Someone who worked on the software at this company who knew what they were doing could tap into the funding without a trace. Patrick’s words buzzed through her head.
Oh, God. Was that someone Nathan? Did this have something to do with what the mysterious software he’d had her run?
She considered the implications of Patrick's statement — banks thrived on being able to show their accounting three different ways and a fourth as a backup. That money could simply float out of an account without any transaction data and put at least one, if not three or four, of their product lines in jeopardy.
It was she and Nathan who had built the banking software and, while it was reasonably clean code, there was probably a big hole in it somewhere that they both missed — or that Nathan had intentionally corrupted.
She tried to hold back the waves of nausea; tried to deny the horrible things she was thinking. But the only other person capable of pulling off such a feat was Nathan. It was too horrifying to contemplate — yet she knew that Nathan was more than able to screw with their finances and probably did.
But why? What was his motive? And what other secrets had Nathan White taken to his grave?
Using his Steiner binoculars, the Nighthunter XP model, a brand that he always trusted, Leo looked around the area where his truck was parked.
Where, as a sniper, would he set up to take a shot? He needed to figure it out because there was a real good chance that whoever had wanted to hire him to kill Jackie Winn would send a back-up assassin when they finally figured out their first choice wasn’t about to deliver on the hit.
There were several good possibilities, including a couple of buildings across the street with windows. The range was a bit on the long side, maybe seven hundred yards, but it was doable. Watching a flag blowing, he calculated the wind. Without a spotter to ID the target and call corrections, it would be a bitch of a shot. With a decent spotter, it still would be difficult, but Leo had shot hundreds of rounds at much longer distances under worse conditions.
Climbing out of his truck, he walked around the parking lot. It seemed to service a number of businesses in the same complex, so he wasn't worried about wandering around.
He spotted a jet black Mercedes SLK and recognized it from the photo he’d found in the manila envelope. It was Jackie Winn’s car.
It was parked off on an edge of the lot, sheltered from car dings by taking up two spaces. It gleamed in the early afternoon sun. The question that Leo wanted answered was how a computer programmer and recently former student would even know about such a car much less buy one? The college student who helped Leo with the computer network at the coin store drove a Honda Civic that could best be described as a pile of rust generally moving in the same direction.
Without using his binoculars, Leo looked around trying to appear as casual as he could.
Another possible sniper site presented itself — a building under construction several blocks away. It most likely offered the best view of the parking lot, but the range was on the extreme side — probably close to eight hundred yards. It would also be at an extreme downward angle — not anything difficult to deal with if you knew what you were doing, but it would be a factor.
Taking a long look at the building, he knew that would be where he would set up.
From the outside, he knew what to look for, but there were always things that one could see only from the sniper's hide that could result in a change of plans. One time he had shown up to take a shot at a foreign minister who had the hobby of torturing political dissidents and realized there was no way to get the proper angle to the target. He could have chanced a shot at the head, but it would have been moving. Instead, Leo moved to another room and completed the job without a problem.
There were no other places that would be good sniper hides, though there were several not very good possibilities. Leo recalled the time when his sniper hide was in the back of a van. That sucked. He had to take into account the bullet going through the window of the van and then making it to the target after traveling six hundred fifty yards. Leo hit the window square on and let the gods of ballistics take it from there. They were smiling down on him as the 190 grain Sierra boat tailed hollow point hit the target between the second and third shirt buttons.
He had been forced out of college due to the lack of money to pay for tuition, boarding and books after the suspicious death of his father and the scandal that surrounded it. Not that the bastard hadn't deserved it. Despite hours of interrogations by the police, Leo was determined to have no connection with the fucker burning to death in his Cadillac.
How and why someone had killed his father had never been determined and it still bothered Leo just a bit considering what he knew about the assassination business. His father's death had been a professional hit. Leo had read about similar assassinations over the years but the killer was as elusive as a puff of smoke.
He had been looking for work when he had been approached by a corporate headhunter looking to fill a slot in a company that built sniper rifles for the police and military. They needed someone to test fire their new creations under real world situations and write a report on the accuracy and functioning of the rifles. As a now ex-star of a college rifle team, Leo was the perfect candidate.
Leo had never fired a gun in his entire life before being goaded into trying out for the rifle team by some acquaintances after they had all gone out shooting one Saturday. From the first time Leo picked up a rifle, he couldn't miss. A walk-on to the team, he found that he the knack and mindset required for precision shooting.
It wasn’t until he was immersed in training that he realized he had been raised into this life by his father — forced into being a loner by constant moves, held to an exacting perfection in all tasks, no matter how small, able to adapt and blend into almost any social circumstance, able to think on his feet and an eye for detail. The punishments for even minor deviations of the expected norm were extreme, but probably not as bad as getting tortured or killed while on a mission.
That his dad was an assassin was so obvious after he had been in the business a while — the absences, lack of a visible job, able to buy whatever he wanted with pocket cash, the drinking and so much more — but for Leo growing up, it added to his hellish childhood. His mother was no help and merely another tool for manipulation by his father. That she died of a massive stroke shortly after his father's death wasn't unexpected.
Leo had been specially recruited by an unknown organization into becoming a sniper assassin. Everyone should be good at something and Leo was the best in the world at killing people at long distances.
The turning point was an assassination that, while it wasn't technically difficult at seven hundred twenty-six yards, it was world changing in his mind. As he brought the rifle scope back down onto the target, he saw the target's children, who had been standing next to him, coated with sprayed blood from the head shot, their faces etched in horror, their screams silent in the magnification of his rifle scope.
Then it struck him: he hadn't been putting holes in targets for the technical challenge but had been killing people.
That had been his second to his last job. He knew that the end was coming soon when he started asking about how to get out of the business. It was almost a relief when the car bomb had nearly killed him, but he knew that there was nothing he could do to atone for his sins.
He regretted the killing and had worked fucking hard to put that behind him, building his life as far away from his past as he could get. Now, he would do whatever he needed to get his life back. Including saving the life of complete stranger.