Kill Code (21 page)

So he was breaking his pattern in a new and
terrifying way. He'd always been fascinated by IEDs, their
construction, how they are used, detected and effects. US based
terrorists hadn't discovered the utility of such devices, so now
was the time.

From his understanding of the target, despite his
$140,000 plus yearly salary, he only rated a company car and a
driver/bodyguard. The car was standard government issue with no
special armor or other protection. Not that it mattered much to Fox
anyway, as he had tricks in his bag that could defeat even the
armor on an M1 Abrams tank.

After a couple of days watching his next victim, he
had a plan. The federal building parking lot turned onto a one-way
street, so there was only one way for them to go and it was a
narrow street. An army issue claymore mine was something that he
had seriously considered and he had a couple stashed away. Instead,
he selected an MM-1, “Minimore” command detonated mine. Developed
for American Special Forces, it was a third the size of the M18A1
claymore mine, and produced a narrower arc of fragments than the
claymore. At 50 feet it produced a pattern 16 feet wide and two
feet high, compared with a 50-foot wide pattern for the claymore
mine at the same distance.

He wanted to kill his target, not destroy an entire
city block and kill everyone in it.

The mine was placed on a wall next to the road and
painted to match the fading brickwork. He was dressed in tattered
rags, sitting in the shelter of a nearby doorway, sipping from a
container of soda hidden in a paper bag—anyone looking would think
that he was homeless and quietly getting drunk. He knew he was
outside the range of any cameras from the nearby federal building
and there were no traffic cameras watching the intersection. There
were no convenience stores or ATMs close with their ever present
security cameras, and he had an escape route and backup route to
get back to his car. Under his wino disguise, he wore khaki slacks,
a button down Oxford shirt and tie. Shedding his disguise, he could
easily become a businessman making his way to back to his car.

The target's car pulled out of the driveway. He
pulled the safety bail on the M-57 firing device, also known as a
'clacker,' back and waited. The light changed as the car pulled to
a stop—right within the kill zone.

He squeezed the clacker and ducked.

Tyrannicide had been analyzing the stories about the
killings in Davenport from news sources all over the country. The
numbers of stories, their emotional content, readability index and
comments from readers caused it to hit a preplanned point, starting
a new subroutine. It was apparent that the government was going
into crisis mode and the general population was close to panic.

It activated a previously unused mail server and
sent a press release to hundreds of thousands of press and blogger
e-mails gleaned from weeks of analysis. The e-mail said:

“The Children of the Constitution have struck a blow
against those who blatantly violate The Highest Law of the Land.
Every sworn office holder will now be held to the standard set by
the Constitution. Consequences for those who continue to violate
their Oath to uphold and protect the Constitution will be absolute
and final. You have been warned.”

The next step was to kill that mail server and
remove all traces that it had ever existed. There would be copy
cats, and others wanting to take credit, but the next press release
would set, in the world's eyes, the authenticity of the original
e-mail.

Tyrannicide considered its target list. Two original
targets were still alive, but with currently finite resources, they
were placed to a lower priority. Soon there would be plenty of
resources to deal with this niggling problem. Meanwhile, it issued
more targeting packages.

###

The BMW X5 Ken Brody, the Fifth Finger, had crawled
under had a wonderful braking system. But it could be subverted
without too much trouble. He had developed a special technique for
doing so. He found where the metal brake line came down to the
rubber hose and worked his way back exactly one inch. Then he
worked his way back and drilled a hole in the metal brake line.
Before too much fluid dripped out onto the plastic he had placed
just for that purpose, he wrapped where the hole was with Cerrolow
117. Made of Tin, Bismuth, Lead, Cadmium and Indium, it was easily
moldable to almost any shape and, most importantly, it melted at
forty-seven degrees Celsius or a hundred seventeen degrees
Fahrenheit—a temperature easily reachable as close as it was to the
hot brakes.

Since US Senator Jan Johnson liked to drive the back
roads to her home, through some very rough, mountainous country,
the plan was to have the brakes fail in an isolated area. The
resulting crash would be fatal given the terrain—if not from the
crash, from exposure or even other creatures, like a bear.

Checking his work, he nodded in satisfaction and
crawled out from under the car. His Blackberry buzzed. Paging
through it, he saw that it was another job. He had just set up to
kill a US Senator, so the next target was a bit of a letdown. But
he wouldn't let that prevent him from approaching it with
professionalism.

###

Leo had a glimpse of what was going on around them.
He and Jackie had been gathered up into a storm of epic
proportions. Nathan White, God rot his soul, was probably at the
heart of it. He had apparently put into place various mechanisms
for some sort of political ends. How to strike it where it was
vulnerable and make it stop before it killed them was the big
problem.

He still felt that there was someone pulling the
strings, directing the assassins, paying them, supporting them in
whatever ways they needed. Based on the money he would have gotten
for killing Jackie, he knew that there was one hell of a lot of
money being thrown around.

Where did that money come from? According to Jackie,
and the numbers that Patrick Lackey had printed out, Nathan had
only subverted maybe half-a-million dollars or so. At say, $30K a
hit, plus expenses, that money should be gone pretty quickly if not
already be gone.

They had taken shelter in a hot sheet hotel.

Jackie was crouched over her computer, having
already hacked into a nearby business's wireless network to gain
Internet access. What good that would do, he didn't know.

She looked up from her computer and said, “Something
of interest here.”

He looked over her shoulder at the screen.

“What am I looking for?”

