The Code Within: A Thriller (Trent Turner Series) (7 page)

Working up the courage to open the door to the room had been daunting. The hacker stood there for five agonizing minutes before he made a move. First he slid the card key through the lock and ran down the hall. The fact that the beep didn’t spark off gunshots had been encouraging, but Etzy Millar still had a hard time mustering up the courage to go inside. His fear that the assassin was on the other side of the door gave way to the reality that the killer could possibly show up in the hallway. The possibility that he could have been followed provided enough motivation for him to do the deed.

When he whipped the door open, Millar was momentarily relieved that the lights had been left on by the hotel’s turndown service. He let out an awkward scream and froze when he saw a flurry of movement from the curtains. It only took a second to resign himself to defeat and hope that his death would be quick. By the time he realized it was the vent from the air conditioner blowing on the curtains, his mental state was frayed. It took a minute for him to get his heart rate down and recover.

Millar was relieved to see his laptop sitting on the desk where he had left it. It was the reason he’d risked returning to the hotel. The computer contained the only copy of the bot software he had, and it was also where he kept the source code for the shadow program he had deployed. He pilfered a dark blue backpack from the dresser, an obvious souvenir meant for the suite’s next occupant, and stuffed his laptop inside.

An envelope in the nightstand labeled “Petty Cash” had nine hundred and fifty-six dollars inside. It was more than enough for him to score a hotel room while he considered his next move. He stuffed his laptop into the backpack and quickly headed down the stairs and out the door to E Street.

The local portion of the morning newscast snapped him back to the present. It opened up with what Millar feared most.

“And now we turn it over to our Washington, DC local correspondent, Layne Stewart,” the newscaster said as the screen displayed a dramatic graphic titled “Maryland Senator’s Son Murdered.”

“Thank you, Kate,” Stewart said in a solemn tone. “There are no new developments in the fatal shooting that occurred last night in Northwest, Washington, DC outside the upscale Mazza Gallerie shopping mall. The victim was Maximillian Soller II, the son of Maryland senator and majority leader Maximillian Soller.” Stewart paused and ruffled his brow for dramatic effect. “The twenty-one-year-old was shot to death following what witnesses have called a dramatic car chase southbound on Wisconsin Avenue.”

The screen flashed to an image of the crumpled car with yellow police tape blocking off the perimeter. The footage showed forensic investigators examining the crime scene.

“His BMW sports car,” Stewart continued, “crashed at high speed into an entrance of the shopping mall, where a man fled the scene and was chased by a gunman. A police spokesman confirmed to CNN that both the gunman and the individual who fled the scene are still at large.”

The newscaster looked down to reference his notes and looked back into the camera.

“At this early stage of the investigation, neither man has been identified. Investigators say that the gunman arrived in a black, late-model Chrysler 300 with Maryland tag EST 5-4-4. Anyone with information on this crime should call the tip hotline that has been set up for this case at 2-0-2-5-5-5-5-5-5-5. There is a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar reward being offered for information leading to the arrest of the suspects.”

The gravity of the situation started to sink in, and his hands began to shake. Life as Etzy Millar knew it was over. Max was dead, and it was only a matter of time before his fingerprints were identified from handling the equipment he’d left at the scene. The images broadcasted from the crime scene confirmed his fears. The three yellow letters on the back of the navy-blue jackets—FBI—meant the investigation had already been escalated, and he only had one option left.

Gas station, Tysons Corner, Virginia

HE PUT ON his turn signal and slowed down to pull into the gas station. His mind had been tortured all night, and he had found it difficult to sleep. He was distracted by emotion and knew his lack of focus was dangerous. Ryan’s death haunted his every thought.

Trent Turner considered the pain his brother’s wife and kids must be feeling right now. He wished with all his being that there was some way he could turn back the clock and take his brother’s place.

He considered the stroke of luck he had last night with his mother’s book. The reagent he had treated the cover with did its job, and the nanoparticles illuminated the faint traces of the assassin’s fingerprint. The new technology impressed him.

