Then, as suddenly as it started, the crying stopped, replaced with quiet sobs.
With nothing else to do, he reached up to hug her. As he wrapped his arms around her, their lips touched. She moved so that they could stay touching. Her lips were smooth, warm, inviting. He felt himself drawn deeper in to the embrace.
Leo could feel her touching him and pulling at his clothes. He did the same, marveling at her body and her touch.
He broke the kiss and said, “Do you really want to do this?”
“God, yes.”
He said, “Same here.” He kissed her again and felt himself letting go of all of his being. It was scary and exhilarating. He didn't know where this would lead, but sure as hell wanted to find out.
As she slipped off her bra, she said, “One question — what do we do with our guns?”
You couldn't swing a dead mouse in the conference room and not hit a bigwig fed of some sort or another. FBI Agent Jeff Silver had met the power brokers from DHS, FBI, BATF, FEMA and probably other unnamed agencies. They were all fighting to have the center stage. It was beyond full blown crisis into complete and utter chaos.
Never mind that it was his case, his conference room, in the FBI's office. All they were doing was trying to see who's dick was bigger and should have control of this case along with all of the press sucking glory from it. No one cared that he had been working on it for a week solid with more than enough resources to help and only had stumbled upon one puzzle inside of another with answers only leading to many more questions.
He sat in the corner and reviewed his notes. The field agent that had trained him pounded into his head that when a case dead ended, go back to the beginning and look for something that you missed.
His secretary, a matronly woman who dressed and acted like a nun, brought in a slip of paper and handed it to him.
He nodded his thanks as she looked at the shouting matches echoing throughout the room.
Pushing her dark rimmed glasses back up on her nose, she said, “Should I call the medics?”
Jeff grinned and said, “No. But I'd have their number of speed dial.”
Shaking her head, she left, leaving Jeff to realize that she had just delivered what he was looking for.
Making his way to the front of the room, he took a phone book from by the phone and slammed it down on a table until he had a stunned silence.
“Thank you. Please have a seat and we'll get started.”
The DHS representative said, “But…”
Jeff said, “Not now. I'll tell you what we have and we can go from there.”
There were some grumbles, but everyone seemed okay with it for the most part. He put a jump drive in the computer feeding the overhead projector. He started from the beginning with the body of James Phillips/Brent Foster found well cooked in the trunk of a car. The pictures caused more than one of his audience to gag, but at least they weren't yakking on the floor yet.
He continued, using slides occasionally to stress a point or two, all the way up to the press release sent to thousands of members of various news media ranging from bloggers to the New York Times. What had started as a local problem had focused the entire world in on Denver in a media firestorm of epic proportions.
“So far, we’ve been able to link at least ten victims to this organization, if that's what it is, and haven’t had much luck going from there. But with the amount of resources we’re throwing at the problem, I feel we should have some sort of break very quickly.”
He held up his hands as a barrage of questions flew at him.
“I didn't say we didn't have any leads.”
Switching the projector over from computer to scanner, he displayed the sheet he had gotten from his secretary on the overhead.
It was a driver's license picture of an unassuming looking man, early thirties, staring into the camera.
“This is Leo Marston. He is co-owner of a coin store in Albuquerque, and disappeared about the time we figure that James Phillips/Brent Foster was killed. He has no bank accounts, pays taxes on a modest income from the coin store, no cell phone, no e-mail address that we can find, few friends, no politics one way or the other and, more importantly, his only vice is that he is a long-distance shooter of some regard in that community. These are the top shooters in the world transcending the science of precision long distance shooting way into the black arts.”
An FBI supervisor stood up and said, “What do you mean black arts?”
“Leo doesn't compete any more, but one shooter we talked to said that he regularly shot sub-three inch groups during competitions.”
He posted a picture of Leo holding a trophy, a heavy barreled rifle with a huge scope on it tucked under his arm.
“At what range?”
“A mile.”
The FBI supervisor sat down with a heavy thump.
There was a flurry of activity as several people left the room, dialing on their cell phones as fast as they could. Jeff figured that the president was probably going to be spending a very uncomfortable night in an underground bunker.
“That's not even the real kicker. We uncovered something else — Leo Marston isn't even his real name, not by a long stretch. He didn't even exist until a little over ten years ago. Then he appeared on the radar, paying taxes, getting a driver's license and all the trappings of a regular citizen.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“The passport and Social Security Number were both part of a group devoted to a government project, throw away IDs for an assassination team.”
“Who the hell issued them?”
“I don't have any idea. My agents have tried to track it down and have run into brick walls to the point where some of them are in fear of their lives for even asking.”
Pandemonium broke out that made the earlier arguments seem laid back and calm in comparison. He let it go on for a minute or two, and then slammed the phone book again.
When he had their attention again, he said, “We don't know if Leo, or whatever his name is, has anything to do with this, but we'd sure like to talk to him. But the only glimpse we've had of him was his license plate showed up on a traffic camera where we had a mysterious shooting.”
The DHS agent stood up. “Which victim was this shooting? I don't recall any sniper shootings from your list of murdered people.”
“Hold on a second.” He flipped back to his computer and selected another picture. It was a badly burnt piece of equipment.
“This is, according to what my lab guys have been able to figure, a remotely controlled rifle platform. They were able to salvage enough of the barrel for a ballistics check and came up with a couple of political assassinations in Central America. The damage was done with a rather sophisticated self-destruct system, and we are lucky that the whole building didn't also burn down or we wouldn't have found it.” He flipped to the next slide showing two bullet holes through a window, then another picture showing two holes in a wall. Then there was a picture of two very mangled bullets.
“These were dug out of the wall. They were handmade — all of the components, the jacket and the core, are at least .30 caliber. The closest shooting site was over six hundred yards away. From this, we can project that there was probably a sniper and someone counter-sniping him.”
He flipped back to the entrance holes. “At six hundred yards, the group is two inches apart, and we think that it was deliberate, designed to take out whoever was sniping.”
Moving back to the first picture of the remote rifle, he said, “We found a slug from this in the doorway of a software company. We’re still working on any links between Leo and this company, but their accountant was killed in car bomb very much like what took out three IRS agents and two FBI agents. A similar device was used to attempt to kill the co-owner of the company, a Jackie Winn. Since then, she has disappeared, not that she had much of a presence in the world anyway.”