Seven Grams of Lead (31 page)

Mallery looked at him, her shoulders raised.

“Building settling,” he said. And hoped. He cursed himself for neglecting to set up even a rudimentary tripwire to notify them of the arrival of another person.

On her clipboard, Mallery jotted out the alphabet on two grids.

“Each letter’s represented by the part of the grid surrounding it,” she said. “If it’s the second letter in the slot, then it gets a dot in the middle. For example, here’s
A
and
B
and …”

She wrote:

She tapped the three drives perched on the rack just above her head. “These three drives are for subjects named Johnson, the one before is Jemison—why is that name familiar?”

“There’s a Stanley Jemison on the board of ExxonMobil.”

She continued perusing the labels.

“A. Kellogg, S. Kirkendall,” she said. “Scott Kirkendall, secretary of defense?”

“Could be.”

“And X. Laibe,” she read. “Has to be Xavier Laibe, right?”

“How many X. Laibes can there be?” Thornton wandered toward the Ts, wondering if he’d see a hard drive labeled with his own name. “Who is he?”

“He heads up mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, which took my company public. To be a fly on his office wall is to potentially have billions of dollars’ worth of insider information.”

“Maybe that’s the reason you initially were bugged.” Thornton took in a smaller, newer hard drive:

Something Sokolova. He recognized it as the female variant of the surname Sokolov. Leonid Sokolov’s wife—Bella? There was no shortage of Eastern Europeans represented here, and Sokolov was the fifth most common Russian surname, following Smirnov, Ivanov, Popov, and one that Thornton couldn’t immediately recall—but what were the odds? He hurried back to Mallery to double-check the symbol for
B
she’d written down.

“G-gee,” she stammered. “G. Langlind.”

Thornton couldn’t get the question out soon enough. “Can we find out what he’s been saying?”

“We would need to do heavy-duty hacking to get audio, but we should be able to bring up the transcriptions
right now.” Without waiting for a reply, she pulled the USB cable down from the hard drive, climbed over a cluster of wires, slid into a chair in front of the computer, and plugged in the cable. A tap at the keyboard and she awoke the monitor. Nothing but white pixels and a trash can icon in the lower right corner.

She hit
RETURN
. Type flooded the screen. She read aloud from the top.
“And can I get a half and half with that, please?”
She moused up. “Apparently, this is him at 3:04 this afternoon, in the Senate Dining Room with someone named Selena.”

“Probably Seldridge,” Thornton said. “Selena Seldridge.”

“Sounds familiar. Senate staffer?”

“Rumor has it, his mistress.”

She groaned. “And he beat me on family values.”

“He beat you by getting into bed with the wrong people, Selena Seldridge aside. Can you search by date?”

“Maybe. There’s a search box.”

“Try the day before Catherine Peretti was killed. October twenty-third.”

“Got it.”

“Any mention of her? One
R
and two
T
s.”

Mallery quickly filled in the search box, resulting in: “Nothing on October twenty-third. But three days later, we have Langlind saying,
Unfortunately I can’t go to Cathy Peretti’s wake. Will you send the family some flowers and a nice note from me?”

“She hated being called Cathy,” Thornton said. “I guess she wouldn’t have told the boss that, though.”

“He wouldn’t have listened anyway,” said Mallery.

“Swell guy. Let’s try searching under ‘Cathy.’ ”

Mallery typed, then scanned the results. “Check this out, from October twenty-third.”

Thornton ducked beneath the rack and swept cables aside in order to read:

Thornton felt an urge to punch the monitor. “It would seem Langlind is more than just a stooge.”

Mallery continued to study the transcription. “What’s the significance of a satellite picture of someone on a yacht?”

“Catherine could have seen satellite imagery of a man on a yacht on Lake Michigan the night of Sokolov’s murder. The assassin supposedly used a miniature submarine to get to and from Sokolov’s property. The FBI, the Coast Guard, and Homeland all failed to find any trace of the sub. Maybe it was deployed from a yacht, then returned to the yacht after Sokolov was killed. Whatever Catherine pieced together,
it was damning enough to cost her her life. Speaking of which, did the interrogator ask you anything about Sokolov?”

