Chapter 21
Tyrannicide's analysis of media broadcasts revealed the general public was in a barely concealed state of panic. The collateral damage so far had been minimal, with few in non-government positions being hurt or killed and the basic infrastructure was still intact — street lights works, food was being delivered to grocery stores and most people could go about their daily lives without much worry. But all it would take was one event to turn the city into riots.
There was a delicate balancing act that must be maintained, otherwise there would be armed soldiers in the streets, shooting at frightened citizens.
It sent out several more targets for its special operators, then settled into wait for further developments.
Matthew Tudor was delighted at his new assignment — destroy, hopefully without harming anyone, the Denver Police Department’s Armored Personnel Carrier. Yes, they called it a 'Peacekeeper,' but a tank was still a tank, no matter if you painted it pink and hung flowers off of it. It was a LAV-300, a six-wheeled vehicle built by Cadillac Gage, Textron Marine and Land Systems. This particular one had been one of at least six captured by the US Army during their invasion of Panama.
Armored only to stop 7.62 bullets, it was vulnerable to any number of weapons, including grenades. It had all sorts of fancy sensors including thermal sensors, computerized tracking devices, night vision, tear gas launchers and probably even a doughnut and coffee dispensing system. It had blue high output LED lights on it and was painted jet black with 'POLICE' on the front and 'SWAT' on the side.
Powered by a V-6 turbo-diesel engine and transmission, it could do sixty miles per hour on roads and could hold up to nine SWAT officers plus the driver. Some variations included water jets underneath that allowed amphibious operations.
They had gotten the vehicle from a DHS grant, the same nitwits who had provided snowmobiles to a Texas police department — their city had gotten maybe a half-an-inch of snow in ten years, but they said they really needed them.
The difficult thing for him was going to be taking out the vehicle without taking out the driver, who sat next to the engine and transmission. Yes, he could probably get the diesel tank to light up somehow — diesel was hard to get going, but once you got it burning, it was a major pain to put out. However, he didn't know if the fire suppression system that was usually standard equipment on this vehicle was still active. Yes, enough fire could overwhelm such a system, as they were only designed to give the crew enough time to evacuate the vehicle. But it did add another complication to the picture.
Thank goodness they hadn't upgraded the thing to dual self-sealing tanks, rather than the standard single tank.
Another complication was that the damn thing didn't get out much. After the initial public fury when they had purchased the vehicle and that they had to pay $50,000 to refurbish the thing, it had not been seen very often on the streets of Denver. That was the nice thing about the city, there were enough bleeding heart liberals to make life interesting for those trying to militarize the police.
They had promised that the APC would be used at least fifty times a year, all for SWAT call outs and for dangerous situations to protect the officers. He wondered why they needed such protection. It had only been seen in parades and while he had searched for news articles about it being used, the press was strangely silent about it when it was used, if at all.
So it was either figure out some way to get the thing out on the streets, and take his chances that he could kill the crew with one of his devices, or figure out where it was stored and take it out there. He wondered if there was a bonus if he took out other interesting police vehicles — rumor had it that they also kept an ambulance and fire truck to trick people into thinking that they weren't the police. He'd love to burn up a fire truck, the irony in that act was something that would make him feel all warm inside.
He found a copy of the plans for the police garage and set to work on figuring out how he was going to pull this off.
Leo knew that he needed to set aside what was going on with Jackie and find a new approach to the problem of figuring out who was pulling the strings and why.
He tried going back to his past and his current skill set to get an idea as to what to do and how. Nothing he could think of regarding shooting seemed to work. Putting bullets into small groups at enormous ranges didn't much tie into anything that seemed to be able to help him.
Then he considered his coin skills. Yes, he could tell you which coins had strong strikes, what years they were made and what the rare dates were. But his specialty, if you could have such a thing in such a broad area such as coins, was US coins. There were plenty of people that specialized in one particular type of coin, say Indian Head pennies, and some even went down to knowing and collecting all that they could regarding a small number of years and strikes.
He had the books and the knowledge to look in the right places to get his questions answered, but other than that, he could care less. The magic in coin collecting had pretty much been replaced with the pragmatism of someone who bought and sold valuables — anything in the store was up for sale for the right price. In fact, you could probably walk in with enough money and buy the whole place, lock, stock and barrel.
So, was there something that he could use that he had seen before?
Then it hit him; his partner in the coin store dabbled in ancient coins. It was a tricky business because such coins were much easier to fake than more modern coins. What had helped was if the coin had providence — documentation showing where and how it had been found, testifying to its authenticity. Even such paperwork could be faked, but it was something that many buyers of high-value ancient coins insisted on examining often even before they looked at the coin. Yes, there were plenty of gray market buyers out there that just wanted to fill their collection with a coin that no one else had, but the vast majority of the collectors that Leo's partner dealt with were way above legit.
Given the providence concept, showing how and where it got to its current location, how could that be applied to what was going on now?
He realized that he lived in a vacuum, doing his own thing, not really influenced by outsiders. Every day the coin store was open, he went to work. He spent his evenings working on his rifle or researching the history of assassination. He didn't even think that Rob, his partner, knew what he did with his free time, not that he even cared what Rob did when not at the store.
But had Nathan White lived the same way? You just don't spring from the womb with the ability to manage a team of professional killers. And it wasn't something that you could pick up by reading. Someone had to determine that you had the right mindset and morals to do the job and then teach you to how to handle a stable of very highly trained and paid professional killers.
He considered the skills needed including recruiting, training and equipping the assassins. Then you had to have work for them — offering to kill someone wasn't something that you could just post an ad in a phone book. Even word of mouth would draw the attention of too many feds, cops and whack jobs wanting their wife killed.
So how would you come up with people willing to pay for the support team, equipment and the assassin? Maybe large businesses, but definitely governments. Yes, all of his jobs had been outside the country. And it had been shockingly easy to get in and out of the country. He imagined some rogue government agency, not necessarily based in the US, running the entire operation for their own ends. What those ends were, he had no idea.
Returning to his original problem, who had been Nathan's teacher? That's under the huge assumption that Nathan hadn't been set up to take the fall — real difficult to talk to a dead person. In both cases, someone was still calling the shots — no matter if Nathan had been in charge of running it until his death.