RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  “No, this is really good. Really good. It came in through the cell phone when he used the Bluetooth modem. That’s why my friends couldn’t find it on the phone. Dick, you have to find him and tell him. He’s not at his house.”

  I glanced at the clock. It was now nearly eleven. The last I’d seen Danny was downstairs a few hours ago. He was probably on his way home by now via a random route sure to include a police bar or two. There was no sense tracking him down; Shunt had both the laptop and the phone. This was one time bad news could wait until morning.

  “I’ll tell him as soon as I can. If he got it on a call, can you figure out from which call?” I asked.

  “I don’t think it’ll be easy.” I could hear the metal grind in his head. “Yeah, wait, I have an idea—look for a data transmission associated with something. Oh shit, that’s how they got it in! I figured it out, Dick! I figured it out!”

  Shunt actually didn’t explain it then, and I’m not sure I was awake enough that night to understand it even if he had. Basically, what had happened was this: Danny’s spiffy new phone and lightweight laptop could connect to each other using something called Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a type of short-range wireless connection involving hardware and software that, among other things, allows you to use a cell phone to connect to the Internet. (It does other stuff, too, but that’s not relevant here.) On one of those connections, the cell phone transmitted a virus to the laptop. Calling it a virus is really an insult, because according to Shunt the program was extremely sophisticated. It replaced part of the code in the laptop’s Windows XP Pro operating system without drawing any attention to itself or adding anything extraneous to the computer. It was as if the hacker were a surgeon, reaching into someone’s body, pulling out his heart and replacing it with one exactly the same size and weight. The new heart beat exactly the same—except that every time it made a connection through the cell phone, it activated an outside program on another computer to run a series of its own programs. That program gave the hacker a view of everything on Danny’s computer and information on all the calls the phone had made—location and time. The technical aspects were pretty impressive, Shunt said, at least on par with the work the agency that doesn’t exist had done on the hard drive we had replaced. The techie said the hacker deserved a spot in the hacker hall of fame.

  I said he deserved a spot in Danny’s woodshed.

  According to Shunt, the virus could only have affected Danny’s computer, not any of ours, but just in case, I got up to shut everything down. On my way to the office, I crossed through the living room, where Doc was leaning against one end of the couch reading a book. He’s a committed computerphobe and won’t go near a computer except at the point of a gun. I didn’t bother telling him about the virus. All that would have done was invite a hearty “I told you so.”

  “Danny’s not around, right?” I asked.

  “Left for home an hour ago.”

  “No. He’s meeting his daughter in a bar over in Richmond at midnight,” said Tiffany, opening up an eye in the oversize leather chair in the corner. “He was all excited about it.”

  “Which bar?”

  “SciClub,” she said. “It’s right near her place in Richmond.”

  I’d never heard of it. Apparently it was a very happening place if you happened to be twenty-two.

  Family reunions aren’t my thing, and Shunt’s virus, as high-tech as it might be, didn’t seem reason enough to break this one up. Until a half hour later.

  I was back in bed, just about dozing off, when the phone rang and the dream that had begun percolating in my brain was replaced by Shunt’s fervid screech on the answering machine.

  “Dick! Dick! Dick!”

  “What the fuck, Shunt?”

  “I know where Danny got the virus!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who does he know in Richmond, Virginia?”

  “I don’t know, Shunt. Has to be a million people. You have his phone, right?”

  “The number is unlisted, new. Can we, like, tap into some police connections to get the details? Or should I just say ‘fuck it’ and hack into the phone company.”

  “Uh-huh.” I was about to tell him we’d deal with it in the morning when I finally realized what the hell was going on.

  Doom on me for taking so long.

  Chapter

  15

  Doc Tremblay had known me so long that his handlebar mustache jumped to attention just from the snap in my voice. Tiff jumped up as well, and within a minute of Shunt’s phone call all three of us were running out to the Yukon. Sean, who’d been dozing in one of the spare guest rooms, came out as I turned over the engine. I told him to crank up his motorcycle and follow.

