Kill Code (30 page)

She was stunned almost into numbness. What should
she do?

The very least was to contact Leo. For most people,
it would be simple, find a phone and call them, or even easier,
drop them an e-mail. Leo had neither. So, she had to punt.

The last contact with Leo had been at their hotel
room.

But she had seen him dragged out in handcuffs by FBI
agents dressed in black Nomex, carrying rifles and pistols out of a
Star Wars movie.

Where, if she were Leo, would she go? Their night of
lovemaking meant something to her, but what was it to Leo?

Probably just a way to get her bent to his will.
Maybe. She couldn't take that chance, though. So she was going to
have to make her way to the hotel room and maybe he would be there.
If he had any thought for her in his heart, there would probably be
a sign of something that he left for her.

Before she packed up her newly acquired computer,
she researched the quickest route, by foot, to go back. She didn't
have money for cab fare, not that any of them would come even if
she called with the potential of having a drunken college student
or six throwing up in the back of the cab.

Her route planned, she headed out into the night to
find Leo.

###

If the day had started out as shit for Jeff Silver,
it had gotten much worse. Some fuckwad had figured out a way to
blow up the Denver Police Department's Police Vehicle storage
garage. Now, he had not only DHS to deal with, but the BATF. And
the Denver PD wanted to run the investigation.

Considering that the whole world appeared to be
blowing up, Denver PD should have turned everything over to the
feds and stepped back, but this was something they apparently felt
they should investigate.

It was a longstanding feud between the feds and
local LEO's as to who should have control of a particular
investigation. Yes, the federal government often had almost
infinite resources for dealing with situations, but they rarely
knew the local area as well as the people who worked on the
streets. With their arrogance, they tended to piss off the locals.
But the hammer of time in a federal penitentiary was often enough
weight to cause cases to break.

Most often, as in the Ronald Reagan bank robberies,
the local police were more than happy to step aside and let the
feds handle it. But this was apparently a much more delicate issue
and attitude didn't help matters at all.

Though Jeff was a fellow fed, he didn't like the
BATF. They always walked with a heavy tread when something more
subtle was needed or even appreciated.

After getting is ass reamed out by Director Gerald,
he checked his messages on his cell phone. He'd been forced to turn
it off when entering the electronically secured conference room
despite the number of things happening that he had to be kept
apprised of. His wife had left three messages, all increasing in
concern as she saw stories on the news.

He dropped her a quick text assuring her that he was
fine and would call as soon as he could. She'd be angry, but there
wasn't much he could do about it.

Then he found a strange message from a number he'd
never seen before.

The caller identified himself as Leo Marston and he
said that there was something important to breaking the case wide
open at his hotel room. For further confirmation, track the cell
number that the call came from.

He sprinted to the technology lab and had them drop
everything and run the phone number locations for the last several
days. Developed for Enhanced 911, the system could pretty much
pinpoint a specific cell phone to about a city block based on
signal strengths at various cell towers.

Some of his fellow agents were going to be pissed at
having their cases stuffed off to one side.

It would take a couple of hours to generate the data
and correlate it based on the recent events happening around the
Denver area. Assuming the data discovered about the cell phone
confirmed what Leo said, his next step was to figure out a plan.
Two HRT members had been killed in the exchange of gunfire in front
of the FBI building and four others wounded.

It had been a royal goat fuck of a situation. But
HRT now wanted blood and would probably go along with anything he
suggested up to and maybe including air strikes to get it.

He returned to his office and booted up the web page
that would show him where the GPS locator he put in Leo's computer
case had been.

It took a few minutes to come up, but it led
straight back to the hotel room where they picked up Leo. And it
appeared as though he was still there.

One of the things he hadn't had to turn over to Leo
on his release was all the photos taken at the scene. He printed
them up despite being able to view them quite well on the computer
monitor. He was old school in that way.

He posted the relevant ones on his bulletin board
including ones showing the front of the building, the surrounding
structures and how the room was laid out. It looked and smelled
like another killing zone with limited access, lots of buildings
overlooking the area, close to a major street that led to a highway
and multiple exits from the several parking lots that serviced the
hotel. There was also lots of foot traffic to contend with. It was
perfect ambush country.

Was it a trap? Maybe. But he couldn't take a chance
that the bastard Leo had something for him. He had pushed him out
of the way of a bullet, something that even the elite HRT snipers
couldn't see.

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the
pictures, wondering how he was going to pull this off.

###

Leo had never been formally trained as a
counter-sniper. But he knew a great deal about hunting the most
dangerous game—man, and all a sniper was to him was a man with a
rifle. It raised the stakes a bit, but it was something he could
handle.

From his reading, the best way to kill a sniper
wasn't necessarily with another sniper, but with artillery and air
strikes—something he didn't have access to, nor a desire to use.
He'd followed as much of the war with regards to snipers in Iraq
and Afghanistan as he could, but really couldn't see how he could
apply what he'd learned to this environment.

He placed himself on an oblique angle to the front
of the hotel room, but behind the building. It did increase the
range, and that was an advantage as he knew his rifle would be able
to hit a man-sized target at a thousand yards. That is, if his
rifle hadn't been monkeyed with.

If he felt that he had enough time, he would have
torn his rifle down to the last screw and pin and measured each
part with a micrometer. He had been reduced to verifying his scope
settings and making sure that the firing pin still would be able to
hit the primer. Coloring the primer of a spent shell with a small
piece of tape, it looked like it would have enough force to fire a
shell.

