BAD DEEDS: A Dylan Hunter Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers)

by Robert Bidinotto

  She scribbled down his name and “SS Energy Audits” from the paperwork he gave her. “So you are a contractor for the EPA?”

  “That’s right.” He flipped to the second page and pointed to a line. “See, it’s right here. Like I said, this is for their annual energy award programs. EPA hires us to do energy efficiency audits of nominated companies.” He looked around. “And I can see why this company is a finalist.”

  “So what, exactly, do you have to do?”

  “Just unscrew and check the thermostats in your offices, see if they’re working properly.” He tugged the brim of his baseball cap. “Do some ambient air-quality readings in the A/C ducts. Then check the solar panels up on the roof. Those are your company’s, right?”

  “Yes. We had them installed when we moved into these offices.”

  “I see you’re watching the clock. Don’t worry, I promise I’ll be out of here before four-thirty.”

  “Oh sure, then, go ahead. Our president will be so excited when I tell him we’re a finalist.”

  He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Well, frankly, I shouldn’t have told you that much. Finalists are supposed to be confidential till the official announcement next month. But if things turn out like I expect, I think your boss will be in for a big surprise.”

  She laughed. “If you’re right, Mr. Stone, I can’t wait to see the look on Mr. Sloan’s face.”

  He laughed, too. “Call me Shane.”

  Dressed in his long coat and carrying a large paper bag, Hunter took the stairs down from his ninth-floor apartment. A minute later, still carrying the paper bag, he emerged from the stairwell into the sixth-floor hallway wearing a gray trench coat, blond wig, mustache, and glasses. He nodded to a man waiting for the elevator and continued down to the end of the hall. After checking an unobtrusive telltale, which hadn’t been disturbed, he entered the apartment of Wayne Grayson, investment advisor.

  This second apartment fulfilled multiple roles, especially now that the police knew about Hunter’s residence three floors above. It was a nearby place to bolt to, quickly and discreetly, during a police raid or other emergency. It served as a cache for items that he could not afford to be linked to Dylan Hunter. It allowed him to keep a couple more vehicles in the building’s garage, including the BMW 7 Series sedan, registered to the innocuous and seldom-seen Mr. Grayson.

  It also permitted him to maintain independent systems for secure communications, just in case the cops or some enemy ever tried to bug Hunter’s apartment or hack his computer and phone. That was the role it was serving now.

  He closed and bolted the door, left the bag containing his coat on a nearby chair, then disarmed the alarm system. He added the raincoat he was wearing to the pile on the chair and walked casually around the room closing the curtains, just as any law-abiding citizen might.

  He spent the next five minutes sweeping the place for planted bugs. Finding none, he moved to the closed door of the interior bedroom, which he had set up as an office. It was the only room without a window, insuring a greater level of privacy. He checked another unmolested telltale before entering.

  Next, he powered up the waiting laptop. Following Wonk’s instructions, he inserted the thumb drive, and from it installed email client software that the researcher had customized. He launched the program and tweaked its settings to retrieve email from Dylan Hunter’s public email account—but routed through a high-anonymity proxy server that Wonk had established for other secretive clients. This would create an additional barrier to anyone trying to track back his email correspondence.

  All this took a while, but once everything was ready, Hunter let the software retrieve his waiting email. He watched as the stream of messages downloaded.

  “Ah … there you are.”

  Both Sloan and Lockwood had replied to emails he’d sent them earlier in the day. Sloan’s note was terse. He didn’t know when he’d be able to reschedule an appointment, or “if it would even be worthwhile, given that you already seem to have made up your mind about the facts.” Lockwood was blunter, reiterating that NLA was weighing legal action, and that any further communication should be through the firm’s attorneys. He found no email replies from Weaver or Trammel.

  It didn’t matter; he already had what he needed.

  He reopened Sloan’s message. Using the “redirect” function in the customized email software, he created a new email. Then he used a second program that Wonk had provided—routing modification software—to strip out all prior header routing information, except for Sloan’s. He then deleted Sloan’s subject line and the text of his reply.

