While she did most of her business in anonymous bars, someone was going to be able to put the pieces together and catch her.
A saving grace was the chaos in the Denver area. The police were overwhelmed with the number of killings in their city and surrounding areas. While the FBI was probably involved, they would take too long to get up to speed — she hoped to be sitting at her beach house enjoying a fine wine before they got really involved in the investigation.
Another point in her favor was the nature of the deaths she caused — there had been enough deaths by fire bombings, stabbings, shootings and beatings to allow her activities to fade into the background chatter.
She checked her Blackberry again for information on her next target. It was going to be easy, another man. He liked exotic food, so Botulinum toxin would be his undoing.
Considered the most toxic substance known to mankind, a fatal dose was in the order of micrograms. She hated to use it as it tended to get the attention of the wrong sorts of people, including the FBI and DHS, as it was a potential war bug. In fact, prior to the first Gulf War, Iraq had produced enough of the stuff to kill every living human three times over. Various attempts had been made over the years to control it to keep it out of the hands of terrorists, but since the toxin was produced by an easy to handle soil bacteria, it was a lot more difficult than originally anticipated.
While rarely fatal any more, the dosage she was planning on giving would be deadly even if the appropriate treatment was started immediately. The chaos around Denver would help delay proper supportive care and treatment.
It was the last poison in her current arsenal — she had no more materials with her even after several uses of improvised poisons. After she poisoned the low level DEA informant, she would shut off her phone, get on her chartered jet and head back home.
While her bank account was quite fat with all of this work, she wasn't. She was used to only doing one or two jobs a year at most and having completed ten assignments in the past week and a half was way too much work. She missed her laboratory, her wine cellar and the life that she had built for herself.
She looked at the tiny vial containing the Botulinum toxin. There was enough to kill the entire city and it had taken some new and interesting ways of processing the base materials to create this amount.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the target. He was slightly early for their dinner date, which didn't matter to her as she was planning on being very late. The date had been set up in an online chat room for sexual sadists. While she considered herself asexual, she knew enough of the kinks to play enough of a convincing character to lure in her victims.
She looked at her face in the rear view mirror. Tonight, she was a blond and had even dyed her eyebrows to match. Sky blue contact lenses and heavy makeup completed the disguise.
Running her hand through her hair, she settled in to wait until ten minutes after the dinner reservation. Then it would be time to get to work.
Chapter 25
Before returning to the interrogation room, Jeff Silver made a phone call. Luckily, the Denver branch of the FBI was big enough to have their own HRT team with snipers. He gave the team leader specific instructions and knew that they would be followed to the letter when he mentioned talking with Director Gerald. Then he stopped by the Computer Forensics Lab in the FBI office. It was packed with piles of computer equipment and monitors all in a disorganized mess on cheap metal shelves that were bent by the weight of their contents.
He had dropped off the notebook found in Leo's hotel room hoping that the technological wizards could get something from it.
There were three of them standing over a bare computer, glaring at a wide screen monitor. The tech guys were contractors, not sworn agents, so he couldn't bully them around like he could a regular agent.
Two of the men were pencil thin, the other almost morbidly obese.
“What did you find?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He glanced down at his watch. “You've had it for almost four hours, what have you been doing in that time?”
“Trying to crack the encryption.”
“What encryption?”
The obese man, wearing a ratty t-shirt, said, “First, per procedure, we did a byte-by-byte duplication of the hard drive. Then we plugged it into our computer and have been trying to access the data since then. It's encrypted up the wazoo and none of us have any idea as to how to crack it.”
“How is it encrypted?” As an FBI agent, he had to deal with all sorts of computer crime and had been through the FBI's technology classes. Not that it got him up to the level of the computer geeks, but he could speak the lingo.
“It's called Twofish. Considered one of the top five advanced encryption methods, the 128-bit Twofish encryption cipher, which we have here, has never had a successful attack reported. A 128-bit key has over 3.4 x 1038 possible combinations. Cracking Twofish trying every possible encryption key would take 8.77 x 1017years.”
“How about the NSA?”
“Maybe a massively parallel computer, or even quantum computers, but from experience, they wouldn't even talk to us. I mean that the NSA knew about public key crypto 15 years ahead of civilian researchers, so who knows what they are up to now.”
“So we couldn't obtain anything from it?”
“Not only no, but hell no. There appear to be at least two hidden partitions, and the base operating, we think, is some highly secured Linux variation. We'd like to meet the person that put it together; it's not off the shelf and very sophisticated.”
He shook his head, “I need everything back, as it was, now. I've been ordered to release our suspect.”
“Can we keep the data image?”
“Yes. But, everything else, pack it up, I'm on a deadline.”
They stared at him like he had grown a third eye.
He slapped his hands together. “Now.”
Snapped into action, they scurried around packing up the evidence. Very soon, he left them holding a box containing all the material that they had examined. A similar visit to the ballistics room got back Leo's rifle, ammunition and his pistol, though not before they had been fired and a case from the .22 and bullets from both weapons had been taken. Maybe he could tie them into something big and have a chance to reopen this case from this end.
A phone call got Leo's truck out of the impound — luckily, they hadn't had time to even inventory it, much less start tearing it apart.
Burdened by his packages, his final stop was the Operational Technology Division (OTD) office. If it could be bugged or tracked, these guys could do it. While technically in the same area as computer forensics, the Denver field office was large enough to have its own OTD unit. They worked with other law enforcement agencies, including other federal services.
In sharp contrast to the forensics room, everything was neatly organized, stored in numbered bins on shelves. He knew that some of the really cool things were locked away from prying eyes.
The guy who ran it was named Troy Castillo. He had more degrees than an office full of medical doctors in esoteric things such as applied mathematics, computer security, and, strangely, French literature. He was an odd duck in a business that thrived on standardization to the extreme all the way down to acceptable tie widths in the employee dress code. He was wearing a polka dot bow tie and an Egyptian cotton shirt. A Brooks Brothers suit coat hung on a wooden coat hanger fastened to the wall.
Castillo held a soldering iron with a needle sized tip, and was leaning over a very tiny device.
He looked up in surprise as Jeff came into the room and the door closed with a loud clank.