Heart of a Killer (22 page)

“She’s beautiful,” Sheryl said.

“I know. I’ve seen her picture. And I’ve seen her mother.”

Sheryl smiled. “I was going to get my hair done before you came, but who has time?”

“You definitely should do it before the parole hearing, and maybe a manicure and pedicure.” I smiled to show her I was joking, in case she didn’t know. Nothing like a good solitary confinement prison joke to lighten a mood.

“We have a chance in the hearing?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet; it really depends on what Novack comes up with.”

“It’s a week away.”

I nodded. “Believe me, I know.” Then I added, “We’ll be ready,” although I had no idea if we would or not.

“Don’t bullshit me, Harvard.”

I smiled. “I don’t usually. It was just a weak moment.”

“Harvard, if anything happens to me, you know what to do, right?”

“Nothing is going to happen to you until we’re ready for it to happen, Sheryl.”

“But if it does, you know what to do, right?”

She was telling me that she might have a way to kill herself, even in her current circumstances. “Don’t do anything, Sheryl.”

“Okay,” she said, “I won’t.”

“And don’t bullshit me.”

She smiled. “I don’t usually. It was just a weak moment.”

I didn’t know where to go with it; she obviously had some plan she was working on, and I had neither the power to find out what it was, nor to stop it. Her ability to die was what I had been fighting for all this time, yet hearing that it was possible scared the shit out of me.

I assume she was reading my mind, because she put her hand on mine and said, “You can’t fix this, Jamie. Don’t use up your energy trying.”

I wanted to tell her how hard all of this was for me, but it would have sounded stupid and self-centered, because it was. When all of this was finally over, either she or her daughter would have died, and my biggest problem would be where to work.

But I knew one thing; wherever I worked, I was going to refuse pro-bono cases. Give me a boring contract law case where nobody I cared about died, any day of the week.

“Mr. Wagner? Can you come with me, please?” It was the guard, standing at the door.

“What’s the matter?”

“You have an urgent call from Lieutenant Novack.”

“Maybe he found Hennessey,” Sheryl said.

I nodded, and told her I’d be back to tell her whatever I learned.

The guard led me down one hallway, and then another, finally pointing at a room with the door open. I went in, and saw that the hold button on the phone was flashing. I closed the door behind me, and picked up the phone.

“Novack?”

“Yeah. There was an explosion in Garfield this morning, in a strip mall.”

“I heard about it,” I said. “They said on the radio that it was a gas leak, and that one person was killed.”

“It wasn’t a leak,” he said. “And the dead guy was Hennessey.”

The Predator drone was not exactly a secret weapon. Any casual reader of newspapers knew that these unmanned aerial vehicles were widely used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to locate the enemy and often attack them with deadly munitions.

Less commonly known, but also far from a secret, was the fact that the same drones, minus the armaments, were used to help patrol the U.S. border with Mexico. They dramatically reduced the amount of border guards necessary to do the job, and acted quite literally as the eyes of the border patrol. A lone border agent, sitting at a terminal, could watch the images fed in by the drones’ cameras, and dispatch patrols where needed.

But what most people didn’t have any sense of was their size. The common perception was that they were very small, almost like toy planes. It was this size, most believed, that allowed them to fly relatively undetected, just another bird in the sky.

The truth was that the Predator B, a common model, had a wingspan of sixty-six feet, was thirty-six feet long, and weighed ten thousand pounds. It was an amazing engineering feat that this five-ton vehicle was as mobile and agile as it was.

But it was not without its deficiencies. When it was far from its base, the terrain often caused it to lose direct contact with its operator. It compensated for this by bouncing its signals off a satellite.

Also, when the Predator communicated with the ground, its signals were not encrypted. This was a flaw in the design, an inexcusable one, since encryption was so common. Every financial website, for example, and most online retailers, used encryption for security. An engineering marvel like the Predator should certainly have had it.

Both of these flaws left the Predator vulnerable to hackers. Our enemies in Iraq, for instance, had success in hacking into the systems, thereby sometimes enabling them to know where the Predators were, and what they were watching.

If the relatively unsophisticated Iraqi insurgents had that kind of success, it was a piece of cake for Nolan Murray and his team. And the Predator B, serial number A256489, became the vehicle through which Nolan Murray would impart his next lesson.

This time there was no difficulty in Tammy getting the call through to Mike Janssen. Janssen was waiting for it, had been waiting for days, and his team was prepared to deal with whatever emergency arose, no matter where.

“Hi, it’s me, Tammy.”

The Bureau psy-ops people had not come up with any way that Janssen could effectively deal with the situation, no way of talking that could likely influence the outcome. What Tammy had to say was preordained, as if part of a play. She was delivering a message, the content of which Janssen was believed to have no chance of influencing.

So they told him to keep his voice cold, measured, aloof. If the caller’s goal was to get enjoyment out of toying with Janssen, with exercising power over him, that would be the best way to keep that enjoyment to a minimum.

“What do you want?” Janssen asked.

“Are you mad at me?” The little girl’s voice was petulant, hurt.

“What do you want?” he repeated.

“You know what I want, silly. I want money.”

“We’re prepared to talk about that.”

“All you want to do is talk,” Tammy said. “Ooh, you make me so mad. It makes me want to crash another plane.”

“That’s not necessary,” Janssen said.

“Is too. Is too! I’m gonna crash one. That’ll show you.”

“Where?”

“Texas. Oh, and Mr. Janssen?” Tammy said, her voice softening.

“What?”

Suddenly it wasn’t Tammy’s voice anymore, but that of a man speaking in a tough no-nonsense manner. It was filtered through a synthesizer, and sounded nothing like Nolan Murray. “This will give you something to remember, but next time it will be for real.”

