The Blueprint (The Upgrade Book 1) (6 page)

“That’s part of the reason you find yourself in this predicament,” Alexander said. “You have a brilliant portfolio of technologies, yet you have the staff that could serve a company three times the size and ridiculous pension policies. You may not see it this way, but trust me; I’m doing your shareholders and your company a favor.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Engel.” said the person on the other end and hung up the phone.

Alexander hung up the phone and rang his secretary.

“Susan, I’m staying in the hotel tonight, and when I get there it better have food, champagne, and the best-looking girls this city has to offer.”

“How many, sir?”

“Four. Actually, you know what? Make it eight. Eight is a good number today,” he said, then hung up the phone.

The wolf had made his kill and now it was time to celebrate.

•     •     •

Jeremy was confused. His body felt rigid, stretched, and sore, his face was wet and cold, and there was a loose cannon ball in his skull where every slight movement of his head sent it spinning and bouncing, crushing everything in its path. He grunted and slowly opened his eyes trying to take in the surroundings. At first, what he saw didn’t make any sense. He was in the room, facing a small dirty window, a featureless aluminum table and a square wooden stool. The view wasn’t very interesting, but there was something profoundly wrong with what he saw. Jeremy tried to move his hands, and the movement, or rather the lack thereof, finally brought him to his senses.

I’m hanging upside-down.

He thrashed about, trying to free his hands, but the cord binding them together behind his back just cut deeper into his wrists. Somewhere behind him he heard approaching footsteps.

“Good morning.”

The face that appeared in front of Jeremy’s was familiar, as was the bright toothy smile.

“I’m sorry you have to find yourself in this predicament,” the man said, making himself comfortable on a stool, “and believe me, I don’t enjoy this part, but I have a few questions and I absolutely must have the answers. If you answer them honestly and don’t waste my time, I promise you, soldier to soldier, you won’t suffer. I know most of the information anyway. General Armament, after all, is our main competitor, but I hear that there’s a new and dangerous man somewhere high in your company’s intelligence now.”

“Brian Stinson,” said Jeremy, naming his bald boss, and closed his eyes. He tried to move his fingers, feeling for the ends of the cord binding his hands together.

“That’s a bad start, Jeremy. I’ve known Brian for years, and while he has his moments, he’s not the guy I’m interested in.” The man got up and walked somewhere behind Sykes. A few seconds later he came back holding something that looked like a foot-long knitting needle.

“Let’s try it again. What’s the name of the new guy they have in GA’s intelligence force?”

“Brian Stinson,” said Jeremy, without opening his eyes. His left pinky found a loose end of the rope and started moving it toward the rest of his fingers.

The man sighed, tapping the sharp end of the needle with his thumb, and stayed quiet for some time.

“Jeremy,” he finally said his voice somber now, without a trace of usual irony. “I don’t want to do this, but I have no choice. I need to know the man’s name.”

Jeremy stayed silent as his fingers groped the end of the rope. He started pulling on it away from his wrist, trying to loosen the knot.

The man firmly took Jeremy’s left arm and stabbed him just under the bicep, pushing the long needle deep into his body.

Bright, excruciating pain pierced Jeremy’s very core, reverberating through his bones, running through his veins like rivulets of molten lead, gripping his heart in its burning grip, slowing its beating rhythm, clawing at his chest from the inside with red-hot talons.

Jeremy Sykes started to scream.

•     •     •

Mike Connelly was washing his hands. The small dirty sink made gurgling sounds as it struggled to push the pinkish liquid through its rusty clogged pipes. Soon there was no more blood splatter on his hands, but he kept on slathering them with a cheap sharp smelling soap and rinsing them with the hottest water he could tolerate. Finally, he turned off the faucet and wiped them dry with a rough towel. He still felt dirty.

Mike was never an idealist. As a soldier he’d seen his share of dirty and bloody, and over the course of his career the body count that he meticulously maintained in his head was high, ninety-seven souls, but it was one thing to kill someone in the heat of a firefight and quite another to do the same thing methodically.

Mike didn’t have any intention of bringing his body count to ninety-eight today. He threw the towel into a rusty trash bin and went back to a small room with no furniture.

