Blood List (25 page)

Who are you, Shelley? Come to Mama so she can spank your naughty little butt.
She had a thought and smiled.
You can afford to hire mercenaries to kill people for you.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard, cutting everyone with a net worth of less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, barring primary residences. That was probably too low, but she needed to be somewhat conservative. He could be using government funds. Six hundred and twenty three people.

What else do I know that can narrow this down?
In the next hour she wrote a program to track as close as possible the exact position of the cellular phone on an hour-by-hour basis. The granularity of the data was terrible. She only had what cell tower covered the phone at any given time, which gave her almost nothing at all. The one thing it did give her was the exact time the phone crossed from one cell area to the next.

She tapped her bottom lip.
Doesn't I-395 have HOT lanes?
High-Occupancy Toll lanes were special highway lanes for car-poolers, but also for people willing to spend extra money to drive faster from point A to point B. A wealthy government-type would almost definitely use them.

She looked up the locations of the HOT toll booths and overlapped them with cellular coverage maps. One HOT lane on 395 was within a quarter mile of a transition from one cell to the next. She cross-referenced the cellular travel patterns of the phone with government-owned EZ-Pass (HOT) toll card records, fed the new information into her program, and looked at the screen. A picture of a man in his late fifties or early sixties stared back at her.

There was only one wealthy, male, American-born or early immigrant government employee whose travel and work patterns exactly matched that of Shelley's cellular phone. Sam recognized Emile Frank. It was awfully hard to believe. She had to be sure. She double-checked the timing of calls made to or from the phone with calls made to and from Shelley's home.

Around the time Renner shot MacUther, someone made a call from the San Francisco area to Shelley's phone, somewhere in Springfield, Virginia. Seconds after that call ended, Doctor Frank made multiple calls out from his encrypted house phone. He received another call while Gene and the team were interrogating MacUther in the hospital, then called out on his house phone.

Sam indulged in a self-satisfied smile. She'd just proved exactly how much shit Gene and the guys were in.

She pulled up Frank's employee records and let out a low whistle.
Impressive guy.
She scanned his online resume and didn't find anything useful. She accessed his security clearance background check and a name jumped out at her. He worked as Chief Research Associate for Bailey Pharmaceuticals in the seventies but didn't include it on his resume. Her grin was fierce. "Gotcha, you bastard. You'd better hope Renner finds you before we do."

She looked at the clock. It was three AM.
Midnight in California.

She tried Gene on the COM. He didn't respond, but that wasn't a surprise this late. She tried him on his phone. Four rings, then a pleasant female voice relayed a message. "The cellular customer you are trying to reach is currently out of the service area. Please try again later."

Sam frowned and hung up the phone. Gene's team all had the same issue phone, and when they couldn't get cellular service, it switched to satellite coverage.
You could get a call in the middle of Siberia with these things.
She uploaded the data onto a secure personal server that she used as an FTP drop for Gene's team, but realized she had no way to tell Gene to go get it. Her mind raced; she knew where she had to go. She grabbed her purse and headed for the bus. A quick ride home to get her car, and she'd be off.

February 3rd, 3:26 AM EST; Sam Greene's Apartment; Washington, D.C.

Twenty minutes later Sam got off the bus a block from her apartment building. The short walk was quiet. She always preferred the night. It was so much more peaceful than the daytime, especially in the city. She trudged up the stairs, let herself in the front door, walked over to the elevator, and hit the up button, all without seeing another soul.

She fiddled with her keys outside her apartment door, found the right one, and put it into the lock. She turned and the deadbolt slid back. Acting on years of ingrained habit, she removed the key halfway and twisted it back the other way a quarter turn. Nothing happened.

She frowned down at the key in her hand, her heart thumping in her chest. The intrusion detection tumbler she'd installed when she moved in hadn't tripped, and that meant only one thing. Somebody who didn't know about it had unlocked, then relocked her door.
A little healthy paranoia goes a long way, Sammy-girl.
Her mind raced.
Too late to run
—
they already know I'm here. Well, best to play ignorant, then.