“I've done an analysis of the
targeting packages that we found. You were right, almost all of
them were outside the country. There were two, until recently, that
were in the continental US. One was a car fire in Indiana, a
Phillip Jennings, and in Ohio, a poisoning of a
Joe
Taylor.”

“Bring up the information on Jennings.”

She brought up the targeting package on him. “He
looks a lot like you.”

“Yes. He was my father.”

He scanned the background information. It looked
like his father had been a professional killer, not an ordinary
citizen who had gotten swept up in events beyond his control. The
information didn't indicate this outright, but Leo knew enough to
read between the lines. At some point his father had become a
liability and was taken out—very much like what they had tried to
do to him.

He wasn't sure if it was a shock, a relief or what
to think. This organization had been fucking with his life since
before he was born, and he'd fallen right in with them, doing their
evil bidding. If his father hadn't been involved, would that have
made a difference in the hell that was his childhood? How does
being a killer for hire change you? He realized that in himself, he
had seen some things that would normally concern others—like the
inability to form close relationships, but Leo really didn't care
for people anyway. Yes, there was that occasional pang of regret
when he saw a couple walking hand in hand down the street in front
of his coin store, and wondered what it would be like to be able to
open yourself up to someone, letting yourself be vulnerable, but
you can't really miss what you've never had.

“He was your father? Did you know that he was a
professional killer?”

“No. I just thought he was a rat bastard and a drunk
who beat on me and my mother for fun. I was happy when he croaked,
but when the cops thought I was the one who had done it, that
really messed with my life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was forced out of college and had to become an
assassin. But it's too late to complain now.”

“So, you were manipulated into doing this for them.
I never thought Nathan could do something like this.”

“How old was Nathan when he died?”

“Forty-three. Why?”

“My father was in his early fifties when he was
murdered fourteen years ago. So, say he got into the business in
his twenties, like I did. Do the math. Either Nathan was running
this organization from the zygote stage, or something isn't
right.”

“I see.”

“Also, what good would it do to keep all of this
information around, even on a secured computer? It's incriminating
to the owner of it and the assassins in your stable. Those people
are very expensive to train and keep happy, why risk them being
discovered by keeping around enough information to incriminate them
once they were caught? Which you could do very easily given all the
information you have on them here.”

“How would you catch them?”

“Each member of the Black Hand specializes in a way
of killing. That's a pattern. Once you've locked onto the way and
how they do things, all you have to do is look for specific markers
and once one of them shows up, you have them.”

“I still don't get what you mean.”

He flipped through the files and found the targeting
package for the city council
. Then he found the
Denver Sentinel story about the killing of pretty much the entire
city council.

“Okay. Most of the dead and dying drank coffee at
the meeting and that's what did them in—the update on the news
story said it was thallium poisoning. But something else killed
Councilman Van Wyk as he got sick after a meeting in a local
bar.

“That leads me to think that the killer was a woman.
How better to approach a fat-assed idiot like Van Wyk? Those in
power think that despite their looks, their power is what draws in
attractive women. Well, that may be true in their minds, and it was
what got him killed. I think that if you broke down the killings by
method, that you would find that most of those killed by poison
were men. Besides, statistically, women are the ones to use poison
to kill someone rather than a baseball bat like a man would
do.”

“It makes sense. Do you think I should do an
analysis of the methods by which these targets were killed?”

He shook his head.

“I don't think that it will help us for the amount
of time and effort it will take. The targeting package just
provides the particulars about the victim, not how it is to be
done. But if you were sent on it, and it was within your skill set,
you did it the way you knew how. For me, it was the long kill,
which wouldn't work very well to take out a city council.”

“It wouldn't be that hard, just Google the
names...”

“No. Do not do that.”

“Why?”

“We may have triggered something when we downloaded
this information from the Blackberry. Hell, it still scares the
crap out of me that we had to turn the damn thing on in an
unprotected environment. Suppose someone has figured out we have
this information? What would you watch for next? Someone trying to
find out about the people listed in the files. You've established a
pattern, and are now in line to get killed.”

“How would that be any different between what
they’re trying to do right now?”

“I want to be able to pick and choose the place
where I confront these assassins. It will be where I have the
advantage. The only person that can even touch us is the sniper and
I think that we've screwed him up for a bit by taking out his
remote controlled rifle.”

“What about the other members of the Black
Hand?”

A siren screeched by their window followed by
another one.

Leo stepped up to the window and cracked the curtain
open. Another siren passed.

“Fire trucks. Turn the news on, maybe we'll see
what's going on.”

She flipped on the TV and found a local news
station. Sure enough, a reporter was standing in front of a burning
building with firefighters scurrying around in the background. It
wasn't just burning, it appeared to be a blazing hell.

“That building next to the burning one looks
familiar.”

He took a long look at it. Then it hit him. “It
should, the burning building is where Nathan and you had your
business. I guess we won't be able to search for any information
that Nathan had squirreled away in it now.”

Jackie slumped onto the bed. Turning away from him,
he saw that she was crying—her shoulders shaking.

He stepped up to her and put a hand on her shoulder,
for the first time realizing how fragile she felt under his
calloused grip.

“I'm sorry,” was all that he could think to say.

She made a grab at the tissues on the nightstand and
tried to wash the tears away.

“I've lost everything—my boyfriend, my business and
everything that I've spent years building. And I may be killed
anyway.”

Leo couldn't think of anything to say. The stakes
they were playing was something that he had prepared for all of his
life, that there would be a knock on his door and he was taken into
account, one way or another, for his past. But Jackie was an
innocent bystander; she didn't deserve anything that had happened
to her.