Total Mayhem Read online

  “Time for us to part company,” Jonathan said.

  Spence looked shocked. And angry. And a little afraid. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not complicated,” Boxers growled. “You stay here, we move on.”

  “What am I supposed to do from here? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Ah, come on, Spence,” Jonathan said. “Uncle Sam invested millions of dollars in you to make you resilient and resourceful. Don’t let him down.”

  “So, that’s it? I’m not a part of this anymore?” Spence looked to Gail, presumably to get a vote for his side.

  “Sorry,” she said. “We fly too close to the sun as it is. You’re a variable we don’t need.”

  Spence looked hurt.

  “If I were you,” Jonathan said, “I’d find a ride to the local Walmart and buy some clothes that looked a little less soldierly. It’s been a pleasure.” He was careful to leave no room for argument or negotiation.

  “This is a done deal, Spence,” Boxers said. “There’s been enough violence for one day.”

  “People are going to come looking for me after all that shooting.”

  “That’s why you shouldn’t waste any time,” Jonathan said. “You’ve got your phone, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Boxers laid a hand on his shoulder. “The time for talking just expired, buddy,” he said. “Best of luck to you.”

  “Bite me,” Spence said as he slid out of the seat and stepped out.

  “There’s the spirit,” Boxers said.

  Fifteen seconds later, they were back on the road.

  “Think he’ll be okay?” Gail asked.

  “Don’t give a shit,” Jonathan said. “He tortured a guy. Let him taste some of his own medicine.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and pressed a speed dial button. “Besides, the last thing we need is a mercenary we don’t know peeking behind the scenes of what we do.”

  “Who are you calling?” Boxers asked.

  At that instant, Mother Hen answered her phone.

  * * *

  Venice listened and took notes. With every additional word, the task before her grew progressively more difficult. In order to get ahead of the conspiracy that now had a name—Retribution—Jonathan thought it was essential to learn the identities of the conspirators, and the job of accomplishing that mission fell to Venice.

  Jonathan often depended on her skills as a renowned computer wiz and hacker extraordinaire to achieve the impossible under crushing time constraints. Eight times out of ten, she was able to rise to the task and make it all happen by herself. That other 20 percent of the time, she was forced to reach out to others within the hacking community for reinforcements.

  Almost no one else in the world knew that Venice had an alter identity that triggered fear in the hearts of people like her who understood the awesome power of cyberspace to both create and destroy great things. When the hacking community heard of FreakFace666, they undoubtedly envisioned a geeky, brilliant young man with no social skills, living in his childhood bedroom. Or, because FreakFace666 was the leader of Gloomity, the hacker army that single-handedly brought down a pedophile political candidate and stirred other mayhem, perhaps they envisioned him in a position of power, a Game of Thrones great room where he meted out praise and punishment at his whim. Certainly, no one saw FreakFace666 as a young African American woman working out of a spectacular office in the little burg of Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia.

  Or, alternatively, out of her recently-opened satellite office on the third floor of the Resurrection House administration building, which also served as her home. After too many overnighters at the Security Solutions firehouse headquarters, she’d finally opened the satellite to exactly zero objection from Jonathan. In fact, he asked her why she hadn’t done that years ago. Some of the more advanced data stuff still demanded her presence down the hill, but for the boys’ overnight missions when her greatest task was to keep in touch, it was nice to be at home in the mansion.

  Venice reviewed the details of what lay ahead. She opened a page on her computer and typed the heading, What we don’t know. Then she skipped a line and started a list.

  She wrote, Who are they? According to Jonathan, Logan Masterson didn’t know who his fellow terrorists were—or even how many were in play. The only safe assumption was that the others likewise toiled in the dark. That spoke of a well-organized structure that emphasized operational secrecy. Actually, that wasn’t true. One person had to know it all.

  She typed, Iceman. If Jonathan could find Iceman, he’d have real leverage to rip open the whole network. If.

  What’s next? She wrote the words because they were appropriate to write and because knowing that—getting ahead of the terrorists’ plan—was the key to everything. But she skipped to the next line.

  Why? What could possibly motivate a plot such as this? The motivation for the worker bees who were responsible for the death and destruction was money, pure and simple, hard stop. If there was one thing that Venice had learned through Jonathan’s years of bringing justice to animals dressed in human skin, it was that morality was easily bought for nothing more than wads of cash. At one level, that made these jerks no different fundamentally than common street thugs.

  The next thought that hit her took her breath away. She typed, Soldiers?

  Masterson had told Jonathan that he was recruited via a soldiers’ site of some sort. Could it be that every member of every assault team was former military? If so, that changed everything. It separated them from everyday street thugs. That would explain the competence and precision of what they’d been able to pull off. And the secrecy.

  Masterson had also told Jonathan that he’d been paid half a million dollars for his efforts in Nebraska. If each of the conspirators received similar payment, that was a lot of money, no matter how many of them there were. Add to that the money that was necessary to fund the planning and execution—the expenses—and the list of people wealthy enough to fund it all grew short.

