The Kill Chain

by Nichole Christoff

  The Kill Chain is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2018 by Nichole Christoff

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN 9780425285343

  Cover design: Tatiana Sayig

  Cover images: Shutterstock

  randomhousebooks.com

  v5.3.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Nichole Christoff

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Happy hour had come and gone in every bar in Washington, DC, and I was still at my desk, all alone, in my M Street office—but that’s when my visitor came to call.

  Five floors below me, the closed-circuit security camera, tucked into the lobby’s crown molding, picked her up the moment she slipped in from the sidewalk and transmitted her image to my laptop. She wore a short, black trench coat and gray leather gloves, as if the Mid-Atlantic’s early April weather were too cold for her. And despite the camera’s awkward angle, I could see her shiver when Chester, the guard on duty behind the wide mahogany reception station, hailed her.

  She gestured to the directory, framed within a shining brass-and-glass marquee beside the elevator. The thing showcased the names of the building’s businesses, and Chester picked up his phone. Mine didn’t ring, so he must’ve called the accountants’ office on the third floor, or the stockbroker’s on four. Once in a while, they worked late. But by now, it was after eight on a Thursday evening and anyone with any semblance of a social life had left. Even my long-suffering office manager had headed home to her honey hours ago. I should’ve done the same. Except I didn’t have a sweetheart waiting for me at my place.

  That, of course, was all his fault.

  Or maybe it was mine.

  In any case, Chester waved the woman through the metal detector downstairs. When she didn’t set off any bells or whistles, he sent her on her way. Bypassing the elevator, she ducked into the stairwell. I turned my attention from my laptop. And back to the schematic spread across the desk in front of me.

  Detailed in black and white, this was the layout I’d developed for Scotty Handemann. Scotty is an Operation Enduring Freedom vet who’d lost a leg and most of an arm to a roadside bomb, but who’d come home to serve his small town as its mayor. Not long ago, he’d declared his candidacy for Virginia’s Twelfth Congressional District—and he’d been giving the crusty old incumbent, who’d grown a little too fond of Washington’s big-city comforts, a run for his money ever since.

  Perhaps not so coincidentally, Scotty’s campaign headquarters had ended up burgled last week. Twice. Then, Saturday night, his pregnant wife, Rachel, found herself face-to-face with an intruder rifling through the desk drawers in their country farmhouse.

  When the police swore they’d done all they could do to protect the candidate’s family, Scotty took charge of the matter.

  He hired me.

  I’m a security specialist who’s built her business on a private investigator’s license. My client list is full of folks who call me when calling the authorities is out of the question. Like that governor whose underage daughter ended up in nine kinds of trouble when her so-called boyfriend bought her drink after drink in that dive bar last year. Or the niece of that elderly queen of the silver screen, whose lawyer locked her in a bedroom and forgot about her while he lived large on the old lady’s residual checks. Four days ago, like them, Scotty Handemann became my client.

  On Monday, I assigned a team of bodyguards to Scotty’s family and personally made site visits to identify potential risks at his home, his office, and everywhere in between. On Tuesday, I sketched out a comprehensive surveillance-and-security system that the couple’s nine-year-old daughter could operate—and that Fort Knox would envy. On Wednesday, my tech guys installed it and I taught the Handemanns how to use it. Now, on Thursday, my job was done. But I couldn’t quit thinking about Scotty and Rachel and the little slice of happiness they’d hired me to help them hold on to. For them, security had less to do with motion sensors and alarm panels than with one another. Every time I so much as glanced at the schematic, I saw that as plain as day.

  Tonight, however, something else caught the corner of my eye.

  Past the threshold to my inner office, across the dark expanse of cubicles and conversation groups where my staff worked every day, a silhouette grew tall against the wall of frosted bulletproof glass. The shadow hinted at a woman’s figure. She halted as if reading the blocky black letters—painted in reverse from my perspective—on the partition between my business and the fifth-floor corridor. The letters spelled out the name of my company: Sinclair and Associates. The woman raised a fist and rapped on the glass.

  Slowly, I reached out, touched a button on my laptop’s keyboard. Another video feed sprung to life on my screen, giving me a bird’s-eye view of my visitor. I shoved my square-rimmed glasses northward along the bridge of my nose and spoke into the laptop’s built-in microphone.

  I could hear my voice echoing in the hall.

  Without a whisper of welcome, I said, “What can I do ya for?”

