Kill Code (5 page)

###

Matthew Tudor specialized in killing with fire. He'd
been doing it for twenty-plus years and was very good at making
flames do his bidding. Gasoline and other such petroleum-based
accelerants were for amateurs. Matthew had developed virtually
undetectable methods of starting fires that also made them appear
to be caused by something else entirely. It helped that he had a
PhD in chemistry. Neither industry nor academia paid what he earned
in doing one or two 'jobs' a year, and it gave him time to play
with his love and fascination, chemistry. He owned quite a chunk of
property in middle Texas and had a lab rivaling that of any
university. 

Matthew was also a member of The Black Hand, an
organization of killers which specialized in a particular method of
murder. After his twentieth job, he had been invited to join the
group, which included a variety of specialists in poisons,
explosives, faking accidents and a sniper. Originally, there had
been ten members, now there were five—the nature of the business
taking a heavy toll on the members.

He'd been busy at work in his lab on the secrets of
a new untraceable, alcohol-based accelerant when his Blackberry
buzzed, signaling a new message. The company he worked for had
given him the Blackberry, and he had been instructed to only use it
for dealings with them and no one else.

Setting down a bubbling beaker, he checked the
message and saw he had a burn job in Denver. It even specified how
it was to be done—automobile immolation—his specialty.

###

The happiest Leo felt was with his cheek against a
rifle stock, a paper target off in the distance. This was when he
transcended the science of rifle shooting and could take it into
the realm of art. So many factors were behind each shot: wind,
temperature, humidity, range and even the spin of the earth. Even
if you used the best equipment and the finest components for
building ammunition constructed to inhuman tolerances, and your
rifle and scope were as perfect as anything constructed by man,
firing the rifle still required luck to hit the target where you
aimed.

He always tried for the perfect shot every time,
knowing he would never attain it. He didn't know if he could do
this sitting around waiting for someone else to kill another
person.

His last perfect shot was at well over twelve
hundred yards. Peru. He could still taste the gusty breeze, the
heaviness of the humidity. He could barely pick out the target in
the scope for the mirage, but his spotter, a pudgy former Marine
who really needed to learn to shut the fuck up about all the girls
he'd had sex with, called the scope settings out in a calm, cool
voice.

The cross hairs danced around the target to the beat
of his pulse. Leo took a deep breath, let half of it out. He went
to that deep inside place where nothing else mattered except the
feel of the rifle embraced by his body, the scope, the target and
the trigger. The sight settled onto the target.

As he took the slack off the trigger, Leo was
surprised when the rifle fired.

His spotter said, “Hit.”

He knew it was the best shot he had ever taken.
Since then, he had tried, but never succeeded, in finding that same
feeling. Maybe it would come, but he wasn't sure.

A movement by Jackie's car snapped him from his
daydreaming. It was a man opening the trunk. He put something
inside and quickly closed it. What the hell was going on?

###

Jim Fox walked quickly away from where he had placed
the car bomb. As a specialist in explosives and a member of the
Black Hand, he knew that the Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) he
had placed in the target's car was more than enough of a device to
do the job. First developed in World War II, and most recently used
in Iraq for particularly devastating IEDs, it had the ability to
take out an Abrams main battle tank from thirty yards away. Instead
of being close to the subject like a conventional shaped charge,
the target could be some distance from the charge itself. He'd read
somewhere that an EFP eight inches in diameter threw a seven pound
copper slug at two thousand meters a second. Bypassing the
Mercedes' security system to place it had been simple. He used a
device he had bought from an Israeli company. It sniffed the remote
codes when the target had driven up in the morning using the remote
to lock the car.

He armed the device remotely with a remote key fob.
The next major movement of the vehicle, say, a car door slamming,
would set the device off and send a jet of white-hot plasma through
the back seat, through the driver’s seat and out the front
window.

It was a relatively easy job and would pay decently.
He was on his way out of town as he did not want to be in the area
when this much explosive went off. He knew, from twenty years in
the murder business, that it would do the job. He'd only missed his
target once before, and that was one hell of a long time ago. It
had been in Columbia. It was only bad luck and timing that the car
had been stolen before the target had gotten in it. Those days, he
used explosives tied directly into the starter system. Four pounds
of Semtex had practically blown the car thief into low orbit. Once
he missed, it wasn't his problem anymore. He had wired the car—that
it had taken out the wrong person was beyond his control or
caring.

He walked around the block to where his rental car
was parked, got in it and drove off into the early afternoon sun.
He still had one more device to set before he left town. 

###

Jackie found a gun in Nathan's drawer. It was shiny
blue and big. She didn't know a damn thing about guns, having no
interest in them one way or the other, but she knew a gun when she
saw one. While Nathan had been a strict Constitutionalist, he never
talked about the Second Amendment, and had expressed disdain at
what he called “NRA nitwits” whenever the subject had come up in
casual conversation.

He never mentioned any interest in guns at all. In
fact, he had shown complete aversion to them when the subject had
come up at a party several years ago.

She carefully pulled the gun out and set it on the
desk. There was a piece of paper in the bottom of the drawer.

In Nathan's distinctive scrawl, it simply said,
“Jackie, if you find this, I'm dead and you may need it. Love,
Nathan.”

A cold chill coursed through her body. Why the hell
would she need it?

She found a computer printout and wrapped the gun in
it, picked up her lock picks and returned to her office, her
thoughts and feelings completely chaotic.

###

Leo started his truck and tried to follow the man
who had put something into Jackie's car. The man ducked around the
corner and was gone before he could see if he got into a vehicle.
There was something familiar about the man—as though he had seen
him many years ago but he couldn't place him.

