Kill Code Page 2

  The forty-five hundred degree Fahrenheit liquid produced by the burning thermite would hopefully destroy enough evidence and give him the time he would need to put some distance between here and whoever would soon be looking for him.

  He dug out a timer, glad he’d done his research. Thermite was somewhat difficult to ignite, and even harder to fire electrically, but Leo had figured out a way. He had a lot of free time on his hands, no romantic commitments, and no other life except for precision rifle shooting and the coin store.

  Damn, he was going to miss out trying the new load he had worked up for his thousand-yard rifle.

  Working fast, Leo popped open the trunk and set up his thermite. The first charge, a baggie full of powder with an attached firing system went into Phillips’ mouth to obliterate anything that could be matched to dental records. The second one was set on his chest. Leo taped the man's hands over the charge with the goal of erasing any fingerprints and placed them over the letter opener. He set the timer for an hour, tossed his gloves on the body, closed the trunk, locked the store and then drove for five minutes to an industrial park that was conveniently vacant thanks to the commercial real estate bust.

  He walked back to the store without looking back. When the thermite ignited, it would burn through the body, destroying the letter opener and the bottom of the trunk, and into the gas tank, causing a massive fire that would further hinder any investigation.

  He pulled his truck, a six-year-old GMC pickup complete with topper, to the back and loaded up some other items from the safe, including his target rifle, a stash of gold coins and bundles of cash he had set aside. He locked his truck and entered the store. He stopped at the counter and stared at the plain vanilla envelope.

  Leo retrieved another letter opener and carefully slit the envelope open from the bottom. He slid the contents out onto the counter and studied each document. It was the standard targeting profile—name, pictures and various biographical details. On the last page were the specifics of the proposed hit. Leo was supposed to undertake this particular assassination solo with no spotter or backup team. There was also no site set up for him to shoot from. In all of his previous jobs, all Leo had to do was show up to find his rifle set up and the spotter waiting. When the target showed up, Leo took the shot and walked away. That was interesting in itself. There were no further details except that he was to receive thirty thousand dollars for this job. The payment was on the very low side for someone with Leo's expertise. His last job had paid ten times as much and that was over ten years ago. Another piece to add to the puzzle.

  Leo punched in his partner’s number. “Rob. Hey. It’s me. Yeah, look. Something’s come up—no. No I’m fine. Family thing. Sister’s kid got in a little trouble.

  “Yeah,” he grunted out a laugh at Rob’s reference to teenagers. Of course, Leo didn’t have a divorced sister with a teenager, but as far as Rob was concerned he did and she lived in Toledo. When he’d taken on his new identity, he’d contrived a background to go with it then made damn sure he’d planted his ‘family’ plenty of miles away.

  “Anyway, Barb thinks the kid needs a male hand, so you know where this is headed, right? I need you to cover at the shop for a few days.

  “Great, thanks man. I owe you. And look, if business is as slow as it’s been the last couple of weeks, just shut the place down for a day or so if you have to.”

  He waited while Rob told him to take his time. “Thanks again. I’ll be in touch.”

  Leo hung up, and then studied the picture of the target. Short black hair, round face, intelligent eyes. The name underneath it read “Jackie Winn.” A pretty girl who didn't need makeup to look nice even in the photo, apparently taken from a distance.

  Leo slid the paperwork back into the envelope and folded it into his sport coat pocket. On his way out of the door, he picked up Phillips' pistol and added that to the pocket containing the envelope.

  “So. Jackie Winn,” he muttered aloud as he settled behind the steering wheel. “Who the hell are you and why does someone want you dead?”

  More to the point, who in the business knew he was alive and why had they dragged him back into it?

  If he wanted answers to those questions, he needed a plan. While he had realized that the day he would have to pay for his past sins would be coming, he had always held on to the hope that he could keep his comfortable, reasonably safe life. Hell, he was in his early thirties and had lived way beyond his expected life expectancy as an assassin.