She reached into her purse and grabbed the handle of the Ruger SP101 5-shot revolver she'd been carrying since college. The metal was cold and slick in her sweaty hands but tremendously reassuring, and the Trausch grip fit her hand perfectly. She buried her hand deep into the purse and tilted it, hiding the weapon. She opened the door as casually as possible.

Sam stepped inside and closed the door, rooting around in her purse as if searching for her ChapStick. In truth, she kept her hand on the grip and her finger off the trigger, just like at the range. She left the door ajar and did her best to pretend that nothing was amiss as she walked into the kitchen. She placed her purse on the counter, still rummaging, listening for any sounds of movement or breathing. She jumped out of her skin as a man spoke from the darkness of the apartment behind her.

"Don't move, and don't turn around." Even expecting the intruder to still be in her apartment, it terrified her to have an uninvited stranger in her living room.

She froze in place. Her body shook. Her fingers trembled on the pistol grip as her index finger found the trigger.
This is a lot different than target shooting at the range.
Her usual targets weren't breathing. She'd never even hunted before. Her mother had always told her to never carry a gun unless she was willing to use it.
Could be do or die time.
The SP101 .357 was known for stopping power and could do tremendous damage at short range. Sam didn't want to know how much.

"Who did you tell about the information you were searching for this evening?" The voice was warm, almost friendly.

When in doubt, play dumb. "What information? I don't know what you're talking about."

The man tsked. "Don't waste my time. Who did you tell?"

She looked at the ground. "No one. I didn't tell anybody."

"Turn around." She turned around, clutching the purse to her chest. It wasn't hard to act terrified. It wasn't an act.

The man wore blue jeans, a black turtleneck, black sneakers, and a black ski mask. She couldn't see anything that would help her identify him later.
Well, at least he won't kill me now that I've seen his face.
She cringed at the thought.

"Look me in the eyes and answer the question. Who did you send the information to?"

She licked her lips and looked him in the eyes. "Nobody. I tried to send it to my boss, but I didn't get the chance."

The man tensed. "I believe you."

The silenced gun snapped in the tiny apartment. Sam expected the shot and had half-turned when the man brought up the gun to fire. Her anticipation gave her an edge, but she wasn't fast enough to capitalize on it.

One bullet winged her in the left shoulder. It punched through muscle before exiting the other side. The other two punched into the wall behind her. She gasped in pain and fired her revolver. The clean double-tap blasted through the leather bag with a deafening roar. Both bullets hit their mark, the second higher than the first. Bloody chunks of the man's stomach and right kidney blew out of his back and all over the living room, and he dropped face-first onto the carpet. Ears ringing, she heard footsteps from the hall and a scream from the neighbor's apartment.

Her right hand numb from the tremendous recoil, Sam turned in place and pointed the gun toward the hallway with both hands, her feet spread wide for stability. Her shoulder hurt like hell, but she was pretty sure there was no serious damage. The apartment was dark, but the hall was well lit. It gave her a perfect view as the figure rounded the corner and jerked open the door. She saw the ski mask and machine pistol and fired another pair of shots. Blood splattered the wall as the man's body slammed into the doorframe and dropped to the floor.

Sobbing, Sam forced herself to silence and squeezed her eyes shut. She heard the neighbors, already on the phone with 911. She heard the people upstairs crashing around. She also heard the headset underneath her first assailant's ski mask.

She stumbled to the living room, dropped to her knees, and ripped off the mask. He was a young man, in his mid-twenties at most. He would have been handsome. The metallic tang of blood and fetid stench of shit filled her nostrils, mixed with some kind of cologne. With a sob she yanked off his headset and put it on. A voice flooded into her ear.

