A deadly encounter with a gay prostitute was an option…if there was anything that suggested the attorney was homosexual. But from what his men had observed at the Marriott, where Drake had ignored the obvious flirtation of a male prostitute at the bar, that wasn’t an option. According to what Saleem reported, Drake liked to drive fast cars, but they missed their chance with that yesterday. The man ate alone, slept alone, and did his running alone.
Walker considered the possibility of a female prostitute. Perhaps Drake would welcome companionship; a woman who could lower his defenses, among other things, until she could permanently cool his passion.
He called Canaan. “Are you alone?” he asked.
“Why do you think I wouldn’t be?” the younger man returned.
“Please, Saleem,” Walker sighed, “do you think I’m not aware of your pastimes? I’m calling because of them. Have you used our escort service since you’ve been here?”
“Why do you ask? Did someone make a complaint?”
“Answer my question!”
“The answer is no,” Canaan said. “I can find my women without your services.”
“Excellent. I want you to meet a woman and point Drake out to her. She may look like a high-class hooker to you, but she’s very good at what she does. Pick her up tomorrow at noon at the terminal where you arrived last week and take her to lunch before you return to work. How is work going, by the way?”
“Don’t worry,” Canaan said. “When you deliver the worm, there won’t be a problem. I’m on the team, they have accepted me, and I have the access to the system you need.”
Walker stayed at the window gazing out across the Bay. The woman he was about to call had worked for him before. If there was one woman in the world he could trust to seduce a target and fulfill a contract, it was the Brazilian beauty who lived just an hour’s flight away.
Chapter 21
Drake reported to the office of Detective Cabrillo the next morning to give his statement regarding the drive-by murder of Jeremy’s mother. He learned that she was a college graduate, that she and her husband had never been arrested, and neither of them had any known connections to street gangs in San Francisco.
“The only connection to violence I can find,” the detective said, “is to you and that company you’re working for.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Drake asked.
Cabrillo put his digital recorder in his pocket. “That manager we found dead in his car Sunday morning worked at Energy Integrated Solutions. You’re working for the same company.”
“I thought he had a heart attack.”
“We did, too, at first,” Cabrillo said. “The medical examiner wants to run some more tests. He hasn’t been able to link the marks on his neck to the cause of death, but he’s suspicious. I talked to the detective handling it because you and the vic both work or worked for the same company.”
“So you think EIS somehow connects his death and the drive-by?” Drake asked. “That’s pretty thin, Detective.”
Cabrillo grinned. “You were a prosecutor, Mr. Drake. You’ve probably seen cases that turned on thinner threads than this. Relax. It was just an observation. It only holds together if you were the real target MS-13 was gunning for. You weren’t…were you?”
Drake thought of other close calls he’d survived in the last several months before he answered. “No one knew I’d be in that parking lot yesterday, so it’s unlikely. You have any leads on the shooter?”
“I asked the Gang Task Force to see if any of their CI’s know anything. I’m not hopeful. MS-13 has a reputation for hacking up snitches.” Cabrillo signaled that the meeting was over by standing up and walking toward the door of the conference room. “You have a nice day, Mr. Drake. And thanks for coming in.”
The detective’s unlikely suggestion that EIS was the link between two murders in three days had been made without any knowledge of the problems Bradford’s company was having. Drake’s intuition was beginning to flash a warning light on his mind’s dashboard as he left the police station. He’d told Cabrillo that no one knew he’d be in the Sports Basement parking lot, but he’d had no reason to be watching for someone following him. It was possible, then, but why?
Drake drove back to his hotel looking for signs of surveillance and wondering if he had missed something at EIS. Hacking and cyber attacks for the purpose of industrial espionage were more common than most people knew, but they usually didn’t involve this kind of violence. He had read that nations like Israel, that were entrenched in cyber warfare with their enemies, received as many as a thousand cyber attacks a minute. He’d heard that one Israeli electric company had reported receiving 20,000 attempts in one day.
But even if EIS was involved in some cyber war that went beyond someone trying to steal intellectual property the company had developed, Drake asked himself, why would someone come after him?
He had planned on going home after meeting his friend, Mike Casey for dinner, but now he was beginning to think he might have to stay around a little longer.
He used the Audi’s Bluetooth smart phone connectivity to call his client. “Are we still on for sailing this afternoon?”
“We are,” Bradford said. “One o’clock at the marina.”
“Good, because I think we need to rethink your situation.”
Drake drove toward Fisherman’s Wharf, where he intended to order a hot seafood platter at Capurro’s. He’d let his subconscious mind work on the EIS puzzle while his conscious mind focused on crab cakes, Monterey calamari, and beer battered jumbo shrimp.
~
Saleem Canaan parked his BMW in front of the Signature Aviation Support terminal and waited for Walker’s hooker. He didn’t know what she could do to Drake that he couldn’t, but it that’s what Walker wanted, so be it. He didn’t mind taking the woman to lunch and getting to know her. It would save him a call to the escort service later.