  She ran some numbers through her head. The night of the Nebraska incident, a total of six high school games were attacked. That was three million dollars just in pay if everyone got the same half-mill as Masterson. Yesterday, there were five explosive attacks, so if—

  Venice bolted upright. Yesterday, there were only five attacks. With Masterson in custody, there were only five attackers in play, so that meant the original team numbered six, right? Six minus one is five. It was a number to work with.

  What was it that Jonathan had told her? All of the communication between Iceman and his pawns was done electronically, through encrypted email or messaging.

  Her heart rate picked up. There was a kernel of an idea in her head, and she needed to develop it. The idea teased her, taunted her. It was right there.

  Iceman couldn’t know that Masterson was in custody. So, when the time came to communicate with his teams to plan their next strike, he would have reached out to everybody, not knowing that one of his team members was out of service.

  This was a hacker’s dream. If she could nail down one variable, then she’d have a place to start searching for all the others. In a perfect world, she could have Masterson’s phone or computer, but the world was never perfect. If those things existed in anyone’s custody, it would be with the FBI, and she didn’t expect them to be in the mood to share.

  Venice opened a new window on her computer and went to the list of evidence that was seized from Logan Masterson at the time of his arrest. Sure enough, a phone was on the list, and the evidence clerk had been thorough enough to include the make and the serial number. It no doubt was a burner, but that didn’t necessarily matter.

  How many burner phones could there have been in Indian Spear, Nebraska, in the days surrounding the shooting? Every time electronic devices talked to each other—or attempted to—they left a trail. If you could discern the trail, then you could identify both sides of the communication—or in this case, all sides of the commun
ication.

  She saw a glimmer of hope. If she could identify the communications from Indian Spear that involved the brand of burner phone that was found on Logan Masterson, she’d be on her way. She could trace it back to its origin. Then, if she could find a second effort to contact the same phone around the time of the bombings, then she’d know for sure that she’d found the source of Iceman. Using Iceman’s identity, she could then scour around and find out the electronic identities of the other conspirators.

  Unless, of course, they were super computer savvy themselves. There were ways to route data needles through electronic haystacks, but for this first stage, she couldn’t focus on the negative. There had to be a way.

  But it was an enormous task that would require lots of time and resources, all while the clock was ticking.

  What she needed was a thousand times the computer power to handle the de-encryption and the analysis, along with a coconspirator of her own help nail down data.

  And she knew just the guy who had just the resources. And a really hot body.

  Venice stood from her desk and walked across her office to her wall safe, where she kept her Gloomity computer, the one dedicated exclusively to her moonlight hacking. The machine booted up, and she took a few minutes to make her home base appear to be in Vietnam before she reached out to TickTock2.

  Because of security restrictions at the Puzzle Palace, it could take Derek as long as a few hours to get back to her.

  * * *

  Art Evers—Arthur to his mother, Artie to his friends, Iceman to his team—entered the National Air and Space Museum through the main entrance on Independence Avenue. He waited in line as a dozen tourists in front of him filed through the magnetometer and subjected their purses and backpacks to rudimentary security checks, if that’s what you can call the process by which bored, nearly comatose automatons poked sticks into bags and ignored whatever they hit.

  People like Evers—people who understood security and the meaning of hard targets versus soft ones—recognized the show for what it was: empty posturing. He didn’t know how the security guards could take it. He hoped they were at least paid well, because the monotony of it all had to be soul stealing.

  When it was his turn, Evers prepared himself for the inevitable. He stepped through the portal, and the magnetometer squealed.

  “Empty your pockets,” said the three-hundred-pound somnolent woman with three chins and a badge.

  “I have a prosthetic leg,” Evers said.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  She handed him what might have been a gray plastic dog bowl into which he put his wallet—the entirety of his pocket contents.

  “Is that all of it?” the guard asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Go through the detector again.”

  He took three steps back to get around the structure of the metal detector and then walked through a second time. Because the laws of physics had not changed in the last thirty seconds, it squealed a second time.

  “Okay, step over here and hold your arms out to your side.” The guard powered up a handheld wand.

  “Ma’am, did you hear me?” Evers said. “I have a prosthetic leg.”

  “That might be an excuse,” Lady Genius said. She scanned his armpits and crotch, got a return from his leather-banded wristwatch, and then got an even bigger return from the scan of his left leg, the pegged one.

  “Would you mind pulling up your pant leg to show me?” she asked.

  He did, and she seemed satisfied. “Thank you,” she said. “And have a nice day. Don’t forget your belongings.”

  Clear of the checkpoint, he walked straight to Friendship 7, the Mercury capsule that had propelled astronaut John Glenn three times around the Earth back in 1962. There, he found Porter Brooks standing right where he was supposed to be. The other man checked his watch. “You’re late,” he said.

  “Got stopped at Checkpoint Charlene,” Evers said. “I guess your badge makes you exempt from all that.”

  Brooks’s expression remained stern. Tall and fit, he was a poster boy for the FBI agent that he was. His shoes were shined to mirrors, and his suit was tailored to emphasize his physique. Every time they got together, Evers felt a pang of remorse for what he might have been if he hadn’t donated his leg to the Iraqi desert.

