“So, it's a database? Stored on a computer?”
“Yes.” She didn't know what he was getting at, but had a glimmer of understanding.
“Can that database be changed? How hard would it be?”
She thought about it a minute. “I suppose so. Though it would probably be pretty difficult. What are you thinking?”
He stopped and she turned to face him.
“I was hired ten years ago as an assassin. They sent us the targeting package via US Mail and paid with wire transfers. When I joined, I learned that the company that I worked for, whose name I never knew, had been working that same way for a number of years, probably since the end of World War II. Given Nathan's age, there is no way that he could have been running a company that assassinated people since the end of the war.”
Then another thing hit her, that the man standing before her was a professional killer and hadn't made any point of trying to hide it.
“Was it true what the targeting package said about you?”
He shrugged. “That was then; I was young, stupid and easily impressionable. Now, I simply want to get back to the coin store that I co-own and spend my free time perfecting the ultimate rifle, bullet and load and punching them into targets at longer and longer ranges. I will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.
“Anyway, getting back to the subject, suppose that Nathan was running a company specializing in assassination. How or why, we won't worry about. There have been several killings since he died, so who the hell is running it now? And how can we find them and make them stop? Or at least take us off the damn list so we can get on with our lives?”
She found the questions perfectly logical, appropriate and disconcerting. And she didn't have any idea how to find the answers.
Tyrannicide, following its set routines, sent out another set of e-mails. One, a targeting package of sorts, cleaning up some loose ends, and another much more complex and ominous.
Matthew Tudor was bored. He'd much rather be sitting in his lab, playing with some new chemicals that should be showing up in a couple of days. They would enable him to take arson to completely new levels; creating fires that simply couldn't be put out using conventional firefighting techniques and were very difficult to detect as arson. Basically, it was a highly modified version of a solid rocket fuel, specifically a composite recipe based on ammonium perchlorate, an aluminum fuel, and Hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) as a binder. Considered a high performance rocket fuel, the stuff would burn a hole through concrete without a problem. Most importantly, if you put water on it to try and put out the fire, the heat from the combustion would liberate the hydrogen and oxygen from the water explosively, making that much more of a mess.
Instead of developing his new rocket fuel/arson tool, he was sitting around in a hotel room in Boulder, Colorado, waiting for further instructions.
His Blackberry buzzed. About damn time. He paged through the information. It wasn't an assassination, but an arson job on a building. It didn't matter much to him as the money was the same.
Checking out the blueprints, he saw that it was a steel-framed building. That made it easier as the steel used in girders would collapse at 50 °C and would be greatly weakened at anything about 19 °C and would be likely to collapse given the weight of the roof.
A number of firefighters had been seriously injured or killed when buildings with steel supported roofs had collapsed on them. He would make sure that by the time that the firefighters showed up to put the fire out, they wouldn't even be tempted to make entry and put themselves in danger. Not that he really had a problem in killing a firefighter or two, but they weren't the target here. Besides, he had a grudging respect for the people that put their lives on the line fighting what he knew intimately and loved — fire.
They got into the truck. Both Jackie and Leo were thoughtful after their discussion. Leo didn't know what to think about what he had seen in Ryan's office. Not only did he see his name and that of Jackie, his own father's name was also there.
As a trained sniper, he had learned to pick up minute details very quickly. This had been reinforced by his years of peering at coins — often he would have to sort through hundreds of coins in minutes while hiding an expression of glee at finding an unexpected treasure so he could buy them at the right price.
His father had been killed by someone. It wasn't an accident, and Leo hadn't had anything to do with it like the authorities had suspected.
He hadn't really known his father that well. He was a traveling salesman — or so he said — and was gone a great deal of the time. When he was home, it was hell on earth for all involved as his father was a heavy drinker and would take out his various rages on whomever was handy. Often it was Leo and occasionally it was his mother.
Had his father been a professional killer? From the perspective of this new information, it was entirely probable. He really did want a closer look at the data that Jackie had copied from Ryan with the targeting packages.
He was familiar with all the information contained on one of them, as it only contained the who, how and information on finding them, not anything on why. The jobs that he had done, he didn't often realize that he had killed someone important or a motive as to why until the press had gotten a hold of the story. All the targets were, for him, flickering images in the scope's cross hairs.
But the targeting package may contain something more that could help him figure out why his father had been killed. He doubted it, but even a thread to hold onto might provide an answer or two, maybe even some more questions to ask and where to find them.
He had also recognized several of the targets that he had taken out on the list.
Something did stick out — was this a working piece of software or an archive? Even more ominous, it could be a plant, giving enough information that Leo and Jackie would stick their heads out enough so that they could be killed.
Yes, there could be some important information there, but in a list of several hundred names, how to find it?
Leo considered what to do next. Finding the owner of Alamut Enterprises looked to be a dead end. Maybe there was more information about what Nathan had been up to at the office where he and Jackie worked.
He wondered how the assassins were being controlled and paid. It couldn't be Nathan any more, but someone, somewhere was pulling the strings, and if they could find that out, they could interrupt that chain causing the whole works to collapse. At the very least, they could get their own names taken off the hit list.
He wondered how his partner was getting along with the coin store. Rob Gates must be going quietly nuts running it by himself. Leo was the one who had the touch with the difficult buyers and sellers — Rob had said that Leo could sell you back your coat and hat if you left them in the store, and the customer would feel great about the transaction. It might have been an exaggeration, but Leo felt good about his sales skills.
He stopped himself from drifting. He needed to be focused on the here and now — any deviation from that would result in his death.
Pulling out into traffic, he said, “Let's get something to eat and then figure out where we’re going from here.”
Jackie nodded. It was apparent that she had been hit hard with the recent revelations about Nathan.
Over dinner at a fast food restaurant, Jackie was eating mechanically, putting food into her mouth and chewing listlessly.
“I think we need another look at Nathan's office,” Leo said.
“I was thinking the same thing. The problem is that I've been through it pretty well and didn't find anything.”