Kill Code (18 page)

He followed Jackie towards the back of the store,
noting the boxes probably containing store stock that lined the
walls on cheap metal shelves. There were a lot of them. Also, where
the front of the store was luxuriously decorated with soft toned
walls, muted lighting and thick carpet, everything behind the
counter was Spartan, including harsh overhead lighting and bare
concrete—all the trademarks of a cheap corporation.

Jackie seemed to know exactly where to go. He
followed her to an area in the back of the building next to the
loading dock. Handy information if you need to get out of here
quick, Leo thought.

A man was crouched over a work bench with a
soldering iron clutched in a meaty fist.

“Ryan,” Jackie said.

She had to repeat herself several times before the
man looked up. He had magnifying goggles over his eyes, giving them
a buggy appearance. “Jackie!” he said, tossing the soldiering iron
down onto the bench.

He stepped away from the bench and Leo saw that he
was at least a foot shorter than Jackie. Wrapping his arms around
Jackie, he said, “I just heard about Nathan. I'm so sorry that I
didn't hear in time to get to the funeral. How you doing?”

“Just fine. I need some help with something,
though.”

Then the man noticed Leo.

“Who's your friend?”

“Ryan, this is Leo. He's helping me.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And I need your help with something that
Nathan dropped into my lap.”

After appraising Leo, Ryan stepped over to Leo and
held out his hand, he shook it, noting that despite being pudgy,
the grip was strong and calloused.

“Ryan Rees,” he said.

“Leo Marston,” Leo replied. Jackie better be right
about this guy helping them or he was going to have to kill him to
protect their identities.

Turning back to Jackie, Ryan said, “So, what can I
help you with?”

She pulled out the plastic bag containing the chips
she had taken from James Phillips' Blackberry. “I need you to dump
these. Contacts and messages are what I'm looking for.”

He sat down at a computer, typed for a minute.
Turning to Jackie, he said, “Let me have the SIM card.”

Despite that the card was dwarfed in his hand, Ryan
dexterously slid it into a slot on the computer.

“What kind of phone is it from?”

“Blackberry. It looked like the model 9700.”

“Cool. You heard about the processor? It's a 32 bit
XScale PXA900, made by Marvel. Cooks along at about 624 MHz, but
the specs say that it can run up and over 800. I haven't had a
chance to see if I could over clock and make it really fly.”

“Yeah. Lots of extra stuff on the processor to make
it handle wireless faster. I played with the ARM instruction that
it runs and as a RISC OS, it's a major pain if you have to write to
the SVC as it will throw up in your lap if you look at it cross
eyed.”

This techno-babble was too much for Leo. “What's the
card say?”

“Give me a second.”

The screen filled with information, looking like
mostly gibberish to Leo.

“What am I seeing?” Yes, Leo could sit all day
waiting for the perfect shot to present itself, but they had spent
way too much time screwing around when they should be tracking down
who was trying to kill them.

“It's just a dump of a SIM card.”

“Which is what?”

Jackie, seeming to sense Leo's impatience, said, “A
SIM card is the Subscriber Identity Module. It contains subscriber
information, phone contacts and any SMS text messages.”

“SMS text messages?”

“Yes. What you see teenagers doing all of the time
with their cell phones—texting each other.”

Leo hadn't really noticed much of that as he ran in
different social circles than most teenagers. Kids who were
interested in coins didn't text while in his store, and the kids
who were probably into texting didn't hang out in a boring coin
store with a bunch of coin dinks.

Ryan continued to page through the information.

“Bad news, only subscriber information, no phone
book, nor any messages.”

She handed him the thumbnail sized chip from the
phone. “How about on the SD card?”

“Only if he saved his e-mails to it. Blackberrys
'push' e-mails from the mail server, and it's saved to the internal
memory. Since that's only like sixty-four meg, that ain't a lot of
memory. Though, you do need some secondary software to save it to
the SD card.”