  SciClub was located on an alley off North 14th near Route 360 and the railroad tracks. Aesthetically, the area was less than optimum for a club, which apparently made it perfect for a club. The thing I didn’t like about it was the easy access to the highway; Danny could be miles away by now, trussed and squeezed into somebody’s trunk.

  “We oughta check the address where the phone call was made first,” suggested Doc. “That’s where he’ll be.”

  I tended to agree, but Shunt hadn’t called back with it yet; he was still hacking away at the phone company computers, which he warned might take a while. We settled for the club. Doc and I would stick out like the old farts we were, so sending Tiffany and Sean in first to sneak a peak was a no-brainer. Both were packing. Sean had two Berettas, one from the service and the other from his police work. Tiffany had a smallish Walther P99 in her purse and a smaller P5 Compact hidden—well, somewhere on her body, though I defy anyone to find it. The P5 Compact is smaller than a lot of pistols, but not that small, and how Tiff got it under her clothes without producing a telltale bulge—well, all women have some secrets, and that’s one of hers.

  We swung off the ramp, took a right, and looked for the block. I figured Shadow was behind all of this, and in that case, it was very possible that I was the real target and this was a trap to set me up for a sucker punch. We’d peek first, strike next.

  Though if it was Shadow, it made sense to be ready for anything. That’s why Doc had pulled the M249 SAW machine gun out from under the seat in the back. It also accounted for the MP5 in my lap. Overkill? Only if I had to explain it to a traffic cop.

  “Should be the next turn.”

  I backed off the gas as I turned the wheel onto 14th, not quite knowing what to expect. Sean was a few cars behind us. Doc had reached Hulk by cell phone; he was heading over with two of my new shooters as cavalry. They were at least another ten minutes off. A police car passed me as I turned; I pushed the submachine gun lower, even though it was already out of view.

  “Nice and slow, children,” I said. “Alley is right over there on the right, and there’s the front door of the club.”

  The words were barely out of my mouth when the door burst open. A body flew to the ground. I hit the brakes and jumped out, leaving the car in the middle of the street. Tiff and Doc followed, crouching in firing position, heads rotating in a quick sweep. The figure on the ground rolled just enough for me to realize it wasn’t Danny. As I took a step toward him, the door opened again. Another large body tumbled out, did a half turn, and then flipped onto the hood of a parked car to the left. His arms flailed, but Tiff cut short his effort to get up by pulling him off the hood and gently placing the heel of her boot on his throat.

  Perhaps it wasn’t quite that gentle. A mash of words spewed from his mouth; none of them were “Have a nice day.” A second kick, and instead of words, he began spewing vomit. Tiff took a step back and applied a soccer-style coup de grace to his side, wedging him into the gutter next to the car.

  “Something I learned in France,” she said.

  The club door opened again. This time, Danny Barrett stepped through the frame. He did not look like a happy camper, but he was intact and moving under his own power.

  “Danny!” I shouted.

  �
��Yeah, I know. I’m a fucking asshole. A fucking asshole.”

  Actually, I’d been trying to warn him about the gorilla about to tackle him from behind. It was unnecessary, however. Just as he finished his personal assessment, he ducked, timing it perfectly. The man flew out over him so quickly that he couldn’t get his hands out to break his fall. His headfirst splash on the pavement was as convincing an advertisement for helmets as I’ve ever seen.

  “They’re just fucking bouncers. Assholes,” added Danny. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I’m parked a couple of blocks over.”

  He explained what had happened as we drove to his car. For weeks, Danny had been trying to set up some sort of meeting with the young woman named Melanie who claimed to be his daughter. He’d been frustrated at first by the fact that she wouldn’t give him a phone number or anything besides an email address to contact her with, and he had some police department friends check around to see what they could come up with. He was also interested in finding the girl’s mother, SueLi. Call it nostalgia or misplaced romanticism, but he had a crazy notion of talking to her and maybe doing something to pay her back for all the years she’d raised their daughter by herself. Danny’s “daughter” Melanie eventually gave him SueLi’s phone number, and with everything else that was going on, he more or less forgot about contacting her mother—until he set up the meeting with his daughter. He was en route when he called his friend, thinking he might take a long shot on calling her mother. The friend had written down the number a week ago, while Danny was out in the Midwest. He had it on a Post-it right near the phone.