  “I’ve come to see Jamie Sinclair,” the woman in the corridor replied. “I’d like to hire her. Or rather, my institution would.”

  The word institution conjured up images of crumbling brick edifices where Victorian street urchins worked their fingers to the bone to pay some drummed-up debt to society.

  I rose from my desk, drew the Beretta 9000S nine-millimeter handgun holstered on my hip. I approached the frosted-glass portal with my weapon alongside my thigh. I applied my key code to the complicated electronic lock, retracted the bolt, and opened the door.

  The woman on the far side of it was older than she’d appeared over the closed-circuit camera downstairs. She probably had a dozen years on the t
hirty-eight that I’d collected, but her hair, which she wore in a bob crammed carelessly behind her ears, had been dyed a dimensional black at an excellent salon. Her makeup was minimal and just as artful. A dusting of blush, some no-nonsense mascara, and a dab of tinted lip balm made the most of what God had given her. All in all, I’d have said she wasn’t a high-maintenance type of female. Or maybe she just didn’t want to look like one.

  “Which institution,” I said, “would that be?”

  “You’re Jamie Sinclair,” she breathed.

  “In the flesh. And you are…”

  A slight smile twitched at the corners of her mouth.

  She extended a gloved hand and I shook it.

  “I’m Madeline Donahue,” she said. “PhD. I’m the Director of Innovative Engineering at Stellar Unlimited.”

  I blinked.

  Stellar Unlimited had been the brainchild of Niilo Järvinen, the filthy-rich Finland native whose hyperintelligence turned heads in Silicon Valley before he’d even graduated from Oxford University at the age of fourteen. By the time this whiz kid had breezed through MIT and pursued a post-doc at Caltech, the technology giants of Northern California wooed him for all they were worth. He’d tried working for them for a while, but reportedly, software development and sophisticated search algorithms bored him to tears—because Niilo Järvinen had had his eyes on the sky.

  Six years ago, Järvinen founded Stellar Unlimited, a privately held competitor to NASA, the European Space Agency, and every other space program supported by government bucks anywhere in the world. His goal was to make the potential of space—or at least the possibilities found in low earth orbit—accessible to everyone, from third-world cellphone companies that couldn’t afford to rely on the communications satellites belonging to the global powers that had cornered the market to Great-aunt Millie who wanted to go to space for her eightieth birthday. Rumor had it he even had plans up his sleeve for a moon colony and lunar tourism.

  Of course, Aunt Millie couldn’t shimmy into a flight suit quite yet. Järvinen’s Stellar Unlimited hadn’t perfected their shuttle. However, by all accounts, his innovative rockets and payload delivery program had been doing big business for the past thirty-six months.

  “Well,” I said to Dr. Donahue, Stellar Unlimited engineer extraordinaire. “Come on in.”

  No one lurked behind her in the hall, but I quickly locked the door once she’d stepped across the threshold. I didn’t turn my back on her, either. And I certainly didn’t flash the weapon I held at my side.

  Still, Dr. Donahue said, “Do you usually answer the door with a gun in your hand?”

  “That depends,” I replied. I holstered the weapon, pointed her through the gloom and toward the wedge of light that arrowed from my inner sanctum’s desk lamp. “Do you usually knock on the doors to dark offices after business hours?”

  Dr. Donahue’s smile hitched a little higher. “I suppose, given your occupation, there’s no such thing as too careful.”

  “If there is,” I admitted, “I haven’t come across it.”

  And that was the truth. Three weeks ago, I’d intended to be very careful when I’d taken on the hunt for a missing woman at the behest of a certain DEA agent who’d wanted more than my professional involvement. Despite my precautions, however, I’d ended up in a Texas Hill Country hospital with a concussion—and making a mess of things between me and the military cop who made my heart beat faster. But that was neither here nor there. And given that that military cop, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett, was still doing penance on an army post over a thousand miles away from Washington, DC, for bad decisions he’d made when a cold case in his hometown had heated up again, careful was all I had to keep me company.

  I clamped down on that rumination, however, rolled up Scotty Handemann’s schematic, and stuffed it into a cardboard cylinder while Dr. Donahue settled into the funky Eames chair opposite mine.

  She said, “I couldn’t take a chance on being seen coming here, but I had a hunch you might stay to work after closing.”

  “And who helped you with that hunch?”

  Again, her smile flickered. “I’d rather not say.”

