The Code Within: A Thriller (Trent Turner Series)

by S. L. Jones

  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.

  Chapter 20

  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 imagi
ned 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.”

  Chapter 21

  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.

  Simpson laughed. “It’s a scary thing when someone can see right through you.”

  Reed looked at him nervously. He was trying to judge whether or not he’d been exposed. If Simpson knew the real reason for his retirement, it would be a serious problem. The doctor shook his head in an effort to wipe away his guilty look.

  “Not me, Trent,” Simpson added.

  He sat down in one of the two chairs in front of the large maple desk and leaned back. His eyes drifted ponderously around the office and settled on the room’s only window. He watched a raindrop connect the dots down the window’s surface, then let out a sigh.

  “It’s unnerving, Addy,” he said flatly.

  Reed had worked with Trent Turner extensively and knew what made him tick better than most. He never felt like the sessions he had with their top operative were under his control. Instead, it felt like a jousting tournament, and he was left with the short stick. He might have been the one calling for the session, but it was as if Trent Turner only showed up for his personal amusement.

  “I’ll bet,” Simpson said. “I’m sure most doctors would prefer not to be psychoanalyzed by their patients.”

  The doctor couldn’t hide the annoyed look on his face, even though he knew Simpson’s comment wasn’t meant to criticize. “He figures out the layers I’m trying to peel back and then…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Trying to get in his head is like cutting into a goddamn onion. The first cut is easy enough, but if you want to slice it wide open, where you have a chance for some real insight, the stinging worsens with each cut. It makes you question the effort in the first place.”

  “At least he doesn’t make you cry, does he?” Simpson laughed, and was met with an angry glare.

  “Funny. Look, Trent is unique. The killing, it’s something he takes in stride. It doesn’t faze him, even when it’s up close and personal.”

  Simpson nodded.

  Both men had seen their share of soldiers come unraveled by the brutal reality of violence. If you dwell on what you’ve done or see too much death, the long-term effects can prove fatal. Reed’s work had taught him that people die hard, and it became increasingly personal and gruesome as the distance from which the deed was done decreased.

  “Look, Charles, it’s not an easy job. Everyone has their own way of switching off, detaching the emotion from what needs to be done. If an operative can’t do that, they don’t stand a chance in this business. That’s not news to you.”

  “I can understand that in the field, but—”

  “He’s the best I’ve ever seen. Maybe that’s what makes the difference for him. Being able to shut it out completely.”

  “Sure, and a mechanism for doing so includes getting a rise out of his shrink? The guy who’s trying to help him? Smart move,” Reed said sarcastically.

  Turner’s rivalry with the doctor had been obvious from the start, but it wasn’t personal for Trent, and both men knew that.

  “Maybe he doesn’t need any help,” Simpson suggested, as if Reed was past the point of being able to be objective when it came to Turner. “It’s not like he has a tough time sleeping or he’s having flashbacks.”

  “Perhaps,” Reed said. His failure to make any significant progress in getting through Trent’s mental barriers after all of these years had become a bit of an obsession for the doctor. The circumstances behind the death of his twin brother had the potential to change all of that. Leaving at a time when there could be a breakthrough would be difficult, but he didn’t have a choice. “That could change after what’s happened. How are you going to get this under control? If he hasn’t already started hunting down his brother’s killer, he will soon.”

  Simpson started to say something and stopped himself before saying, “I’m heading to Virginia to meet with Jack.”

  Reed was taken aback. “Really?” He knew Jack Turner was head and shoulders above any operative Simpson had ever worked with during his time as a SEAL, and he was also Trent’s uncle.

  “He’s the best chance we have to turn this around.”

  Reed squinted in disbelief and said, “So you’re expecting a happy ending?”

  “Are you having doubts about your assessment?”

  “No,” Reed said. “He won’t fly off the handle, but he’s not someone you, his uncle, or anyone else for that matter can control.”