  “Let’s walk while we talk,” Brooks said. Of all the museums in Washington, DC, the Air and Space was one of the most popular, especially among families. Dinosaur bones, dioramas of taxidermized animals, famous paintings and sculptures, and wax reproductions of people appealed to certain targeted groups, but who didn’t like airplanes? And they were everywhere—on the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and featured in film in the IMAX theater.

  “What’s this about?” Evers asked.

  “Are you shitting me?” Brooks said. “Are you shitting me?”

  Evers sensed the other man’s anger—it wasn’t as if he were trying to disguise it, after all—but he was anything but intimidated. Brooks had the advantage of size, but Evers had killed people who were far larger. “How about you stop the posturing and get to the point?” he suggested.

  “The South Dakota shoot-out, for God’s sake,” Brooks said. “What were you thinking?”

  Evers was confused. “What did you think I would do when you told me where Masterson was?”

  “It was a slaughter,” Brooks said. “Why did you send such incompetents?”

  The question knocked Evers off-balance. “Incompetents?”

  Brooks pulled them both to a halt. “Are you telling me that you didn’t know?”

  Evers felt something melt in his gut. “Know what?”

  “Masterson got away. He’s still in custody. Your guys were the ones who were slaughtered.”

  Evers closed his eyes and leaned against the metal stairs that led to the SkyLab exhibit. He didn’t know all the guys on the assault team, but the ones he did know were good. “All dead?” he asked.

  “Every one of them. A couple of our contractors, too.”

  Now Evers was pissed. Not at Brooks, but at himself. Trying to hit Masterson was a mistake. A temper tantrum. It was unprofessional, and now he’d incurred the ire of the FBI for the attack on their contractors.

  “So, where is Masterson now?” Evers asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brooks replied. “I’m not even sure my boss knows.”

  Evers wasn’t buying. “She’s the director of the whole Bureau,” he said. “She has to know.”

  “I think maybe she doesn’t want to,” Brooks explained. “For years, Director Rivers has talked about plausible deniability.”

  “Where I come from, that’s called cowardice,” Evers said.

  “In Washington, it’s called survival. It’s called politics. What you need to worry about now is the same thing that I need to worry about: she’s gonna want to know the source of the information leak.”

  “That sounds much more like a problem for you, Mr. Security Detail.”

  “Do you really think she’s not going to turn the world inside out trying to find out who those attackers worked for?”

  “Of course she will,” Evers said. Brooks was playing directly into his hand, and he had to suppress a smile. “But I’m confident that as the guy who’s most likely to lose his pension, you’ll find a way to knock her off the trail.”

  Something changed behind Brooks’s eyes. He’d been hit with an idea, and it triggered an emotion that looked a lot like fear. He pinched his lower lip and walked a couple of paces away.

  “What’s going on?” Evers asked.

  “There’s another thing I should tell you, and now I think it makes some sense to me.”

  Evers stood quietly as Brooks sorted his thoughts.

  “In South Dakota,” Brooks began, “during the shoot-out, there were more people present than just the rent-a-soldiers that were supposed to be there. That comes from just an initial analysis of shell casings. Lots of five-five-six. Of the rentals who were on duty, only one
of them survived, and we don’t know where he is. It appears that the others were killed early on, in the first seconds of the assault.”

  “I’m not sure I follow what you’re telling me,” Evers said.

  “The people who shot your guys were not our guys,” Brooks said.

  Evers connected a couple of dots. “Plausible deniability?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m still not seeing what you’re trying to show me,” Evers confessed.

  Brooks explained, “Your guys didn’t have credentials, right? That’s why they had to shoot their way into the compound. But the unknown shooters had to have creds or they wouldn’t have been let in.”

  “So, they’re FBI agents?” Evers asked.

  Brooks shook his head. “No. Well, maybe, but I don’t see how. That’s the sort of thing that I’d probably know about. I think it’s a covert team, and I think it might be working for the director.”

  “You mean personally?”

  Brooks thought a little more. “Let’s talk outside,” he said, and he led the way across to the Jefferson Drive exit. A security guard started to object, but Brooks badged him. “This gentleman is with me.”

  There weren’t a lot of tourists in town this time of year, and the street on this side of the building was fairly free of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian.

  “So, here’s the thing,” Brooks explained. “Every now and then, Director Rivers meets with this mysterious guy from someplace I don’t know. He’s got a tough guy look to him, and he’s got lots of attitude. Very full of himself. He goes by the name Richard Horgan, but I question whether that’s his real name.”

  Evers was no less confused. “Surely, the FBI director meets with a lot of people every day.”

  “Not this way,” Brooks said. “It’s almost always over at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Northwest, and when it’s there, it’s always in the same little chapel.”

  “What do they talk about?”

  “I don’t know,” Brooks said. “You can’t hear anything, and she’s never shared any of the details with me.”

  “So, why is this an issue?” Evers asked. “I still don’t understand.”