  Now he had a blank message whose routing header—even if expanded and checked—would seem to have originated directly from Sloan himself.

  He typed in on the subject line: “Re: Inquirer reporter”

  In the body, he wrote:

  “All:

  “The attached from a quick web search re: DH. Not much, but perhaps useful if you have not seen it. Delete this after reading. No need to reply; out of office.

  “Damon”

  In the “BCC” field of the message, he typed in the email addresses he had compiled for Lockwood, Weaver, and Crane. He liked that touch: It made it appear that Sloan was trying to keep the recipients’ names confidential by blind-copying them.

  Finally, he copied a third file from Wonk’s thumb drive onto his computer, then attached it to the new email message. It was a JPEG copy of a newspaper article about the role Dylan Hunter’s articles had played during the recent wave of vigilante killings in Washington. However, Wonk had embedded some hidden code in the image file.

  “Bombs away,” he said as he clicked the “Send” button on the doctored message and watched it vanish from the screen.

  He had one more task. From the office’s walk-in closet he rolled out a tray table containing a military-grade, full-spectrum radio receiver. He plugged it in, got it running, and adjusted it to scan between several specific frequencies.

  One frequency was set for the bug that he had hidden in the thermostat in Sloan’s CarboNot office. Its signal was amplified by a relay transmitter he had attached to a solar panel on their roof.

  Another frequency was set for the bug in the radon detector that he had installed unobtrusively in Gavin Lockwood’s office. Its signal was amplified by a relay transmitter hidden in the basement of the building housing Nature Legal Advocacy.

  The last frequency was set for the bug inside the bust of John Muir on Jonathan Weaver’s desk at the EPA. Unlike the others, its signal had started up on a timer delay, so that it would pass through security undetected. That signal was amplified by a relay transmitter housed in a nondescript, locked metal container bearing the stenciled words “EPA AIR QUALITY MONITORING,” along with the agency logo. He’d placed it beside some water control meters in a courtyard outside the Ariel Rios Building.

  The scanner test showed that all the transmitters and bugs were functioning.

  He checked the time. Almost midnight. Nothing much would happen over the weekend.

  He turned off the receiver, powered down the laptop. Got up, stretched, and yawned. It would be nice to get a couple nights of uninterrupted sleep. He would need it for what lay ahead.

  Now, the only thing left to do was to provoke them to communicate with each other.

  He had already planned the provocations.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Dick Wilson peered ahead through the smeared windshield. That, the sleet, and the weak street lights in the business park made it hard to see a damned thing.

  “You spot it?”

  “Not yet.” Andy Elias sat next to him in the cab of the truck. “I think it must be up past that next building on the right.”

  Dick tapped the gas a little more, and the flatbed hauling its heavy, oversized load moved forward. They drifted past the two-story office building to a flat-topped, single-story one. It was obviously new—no grass in front, just lumpy dirt frosted with a few patches of snow. Jus
t beyond it, a driveway curved into a parking lot.

  “There he is,” Andy said, pointing. Dick leaned forward and spotted him—a guy standing under a light in the lot, next to an SUV. He hit the turn signal—just habit, nobody out here on a Saturday night—and moved down through the gears, slowing the rig to make the wide turn into the lot. He pulled up beside the guy and rolled down the window.

  “Where you want it?” he yelled out over the idling engine.

  The guy wore a parka with the fur hood up, half-masking his face against the sleet. “Offload it right over there, near the edge of the lot.” He pointed.

  It took Dick a bit of back-and-forth to position the rig. Then he shut it down and set the brakes. He and Andy got out and unhooked the four tie-down chains from their anchors, followed by the tie-downs on the boom and bucket. They lowered the ramps onto the pavement. Andy climbed into the machine on the bed, powered it up, raised and curled up the bucket, then eased it down the ramps while Dick guided him.