The call was disconnected, and the government apparatus swung swiftly and efficiently into action. All planes still on the ground in Texas, as well as those preparing to take off for there from airports in other states, were not allowed to take to the air.

There were sixty-eight flights airborne at that moment in the air over Texas, forty-three were commercial flights, eleven were private, and fourteen were military aircraft. All were ordered to immediately land, and within a half hour all were safely on the ground.

All Janssen could then do was wait. After the crash on the amusement park ride, he had no illusions that disaster had been diverted. He knew better than to think there was any chance that Tammy’s plan had been thwarted that easily.

At that moment, the Predator B, serial number A256489, had finished its run over the border, and was on its way back to base. It was currently five miles south of Crystal City, about a hundred and twenty miles from San Antonio.

At a 135 miles an hour top speed, it would take under an hour to get to its destination. The operator on the ground, watching the computer, believed that it was on course back to base. After twenty-five minutes, he finally realized that the pictures it was sending back were inconsistent with the route it should have been on.

It took another seventeen minutes for the word to get to the command center, and another five before anyone connected the off-course drone with the Homeland Security emergency that had grounded airplanes throughout the state.

The only option at that point would have been to shoot it down, but the Army had no way of doing that. Not considering its location, and the fact that all of its airborne assets were grounded.

The operator could only watch the pictures the drone was sending back. They were crystal clear, in high definition, and he could actually see the horrified, panic-stricken faces of the tourists at the Alamo as the drone bore down on them, and crashed in their midst.

Forty-one people died, and another twenty-eight were injured in varying degrees, eleven of them critical.

The man’s voice that replaced Tammy had told Janssen that he would give him something to remember, but Janssen had not made the connection.

Until it was too late.

And now the entire country would again remember the Alamo.

“My fellow Americans, I come before you tonight to tell you that we are under attack.” With those words from the president of the United States, in a national address to the nation, any chance Jamie Wagner had of maintaining press coverage of Sheryl’s case came to an end.

“It has been an insidious form of attack, technological in nature, but deadly in its result. When I campaigned for this office, I promised that I would always be straight with you, and that’s what I’m going to be tonight.”

He proceeded to explain the origins of the three incidents, the Charlotte plane crash, the Disneyland ride crash, and the Predator drone crash, and to show that the three were the work of a single entity. He didn’t mention the childlike Tammy voice, and he withheld some other facts as well, as Janssen thought it would be wise to keep those things known only to the investigators.

Also at Janssen’s suggestion, the president talked of the need for the public to get involved and to report any suspicions they might have to a special number that the FBI had set up. He talked about the way Americans come together in a crisis to defeat whatever enemy was before them, and this time would be no exception.

And then he talked about our technological strengths, saying that our expertise in this area was second to none. He said extraordinary measures were being taken to ensure that our computers were secure, and he was confident that those efforts would be successful.

He was lying. He knew as he was speaking that the military had tested the security of not only its aircraft, but also its Predator drones. They had done this before the attack in Texas, and had specifically tested Predator B, serial number A256489. It had been judged secure, and then within days had been coopted by the terrorists.

The implications of that were chilling, so much so that the president felt it exceeded the limit of what his “straight talk” might include. Because in the drone case, we assumed they were coming, we took defensive measures, and the enemy still prevailed.

How, then, could we stop it next time?

Janssen watched the speech with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was glad that his advice was finally being heeded, albeit mostly for the wrong reasons. The president and his team felt that the lid could not be successfully kept on the secret for much longer, and that it was far better politically to be the ones to tell the American people, rather than have it come out through the press.

In fact, in the hours before the president spoke, there was rampant speculation as to what he was going to say, and much of it was fairly accurate. The press was on the story, far too late for them to take any bows, but the administration wanted to come out ahead of it, to the extent that they still could.

Janssen was also glad that the public would now be a source of investigative tips. Someone, somewhere, knew the perpetrators, and if they could connect the dots and come forward, the chances of arrests grew exponentially.

But there would be a negative component to the revelations, Janssen knew. When people get scared, they get irrational, and things can turn ugly very easily. Especially when more attacks follow.

And that was the other part of this that made Janssen uneasy, and a little scared himself. There was always the chance that the public exposure could speed up the timetable of the perpetrators. Janssen had long felt that there was something big coming, something which the killers hoped would net them far more than the money they had so far been leaving on the table.

And the truth was that Janssen and his team had no idea where the attack would come from, what it would be directed against, or how to stop it.

After the speech, the administration sent a small army of people out to deal with the media, to supply the details that the president had not gone into. The story they told made the situation seem that much more dire, because of the lack of specificity as to how people could protect themselves.

If computers were not safe, and computers were everywhere, then how could anyone hope to stay safe?

Novack and Captain Donovan had no illusions about getting federal help. While they originally rejected the idea of going to the FBI and trying to take advantage of their cyber-crime capabilities, they hadn’t taken the idea off the table.

Now, with a declared national emergency totally relying on those same capabilities, there was not a big enough table in the world to accommodate the requests of a local police department. The FBI had one mission, and one only, and that was to catch the hackers that were killing and terrorizing people.

Even Donovan, who had been less than eager for his department to even peripherally get involved in the Sheryl Harrison situation, was aware that the investigation had increased dramatically in importance.

Hennessey’s murder, plus the discovery that Charlie Harrison had participated in other frauds in the same jurisdiction, using the IDs in the safe-deposit box, had upped the ante considerably. Donovan did not have to be coaxed into putting more resources into the investigation. Anders, Novack’s partner, was now assigned to the case exclusively, as were two other teams, who would work under Novack’s direction.