Outriders (16 page)

Though Davis hadn’t shared any of the conclusions that her team had reached, she’d included summaries of analysis from several of her team members in the packets she’d prepared. Lincoln had read through all of them and, as far as Henry’s murder was concerned, the general consensus amongst the analysts of the 23rd seemed to fall along the lines of “wrong place, wrong time”. There was no question that it had been a hit, well planned and well executed. But as far as the analysts could tell, there just weren’t any signs that Henry had been targeted specifically, except perhaps as a tangential associate of Dekker. A target of opportunity, at best. If it hadn’t been for LOCKSTEP, it was doubtful anyone would have blinked at the loss of Henry Sann.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, there was no direct video feed from the surveillance cameras in and around the hotel where Henry was killed. The attacking party had disrupted the coverage of the area about twenty minutes on either side of the event, as best as the 23rd could figure. That they’d had that level of sophistication elevated the hitters above common street-level, but was still consistent with the capabilities of a rival organization. Though a few eyewitness recordings had emerged, none of them had captured any useful material.

The crime scene investigators did, however, have ample footage of the immediate aftermath, and Lincoln had spent a couple of hours scrubbing through the feed and slicing out still images of shots that caught his attention. He closed out the panel containing the report on Dekker and brought up the stack of images again. For many of the stills, Lincoln hadn’t been consciously aware of what had given him pause. At the time, it hadn’t mattered. Any time he found himself scrubbing back and forward through a section more than once, he clipped it. Now, having given his eyes a rest by focusing on something else, he cycled through the images one at a time.

He’d seen enough of it up close and personal that the carnage didn’t affect him on an emotional level. And in a strange way, there was something pure and simple about the process of analyzing the scene of an attack. Violence always told a story, if you knew how to read it. When you saw it firsthand, there was no way to hide its truth, no obscuring its intent. And firsthand experience made it easier to read the aftermath, to recognize the patterns. But Lincoln kept coming back to a close shot of Henry’s body, curled on the ground with blood pooled by his head and a rivulet trailing away towards the eastern exit, as if it too sought to escape the brutality that had befallen the courtyard. He pulled that image off to one side and then flipped through the others until he found a similar image of Dekker’s body. Lincoln didn’t know why, but his gut told him the general consensus had it wrong. This hadn’t just been some inter-gang takedown.

“Mike,” Lincoln said.

“Yeah?” Pence answered from the floor, without taking his arm away from his eyes.

“The hitters. How would you rate them in terms of professionalism?”

“There’s no question they’re top-tier, sir,” Mike said. “I’d say ex-military or high-level personal protection. Ex-law enforcement, maybe, but I think that’s an outside chance.”

“Why so sure?” Lincoln asked, even though he agreed.

Sergeant Pence rolled up off the floor and came over to stand behind Lincoln. He held up a hand next to Lincoln’s stack of images.

“You mind?” he said.

“No, go ahead,” Lincoln said.

Mike scrolled through the stack and slid one image out that Lincoln hadn’t given much attention. It was of a man in the hotel, up on the fourth floor, if Lincoln recalled the details correctly. He’d been shot once, through the chest. The flexiglass window had a spiderwebbed hole about a half-inch in diameter punched out of it. A compact rifle sat on a table near the window, set up on a bipod but off to one side, out of view of the window. Lincoln recognized it as a takedown rifle, one that could be easily disassembled to fit in a small case. Easier to transport, easier to conceal.

Pence tapped the bullet hole in the window with his forefinger.

“Counter-sniper,” he answered. “That’s hard work, even if you know to look for it.” He then tapped the rifle on the table, assembled but apparently otherwise untouched. “This guy up here on the fourth floor didn’t have much of a chance to do anything, which says to me that he’d been detected before it all went down. So you’re looking at an experienced crew here, not some gang-war spillover. And I don’t mean just experienced hit squad.”

Lincoln nodded.

“So we have primary shooter in the courtyard, with Henry, and then overwatch somewhere outside,” Lincoln said. “Two, minimum.”

“And a driver for exfil,” Mike added. “Probably.”

“Could have just used an on-demand,” Coleman said from across the table. She was still intent on whatever she was reviewing, but somehow managed to follow along with their conversation at the same time. “Or preprogrammed one.”

“Could have, sure,” Mike said. “But I don’t think so. I’m guessing a team that careful wouldn’t leave it to chance. If things went bad, security could lock the whole area down. I get the impression our friends here were the four-levels-deep kind of planners.”

“You think military then,” Lincoln said.

Mike nodded. “What’s your take?”

“The same,” Lincoln said. “Looks sloppier than it actually was.” He pulled up three images of the courtyard with an overlay indicating where rounds had impacted. “Mid-morning in the cafe, all these extra rounds fired, and yet no collateral damage. They only hit the people they intended to. And, if you’ve got someone good enough to do that,” he pointed to the picture showing the sniper’s work, “no need to have a shooter in the target zone.”

“So we have conscientious killers,” Mike said.

“Like you said,” Lincoln said. “Top-tier professionals. So I think that pulls a couple of these folks off the list.” He returned to the images of suspects displayed on the wall and adjusted the transparency on the panels for two terrorist groups and one organized crime cartel, leaving just their ghosts behind. “I’m saying it’s not these guys. Anybody got problems with that?” Everyone took a moment to check out the changes, but no one offered any objections.