###

Allan Wells was having problems with a tracking
servo. The thing kept moving just six micrometers out of time as it
cycled. To most people who used servos—robotics hobbyists—that
distance wouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. For
especially precise applications such as remote surgery, it might
make a difference, but Allan's need for it transcended even that—as
a remotely controlled sniper rifle.

He'd started out adapting the military remote gun
platforms but discovered that they were built to very loose
tolerances. Unacceptable for him, which was understandable as they
were designed to hold machine guns and grenade launchers. These
platforms were also built for battlefield conditions and needed to
work while in snow, mud, fog and rain and survive ham-fisted
maintenance personnel.

The device sitting in front of him had multiple
targeting lasers, a high-speed data link, GPS and could be tied
into remote humidity and wind sensors. All Allen needed to do, if
he could get this damn servo working right, was to sit back, miles
from his target if necessary, and wait for the victim to walk into
the cross hairs and it would all be over. 

Settling back, he recalled the first time that he
looked at his creation, brightly polished aircraft-grade aluminum
carved by a CNC machine to his exact specifications. It was a meter
square, a box frame that would support a single shot precision
rifle, the servos for aiming and room for a sophisticated compact
computer with a sensor array.

Allan had been a competitive-level rifle shooter up
until a little over nine years ago when he had been recruited by a
shadowy company to snipe people who needed it. The job wasn't hard
and paid very well, so he had been able to complete his degree in
Mechanical and Electrical Engineering.

Though he wasn't formally a competitive-level
shooter any more, he still did bench rest shooting to keep his
skills up. At a match, he saw an Unlimited Class rail gun rifle
that was simply a heavy metal plate, a rifle action with a scope
and a trigger. It almost completely removed human involvement from
the equation of shooting as all the shooter had to do was set up
the shot on the target and caress the trigger.

It was perfect. Add some servos, electronics, a
remote camera and now there was a simple way to kill people from
long distance and not even be in the same zip code. Naturally,
there were developmental issues, but Allan threw his entire
intellect into the project, and with some unconventional uses of
various electronics, was able to persevere.

The device had debuted seven years ago to a
resounding success hitting a target at two hundred fifty yards
right under the eyes of a close protection team. They had been
looking for human threats, not a cleverly built robot rifle
concealed in a fake air conditioner.

The newest version could hit a target consistently
out to six hundred yards. And if he could get the damn servos to
track better, he would be able to push that out much further.

The problem with range came from blending sensor
readings, like humidity, temperature, wind speed and direction,
with ballistic tables. The software program was complex and
initially had a lot of bugs—tying analog sensors to a digital
computer was a royal pain as they didn't ever want to play nice
with each other.

Then there was the remote video setup. The bandwidth
required to be able to transmit high enough resolution with a
decent refresh rate was enormous. People would notice if they
couldn't watch their professional wrestling because of a powerful
radio transmitter sitting twenty feet from their house.

The advent of wireless Internet had helped ease this
problem somewhat along with high-speed video compression, although
it took a more powerful computer system to rewrite large sections
of code.

Allan settled back in his chair and wondered how to
deal with his servo problem. Maybe he should check into the servos
used for robotic surgery but they were expensive as hell.

His Blackberry buzzed. He glanced at it. A job. That
was a problem in being a member of the Black Hand, the necessity to
work. But the job should pay for the new servos. Having a
six-hundred-yard range was going to have to do.

Jackie went back to her office. Despite all that was
going on, she had an appointment to get her car looked at. The
Mercedes SLK was a gift from Nathan after a particularly profitable
sales quarter. She would have never bought herself such an
extravagant vehicle and had been happy with her 1985 VW Rabbit. But
recently, the SLK had been running very rough. Research on the
Internet turned up that it might be a bad wiring harness. Since
obtaining an appointment at the rather exclusive Mercedes
dealership was about as difficult as winning the lottery two
drawings in a row, there wasn't any point in trying to
reschedule.

She packed up her laptop, thinking she might as well
get some work done—she'd already hacked the dealership's wireless
network but had to be careful about what she accessed as she didn't
want their firewall shutting her down.

Not knowing what to do about the handgun, she
stuffed it into her laptop case and zipped closed the compartment.
She had no experience with them at all and knew she didn't know
enough to use it. She noted down the model number—someone would
have posted information on how to use it on the Internet so she
could at least unload it.

One thing that seemed to make the car run better is
if it was warmed up. Finding her keys, she pressed the remote
start. An explosion rocked the building.

###

Leo had lost his prime parking to a battered Ford
LTD. In fact, there were no spaces left in the parking lot where
Leo had been hanging out. So he was reduced to checking for an
empty slot at the building where Jackie had her business.

He glanced over at her car and saw a white hot flash
as the explosion rocked his truck causing him to bang his head on
the b-pillar.

Shit. Had he missed her getting into her car?

He pulled up, slammed the transmission into park and
jumped out. The car was on fire. The windshield was completely
gone, flames greedily licked the interior. Fuck. There was no way
anyone could survive such a blast.

Leo had a déjà vu sensation. The car bombing that
had nearly killed him looked almost exactly like this one. The area
where the driver sat was destroyed, probably done with a
sophisticated directed shaped charge. He'd have been dead except
for the dumb punk that had tried to steal his car and ended up
having his head blown completely apart and immolating any
fingerprints, making identification of the body impossible. Running
DNA might have narrowed it down, but it had happened in Bogota,
Columbia, and the police had too many car bombings and murders to
care about one more. Max Jennings, the name that Leo had worked
under, had died that day for all who cared to know. That's when Leo
tried to start a new life. It worked for a while, and now that it
looked like Jackie was dead, he didn't have much of a chance of
getting it back.