Heckler had sent him what they were able to learn from the fingerprint and composite image he had gotten from his mother in less than an hour. The information that came back was no surprise. It turned out that the man who had killed his brother was a Russian called Aliaksandr Petrov. He was a freelance assassin who was once a top agent for Russia’s counterpart to the CIA, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR for short. The Shop’s contacts at MI6 confirmed that Petrov was an extremely capable individual and had spent a lot of time in Britain.

Now he was waiting for Heckler to get back to him on the assassin’s possible whereabouts. Turner pulled the car next to the gas pump and headed inside to pay. He tried to remember the last time he’d been in Tysons Corner. He wasn’t sure whether it was the gas station bringing back old memories, or there was something else that was pinging his radar.

“Thirty dollars on pump three please,” he said to the cashier inside.

“Sure thing, hon,” she replied.

She cracked her chewing gum as she worked the register.

Turner laughed. “You’re pretty good at that.”

She looked up thoughtfully and offered a playful smile. He guessed she was in her late fifties, and she had kept herself in great shape.

“That’s not all I’m good at, cutie,” she said, adding a few more cracks of her gum for effect.

He nodded toward the wedding picture on top of the cash register and said, “I’ll bet. Too bad he beat me to it.”

“He sure did, and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she replied with a wink.

“My advice…” her husband chimed in from behind the counter. He pursed his lips as if to consider something of significance. “Stay single.”

His wife tossed a bag of chips at him, and they both laughed.

Trent smiled and handed over the cash. A bell sounded as he pushed the glass door open. He had to admit he envied the couple inside. It was clear they were in love. They had made a nice, simple life for themselves in suburbia, a luxury he knew he would never have.

Something was still gnawing at him as he pressed the button on the fuel pump and began to fill the tank. His eyes were transfixed on the digital readout showing the dollars and gallons tick by. He shifted his weight and felt uneasy. When his glance drifted across the island of gas pumps, he recognized the barrel of a pistol being leveled at his head.

He recognized the outline of Aliaksandr Petrov’s face behind the weapon before an ingrained reflex pulled him down and to the left simultaneously. The loud report of the weapon was followed by an arc of sparks on the roof of his car.

He carefully peered around the gas pump as Petrov slammed his door shut and threw the car into gear. Turner quickly squeezed off a round from his HK45 Compact Tactical pistol, splintering the driver’s side of the rear window. The grimace on Turner’s face showed his frustration. He didn’t have the angle to deliver a kill shot.

He jumped into his rental car, fired up the engine and jammed the black Ford Focus into gear. A loud popping sound signaled that the gas nozzle had reached the end of its length. He saw the rubber hose snap back toward the pump in his rearview mirror and shook his head. He pointed the car at the median strip that separated the two directions on Route 7 and swerved through the traffic after the Russian.

The Focus sped through the grass divider, and Turner made a beeline for the on-ramp that led to Interstate 495. His frustration grew as the blue Chevy Impala continued to pull away from view. He shook his head and wished he’d chosen a car with a set of balls.

HIS FOOT WAS pinned to the accelerator when the XHD3 rang out. Trent Turner cursed under his breath, annoyed with his current automotive disaster. He didn’t have to look at the display to know the call was from Heckler. He was the only person with his number.

“Finger here,” he answered.

“I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” Heckler said. “What do you want first?”

He was losing ground quickly in the pursuit.

“Might as well start with the bad news to help get my spirits up,” Turner said sarcastically.

“All right then. There wasn’t much on Ryan Turner. He won the Boston Marathon recently and donated the prize money to a foundation. There’s nothing that ties the win to his death. The only other intel was that he was a software developer and worked for his father’s company.”

Turner wished his brother’s death and the marathon win weren’t related, but he knew better. It would have taken time for The Shop to modify the images of his brother used in the news reports. Even with the infrastructure they had in place for damage control, it would have been impossible to catch everything. He was sure major news publications posting pictures of his identical twin from the marathon was what led to his death. Someone had seen the images and thought it was him. It was a deadly case of mistaken identity.