"—the target? Three? Two? Check in." She took a moment to load four more rounds into the revolver, and for good measure picked up the machine pistol and shoved it muzzle-first into her purse. The man had a pair of tear gas grenades on his belt. She took those, too. A quick frisk revealed no ID of any kind. "I say again. Three, two, do we have the target?"

Her legs shook so hard that she could barely stand, but she pushed herself up on the couch and looked around. She held her breath to listen for other intruders.
Nothing so far.
She breathed in. The voice in her ear continued on as she looked around for something to use as a bandage.

"Team Bravo, we do not have a confirmed kill." She grabbed a roll of duct tape and a washcloth from the tiny pantry. "Cover the rear entry. We'll take the front." She thought about turning on the gas, but the voices of her neighbors made her change her mind. "On my mark. Three. Two."
Time to go!
She stumbled into the hall and held the cloth to her shoulder with her left hand, aiming the pistol with her right. She'd tape it in place once she got away.
If I get away.
She heard boots tromping up the front stairwell.

The others didn't have gas masks.
She fumbled with the grenades, dropping the washcloth as she struggled to pull the pins without letting go of the spoons. She'd never done this before, only seen it in movies. She pushed open the crash-bar and let the little oblong canisters tumble out of her hands. They clacked and clattered down the stairs as she cowered behind the metal fire door. Both from the stairwell and the headset she heard a man scream, "Grenade!"

The world erupted in twin explosions, impossibly loud. The door jumped on its hinges. She felt shrapnel ping off the metal, then all she could hear was the ringing in her ears. A man screamed in the stairwell. It took her a moment to realize that they must not have been tear gas. She ran down the stairs at what was, for her, breakneck speed.

The remains of two masked men lay on the stairway. One stopped his incoherent screaming and started panting as she passed by. Each breath was a watery hitch, fainter than the last. The other lay face down, smoke curling from his body. She ran past them to the parking level.

As her feet touched the ground floor, a cool, collected voice erupted in her ear. "Alpha, we do not have visual on the suspect." She busted through the emergency exit door and into the parking garage, gasping for breath. She hadn't run down three flights of stairs since high school, if ever. She'd never done it that fast.

"Alpha, respond."
I think Alpha just had a close encounter of the fragmentary kind, asshole.
She reached for the machine pistol in her purse and grasped nothing. It must have fallen off her shoulder. She tried to get enough air through choking sobs and made a frantic scan of the area. A black H2 sat idling twenty feet away, parked sideways. The man inside the massive vehicle looked out the opposite window, his machine gun aimed at the far door. He wore a headset identical to the one she had on. She saw him speak, and she heard his voice in her ear. Her sobs vanished.

"Bravo, Alpha isn't responding. Move in and prosecute." Sam stumbled toward the car and pointed the revolver at the back of the man's head.

"Get out of the car, asshole," she said. The man whipped his head in her direction and tried to bring the assault rifle to bear. The bulky weapon hit the roof of the cab, and it gave Sam all the time she needed. She fired.

One bullet flew off into the garage. The ricochet pinged off a concrete pillar in the distance. The other bullet penetrated the base of the man's neck. Eyes wide, he dropped the rifle. He tried to stem the flow of blood that erupted from the wound, but the sticky red liquid gushed out between his fingers.
Jugular.
Sam gritted her teeth in fury and approached the car.

She opened the door with her left arm, the adrenaline overwhelming the pain in her shoulder, the pistol still aimed at the dying man's face. "I said get out." The man's eyes lolled as he struggled to maintain consciousness. She hauled herself up and into the massive cab.

Sam reached across the dying man and pulled the handle on the driver's side door. It popped open, and he leaned out drunkenly. She shifted toward the driver's seat and forced him to the left with the bulk of her body. He fell out of the car, flailing his arms in a vain attempt to catch himself. His head hit the pavement with a wet crack. Sam pulled the rifle the rest of the way into the cab and slammed the door.

Blood dripped down on her as she put the Humvee in drive and gunned the gas. She drove out of the garage and hurtled down the street at eighty miles an hour.