He saw four men walk out of the private aviation terminal and hand their luggage to a limousine driver, and then turn, one by one, and look back into the terminal. A tall goddess of a woman was just leaving the reception area. Canaan was amazed that the buffoons were allowing her to pull her own rolling suitcase.
He was even more amazed when she walked past her gawking admirers and continued on toward him. Dios mio, he thought, could this be the woman he was sent to meet? He casually got out of the car and walked around it to meet her face to face.
She stood still, waiting for him like he was a bell boy dispatched to carry her bags.
“Are you Mr. Walker’s boy?” she asked.
He ignored the insult and took her suitcase. “Only if you’re his piriguete.”
She flashed him a tight smile and said, “Not one that you can afford, morano.”
After her suitcase was stowed in the trunk and they were leaving the terminal, the Brazilian model, who had introduced herself as Adriana Hermann, said coldly, “Walker needs to be more careful with the passwords he gives us. You may be used to being called boy and pig, but I do not let anyone call me a whore. I do many things for money, but not that.”
“Isn’t that what he wants you to do with the attorney?” Canaan asked.
“He wants me to kill him. How I choose to do that is my business.”
Chapter 22
Drake parked next to Bradford’s Audi A8 and saw his white racing yacht waiting for him at the end of the dock. Judging from the yacht club pennant snapping on the club’s flag pole, a steady wind out of the north was blowing up some white caps in the Bay off Hunter’s Point.
It was warm, at least seventy degrees, and Drake left his windbreaker in the car. A yellow Oregon sweatshirt and a pair of jeans should be enough for the afternoon. He waved to Bradford and started down the dock.
“Permission to come aboard?” he asked brightly when he reached the yacht.
“
Cast off the bow line and join me,” Bradford replied. “It’s a great day for sailing.”
Drake slipped the dock line off the forward cleat and stepped into the rear cockpit and joined his host.
“Have you sailed the San Francisco Bay before?” Bradford asked.
Drake shook his head. “This will be my first time.”
“Then we’ll sail the Bay and give you the grand tour.” He turned north and set his sails.
They had passed the central wharf area of San Francisco and sailed under the Bay Bridge before either man spoke. The view of the City from the water and the immense size of one of the longest bridge spans in the world was enough to silence both of them.
“I never get tired of the view out here,” Bradford said. “It’s the main reason I kept my business here, despite the taxes I get to pay for the pleasure. There’s beer and Pepsi in the cooler if you’re thirsty.”
Drake opened the cooler on the floor and pulled out a bottle of Anchor Steam.
“What did you mean when you said we need to rethink my situation?” Bradford asked.
Drake opened the beer and took a pull. “I was involved in a drive-by shooting yesterday. The detective I met with this morning thinks I might have been the target.”
“I read about the young mother who was killed. I didn’t know you were involved. Why does the detective think you might have been the target?”
Drake steadied himself with a hand on the chrome handrail at the rear of the yacht. “Because the medical examiner is conducting tests to determine if your manager they found last weekend was murdered. He doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re both connected to your company.”
Bradford reached for the electric winch controls and let some air out of the main and Genoa sails to slow the yacht down. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Nick Kawasaki was dead before you arrived. What possible connection could there be?”
“What was Kawasaki working on?” Drake asked as he sat down across from Bradford. The sails were flapping as they slowed and then stopped in the middle of the Bay between Treasure Island and Angel Island.
“The Defense Advanced Research Project for the Department of Defense,” Bradford said. “We’re developing security software to protect the country’s electric grid from a worm like the one that devastated power plants in Iran. Nick was in charge of the team that was doing the final testing of the software.”
“Do you think the DARPA project is the reason for the cyber attacks?”
Bradford pointed to the cooler. “Pass me a beer and tell me why you’d ask that.”
Sitting in the middle of the San Francisco bay on a warm fall afternoon with a bottle of beer in his hand made it hard to think about dark conspiracies, but that’s where Drake’s mind was going.
“The Secretary of Homeland Security asked me to see you,” Drake said, “I suspect that’s because you told Senator Hazelton, my father-in-law, you didn’t know how much you needed to report about the cyber attacks on your 10-K to the SEC. They’re good friends, and both of them are involved in matters of national security. Since you’re working on something that involves national security, it crossed my mind that Kawasaki’s death, if it turns out that he was murdered, could be related to the DARPA project.”
“But how would that involve you?” Bradford asked. “Even if he was murdered, which I hope to God he wasn’t, you don’t have anything to do with the software we’ve developed.”
“I don’t know yet. I was a prosecutor in Oregon. Maybe someone thinks I’m here because of his death. He dies on Saturday. I show up the next day. Who knew I was coming?”
“Just me,” Bradford said as a power boat flashed by and its wake rocked the yacht. “Senator Hazelton called me last week to say you might be able to come down. I didn’t mention it to anyone.”
Drake watched as the sails were trimmed and they began to sail north toward another island. The possibility that he would investigate the death of Bradford’s manager seemed like a pretty puny reason to send gang bangers to kill him, he thought. Unless there was a lot more going on than he was able to see right now. Kawasaki’s death didn’t seem to have slowed the project in any way. So why would anyone care that he was here?
