“Finger here,” he answered.
“I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” Heckler said. “What do you want first?”
He was losing ground quickly in the pursuit.
“Might as well start with the bad news to help get my spirits up,” Turner said sarcastically.
“All right then. There wasn’t much on Ryan Turner. He won the Boston Marathon recently and donated the prize money to a foundation. There’s nothing that ties the win to his death. The only other intel was that he was a software developer and worked for his father’s company.”
Turner wished his brother’s death and the marathon win weren’t related, but he knew better. It would have taken time for The Shop to modify the images of his brother used in the news reports. Even with the infrastructure they had in place for damage control, it would have been impossible to catch everything. He was sure major news publications posting pictures of his identical twin from the marathon was what led to his death. Someone had seen the images and thought it was him. It was a deadly case of mistaken identity.
“Okay, what else do you have for me?” Trent asked.
“The incident with the senator’s son. It doesn’t look like a one-time thing.”
“What? People are killing politicians’ sons?”
“No, no. Cannibal has been working overtime. It ran the comparison algorithm through our copy of the National Crime Information Center database and was able to correlate five — wait, hold on a sec…”
Turner exhaled in frustration as the assassin’s car vanished from view. It would have been a different story had he been driving his Tesla.
“Six cities,” Heckler confirmed. “It tied them together with intelligence from the NSA’s database on hackers known to be associated with The Collective.”
“You can’t be serious? The senator’s son was a member of The Collective?”
“Serious as a heart attack. It says the kid was a low-level hack,” Heckler said in a less-than-confident tone that hinted it would mean something to Finger. “It says he’d help out with distributed denial-of-service attacks. He used something called a Low Orbit—”
“Ion Cannon, yeah, yeah. The open-source app that the script kiddies play with so they can call themselves hackers. Go on.”
“Well, he went by mi11Ion2 in the hacker forums, and based on his posts, the analysts said he was actively working to develop his skills. He made a lot of posts, and they could tell he was new to the game, but they pointed out one thread in particular that stood out.”
“How so?”
“It was for some sort of job posting, but the posts in between the Soller kid’s responses were wiped clean.”
“So you only saw posts by him?”
“Yeah, like half the conversation was gone. Our guys hacked into the server that hosts the forum and couldn’t find any trace of what was said in the missing posts, or any clues that would tell us who might have removed them.”
“That was fast.”
“They’re on top of things. For now we’re replicating the forums that he had an account on to our servers so we can try to catch any new recruiting going on.”
“Good call,” Trent agreed. “Hopefully they’ll be stupid enough to try it again.”
“That’s only part of the story,” Heckler continued. “The other hackers who were killed were all involved in a job-posting thread, and every one of them had missing entries. Most of them were college pukes.”
“Really? So whoever these guys are, they won’t shy away from pulling the trigger. It looks like the cleaner who came in behind was sloppy,” Trent pointed out.
“How’s that?”
“When they hacked into the database to cover their tracks, they screwed up. Instead of thinking it through and running a delete query to remove the entire thread from the database, they wrote one that only deleted the posts made by their user name.”
“So they could have wiped everything clean?”
“Absolutely. Normally you wouldn’t give something like that much thought. The easy route would be to remove everything done by the account they used.” Turner paused to let that sink in, knowing Heckler excelled in tactics rather than technology, which was the opposite of his handler, Tak. “You see, doing it quick and dirty like that left us with a way to tie all of the killings together. That’s huge.”
He had turned the car around and was heading back toward his hotel in Tysons Corner. The news was welcome after his anticlimactic car chase.
“The lab said something about a screw-up. I still don’t really get it, so I’ll leave that hacker mojo shit to you smart kids. I’ve got my own computer right here.”
Turner imagined Heckler pointing to his head and smiled.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Heckler continued with a laugh. “It won’t ask for a damn reboot at the most inconvenient time possible either.”
“You give Tak a run for his money as far as entertainment value goes, that’s for sure.”
“Wait till you get the bill.”
Turner laughed. “By the way you throw around words like ‘kid’ and ‘college puke,’ I take it you’re well seasoned.”
“Don’t start—”
“No, no,” he joked. “I’m sure I’ll be thankful for that soon enough!”
“Damn skippy, kiddo. Damn skippy.”
“So the forum entries — that was the good news?”
“No, it gets better. According to the analysts, this case is about to blow wide open.”
Chapter 21
He looked up from his desk to see who had just barged into his office. “It’s personal with you two, isn’t it?” Addy Simpson asked.
“No,” Dr. Charles Reed replied in a less-than-convincing tone. He closed the door behind him and turned toward the admiral.
Simpson laughed. “It’s a scary thing when someone can see right through you.”
Reed looked at him nervously. He was trying to judge whether or not he’d been exposed. If Simpson knew the real reason for his retirement, it would be a serious problem. The doctor shook his head in an effort to wipe away his guilty look.
“Not me, Trent,” Simpson added.
He sat down in one of the two chairs in front of the large maple desk and leaned back. His eyes drifted ponderously around the office and settled on the room’s only window. He watched a raindrop connect the dots down the window’s surface, then let out a sigh.
“It’s unnerving, Addy,” he said flatly.
Reed had worked with Trent Turner extensively and knew what made him tick better than most. He never felt like the sessions he had with their top operative were under his control. Instead, it felt like a jousting tournament, and he was left with the short stick. He might have been the one calling for the session, but it was as if Trent Turner only showed up for his personal amusement.
“I’ll bet,” Simpson said. “I’m sure most doctors would prefer not to be psychoanalyzed by their patients.”
The doctor couldn’t hide the annoyed look on his face, even though he knew Simpson’s comment wasn’t meant to criticize. “He figures out the layers I’m trying to peel back and then…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Trying to get in his head is like cutting into a goddamn onion. The first cut is easy enough, but if you want to slice it wide open, where you have a chance for some real insight, the stinging worsens with each cut. It makes you question the effort in the first place.”
“At least he doesn’t make you cry, does he?” Simpson laughed, and was met with an angry glare.
“Funny. Look, Trent is unique. The killing, it’s something he takes in stride. It doesn’t faze him, even when it’s up close and personal.”
Simpson nodded.
Both men had seen their share of soldiers come unraveled by the brutal reality of violence. If you dwell on what you’ve done or see too much death, the long-term effects can prove fatal. Reed’s work had taught him that people die hard, and it became increasingly personal and gruesome as the distance from which the deed was done decreased.