Kill Code (2 page)

“That’s odd,” she murmured when she saw the T-3
connection status lights were all red, signifying that the Internet
connection was maxed out. It didn’t make any sense since her
program was the only one running.

“Nate,” she said aloud again, her words drifting
away into the empty room, “how big is this sucker?”

Big, she decided. Mega big. Considering that a T-3
line could dump almost forty-five megabits per second directly into
the Internet, it was impressive.

She slumped back in her chair, squinted at the
screen. What the hell is on this DVD? 

She crossed her arms, eyes glued to the screen and
waited to find out. 

###

Leo had read somewhere that if you kill someone by
stopping the heart, the bleeding would be minimized. The last thing
he needed was a mess to deal with. It worked. The man gasped and
dropped like he had been poleaxed. He twitched for a few moments,
made a grab at the letter opener
shoved
in
his chest, sighed and went still.

He fought back nausea. Leo had never seen death up
close and personal like this. A splash of blood on a wall after a
perfect sniper shot was completely different. But he'd been
preparing for this
possibility for
the
past ten years—his past coming to confront him violently.

Leo took a couple of shallow breaths, and then
settled down to do what he needed to do—take care of this
problem.

Rolling the man over on his back, Leo checked for a
pulse and didn't find one. It was handy that he was still wearing
the plastic gloves that he used to keep his hands clean while
handling coins. He'd gotten damn lucky in hitting this guy exactly
in the heart. The letter opener could have slipped off a rib only
causing a superficial injury or the guy could have had something in
his pocket that could have blocked the blow. In this case, luck was
better than being good, but he couldn't always count on luck; he
had to be a great deal better than anyone else he came up
against.

He
left the body and chanced a
glance out the front window. There was a full-sized car parked out
front, but the rest of the parking lot was empty. 

Leo rolled the body up in the rug
and dragged it around to the back where no one could see it from
the front windows. He double checked the corpse, relieved when
there was still no pulse. Methodical and deliberate movements were
necessary for him to be a precision long distance shooter; he
practiced both skills now. Searching for an ID, Leo found a new
wallet and could practically smell the fresh ink on the
man's
driver's license. It didn't look fake, but Leo sensed
that it was. The name on the driver's license, credit card and
other wallet 'fluff' read “James Phillips.”

He found a cell phone that he wasn't familiar with,
having a miniature keyboard and small screen. He took it, removed
the battery from the back and slid it into his pocket. He knew that
cell phones could be tracked even if you weren't using them and he
didn't want to take any chances.

Another surprise was the suppressed .22 Beretta
Model 70S. A favorite of the Mossad—Israel's secret intelligence
agency. With the suppressor, the most sound you would hear would be
the slide moving and the bullets slapping into their target.

Leo had kept up his college habits, studying up on
assassinations, and was somewhat of an expert on the history,
techniques and particular styles
favored
by
various people and organizations. It was an interesting
hobby, but he had b
een forced into it, and with
the exception of that brief period of time that he deeply
regretted, didn't co
nsider himself a killer—today being the
exception.

The .22 pistol confirmed that Phillips was a
professional killer. It also meant that he was a close-in
specialist, you had to be two feet away from the person you were
killing as you fired bullets into their head.
Killing people was still murder no matter if it was at over
six hundred yards or at one foot. And in this particular murder
game, he knew that if he had declined the job, he would have been
quietly eliminated. As loathe as he was to kill Phillips, he had no
doubt he’d be the one dead by now if he hadn’t. Still, self-defense
or not, he’d just been forced back into a game he’d never intended
to play again.

Face grim, Leo wrapped the
carpet-encased body in some plastic tarps that he kept in the back
room. He took care to use only those fresh from the packaging. They
were doing amazing things with forensics today and Leo didn’t want
to take any chances. He also wanted to be far away when the
authorities started investigating what, if taken at face value,
screamed homicide.
If
they ever discovered the body
.

Still wearing his gloves, he went outside, looked
around and didn't see anyone. It didn't mean that there wasn't
anybody watching, only that Leo couldn't see them. When Leo had
worked, there was always a back up team ready to extract him if
something went wrong. He also had a spotter helping identify the
target, doping the wind, checking the range and more.

Using Phillips’ keys, he got in the car and checked
the glove box which revealed nothing except a car rental agreement.
Hopefully, Phillips had sprung for the extra insurance as this car
was going to soon be burnt and twisted metal.

Leo pulled the car around back and opened up the
trunk. Empty. Opening the back door of the store, Leo dragged out
the body and
hefted it into the trunk. He closed
it, stepped back ins
ide the store and opened his personal
safe tucked by the door. He dug around and found a couple of
cardboard boxes. The chemicals inside had been premixed and were
ready to go. It was surprising what you can buy on eBay, and for
about forty dollars and some research on the Internet, he had one
hell of a good recipe for thermite.

While he’d hoped it would never
come to this,
Leo had been preparing for this day for the
past ten years—when his past would catch up to him. Besides, even
paranoid people had enemies.
 

The forty-five hundred degree Fahrenheit liquid
produced by the burning thermite would hopefully destroy enough
evidence and give him the time he would need to put some distance
between here and whoever
would soon be looking
for him.

He dug out a timer, glad he’d done
his research. Thermi
te was somewhat difficult to ignite, and
even harder to fire electrically, but Leo had figured out a way. He
had a lot of free time on his hands, no romantic commitments, and
no other life except for precision rifle shooting and the coin
store.

Damn, he was going to miss out trying the new load
he had worked up for his thousand-yard rifle. 