On a dirty floor there was a naked body of a bound man covered in streaks of dried blood. He squatted next to the man and slapped him lightly on a cheek. When Jeremy opened his eyes, Mike could see that there was fear first, then his features relaxed betraying great self-control. Mike was impressed. His opponent was a true pro.

“Listen up, buddy,” he said, “today you hit the jackpot.”

He pulled an old rusty table knife that he found in this abandoned building from his back pocket. Jeremy’s body visibly tensed with the sight of a knife.

“Take it easy, pal.” He flipped the knife over and put it next to Jeremy on the floor, the rusty handle facing his prisoner. “I’m going to release you. As you can see, this knife has seen better days, so it’ll take you some time to cut the bonds. Once you’re done, I want you to collect your clothes from the pile in the corner and skip this town for good. You’re a resourceful guy; you’ll find a better place. Do you understand?”

Jeremy slowly nodded, then croaked, “Why the change of heart?”

“Does it matter?” Mike stood and wiped his hands on the sides of his pants.

“Be a good boy, though, and don’t make me regret this,” he said and walked out of the room without looking back.

Johnny took a step back from the body, and tilted his head slightly as if admiring his work. The machete in his long sinewy hand was slick with blood, dripping thick burgundy drops on dirty snow.

“Boss?” said his lieutenant, trying to keep a respectful distance. He didn’t like rushing Johnny, but standing next to a psychopath with a blood-dripping machete and a dismembered body in the middle of the day wasn’t an option either.

“Put a hat on him, Frankie,” finally said Johnny in his high-pitched squeaky voice, “and let’s get outta here.”

Frankie produced a cheap paper butcher hat from his pocket and, trying not to step in blood splatter on filthy snow, took a few steps toward the body. From afar, when the gory details were still not visible, the dead man looked as if he had sat next to a small grocery shop and leaned against the wall for support. Frankie carefully put a white hat with a blue rim on top of the man’s head, doing his best to focus on his own fingers and not on the man’s mutilated features.

“Is it good, boss?”

“It’s perfect, Frankie. A fucking masterpiece.”

Frankie stepped back with a sigh of relief. The two men went back to an old dirty Honda van, with Frankie behind the wheel. As they sped through grimy streets, Johnny pulled out a cell phone from his pants and dialed a number.

“Boris, get them boys down to the warehouse. Me and Frankie will be there in twenty.”

As the van continued to drive through the bleak wintry day, Johnny leaned back in his seat. Tonight was going to be extremely dangerous, but also rewarding. As much as he hated to admit it, Johnny liked working for his new master.

It was a simple scheme. He got tips on great booty that he could keep for himself and his crew and, the best part of it all, his gang members didn’t even know that he had to bow to someone outside of the gang.

All his new boss required was complete secrecy and that his assignments were accomplished on time. As long as it was going to pay this well, Johnny was going to deliver.

All eighteen members of the southern division of the Red Dragon gang were already in the warehouse when Johnny and Frankie pulled up. A shabby two-story building that doubled as a car repair shop served as the unofficial headquarters of Johnny’s crew. When he walked in, the smoke filled room quieted, as his underlings settled in, ready to listen for what Johnny had to say.

He slowly walked to the middle of his crew and placed his machete on top of a crate for everyone to see. He looked around at the hard faces, studying each man’s expression.

“One million dollars in cash,” he said. “Each.”

Johnny watched on as excited murmur spread across the room. He let them savor the news, then raised his hand to quiet them down.

“Just a few small wrinkles in this plan, fellas. First, the guy we’re about to pay a visit has ten ex-special ops guys guarding his house. Second, his wife is not to be killed.”

He took out a blueprint of the target’s grounds and rolled it out on the box, on top of his machete.

“Let’s see how we’re gonna handle this puppy.”

•     •     •

Detective Chuck Kowalsky of NYPD grunted with annoyance as he tried to wipe the coffee stain off his shirt. He furiously attacked it with a rough wet paper towel from the department’s men’s room, but he could see that his efforts were failing. Finally, disgusted, he threw the towel into the trash bin, smoothed his now wet shirt over his bulging stomach and angrily marched back to his desk.