  “So I called,” said Danny. “And I said, ‘SueLi?’ And she said, ‘No, this is Melanie.’ Melanie.”

  “She was visiting her mom?”

  “Well, yeah, except that her mom lives in Oregon. That was the area code I called. Melanie wasn’t supposed to be there but was checking on her mother’s place. The mother and stepfather were away on a vacation in Europe.”

  Danny had called from down the street, using a pay phone. Aware that he was being set up but unsure for what, he snuck inside the bar through a back door, checked over the place, and spotted the girl pretending to be Melanie getting ready for the meet.

  “Cute little Asian number. Thirties but definitely hot. SueLi’s mother was Korean and she looked a bit like her,” Danny added. “My guess is that she was going to drug me.”

  Danny called the police, claiming that the girl had a gun in her purse; he figured it would be easier to deal with her once they approached her. He thought it was likely that she was armed, but even if she wasn’t, he could swear out some sort of bullshit and use his influence to have her run into the station. Two uniforms arrived but as they came in she beelined for the ladies’ room. Danny tried to follow. He rattled the door, realized it was locked, then started to back off when the bodyguards began hassling him. He yelled at the police officers that the girl was getting away and explained that she had gone out the rear window in the restroom. The cops didn’t know him, but after a squint or two, they decided better safe than sorry and pounded on the door. Then they broke down the door, whereupon a cute but drunk blonde began screaming. It wasn’t the same girl, not even close, and she didn’t have a handbag, let alone a gun. But the worst thing was, the only window in the place had very thick bars. A fire violation, to be sure, but also an effective way of limiting egress.

  “She wasn’t in one of the other stalls,” said Danny. “It took me quite a while to figure it out. She’d cased the place pretty well. To get out, she went into the last stall, stood on the toilet, took off one of the ceiling panels, and pulled herself up into the gridwork above, which was heavy steel because the place had been a warehouse before being converted. Then she crawled up across the grid of the drop ceiling to the second story. It was too narrow for me to follow, and by the time I figured it out, she’d been gone for more than forty minutes. The cops didn’t even hang around.”

  “What was the discussion with the bouncers about?” asked Doc.

  “They had a problem with me being in the ladies’ room.”

  Shunt called back in the middle of Danny’s story with the address. We figured it was unlikely we’d find Danny’s pseudo-daughter there, but we decided searching the place would be educational, and so we all proceeded in that general direction. Interestingly, the address was similar to but slightly different than the one Danny had gotten from her—a reversal of integers that, had Danny tried to drop in on her, would have led him to the park down the street.

  We rendezvoused with our reinforcements and broke out some surveillance gear from the goodie bags in the SUV, courtesy of Law Enforcement Technologies, with a few smaller items purchased at the No Such Agency Annex, aka Radio Shack. With the apartments under and above the target occupied, we played it safe and quiet, setting up a microwave scan device on the flat, two-story roof directly across the parking lot.

  Originally developed for eavesdropping, the MSD reads vibrations off a window’s glass. The sensitivity can be adjusted to such a degree that you can hear a mouse running across the floor or scampering through a wall. Hear is a figure of speech; you see a bouncing line on a screen and have to be able to interpret it, but you get the idea. These devices have been used since at least the Cold War, and they’ve gotten smaller and more sensitive as time has gone on. Ours was not quite the superdeluxe model, but within sixty seconds of climbing to the top of the roof we knew that the apartment was empty.

  That or whoever was inside had a way to stop his heart from beating.