“Show me the big picture,” he said to Bradford. “I don’t know a lot about the electrical grid, but I know it’s an important part of our infrastructure. What’s at stake here?”
Bradford smiled. It was a question the government didn’t want the public worrying about. “Imagine a blackout that lasted all across the country and went on for months, maybe as many as six months,” he began. “You saw what happened in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. With a catastrophic failure of the electrical grid not just around New York but all over the U.S., the loss would be unimaginable. No electricity means no lights, no heat, no water, no phones or Internet, no functioning gas stations, no banking services or money transfers. Grocery stores have enough food to last three days on average, so people will start to starve and then turn on those who have food. You’d have roving mobs looting and rioting. Gas supplies will be quickly used up and people wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, wouldn’t be able to escape the mobs even if they wanted to.” Bradford paused to give Drake a minute to consider all this, then he went on.
“How many people do you know who have a week’s supply of nonperishable food and water for their families, let alone two or three months’ supply? If they did, would they be able to defend that supply when their neighbors thought they had to steal it or their children would die?”
“Adam, our electrical grid is old. The average substation transformer is forty-two years old. That’s two years older than the designed lifespan of a substation transformer. When transformers fail, we can’t replace them quickly enough. They’re huge. They have to be moved on flatbed rail cars. Most of them aren’t even manufactured here in the U.S. Our grid hasn’t ever been modernized.” Bradford shook his head. “It’s mechanical equipment operating a digital world. I’m working on just one part of the system. And it might not even be the most important part. The whole system has to be made more resilient and more digital. The big picture is that a failure of the electrical grid and the infrastructure it supports is the Department of Homeland Security’s biggest fear. It would destroy our country.”
Doomsday lecture completed, Bradford sailed around Angel Island and without a word steered his yacht toward Hunter’s Point across the Bay. Drake sat across the cockpit and looked at the city skyline set against the bright blue sky to the west. He didn’t see how any of the dots connected, but he was beginning to understand what was at stake if they did connect.
Chapter 23
Adriana Hermann watched Bradford’s white racing yacht glide into a slip at the Hunter’s Point Marina just as Walker’s boy had said it would. The attorney she was waiting for would be jumping off the yacht and going to his car, which was parked two rows over from her rented Mercedes E350 convertible. She had been waiting patiently, studying the file on the man from Oregon and thinking of how she would kill him.
There wasn’t much in the file about her target. He’d played football in college as a linebacker, been in the army, and been a criminal prosecutor in Oregon. Recently widowed and apparently fit, she read. Observed working out in the fitness center at the Marriott Marquis where he was staying and running one of the trails in the Presidio the day before.
She watched as the two men prepared to leave the older man’s yacht. The younger man looked to be a little over six foot tall and with good shoulders. He was wearing a sweatshirt, so she couldn’t tell if he had six pack abs, but it wouldn’t surprise her if he did. Well, she would soon find out. And it would be a pleasure to toy with him when he was paralyzed and couldn’t use his strength to resist her.
At the end of the dock, the two men shook hands. The older man turned and walked toward the Hunter’s Point Yacht Club and the yo
unger man walked to the black Audi. He was careful, she saw, as he casually searched his surroundings.
She laid the file she’d been reading against the steering wheel and kept her eyes down as he got closer to his car. With the sunglasses hiding her eyes, she knew he couldn’t see her watching him. But he could sense that he was being watched. She’d been taught that the human brain had evolved a gaze detection system that rang an inner alarm when someone was staring directly at them. She kept from turning her body and followed his movements with her peripheral vision.
This one would be a challenge, she told herself. If Walker’s information was correct, he had killed or been involved in the killing of seven terrorists in Portland, Oregon. Then, less than a month later, he had prevented an attempt to blow up a dam and killed another handful of terrorists at the same time. She wasn’t planning on eliminating him by playing a game he was good at. There were more elegant ways. Beauty would have her beast, and when he was at her mercy, she would kill him in a most indelicate way.
Adriana Hermann was a German Brazilian, or teuto-brasileiro, and proud of it. Her ancestors had immigrated to Brazil in 1850 and settled in Vitória, the capital of Espirito Santo, the southernmost state of Brazil. Her father was a banker who had been active in the failed Nazi Party movement in Brazil before World War II. Through his connections, she had been recruited by the Alliance after she killed a man in self defense who had raped her. The Alliance had financed her modeling career and when she approached the age when runway models moved on to other careers, trained her to be its honeypot assassin. It had been an easy and satisfying career move, using sex to get men in bed so she could kill them in their sleep. And it paid well.
She waited until her target passed her car before she lowered his file and started her own car. When he reached the end of the parking lot and turned onto the street that led out of Hunter’s Point, she followed him, expecting him to return to the Marriott Marquis where she had reserved a room. Instead, he turned left onto Third Street and drove south.
Dark Trojan (The Adam Drake series Book 3) Page 7
