“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.
He stepped around in front of her and got down on his knees. Taking the Kleenex, he gently wiped the tears from her cheeks.
“I mean it, I'm sorry. You don't deserve any of this. I'll do my best to make those responsible pay the check in full.”
Her sobbing intensified for a moment. Then it started to subside. He needed another couple of tissues to stem the tide of tears.
Leo was way the hell beyond his comfort zone. Yes, he had spent the last two days narrowly missing death, and dashing between hiding places, all spent in the same four-square feet or so of space. Emotions were something that he really didn't want to have to deal with right now — not only did they make him uncomfortable, he did not think he even had the programming to handle them in any appropriate manner.