Having slept less than four hours in the last two days wasn’t making him happy. What was worse he felt it was all in vain. In the past decade the police’s response to any crime fell into two distinct categories; it was either a high profile crime that commanded a lot of resources and support or it was a low profile and was pushed onto the guys like Chuck, and his alcoholic partner Bill Ryan. But in the beginning of this case Chuck felt that the police gods finally threw him a bone.

It started with an old lady driving over some poor fellow in SoHo, then taking him to a local hospital. She also brought a case that the man had had with him, which was quite a feat considering it weighed almost forty pounds.

The case had cracked during the accident, and the nurses, to their horror, found that it contained a high powered sniper rifle with laser–guided bullets. Unfortunately, so far they were unable to identify him, and the would-be sniper was in a medically-induced coma, so it was unclear when it would be possible to interrogate him.

There was also a high-speed chase with shooting on Williamsburg Bridge that ended up with an overturned SUV, with the driver dead and the passenger missing. Going through surveillance videos, Chuck was able to gather that the limo chased by the SUV made a stop in SoHo, just a block away from the place where the sniper had been run over.

That couldn’t have been a coincidence. A quick scan of the limo’s plates turned up Mike Connelly, a former military, with no priors. It was interesting, and possibly connected, but for now a dead end. As Connelly was working for himself, it was virtually impossible to find out where they were driving from.

Kowalsky went through eight hours of video feed trying to figure that out, but it was useless. He caught a little break with a camera on Delancey Street. Although the video was out of focus and the lenses were covered in grime, Chuck could still see that a young couple, a man and a woman, got out of the car for few seconds before going on their way.

Chuck sighed; finding a couple with no names nor faces in the city of eight million people and connecting them to a John Doe with a sniper rifle who was now in a coma. That should be easy.

First, Kowalsky sorted through real estate records within the five-block radius from their SoHo stop for the past decade. The search returned forty-one couples who jointly owned apartments in the area. Thirty-two of them happened to be much older than the people on the video, six were same-sex couples, and two had too much of a height difference to fit the bill. One couple loosely fit the parameters but a quick check indicated that they had moved to Sweden four years ago and hadn’t been back to the city since.

Disappointed, but not ready to give up, Chuck dug into the archival system, pulling every registered crime that had happened in the same area in the hope that something would stand out.

The stats themselves were appalling. Over the past ten years the crime rate increased almost tenfold while the percentage of solved cases dramatically dropped. He scrolled through pages and pages of murders, rapes, and other wonderful examples of human behavior, but nothing was jumping out at him. He leaned back in his chair, frustrated.

“Good morning, Sunshine.” Bill Ryan plopped his skinny butt on a chair next to Chuck’s and stretched his legs. “You surely look sour.”

Kowalsky looked up. His partner’s handsome face was sporting the usual two-day stubble and bloodshot eyes. The not-so-subtle smell of hangover was drifting from him in waves Chuck almost expected to be able to see.

“You don’t sound too happy either,” Kowalsky shot back.

“What the hell happened to your eye?”

“Accident.” Ryan flashed a thousand-watt smile. “I was—”

“Good idea,” said Chuck and turned back to his computer.

“Excuse me?”

“Accidents,” said Chuck. “Gotta check those, too.”

“You’re welcome,” said Ryan, looking part annoyed that he didn’t get to tell the story, part happy that he gave his partner an idea.

Kowalsky pulled up a list of recorded accidents for the same timeframe. Few slips and falls, a collapsed floor, boiler fire, carbon monoxide poisoning, and a few strokes. He paused for a moment and came back to gas poisoning, not quite sure why. A wealthy financier, Andrew Hunt, and his wife were found dead in their apartment. It was ruled out an accident. There was a gas leak that coincided with a malfunctioning of their ventilation unit. It was briefly investigated by a detective named Ron Pizetti, but no foul play was found and the case was closed.

Kowalsky tried to trace the current owner of the penthouse, but it turned out to be a trust, and its beneficiaries weren’t disclosed. For now Chuck didn’t have enough to subpoena the records.