“What about the other owner of the company?”
“Nathan White. He died a week and a half ago of pancreatic cancer.”
There was stunned silence. Then the FBI supervisor said, “So, what is your investigative focus?”
He shut down the projection system and brought the lights up in the room while he framed his answer.
“Trying to find out who is behind this 'Children of the Constitution.' Everything is focused on that. But we will be keeping our eye out for Leo and Jackie as we really want to talk to both of them. We're not even sure that they are involved, but to have a guy who can hit you in the head with a rifle at a mile with all this going on is someone we really, really need to talk to.”
Chapter 19
Allan Wells, the Black Hand's sniper, was up to his elbows in a servo pad framework when his Blackberry buzzed.
He extricated himself and checked his e-mail. He had a job. Glancing down at the carcass of his new remote controlled rifle, he knew that he couldn't get it done in time by a long shot. Despite spending huge amounts of money to get the parts he needed, he still had a number of bugs that he needed to work out.
Paging through the targeting package, he decided that he would do this the old-fashioned way, with a rifle against his shoulder and the victim not realizing that his next breath would be his last.
He patted the framework, “Next time, boy.”
Then he made a list of things he would need to do before he could take the target out. The Blackberry was so handy for this….
Jackie woke and stretched, careful not to disturb Leo. They'd made love for hours, and she was sore in all the right places and feeling quite content, like an elderly cat laying in a sunbeam. Leo had been magnificent — giving, caring, gentle and he had a body to die for — solid muscle, calluses and some scars that he promised he'd explain later. When this was all over, she was going to have to get him a more fashionable haircut and some decent clothes on the man and see how he cleaned up — she suspected that even her rich bitch sister would approve.
They had changed the dynamic of their relationship in so many ways that she wasn't sure where her feelings were. Yes, she had lost almost everything else in her life, but had gained something that made life worth living.
Leo had told her about how it felt to almost die — to feel death brush its hands through your hair, and yet survive; that the air smelled better, food tasted wonderful and the sky was brighter. She hadn't had that feeling much before, even after her car had been blown up, her friend Patrick Lackey killed and being shot at, but this ratty hotel room, twenty feet from a busy road with threadbare carpet, wash worn sheets, 1970s era pine paneling and cheesy art screwed to the walls in cheaply painted frames, was now a castle in the clouds.
She'd read somewhere, a long time ago, that addicts often don't ask for help until they've hit bottom, and then were ready for help. She felt that same way now, that she was on her way out of the bottom, with Leo at her side.
That he had killed people for money and was matter of fact about it, without justification or excuses, was something that she'd have to deal with. But, where she was at right now, she knew that he'd kill or die for her without question or qualm.
Leo stirred in his sleep and then his eyes popped open. He leaned over her and said, “Hi.”
She kissed him, and then said, “Hi back to you.”
Crawling out of bed, he said, “You want the bathroom first? I need to exercise. Then we'll figure out what we have to get done today. Like track down your hacker buddy.”
She quickly cleaned up. Living in hotel rooms was starting to be a grind. Hopefully, they could figure out how to extricate themselves from this mess and she'd never have to spend another night in a nameless hot sheet hotel.
While Leo was showering, she considered joining him, but decided that she really needed to get some things done.
She fired up her laptop and ran the software that hid that she was accessing a wireless network. This secret squirrel stuff was tiring, yet exhilarating, and she knew that she was in the top of her game where the stakes might cost them their lives.
There was no e-mail from her hacker acquaintance. Damn. She should have heard from him by now — he usually replied in minutes, rarely over an hour. The man was connected in ways that she couldn't even understand and had sources for information on systems security that bordered almost on magical.
She sent him another e-mail, marking it high priority and that she really needed his help.
An instant message window popped up her screen. Funny, she'd deliberately deleted that software since she never had any use for it.
It was her hacker friend. She quickly explained that she needed to find out where money was coming from and going to and who was manipulating it.
He asked for the account and routing information and told her that it would be a while, she should check her e-mail later that evening.
Would they even be alive by then?
Leo came out of the shower, drying off with a threadbare towel.
“What'd you find?
“I got in touch with my hacker friend. He's going to check for us on the banking stuff and get back to me. Which is strange.”
“How so?”
“He must have someone on the inside as the cryptographic algorithms used in some banking software are hard to crack. We used to tell people that it would take five months with a CRAY XMT, a super computer with multi-threading processors, to crack.”
“What's a super computer?”
She motioned at her laptop. “In computer terms, this is like walking and the Cray XMT is a scramjet.”
He nodded and flipped on the TV, “Let's see what's happening in the world.”
The breaking story concerned a group claiming responsibility for the recent killings. They called themselves the 'Children of the Constitution,' whatever that meant.
Other groups had chimed in taking credit for the havoc caused in Denver, but they were apparently being given short shrift by the media and only earned themselves unnamed mentioning.
No one had heard or seen Denver's mayor in two days, but his office kept issuing press releases that he hadn't been a victim, but was in seclusion, and in full control of the situation. The surviving US Senator from Colorado had asked for Secret Service protection, as did the other six surviving Colorado members of the US House of Representatives. That was the local angle on things and other important politicians of all stripes were also asking for Secret Service protection. The president was on his way to Camp David along with much of his staff, the vice president was at his ranch in Utah and other government power brokers had suddenly made themselves scarce.
Wall Street was already tanking and there was a rush in the local grocery stores for staples. Some were calling for the National Guard to be activated to assist in peacekeeping, never mind that most of them were in Iraq and Afghanistan. 911 centers were being deluged with panicked calls causing their computer systems to crash. Conspiracy-oriented bloggers were going nuts, spinning out theories that spread through the Internet like wildfire. The least tame seemed to be one that our planet was being 'softened up' for an alien invasion, with the WTC tower collapses being the first test of our defenses. The tone was of barely controlled panic.
They watched until the news started repeating itself. Jackie turned off the TV and said, “What the hell is going on?”
He shrugged. “Not a clue, but it doesn't sound good. Let's get some breakfast and try and figure out what the hell we’re going to do today.”
Chapter 20