  Someone had taken a great deal of effort to track him down. Who? Leo had only done political assassinations outside the United States, not generic murder for hire. Was this attempt to recruit him for something bigger? And if so, why?

  He knew that Phillips was a dead end. The only thread that he could follow was his expected target, Jackie Winn, to see if he could figure out how she was involved. His best bet was to track her down, see why she was a target and then follow the trail back to who had wanted her killed. Then, if he had to, he’d take out whoever got in his way until he found someone he could convince to leave him the hell alone. Forever.

  Like it or not, it was time to go hunting.

  ###

  The DVD tray sliding out of the drive broke Jackie from her thoughts. That was strange—the DVD drive should only kick out the disk when it was done writing, not reading.

  Something wasn't right. She couldn't explain it, but she knew. Good programmers and even hackers just didn't grind out code, they sensed what was working right and what wasn't, coding by feel. It wasn't something that was taught, or even could be quantified, but it was what set her apart from thousands of other code jockeys. And there was something going on here that she felt was wrong. It was just a twinge, but it was enough.

  She looked at the disk. Nothing appeared defective with it so she decided to try a different machine. She stepped over to her laptop and powered it up. Since it was a Linux box, the software wouldn't run on or cause any problems with her computer. She waited for the disk to spin up and then looked at it with sector dump. It was all zeroes. Picking another section of the disk, she looked at it and, again, found only zeroes. Was the whole thing blank?

  “What the hell is going on?” she muttered.

  Minimizing the window, she brought up her C programming environment and wrote a quick section of code to scan the entire disk. She was a programmer to heart, where she even thought in code—specifically C. With that language, you could write code that talked with the individual chips on the motherboard or write an entire operating system. Jackie had done both.

  The program had a couple of bugs that she quickly fixed, recompiled and started it to run. With 4.7 gigabytes of data to sort through, it was going to take a while. She stopped the program and told it to take samples all throughout the disk instead. Ten minutes later, she had her answer—the entire disk was blank. Amazing. And completely illogical. She could think of a couple of ways of formatting a disk with software, but only with specific drives and media.

  Then it hit her. Her grief had clouded her judgment. Before running this software, she should have pulled it apart despite Nathan's final request.

  Nathan had configured the software to load into another computer or computers and then delete from the disk. Whatever she had just inadvertently loaded was now out there somewhere, getting ready to do something that she didn't know and couldn't control.

  “Oh, God, Nathan. What did you do?”

  She brought trembling fingers to her lips as she realized that it had been Nathan’s plan all along for her to set loose whatever it was she’d just unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

  “What did I just do?”

  Chapter 2

  In the Pacific Northwest, a computer server farm powered up. Located where power was cheap, that particular area of the country was popular for similar such farms containing hundreds, if not thousands, of computers, each containing multiple processors and a huge amount of storage. Tied directly into a T-3 line, it h
ad direct and very high-speed access to an Internet backbone.

  As the computers came online, each performed a complete system check. The automatic cooling system ramped up to keep the farm cool, which was another justification for having cheap power as the air conditioning units were not particularly efficient.

  When the entire farm was powered up, Nathan White’s “Program,” code named Tyrannicide, that Jackie Winn had just inadvertently released, spread its far reaching tentacles into the World Wide Web, gathering data, distributing data, analyzing data. Tyrannicide, named for the killing of tyrants or those who have committed tyrannical acts, also sent out a very specifically written coded packet that would switch on software in predetermined credit card machines all over the globe. Designed to take advantage of round-off errors that happened during every transaction, Tyrannicide would add up these accumulated tenths and hundredths of cents and deposit them into a designated account where it would accumulate cent upon cent, dollar upon dollar and eventually finance the task it was written to perform.

  For now, it would only gather money, data and wait until the time was right to strike.