Working fast,
Leo popped
open the trunk and set up his thermite. The
first
charge,
a baggie full of powder with an attached firing
system went into Phillips’ mouth to obliterate anything that could
be matched to dental records. The second one was set on his chest.
Leo taped the man's hands over the charge with the goal of erasing
any fingerprints and placed them over the letter opener. He set the
timer for an hour, tossed his gloves on the body, closed the trunk,
locked the store and then drove for five minutes to an industrial
park that was conveniently vacant thanks to the commercial real
estate bust.

He walked back to the store
without looking back.
When the thermite ignited, it
would burn through the body, destroying the letter opener and the
bottom of the trunk, and into the gas tank, causing a massive fire
that would further hinder any investigation.

He pulled his truck, a six-year-old GMC pickup
complete with topper, to the back and loaded up some other items
from the safe, including his target rifle, a stash of gold coins
and bundles of cash he had set aside. He locked his truck and
entered the store.
He stopped at the counter and
s
tared at the plain vanilla envelope. 

Leo retrieved another letter opener and carefully
slit the envelope open from the bottom. He slid the contents out
onto the counter and studied each document. It was the standard
targeting profile—name, pictures and various biographical details.
On the last page were the specifics of the proposed hit. Leo was
supposed to undertake this particular assassination solo with no
spotter or backup team. There was also no site set up for him to
shoot from. In all of his previous jobs, all Leo had to do was show
up to find his rifle set up and the spotter waiting. When the
target showed up, Leo took the shot and walked away. That was
interesting in itself. There were no further details except that he
was to receive thirty thousand dollars for this job. The payment
was on the very low side for someone with Leo's expertise. His last
job had paid ten times as much and that was over ten years ago.
Another piece to add to the puzzle.

Leo punched in his partner’s number. “Rob. Hey. It’s
me. Yeah, look. Something’s come up—no. No I’m fine. Family thing.
Sister’s kid got in a little trouble.

“Yeah,” he grunted out a laugh at Rob’s reference to
teenagers. Of course, Leo didn’t have a divorced sister with a
teenager, but as far as Rob was concerned he did and she lived in
Toledo. When he’d taken on his new identity, he’d contrived a
background to go with it then made damn sure he’d planted his
‘family’ plenty of miles away.

“Anyway, Barb thinks the kid needs a male hand, so
you know where this is headed, right? I need you to cover at the
shop for a few days.

“Great, thanks man. I owe you. And look, if business
is as slow as it’s been the last couple of weeks, just shut the
place down for a day or so if you have to.”

He waited while Rob told him to take his time.
“Thanks again. I’ll be in touch.”

Leo hung up, and then
studied the picture of the target. Short black hair, round face,
intelligent eyes. The name underneath it read “Jackie Winn.” A
pretty girl who didn't need makeup to look nice even in the photo,
apparently taken from a distance.

Leo slid the paperwork back into the envelope and
folded it into his sport coat pocket. On his way out of the door,
he picked up Phillips' pistol and added that to the pocket
containing the envelope.

“So. Jackie Winn,” he muttered aloud as he settled
behind the steering wheel. “Who the hell are you and why does
someone want you dead?”

More to the point, who in the business knew he was
alive and why had they dragged him back into it?

If he wanted answers to those
questions, he need
ed a plan. While he had realized that the
day he would have to pay for his past sins would be coming,
he had always held on to the hope that he could
keep his comf
ortable, reasonably safe life. Hell, he was in
his early thirties and had lived way beyond his expected life
expectancy as an assassin.

Someone had taken a great deal of effort to track
him down. Who? Leo had only done political assassinations outside
the United States, not generic murder for hire. Was this attempt to
recruit him for something bigger?
And if
so,
why?

He knew that Phillips was a dead end. The only
thread that he could follow was his expected target, Jackie Winn,
to
see if he could figure out how she was
involved. His best bet was to track her down, see why she was a
target and then follow the trail back to who had wanted her killed.
Then, if he had to, he’d take out
whoever got in his way
until he found someone he could convince to leave him the hell
alone. Forever.

Like it or not, it was
time
to go hunting.

###

The DVD tray sliding out of the drive broke Jackie
from her thoughts. That was strange—the DVD drive should only kick
out the disk when it was done writing, not reading.

Something wasn't right. She couldn't explain it, but
she knew. Good programmers and even hackers just didn't grind out
code, they sensed what was working right and what wasn't, coding by
feel. It wasn't something that was taught, or even could be
quantified, but it was what set her apart from thousands of other
code jockeys. And there was something going on here that she felt
was wrong. It was just a twinge, but it was enough.

She looked at the disk. Nothing
appeared defective with it so she decided to try a different
machine. She stepped over to her laptop and powered i
t up.
Since it was a Linux box, the software wouldn't run on or cause any
problems with her computer. She waited for the disk to spin up and
then looked at it with sector dump. It was all zeroes. Picking
another section of the disk, she looked at it and,
again,
found only zeroes. Was the whole thing
blank?

“What the hell is going on?” she muttered.

Minimizing the window, she brought up her C
programming environment and wrote a quick section of code to scan
the entire disk. She was a programmer to heart, where she even
thought in code—specifically C. With that language, you could write
code that talked with the individual chips on the motherboard or
write an entire operating system. Jackie had done both.

The program had a couple of bugs that she quickly
fixed, recompiled and started it to run. With 4.7 gigabytes of data
to sort through, it was going to take a while. She stopped the
program and told it to take samples all throughout the disk
instead. Ten minutes later, she had her answer—the entire disk was
blank.
Amazing. And completely illogical.
She could think of a couple of ways of formatting a disk with
software, but only with specific drives and media.