  The guy walked up, face tilted down against the sleet. “I really appreciate you delivering it all the way out here at this ungodly hour.”

  “Hey, you’re paying for our O.T.,” Dick said, laughing.

  “Mind if I take a quick peek inside?” the guy asked. “We can do the paperwork in there.”

  “Like I said, we’re on your clock.”

  They stepped up on the track and Andy opened the door to the operator cab for them. It was a squeeze for them all to fit.

  The guy took off his glove and stuck out his hand. “I’m Rob.” He kept the hood on; Dick could only make out his grin in the darkened cab. They went through the introductions.

  “Why you need this delivered now?” Andy asked. “You working Sunday?”

  Rob laughed. “Crazy, isn’t it?” He nodded toward the building. “We just put up that place. Now they get a big new contract and decide they don’t have enough space. So we gotta start on the new foundation and work 24/7 if we’re gonna get the expansion wing up by late April.”

  “They must have money to burn,” Dick said. “What do they do?”

  “You know—the usual thievery.”

  They all chuckled.

  “I got the paperwork here for you to sign,” Dick said, reaching inside his jacket.

  “And I gotta pen here,” Rob said, reaching into his shirt pocket.

  “You just initial there, and there—that’s the rental liability and damage waivers. Then you sign down there at the bottom … Okay, I see you left them a big deposit. If you keep the digger out here over a week, they’ll take whatever extra you owe out of your refund.”

  Rob paused, pen in hand. “I won’t need it that long.” He reached out with the pen and tapped the joystick controls. “These things handle a lot easier than when I was a kid. You shoulda seen what my dad had to work with.”

  “He in construction?”

  “Yeah. Big Mike—that’s what everyone called him—he ran his own company.”

  Rob leaned down again and scrawled his name on the paper.

  “There you go. Thanks again. You guys did me a big favor, comin’ out here this late on a Saturday night. Here—let me give you a few bucks extra. Go buy yourselves a beer and thaw out before you go home … Naw, take it—I insist.”

  “Well, thanks,” Andy said, smiling and pocketing the twenty. “I sure hope this job is worth your while.”

  Dick saw Rob’s teeth flash again in the dark.

  “It ain’t work if you enjoy what you do.”

  It took a few minutes for them to maneuver the big flatbed out of the lot and down the street. He watched them go. Then he turned to the excavator perched on the pavement. It was similar to an oversized backhoe that ran on tracks, like a bulldozer. From a distance in the dim, misty light, it looked like a mechanical brontosaurus.

  He climbed back into the cab, settled into the seat. He hadn’t been at the controls of anything like this since he was a teenager, with his dad, Big Mike, beside him to show him how and to make sure he didn’t screw up. But you could learn almost anything these days from YouTube.

  He closed his eyes for a few seconds, recalling the sequence in the video clip he had seen posted. He pushed forward a red handle at his left, freeing the lock. Then turned the ignition switch on the console to his right. A brief high-pitched squeal, and the engine was running.

  Tentatively, he pulled back the right-hand joystick. The boom rose smoothly and obediently, lifting the basket from the pavement where Donnie had rested it.

  Now to get this beast moving.

  He wanted to go forward, so he put his hands on the twin sticks in front of him—one controlling each of the tracks—and pushed them forward. The excavator began to roll backward.

  Damn.

  He stopped, remembering the video. Counterintuitively, the controls worked in the opposite direction. He pulled the sticks back, toward himself, and the big machine began to roll forward.

  So far, so good …

  He released the right-hand stick, pulling the left one only, and it began a slow pivot. When it was facing the back of the parking lot he pulled back on both sticks again, and it lumbered forward. He went off the pavement and across the soil, maneuvering into position behind the building.

  He stopped there. It took a few minutes to get the hang of the SAE joysticks, which maneuvered the boom and its bucket. He pulled back the right-hand joystick to raise the boom high, moved it right to open the bucket, then pushed the left-hand joystick forward, extending the boom outward.