  Such reticence wasn’t unusual. Nobody liked to admit they had a problem the cops couldn’t solve. Consequently, I wasn’t in the habit of demanding references—but I sure liked ’em when I could get ’em.

  Apparently, Dr. Donahue wanted a little reassurance as well. She said, “Would it be presumptuous to ask whether this conversation is confidential?”

  As if I were merely taking notes, I slid my laptop to the center of my work surface. I typed Madeline Donahue and Stellar Unlimited in the browser’s search bar. A wealth of websites popped up, including an article put out by the company’s in-house public relations team. The headline boasted “Director of Innovative Engineering Wins Department of Defense Grant,” and the woman in the accompanying photo was the spittin’ image of the one sitting across from me.

  “Anything you confide goes no farther than this room,” I assured her.

  Dr. Donahue eased back in her guest chair.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  And then she told me her story.

  “Last month, someone hacked into Stellar Unlimited’s local area network. They seized our servers and essentially held them hostage. No one at the company could access email, retrieve files, or issue payments, let alone perform complicated tasks like simulations or launching a payload.”

  “Then you need a cyber forensics specialist. Not me.” I drew a scratch pad across my desk, began to jot down the particulars of a cyber forensics specialist I knew. He was fifteen years old and still lived in the baby-blue bedroom his parents had painted for him before he was born.

  “The hacking wasn’t the end of it.” Dr. Donahue’s gray gloves creaked as her hands knotted in her lap. “We had a ransom demand.”

  I nodded. I’d heard of such things. A couple of years ago, a major Canadian university fell victim to hackers who held their entire computer system hostage. As a result, instruction and research ground to a standstill. And if that kind of information could be laid bare, anything could be done with it. Students’ grades could be altered. Payroll could be stolen. The faculty retirement fund could end up on the fast track down the tubes.

  “We paid,” Dr. Donahue said, “the first time.”

  “And now your hacker’s come back for a second touch.”

  She nodded. “That’s why I’ve flown in from California. His instructions were very clear. This time, he wants me to deliver the cash. In person.”

  But that didn’t sit right with me. Typically, cybercriminals liked to get paid electronically, through Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies that can be converted to cash quickly, easily, and practically anonymously from anywhere in the world. I rocked back in my chair and watched Dr. Donahue closely.

  I said, “Making a delivery can be incredibly dangerous.”

  “That’s why I’ve come to see you. We want you to go with me.”

  “You said he.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said his instructions were very clear. You said he wants you to personally deliver the ransom.”

  “Yes, well, there’s one more thing. We think we may know who’s blackmailing us. His name is Robert Fraley. He led our robotics team, but we had to let him go. Now he lives here. In Fairfax, to be specific.”

  Fairfax was a pretty little suburban community just outside DC’s infamous Beltway.

  And with its multitude of universities and companies under contract with the Department of Defense, it would be chock-full of opportunities for someone with robotics on his résumé.

  I said, “I take it you haven’t contacted this Robert Fraley directly.”

  “God, no. Besides, he’d never admit to any wrongdoing now, even though he left Stellar Unlimited under a pretty d
ark cloud in February.”

  “How dark?”

  Dr. Donahue shrugged a shoulder. “Robert fell for his research assistant. It happens, I guess. But his wife took exception to it. She sued him for divorce. For some stupid reason, that’s when Robert decided he wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

  “He began drinking heavily…and following her. He was subtle about it at first. You know, showing up at her favorite coffee shop whenever she made plans to meet a friend. Then he graduated to planting himself outside her office and shouting at her window. Sometimes he bellowed poetry. Sometimes threats. It wasn’t long after that that we realized the research assistant had taken to running Robert’s lab for him. Given the sensitivity of our research—and its global economic and political implications—that was a big no-no.”

  “How did Fraley take his firing?”

  “Not well. I had to be the one who called him onto the carpet. Neither of us enjoyed the experience.”

  “So, this isn’t a little hacking to plump up a bank account. This is revenge served cold. Maybe against you, Dr. Donahue.”

  My visitor didn’t deny it.

  She wouldn’t quite meet my eye, either.

  I rose from my desk, rounded it, and offered my would-be client the best advice I had to give.

  “Go see this Robert Fraley,” I told her. “It’s been easy for him to hide behind his computer screen and make demands of you. But if you show up on his doorstep, he won’t be able to hide from you anymore.”

  “I…I can’t do that. We have no actual proof that Robert’s behind the hacking or the financial demand. I’d look like a fool—and so would Stellar Unlimited.”