“No matter, try it.”

“Still, it may not even be on there. I'll need the
phone if I'm gonna be sure about getting it all.”

She looked at Leo and he shook his head. His
paranoia about what that cell phone could do when turned on was
something that he didn't have the experience or ability to be able
to deal with.

Jackie had described the Blackberry as a small
computer. What kinds of software could be installed on it? While he
wasn't a computer hacker like her, he had a suspicious mind. How
hard would it be to install GPS software on it? While, in his
experience, GPS didn't work at all inside buildings, it worked just
fine outside where it could see satellites. And hadn't he read
something about using the signal strength between various cell
towers to triangulate a position? Developed for emergency calls, it
sure wouldn't take much to bend it towards evil intent.

Ten minutes of typing and muttered sentences between
Jackie and Ryan amounted to nothing useful being found.

“We're going to have to power up the Blackberry,”
Jackie said.

Leo shrugged and fingered his pistol. She got the
idea that this was insanely dangerous. He would count her judgment
as if it was worth it and apparently she thought it was.

Jackie dug out her jammer, which on seeing, Ryan
said, “Are you fucking nuts? That thing is like a $10,000 fine and
five years in jail if you are caught with it. And this is a cell
phone store, what do you think is going to happen if you power that
thing up and everyone's cell phone in the store goes dead?”

“It has a rather limited range.”

“Still unacceptable. Listen, we'll be in and out in
a moment. I'll power it up, dump the internal memory, load it up
into a simulator, power down the Blackberry and it'll be over
quick, maybe a couple of minutes.”

“Which version of the simulator are you using?”

“Something I threw together from the Software
Developer Kit. Trust me, it works just great. I use it all the
times for the cops—the damn technophobes.”

Leo knew that he was one of those technophobes,
though he doubted that either Jackie or Ryan could hit the bulls
eye at six hundred yards in forty mile an hour gusting winds using
an iron sighted rifle.

Ryan pulled out an inhaler and, after shaking it
several times, took a deep puff.

“Asthma still bothering you?” Jackie asked.

“Yes,” he coughed. Then he cleared his throat and
said, “I've got to get my prescription renewed as I'm almost out. I
thought I'd outgrow asthma, but working back in here with all the
dust and crap only makes it worse.”

Stuffing the inhaler back into a pocket, he plugged
the Blackberry into a cradle, booted up something with the
computer, powered up the Blackberry and then turned it back
off.

“Got it. Software dump, including the e-mails.”

He paged through the data. “It looks like any
e-mails are just a link to a web site. We can access that, if you
want.”

Jackie, who was leaning over Ryan, said, “Yes. But
be careful. Can you spoof our IP Address?”

“I don't think I need to. Besides, I don't have the
software and I don't think that they can lock onto me without a
major pain as this is a corporate computer and there are thousands
of IP's that it could come from.”

He typed some more and pulled up a web page.

“Wow. I wonder what all this data is—contains
everything that you would want to know about someone, address, bank
accounts, even places on the Internet that you hang out.”

Leo said, “It's called a targeting package—and
contains everything you need to find and kill someone.”

“That stands to reason seeing the type of
information it contains. But I wonder who this bad ass, Max
Jennings, is. He's killed a bunch of people and looks to be a bad
ass dude otherwise.”

He moved behind Ryan and Jackie so he could see the
computer screen.

Then a picture came up. Leo remembered it being
taken for his college rifle team. He was crouched behind a
Winchester Model 52 target rifle. Damn that rifle was sweet and put
the rounds exactly where they were supposed to go if the shooter
did his part. At that time, there was some talk of him trying out
for the Olympic Rifle Team, but that dream was crushed the instant
his father was murdered.

A more modern picture came up, of him going into the
coin shop—it seemed like a lifetime ago that he was dealing with
coin dinks, and he missed the dusty, metallic smell of the
place.

Ryan's head swiveled around and he started at Leo.
“That guy in the picture looks a lot like you—could be your twin
brother in fact.”