The trigger pull was still clean, short and very
light. In the past, he had rifles that would fire if he slammed the
bolt home too hard, but he had found it made them too unreliable.
So the trigger pull was set light enough that it wouldn't pull the
rifle off target when he squeezed it, but heavy enough to function
even in a sand storm.

There was one bullet in the chamber, and the rest of
the box of his custom built ammunition sat in their padded case
next to the rifle.

His rifle was only single shot, but he had practiced
rapid reloading to the point where he could shoot almost as fast as
someone with a magazine in their rifle.

He recalled the sound of the bullets zipping around
in front of the FBI headquarters and figured that his opponent had
a smaller caliber rifle, probably no bigger than say .270, maybe
even 7mm. It was a valid assumption that he would be going up
against a human being rather than a machine, and he was probably
shooting a rather small caliber.

He had the advantage of range and height, being in a
tenth story hotel room that he'd rented just for this purpose. From
his vantage point, he could see his truck parked in the lot in
front of the hotel where he and Jackie had stayed.

Leo wondered how she was doing and what she had been
working on since the morning of his arrest.

He'd settled in behind the open balcony door in his
hotel room and sketched out all the terrain features he could see
in his notebook. The laser range finder provided the distances to
various features which were also noted. Using his binoculars, he
tried to put himself in the mind of the other sniper, wondering
where they would set up.

His over-watch position gave him a theoretical field
of view of over a thousand yards. But the longest range he marked
out was a mere seven hundred yards. The other sniper, given his
caliber limitations, would probably be within three hundred yards.
And there were plenty of places to shoot from within that
range.

He used the last of his cheese cloth to tape to the
door frame. It would look, at first glance, like it was closed. The
advantage of using cheese cloth is that the shiny wax gave it some
of the characteristics of glass, but he'd be able to shoot through
it without possibly deflecting the shot.

Laying down on the spread he borrowed from the bed,
he picked up his binoculars and started scanning likely spots for a
sniper to hide, his rifle tucked under his arm.

Allan Wells drove by the hotel where Leo was
staying. At the very least, he could probably at least take him
out. Being able to shoot FBI Agent Jeff Silver would be a big bonus
and might be enough to get him out of heat with the
organization.

His practiced eye quickly scanned the surrounding
buildings for possible places to hide and snipe from.

There were several good possibilities. He'd shot
from a roof before, but the FBI or the cops could defeat that by
helicopter over-flights. And Denver was now almost a military camp
with the governor asking for the National Guard to be activated to
help maintain the peace. Never mind that most of the National Guard
were currently chasing terrorists through Central Asia. At least it
sounded like he was doing something.

Allan recognized the work of his fellow Black Hand
members. There was obviously something big going on here, and he
wondered what it was, though it only really mattered in his ability
to survive.

When he finished this job, he planned on
disappearing. For the past several years he'd been moving money out
of the account where the company paid him and had hidden the funds
in various offshore banks.

He could live comfortably for years on the
interest.

Parking the truck, he decided to get out and walk.
An on the ground reconnaissance was the only way that this was
going to work as he knew he couldn't get a decent view of potential
shooting sites while driving his lumbering former bread truck. It
now sported decals from a fictitious heating and cooling company
which would justify him lugging odd shaped equipment around. Even
better, one of his favorite hides was a box made to look like an
air conditioner/furnace unit. Stick it on the top of any building,
it was light enough to be carried on a hand truck, and it wouldn't
look out of place at all.

While originally designed for his remote sniper
system, it was big enough that he could still use it.

Grabbing a clip board, he climbed from the truck.
You could walk around almost anyplace if you had the proper uniform
and a clip board.

Making sure his truck was locked, he set off to find
a place to hunt from.

###

Leo noticed the heating and cooling company van
parking down the block from the hotel room. It was the same size
and shape as hundreds of others scattered throughout the city. But
something about it attracted his attention and he couldn't place
it. Except for the logo, it could have been a perfect duplicate of
the van that had been sitting in the parking lot of Jackie's
business when someone tried to snipe her.

He continued to watch it. His suspicions were
confirmed when only one person got out of the van. Since when did
any service company only send one person?

Last year, at the coin store, they had to replace
the air conditioner. It was a bastard job in the summer heat and it
had taken a crew of four people and a crane to install it.

Based on his limited experience, it didn't appear to
be legit.

The person who got out of the truck was in his late
twenties, reasonably fit looking under the company coveralls. Leo
zoomed in with his binoculars. Under the brim of the cap, the face
was unremarkable and plain. He scanned the man from head to
foot.

His coveralls were too clean, but what really caught
Leo's attention was that he was wearing sneakers. What employer
would tolerate one of their workers possibly getting their toes
smashed by a heavy piece of equipment?

Then again, who would look at a service person's
feet to figure out if they were legitimate?

So, this guy was someone he needed to keep an eye
on. Was he from the FBI or one of the other alphabet federal
agencies? It was the only reason that Leo didn't shoot him where he
stood. He was already on shaky ground with the feds and didn't want
to blast one of their agents if he could help it. Not that he would
have any problem in dropping the hammer on one of them if they got
in the way, but why call unwarranted attention to yourself by
blasting them as they stood on a sidewalk?

###

Leo saw that there was someone behind his truck,
messing with it. He watched. The man tried to fiddle with the lock
on the topper. He would be there a while as he had put in a new,
stronger lock when he'd bought the vehicle. Not to say that you
can't get into anything, but it wasn't a lock that you could pick
with a paperclip and a small screwdriver.