  Trent Turner’s move to Island Industries sealed the deal that finally brought his old friend and former commanding officer of the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training program over to his new team. The job and the California lifestyle had suited Jack Turner well, but family was family.

  “It’s never about control,” Simpson said evenly. “It’s about respect.”

  “Jack…” Reed shook his head and considered the number of times the man had refused to come to work for The Island.

  The doctor had always thought the fact that Simpson was the one who recommended taking him out of the field had something to do with his previous refusals. It was never easy for an operator of his caliber to accept defeat at the hands of injury. The tough old cuss would have rather been shot and killed on an operation than sent out to pasture.

  “He’ll do whatever he can to salvage this,” Reed agreed. “He feels obligated to look after his nephew for his younger brother.”

  Working with Trent was something Jack had been doing under the radar. No one in the family knew of their new relationship. Mentor and prodigy.

  Simpson rubbed his chin and said, “That’s the reason we were finally able to bring him on board, sure, but he believes in what we’re doing. He understands the big picture.”

  “That’s not the problem, Addy. The problem is how you’ll go about finding a person who had a major hand in developing the very systems we use to track people down.”

  Simpson hated it when people pointed out the obvious. “That’s not something you’ll have to worry about,” he said, alluding to his resignation.

  Chapter 22

  Hilton Hotel, Tysons Corner, Virginia

  BRUCE CAMPBELL ENTERED the Hilton Garden Inn on edge. He looked at the small child throwing a temper tantrum at the front desk and was happy for the distraction. His target, Aliaksandr Petrov, had been reported as being on the first floor. The first floor wouldn’t have been Campbell’s preference, so he began to wonder whether the assassin was expecting an uninvited guest. Perhaps the room was just a decoy. He knew his employer had incredible resources and would have provided the information if there were any indication of a trap, but his target was a top-notch professional, so he couldn’t discount the idea.

  Doubts began to creep into his mind as he casually surveyed the hotel. An inflated ego made coming to the hotel alone an easy choice. He reasoned that he could catch the Russian off guard and score the kill, so bringing his driv
er along for an extra set of eyes wasn’t necessary. He hoped taking care of Petrov would get him back on good terms with his employer. Pressure from Pavel Kozlov about the previous fuckup had unsettled his nerves and chipped away at his confidence. Kozlov wasn’t a man who tolerated failure.

  After exploring the layout of the building, Campbell decided to make a casual pass by the target’s room. Lobby signs directed him down a hallway to the left of the reception desk. The long corridor had a bend, presumably to help keep the noise down for the hotel’s first-floor guests. His level of anticipation remained high. Petrov’s room was still out of view because of the curvature.

  He carefully rounded the bend and was presented with the cleaning crew’s rolling station. The cart was situated in the middle of the hallway, with a guest room door propped open on either side for quick access to the cleaning supplies. Campbell counted the rooms and knew the open door on the right led to the Russian’s. He readied his weapon as he crept to within earshot and steadied his breathing.

  A quick check behind confirmed nobody else was in the hallway, but a flash of movement as he turned back to the room was enough for him to brandish his Sig Sauer P226R. The adrenaline shot spiked his heart rate as his laser-like focus switched to the object in motion. He took a deep breath as a white towel lazily slinked its way down the side of the cleaning cart and fell to the floor. Campbell quickly stuffed the weapon back into his sport coat and checked his six, annoyed with his edginess, knowing the assassin wouldn’t be expecting him. He approached the door slowly and peered around its frame.

  The maid gasped in surprise when he appeared, and raised her hand to her heart. She quickly resumed smoothing out the sheets.

  He took quick stock of the room and asked, “Will you be much longer?”

  “Yes, sir…I mean, no, sir. I’m just about finished.”

  He entered the room as she rushed nervously to complete the job. Campbell was an imposing figure, and the sport jacket didn’t do much to soften his look. After making the bed, she walked to the window and began to open the shades.