“It's me.”

Ryan recoiled in horror and Jackie stepped back.
“Really,” he said, “you killed all those people?”

“It wasn't that many people—twelve, no thirteen—the
guy who I got this Blackberry from. Are there any other targeting
packages on the web site?”

Both Jackie and Ryan stared at him.

“Well, let's get to it,” he said.

Jackie pushed Ryan out of the way and started
typing.

“I'll jump back into the parent directory and that
might lead to some more links.”

A screen popped up. “I'll be damned.”

“What?” Leo asked.

“Look at the list. There must be a couple of hundred
people here.”

“Can you find out who is behind this?”

She popped open another screen, “I'll just access
WHOIS and see what pops up.”

“What's WHOIS?”

Ryan said, “Think of it as a reverse directory for
the Internet. You can find out who owns a web site by typing in the
IP address.”

Leo had no idea what an IP address was, but got the
general picture.

She typed for a few minutes and a screen popped
up.

“I'll be damned,” she said.

Leo and Ryan both peered down at the screen. The
address looked familiar, but he couldn't place it.

“What about it?”

“The web address is owned by Alamut Enterprises ...
and the physical address is the same as White Hat, my company.

Tyrannicide knew there was a problem. The Blackberry
issued to James Phillips had been powered up, briefly, and then
powered down. The logical explanation was law enforcement, either
local, or, more likely, federal as they had the funding able to
purchase the software to make a copy of the internal data contained
on a Blackberry for further analysis.

Minutes later, the HTTP server containing the
targeting packages was accessed without using the Blackberry, first
to look at Max Jennings' information, then the rest of the web site
was copied someplace else.

It was apparent that the data contained on the HTTP
server was compromised.

The software traced back the connection to which
computer was accessing the now compromised data. It took
microseconds to crack through the corporate firewall and locate the
exact computer, and the user of that computer. This was followed up
by accessing the computer and slipping in a piece of software that
would worm its way into the operating system and forward all
relevant data back to the software for further analysis.

In a few minutes, it had determined the name,
address, driver's license picture and a complete credit, tax and
medical history of the computer user—Ryan Rees.

Slipping through some subroutines, it executed the
relevant code and created a targeting package using an alternative
HTTP server for Ryan—he was a threat to the Program and would be
eliminated.

###

Jill Ringler was annoyed.
Three-fourths of the Denver City Council was dead or dying,
including the detestable Phil Van Wyk, and she had just used
alpha
-Amanitin, a toxin found in the Death's Head and the
Destroying Angel mushrooms, on John Halbrook
,
soon to be late of the Colorado House of Representatives. He would
be dead within ten days of acute liver failure. It would be a
brutal and prolonged death, but her black bag of tricks and poisons
was rapidly emptying.

She had just gotten a page on her Blackberry that
she had one more job to do before she could stand down. As she
turned the rented BMW around, she considered her options.

According to the information she had received, the
target suffered from asthma. That would have been perfect to try
out her sarin gas modified inhaler—the canister would emit sarin
rather than albuterol—one whiff of it and you'd be dead before you
hit the floor. But that particular item was back at her lab. She
longed to be back at her lab, playing with chemicals rather than
these interactions with the public—particularly men she detested.
It was nice that she got to kill many of them—the last leer of
their life would be at the person who had just killed
them. 

Her exotic poisons supplies were all but depleted
which left some of the old standbys like cyanide. Yes. She had a
couple of ounces of Potassium Cyanide and the neat thing about it
is that it looked exactly like sugar and she had it packaged in a
sugar packet. It was even as soluble in water as sugar although it
might give off an odor of bitter almonds when it was put in water.
However, most people couldn't smell it and those who could probably
wouldn't recognize the significance of the odor.

Pulling off the side of the road, she called the
airport where the private jet she had booked was parked and let
them know that she would be delayed by a couple of hours.