Before turning in for the night, he set up an ultrasonic perimeter alarm. Any movement larger than a raccoon within twenty feet of his truck would initiate a vibrating buzzer that he fastened to his belt. Once again, a simple setup courtesy of eBay. Ensuring there was a round in the chamber of his recently acquired Beretta, he positioned it where he could find it and crawled into the truck bed.
As he listened to the rustling of trees and the distant, eerie hooting of an owl, he wondered what the future held and whether or not he would survive it.
Tyrannicide noted a problem. One of the events on its initial list of tasks had been overlooked. Tyrannicide knew this by the lack of an obituary and death notices in the newspapers of targeted areas. The fact that many newspapers used the same death notice software for their web-based editions made it easier to keep track of the recently deceased. One specific death notice was noticeably missing. That Jackie Winn’s death had not made the paper was of a low probability.
Tyrannicide adjusted the plan accordingly. It sent an e-mail to an asset with instructions to deal with this issue and also added another name from its list with some special instructions. The company controlling the asset had been paid a retainer for just such a problem. Tyrannicide needed to build up enough capital to implement its master plan; thus, it paid to be frugal.
As this was going on, hard drives continued filling with data gathered from online newspapers, blogs, news sites and anything connected to the Internet. Persons of interest were rated based on political importance and influence. Profiles of these persons of interest were built which included credit histories, bank transactions, voting records, online purchases and even books checked out of libraries. When enough information and money was gathered, a complex rating system would determine which of among them were going to die.
Leo made it into Denver in the early afternoon, right about rush hour. The traffic was thick and crept disdainfully around Leo’s truck as he cruised along at exactly two miles per hour over the speed limit so as not to attract any attention. The last thing he needed was to be pulled over by a cop.
Search and surveillance placed him way out of his comfort zone. As a long-distance killer, all he’d had to do was show up and take a shot. The work hadn’t been physically demanding and there had always been a team ready to extract him from the scene and hustle him out of the country. Any idiot could pull the trigger on a rifle and may even get lucky enough to hit what he was aiming at. But there were maybe fifteen shooters in the world who could shoot as well as Leo and maybe three or four who could do what Leo had specialized in — looking a stranger in the eyes at long range and caressing the trigger.
He pulled off the road and checked his paper maps that he kept in his glove box. It wasn't too hard to find the business where Jackie Winn worked. It was five minutes from highways I-70 and I-270. Handy if Leo had to escape quickly.
The business, White Hat Enterprises, Inc., was located in an industrial park. It was an obvious spec building, built of cheap concrete and metal, designed to fit almost any business application. It was a single story, had a simple glass door, moldering door frame and a peeling, painted wooden sign over the door. As he cruised down the street, he noticed that the surrounding businesses seemed to be tech oriented — a computer recycling company, a graphics firm and a software development company. Leo could almost see through the glass door into the reception. Overall, it was a fairly nondescript sort of looking business.
The parking lot was about half full and Leo was able to back his truck into a spot where he could keep an eye on the door of White Hat Enterprises. What kind of name was that for a company? It was probably some inside computer joke.
He slid across to the passenger seat — he’d read somewhere that people were less suspicious of someone sitting in the passenger seat than the driver's seat — and settled in to wait. “What the hell am I doing?” he muttered to himself. All that Leo knew about surveillance was what he had read in books.
One thing he was used to was waiting. He had once holed up in place for two days waiting for the target to come strolling past. Forty-eight hours is a very long time to wait. The undisciplined mind wore out long before the body. Leo had always been disciplined; his spotter, however, had gone quietly nuts.
Eyes on White Hat Enterprises, he settled in to wait and watch for a target.
Chapter 3
“Hey, Jackie. Got a minute?”
“I’ve got hours if you can just get me away from this paperwork,” she said, smiling and glancing over her shoulder to see Patrick Lackey standing in her office doorway. She felt bad about giving Patrick the cold shoulder last night and wanted him to know she was sorry. She’d been working on the company ownership papers for what seemed like forever. She hated paperwork. Just give her a coding problem — then she was happy.
Though, in the back of her head, she was still wondering and worried about the software Nathan had her run. Stepping away from it a bit always gave her new ideas, but dealing with corporate ownership paperwork didn't seem to help very much. Nathan had left the whole thing a tangled mess and her head hurt from reading convoluted legalese.
“So are you here to save me?”
Patrick was dressed in his usual impeccable charcoal gray three-piece suit including a watch fob draped across his age-broadening abdomen. In a company where the normal dress was a semi-clean t-shirt and tattered blue jeans, he stood out. Like Nathan once said, “Like the Pope at a whorehouse.”
Patrick also insisted on keeping paper accounting records as a backup to his computer records. He explained this by saying, “I like suspenders and a belt, just to be sure.”
He shuffled into the room clutching a stack of papers in his hands. “We need to talk,” he said without preamble.
“Uh-oh. This sounds serious. What’s up?” She motioned to a chair in front of her desk.
Setting the papers down on her cluttered desk, he sat down with a heavy sigh.
“So … what can I do for you, Patrick?”
Patrick seemed to gather himself before saying, “The company is out of money.”
She blinked. Then blinked again. Settling back in her chair, she said, “What? How can that be? We’ve got half a dozen products on the market producing regular streams of income both from royalties and actual software sales.
“White Hat is as close to a money printing machine as anyone could get,” she went on, near panic now when Patrick’s expression turned even more grave.
“Oh, come on, Pat. We’ve only got a three full-time employees and you’re one of them. We’ve got the best rates possible for our off-site contractors.”
“It’s not an issue of overhead costs bleeding you dry. The money has simply disappeared.”
She sank back in her chair. “Disappeared? How could it just disappear?”
Patrick shook his head. “I'm not sure. There were only three people authorized to sign on the checking account: Nathan, me and you. There were no checks written that I haven't accounted for, but money has disappeared from our operating accounts.”
“Some sort of unauthorized transfer then?” God. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony: a master hacker getting hacked.
“Maybe. I've accessed the accounts via the Internet, and nothing shows. One day the money was there, the next it wasn't. No transactions or anything. But it was software that we wrote for the banks. Someone who worked on the software at this company who knew what they were doing could tap into the funding without a trace.”