in coin collecting had pretty much been
replaced with the pragmatism of someone who bought and sold
valuables—anything in the store was up for sale for the right
price. In fact, you could probably walk in with enough money and
buy the whole place, lock, stock and barrel.

So, was there something that he could use that he
had seen before?

Then it hit him; his partner in the coin store
dabbled in ancient coins. It was a tricky business because such
coins were much easier to fake than more modern coins. What had
helped was if the coin had providence—documentation showing where
and how it had been found, testifying to its authenticity. Even
such paperwork could be faked, but it was something that many
buyers of high-value ancient coins insisted on examining often even
before they looked at the coin. Yes, there were plenty of gray
market buyers out there that just wanted to fill their collection
with a coin that no one else had, but the vast majority of the
collectors that Leo's partner dealt with were way above legit.

Given the providence concept, showing how and where
it got to its current location, how could that be applied to what
was going on now?

He realized that he lived in a vacuum, doing his own
thing, not really influenced by outsiders. Every day the coin store
was open, he went to work. He spent his evenings working on his
rifle or researching the history of assassination. He didn't even
think that Rob, his partner, knew what he did with his free time,
not that he even cared what Rob did when not at the store.

But had Nathan White lived the same way? You just
don't spring from the womb with the ability to manage a team of
professional killers. And it wasn't something that you could pick
up by reading. Someone had to determine that you had the right
mindset and morals to do the job and then teach you to how to
handle a stable of very highly trained and paid professional
killers.

He considered the skills needed including
recruiting, training and equipping the assassins. Then you had to
have work for them—offering to kill someone wasn't something that
you could just post an ad in a phone book. Even word of mouth would
draw the attention of too many feds, cops and whack jobs wanting
their wife killed.

So how would you come up with people willing to pay
for the support team, equipment and the assassin? Maybe large
businesses, but definitely governments. Yes, all of his jobs had
been outside the country. And it had been shockingly easy to get in
and out of the country. He imagined some rogue government agency,
not necessarily based in the US, running the entire operation for
their own ends. What those ends were, he had no idea.

Returning to his original problem, who had been
Nathan's teacher? That's under the huge assumption that Nathan
hadn't been set up to take the fall—real difficult to talk to a
dead person. In both cases, someone was still calling the shots—no
matter if Nathan had been in charge of running it until his
death.

Damn, there were too many questions to be answered.
All he wanted to do was go back to his old life, but that was
probably going to be too much to ask. Adding what he may feel about
Jackie was another complexity that he didn't want to have to deal
with.

Somewhere was the Schwerpunkt—the center point of
all this that was going on. The term came from Blitzkrieg, where
the enemy line may be pierced by an explosive combination of
multiple weapon systems. Once the line is pierced, armored forces
dive deep into enemy territory to disrupt command, control and
logistics systems. Once these systems are disrupted, the top-heavy
military units they support collapse in confusion. The same thing
could be found in many dynamic systems, including societies. If you
wanted to collapse an organization, you looked for where you could
expend your resources the most efficiently to cause the most
chaos.