  ###

  Leo drove for ten hours straight until he found an out of the way camp ground. The advantage of camping rather than checking into a hotel room was that there wasn't any paper trail and it was cheaper. The sleeping bag and packed food and water in the back of his pickup were just fine with Leo.

  He selected a camping site away from a group of RVs next to a cluster of fragrant pine trees. He admired the majestic rise of mountains and inhaled the brisk air while he ate a quick meal of MREs that he purchased from a military surplus store.

  In the fading light, he sat in the driver’s seat with the door open and reviewed the information on Jackie Winn. Pretty innocuous stuff. The same questions kept rolling around in his head. Why would anyone want to kill her? And why did they come to him to do it? And the bigger question, the one that plagued him the most, was how did they even know he was still alive?

  Except for today, Leo had only ever killed outside the United States and only for political ends—high-ranking government officials and others in that general field. It just didn't make sense—Jackie wasn't even a registered voter, just some computer guru dealing with “Systems Security,” whatever in the hell that was. Computers were a tool for Leo, they either worked or they didn't and he didn't want to waste the time spent playing with them like his partner, who was addicted to Internet poker.

  Leo looked up, startled, when a burly, yet elderly park ranger stopped at Leo's truck.

  “Evenin’, son. Nice night tonight.”

  “That it is,” Leo agreed and told himself to remain calm. There wasn’t a reason in the world for this park ranger to question his presence here—or to initiate a search and find the Beretta locked in his glove box. “First time in this park. Real nice place.”

  “Can’t argue with you there. ‘Spose you already figured out that I'm collecting camping fees.”

  “Figured someone would be around. How much do I owe you?” Leo asked, reaching into his pocket for his wallet.

  “That'll be ten dollars.”

  Leo pulled out two fives and handed them to the man. “Cheap at twice the price.”

  The ranger gave Leo a tight smile and then a long look and Leo could see that he was wondering where Leo’s tent was.

  “I sleep in the back of the truck,” he said, preempting the ranger’s question. “Much less chance of getting rained on.”

  “Now that’s a fact,” the Ranger said with a chuckle. “How long are you going to be around?”

  “Just tonight. Heading out East to visit family. Ten bucks is a lot cheaper than a hotel room, and with the economy, I have to watch my money. You know how it goes.”

  “I do. You have a good night now.” The ranger tipped a finger to his hat brim, seemed satisfied and continued his circuit of the camp ground.

  Leo watched for a few minutes to make sure the guy was really going away and didn't copy down his license plate or anything. Even if he had, the truck was registered to the store, but it was still a link back to him. Finally, he settled back into his thoughts.

  He wondered how his partner would react to his sudden disappearance. Rob had been in the coin business for thirty years and was grateful when Leo bought into the store after Rob’s previous partner died. That Leo brought a bit of expertise and had purchased a number of valuable coins over the years was also a bonus.

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out the first very good coin that he had ever purchased, an 1857 S Quarter Eagle two-and–a-half dollar Liberty gold piece. It had cost him almost everything else in his collection to buy it, but it had been a turning point in his life—with this purchase, he became a serious collector. This coin had touched him deeper than anything before and almost anything since. Running his fingers along the edge of the plastic case, the ache caused by the hole in his life echoed through him.

  Leo had been collecting coins since he was a child. It provided a refuge from a chaotic home and a physically abusive alcoholic father and a mother whose behavior was only marginally better. Coins had allowed Leo to escape to other worlds and ages and fueled his imagination about the people who once used them. They provided a glimpse into their dreams, aspirations and lives. Though these people were long dust, Leo escaped each time he held the cold metal in his hands.

  He used the money he earned from various jobs to fund his growing collection. Though he had made costly mistakes, he continued to learn, study and wonder. Over the years, he’d made some good investments and when Leo had faked his death and walked away from the assassin life, he had enough collateral to set himself up with a new life. His ‘new life’ that no one from his past was supposed to have been able to uncover.

  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-d
istance 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.