  Danny and Sean took the front door, while Doc and the newbies watched the stairs and the street. Meanwhile, Tiff and I played Spiderman, climbing up a fire escape on the side and working our way around the side of the building. The ledge was nearly six inches wide, so don’t hold your breath.

  Except for the part near the window, where a black shadow jumped across the night about three inches from Tiffany’s shoulder. She jerked back off the edge. I grabbed her, barely keeping my own balance.

  It felt like it took a half hour for me to get my breath back. I love holding beautiful women in my arms, but I certainly prefer to do so under better circumstances.

  We crouched on the ledge, staring at the shadow. It seemed too square to belong to a person, but it took a while to figure out that it was being cast by a large piece of cardboard or something that could spin around somehow. The light inside was dim, coming from somewhere beyond the room, possibly a hallway. I squeezed down at the corner and gave a peek around the edge, easing upward slowly when I didn’t see anything. The room appeared empty. The window was single-pane, easy to break and large enough to duck through, the sort of thing they used to put on buildings around 1940 or so when heat was cheap.

  “How are we?” asked Doc over the commo set.

  “Good, I think. Back room looks empty.”

  “Sean’s using that SoldierVision thing, and he swears the front two rooms are empty, too. I don’t know if we should trust that thing. I think your high-tech shit is bullshit.”

  “We can trust it,” said Sean. “And the microwave said the same thing.”

  “All fucking bullshit,” insisted Doc. “Jetsons stuff.”

  “Hey, Dick, I think the door’s unlocked,” said Danny.

  An unlocked door to an empty apartment spells “booby trap” in my dictionary, so we took a collective breath while Sean used the sniffer to see if there were explosives rigged to the front door.

  Nothing. So either it was a really clever booby trap—likely, given what we knew about Shadow—or not a booby trap at all. There was an easy way to find out, and a slightly harder one. We put a daub of C-4 on the door, got a fistful of flash-bangs ready, and…

  Boom.

  More like: Boom KA-BOOM KA-KA-KA-KA-

  FUCKING BOOM!!!!

  The flash-bangs illuminated the apartment and set off enough of a shock that any explosive rigged to a light or motion detector system would have ignited. Half the car alarms in the neig
hborhood went off, and every dog within a twenty-block radius began howling ferociously.

  Doc, being the kind and caring soul he is, had evacuated the people from the downstairs apartments, clearing the building. The people—all old folk—assumed that the kindly gentleman in body armor, trailed by two black-clad ninjas, was a cop, and he did nothing to correct that misimpression.

  Flash-bangs are basically big-ass Fourth of July firecrackers designed to sound loud and blind anyone dumb enough to keep their eyes open when they go off; they’re called stun grenades for that reason. The charges aren’t powerful enough to kill anyone, though I wouldn’t want one in my teeth when it exploded.

  C-4 is a somewhat different story. There’s an art to using just enough to get a door down, especially an old wooden one; too much and the door and surrounding hallway turn into sawdust and cinders. Let it be said: Sean is not an artist. He blew a big enough hole at the front of the apartment to drive a pickup through.

  Dear Landlord: Hope the security deposit covers it. But those are the hazards of renting to scumbags.

  I smashed the glass and pulled up the window, stepping into the apartment with Tiffany just behind me. We rolled our eyeballs around the place—the light had survived the blast—and got to the hall just as Danny and the others came in from the front. We had the place secure in twenty seconds—not hard to do when it’s empty. The only surprise came in the far room. There was no furniture, no nothing, except for hundreds of pieces of paper pasted to the walls. Let me be more specific: hundreds of pieces of photos and newspaper articles and printouts and maps, all of which had to do with me. The maps were torn from a Rand McNally atlas and traced my recent progress across the country.

  “Someone has a real fucking hard-on for you,” said Danny.

  “This is exactly what we saw in France.” Tiffany went close to one of the photos and frowned at it. It happened to be the same one from the mall, printed out from a computer printer in black and white. “Not a very good picture. You ought to try smiling some more.”