  Taking another deep breath, he pulled back on the other sticks and the excavator rumbled across the frozen earth toward the back wall of the building. When he was close, he stopped again.

  He pushed the right-hand joystick forward, and the bucket came crashing down onto the roof of the offices of Capital Resources Development.

  It made a lot of noise. He winced. Even though the business park was a good distance from any residential area, sound carried at night. It wouldn’t be long before somebody wondered who in hell was making such a racket so late on a Saturday night. He’d have to hurry.

  Fortunately, ripping a building apart took infinitely less time and expertise than putting one up.

  Gavin Lockwood sprawled across his padded wicker sofa in the big glass-enclosed porch of his estate. A half-empty crystal coffee cup rested on a glass-topped table nearby, and the Sunday Post lay at his feet in scattered remnants on the polished oak floor. Last night’s wintry mix had pushed off to the east, leaving clear skies. Though it was still frigid outside, the morning sun had warmed the porch enough that he felt quite comfortable lounging out here in his monogrammed green silk bathrobe, a recent birthday present from Selena.

  From the house’s perch atop the hill he watched the sun dance on the Severn River below. He loved the water. He much preferred this big Arts and Craft home, just a few miles north of downtown Annapolis, to his two-bedroom apartment at the Watergate, which, though smartly appointed, had a city view and felt claustrophobic. That place was a reluctant necessity; a daily commute into the D.C. office of Nature Legal Advocacy from out here was too inconvenient. But this was his weekend retreat.

  The home had been in his family for generations. He’d inherited it along with a formidable trust fund, both fruits of his grandfather’s department-store fortune. His eyes scanned the five acres that sloped down to the river, finding rest on another byproduct of that wealth: Sundancer, his 60-foot Bermuda Cutter, tied up at the dock. He couldn’t wait for summer, when he could take her out, put up her sails, and feel the spray in his face.

  His gaze moved to the lot next door. It was still undeveloped, and Lockwood was determined that it would stay that way. It had been part of a large estate whose owner had died without a proper will, letting the place fall into ruin during a decade of legal battles among the heirs. A few years ago the house had been torn down, and the land was subdivided and sold off piecemeal. Now, young oaks and maples had taken over the adjacent parcel, providi
ng spectacular fall color against the blue of the river, and a buffer against the intrusive sight of other homes. But three months ago some Wall Street shark had bought the parcel, aiming to put up a summer home.

  It incensed him that some rich bastard could just waltz in here, knock down all those trees, stick up some garish McMansion, and mar his commanding southern view of the river. Just one more incremental crime against the environment. So he’d spoken to local conservation groups, the zoning board, and the planning commission. For openers, he demanded a wildlife audit on the property and a study of potential hazards from runoff into the river during the construction. One way or the other, he was determined to raise legal obstacles and regulatory compliance costs to the point where the guy would give up and go away.

  He sipped his coffee, finding it had grown cold. He was weighing the wisdom of a third cup when Selena rushed onto the porch, startling him. She wore pink exercise sweats and an alarmed expression.

  “It’s Senator Conn,” she whispered, his own cell phone outthrust in her hand. “He sounds really upset.”

  He sat bolt upright and grabbed the phone.

  “Good morning, Senator. I trust that … Well, no. I haven’t watched any …”

  His grip tightened on the phone.

  “They did what?”

  Ed Cronin sat on his bed tying his sneakers when his cell buzzed. He fished it from his pocket and saw that it was his partner, Erskine. He frowned. On a Sunday morning?

  “Yeah, Paul.”

  “You see that new Inquirer article yesterday by our old pal Dylan Hunter?”

  When Erskine opened a conversation this way, it was never to bring good news.

  “About CarboNot—that ‘green energy’ company. Sure. Why?”

  “You know how we both thought he might be involved with the vigilantes, until you said you got confidential information that ruled him out?”

  Cronin felt a stab of guilt. No, Paul—I didn’t rule him out. But I was ordered to tell you that. “What about it?”