“Okay, what else do you have for me?” Trent asked.

“The incident with the senator’s son. It doesn’t look like a one-time thing.”

“What? People are killing politicians’ sons?”

“No, no. Cannibal has been working overtime. It ran the comparison algorithm through our copy of the National Crime Information Center database and was able to correlate five—wait, hold on a sec…”

Turner exhaled in frustration as the assassin’s car vanished from view. It would have been a different story had he been driving his Tesla.

“Six cities,” Heckler confirmed. “It tied them together with intelligence from the NSA’s database on hackers known to be associated with The Collective.”

“You can’t be serious? The senator’s son was a member of The Collective?”

“Serious as a heart attack. It says the kid was a low-level hack,” Heckler said in a less-than-confident tone that hinted it would mean something to Finger. “It says he’d help out with distributed denial-of-service attacks. He used something called a Low Orbit—”

“Ion Cannon, yeah, yeah. The open-source app that the script kiddies play with so they can call themselves hackers. Go on.”

“Well, he went by mi11Ion2 in the hacker forums, and based on his posts, the analysts said he was actively working to develop his skills. He made a lot of posts, and they could tell he was new to the game, but they pointed out one thread in particular that stood out.”

“How so?”

“It was for some sort of job posting, but the posts in between the Soller kid’s responses were wiped clean.”

“So you only saw posts by him?”

“Yeah, like half the conversation was gone. Our guys hacked into the server that hosts the forum and couldn’t find any trace of what was said in the missing posts, or any clues that would tell us who might have removed them.”

“That was fast.”

“They’re on top of things. For now we’re replicating the forums that he had an account on to our servers so we can try to catch any new recruiting going on.”

“Good call,” Trent agreed. “Hopefully they’ll be stupid enough to try it again.”

“That’s only part of the story,” Heckler continued. “The other hackers who were killed were all involved in a job-posting thread, and every one of them had missing entries. Most of them were college pukes.”

“Really? So whoever these guys are, they won’t shy away from pulling the trigger. It looks like the cleaner who came in behind was sloppy,” Trent pointed out.

“How’s that?”

“When they hacked into the database to cover their tracks, they screwed up. Instead of thinking it through and running a delete query to remove the entire thread from the database, they wrote one that only deleted the posts made by their user name.”

“So they could have wiped everything clean?”

“Absolutely. Normally you wouldn’t give something like that much thought. The easy route would be to remove everything done by the account they used.” Turner paused to let that sink in, knowing Heckler excelled in tactics rather than technology, which was the opposite of his handler, Tak. “You see, doing it quick and dirty like that left us with a way to tie all of the killings together. That’s huge.”

He had turned the car around and was heading back toward his hotel in Tysons Corner. The news was welcome after his anticlimactic car chase.

“The lab said something about a screw-up. I still don’t really get it, so I’ll leave that hacker mojo shit to you smart kids. I’ve got my own computer right here.”

Turner imagined Heckler pointing to his head and smiled.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Heckler continued with a laugh. “It won’t ask for a damn reboot at the most inconvenient time possible either.”

“You give Tak a run for his money as far as entertainment value goes, that’s for sure.”

“Wait till you get the bill.”

Turner laughed. “By the way you throw around words like ‘kid’ and ‘college puke,’ I take it you’re well seasoned.”

“Don’t start—”

“No, no,” he joked. “I’m sure I’ll be thankful for that soon enough!”

“Damn skippy, kiddo. Damn skippy.”

“So the forum entries—that was the good news?”

“No, it gets better. According to the analysts, this case is about to blow wide open.”

Island Industries, Brooklyn, New York

HE LOOKED UP from his desk to see who had just barged into his office. “It’s personal with you two, isn’t it?” Addy Simpson asked.

“No,” Dr. Charles Reed replied in a less-than-convincing tone. He closed the door behind him and turned toward the admiral.