“He asked me all I knew about
both
Sokolovs. But I didn’t have much to tell him, other than about the murder story. I wouldn’t have known anything about them, except one of my old computer science professors happened to be an electronic warfare junkie.”

Thornton had the sense of finding a way out of a maze. “I think the seven-gram lead bullet really was just a diversion. Leonid died while they were trying to stick a Littlebird in him, so they stuck one in his lab partner instead. There’s a B. Sokolova here.”

Mallery paled. “So then this is about what the Sokolovs were working on.”

“Any way to tell who Langlind was talking to?”

“I don’t think the transcriber would have known unless he or she went back to the original audio and listened to the dialing tones, assuming there were any. Whoever reads the transcript could request additional analysis—that would be a reason they keep a junkyard’s worth of audio around after they’ve already transcribed it.”

“How about searching under ‘Sokolov’?”

Mallery returned her hands to the keyboard, but before she could type the name, the lobby door groaned open. Then came heavy footsteps, at least two sets, flying up the stairs.

Thornton flashed back to the guns he saw for sale
at the secondhand store, the less powerful of which fired two-and-a-half-inch nails at 1,400 feet per second, his for the taking. He’d failed to consider the need for a weapon until now.

“Hide,” he said. Not much of an idea, but his only idea.

The key-card snick
resonated throughout the SofTec office. Thornton crouched behind the row of cubicles farthest from the door. At the other end, Mallery sat with her back to the wall, eyeing him plaintively. He
had
planned an escape route: the back alley. The problem was, using it required getting out of SofTec, a windowless room with only one door—now swinging inward.

A tall man appeared in silhouette in the corridor to the left of the open doorway, gun in hand, flame darting from the mouth of its sound suppressor. A bullet pinged the steel hard-drive rack above Thornton’s head, ricocheting harmlessly away, but the impact caused the entire structure to teeter. He was surprised that none of the equipment fell off.

When no one returned fire, the gunman dove to the carpet, bouncing up into a kneeling position, placing cubicles between him and Thornton and Mallery. A muted report came from a second shooter, in the doorway behind the tall man, the bullet stinging the floor near Thornton and raising a cloud of carpet fibers. The shooter, a squat and powerfully built man, scrabbled in and slid into a kneel at the opposite side of the front cubicle row from the tall man.

Thornton wondered if the gunmen had been instructed to minimize damage to the equipment. Or maybe they knew they required little in the way of cover fire.

The tall man called out, “Ma’am, sir, come out with your hands on your heads.”

His accent was midwestern. He probably wasn’t a SofTec transcriber, but he definitely knew where Thornton and Mallery were hiding. Thornton guessed that there were video cameras in the room, not only for security but to monitor the transcribers. The gunmen might be watching the feed now, in real time, on their phones. Still they couldn’t be certain that Thornton and Mallery were unarmed. Otherwise they would have just strolled into the office and hauled them out. Or shot them.

Thornton hit the Panasonic TV remote, reactivating the building’s alarm sensors. The local police force might be bought off, but it was unlikely that the officers would permit a cold-blooded execution in
front of a crowd of witnesses drawn by the blare of the klaxons.

“You’ve just reactivated the alarm system,” said the shorter gunman, his wide face illuminated by his cell phone. “All that does is notify
us
that you’re here.”

Nodding, the tall man fired, the bullet sparking the second of the three overhead storage racks. Both men advanced to the middle cubicle row.

“Help me,” Mallery begged.

Fearing she’d been struck by the ricocheting bullet, Thornton whirled to find her driving her shoulder into the post supporting her end of the rack bridging the rear cubicle row. Getting the idea, he threw his full weight into the post on his side.

The wobbly rack fell forward, crashing into the middle rack, which in turn dominoed the front rack, all in a second, followed by a rain of hard drives and computer monitors, the shattering of glass, the crunching of bones, and the men’s screams. Enveloped by a cloud of kicked-up dust and sparks, the room reverted to its usual medley of beeps and clicks.

Thornton saw a right arm protruding from beneath the toppled middle rack at a grotesque angle. The squat gunman lay dead like a mouse in a trap. The tall man was slicked in blood. His left fibula poked through his pant leg. But he remained standing, his Beretta pointed at Thornton’s face.