“Not yet, anyway,” Wright said, returning to her work with Sahil.

Lincoln likewise went back to his own analysis, and found himself once again focused on the image of Henry’s body. Something wasn’t sitting right, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was.

“Walk through this with me again,” Lincoln said. He brought up an image from the Elliston medical examiner’s report, all the violence reduced down to five man-shaped black outlines on a plain white background. Lincoln closed out the ones representing the security team for the moment. In the simplified depiction of Dekker, there were four markings indicating the locations of the entry points of the rounds. There were no exit wounds. Three of the shots were scattered around the torso: low right, near the appendix; center right side, through a lung; mid-center, an inch or so above the solar plexus. The fourth, and presumably final, shot was about a quarter-inch off center from being right between Dekker’s eyes.

“The official version goes like this: the shooting starts, Dekker gets three rounds in the torso,” Lincoln said, pointing to those markers, and then over to Henry’s image. “And Henry gets hit by a stray, here, through the neck.”

Henry’s image also showed four wounds: the entry and exit wounds through the neck, and then two more entry wounds in the center of his chest. Well placed.

“Dekker then gets it in the head, so that makes him the primary target. Then Henry gets cornered, and they finish him off. Target of opportunity.” Lincoln tapped the two indicators in Henry’s chest.

“Two rounds, center of mass,” he continued. “Those were the kill shots. This here,” he pointed to Henry’s neck wounds, “is a fairly clean pass-through. He maybe could have survived, if he’d gotten aid fast enough. So here’s the kicker for me.” Lincoln cleared out the panels with the coroner’s report and brought up the background profile on Sann. He pointed at the relevant facts as he talked through them. “Henry’s not your usual NID civilian officer. He’d been doing this sort of thing for a long time. Before NID, he was law enforcement. Worked gang units, organized crime, under cover. Moved to contracting for UAF, ran with high-risk details in Mumbai, Jakarta, all over the Philippines during the war. So he can obviously handle himself. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would freeze up when shots start popping off. Nor does he seem like the type to lie down and let himself bleed out from a small-caliber wound.”

Lincoln looked back at the actual image of Henry’s body, collapsed on the ground, and focused in on the wound through Henry’s neck. And now, having talked it out, saw what it was that had been bothering him. Sann’s shirt had dark splotches from his chest injuries. But there was hardly any blood around the collar or shoulders. Not like it would have been if he’d been upright when he’d taken the wound. Mike saw it too.

“They shot him in the neck after he was already on the ground,” Mike said.

“Yeah,” Lincoln said. “And why would they do that? If they were trying to guarantee the kill, why not the head?”

“Because they’re pros, trying to look like amateurs.”

“And they don’t want anyone to think he’s the primary,” Lincoln added.

Coleman was looking up at them now.

“Shouldn’t the Elliston police have picked up on that? If that round went clean through his neck, there’d be a bullet impact somewhere underneath him.”

“I don’t think they did the most thorough job checking this one out,” Lincoln said, shaking his head. “Once they ID’d Dekker, I’m guessing they wrote it off as some kind of bad-guy-on-bad-guy hit. Henry was the only victim they didn’t already have a sheet on, and I’m sure NID did a good job making sure the locals didn’t find anything worth investigating further.”

“So Sann was the target. Dekker and his guards were the cover,” she said.

Lincoln didn’t like the implications of that, but when Coleman said it, he felt tension release, as if he’d just solved a particularly difficult crossword puzzle. It was the only way the pieces all fit together.

“That’s how it looks to me,” Lincoln said.

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Yeah, I can see that. Don’t much like it, though.”

“Me neither,” Coleman said. “Because I can’t see my way around LOCKSTEP being anything other than a direct attack on our intelligence gathering abilities.”

“What makes you say that?” Wright asked from the far end of the table.

“Because somebody got deep into their sensor systems to make sure they never saw it coming,” Coleman answered. She ran light fingers over the holotable’s controls and expanded the panel she’d been looking at for the past couple of hours, and sent it to the head of the table where everyone could get a good view. Lincoln couldn’t make any sense of the stream of characters. “You want me to walk you through it, or you just want to take my word for it?”

Lincoln had gone through all the basic training on code like everybody else, but he’d never taken it any farther than absolutely required. Even so, as much as he wanted to take Coleman’s word for it, he needed to understand her reasoning.

“Give me the executive summary,” he said. And then added, “But the idiot’s version.”

“Oh, you mean the
officer’s
summary, then,” she said with a quick smile. “Easy day. You know how a sensor suite works on a hop…?”

“Remind me,” Lincoln said.

“Yeah, OK,” Coleman said, and she leaned back in her chair. “A refresher then. Space is big, it’s got a lot of stuff floating around in it. If you’re out there, mostly you don’t want any of that other stuff floating into you.”

“Maybe not the
complete
idiot’s version, sergeant,” Lincoln said.

She held up a hand. “I’m getting to it. On a hop, you’re not usually moving all that fast. By galactic standards, you might as well be stationary. And space is big, like, really big, right? So you can’t see everything all the time. So most stations don’t even try. They just keep track of things that are close enough to matter.”

“Which is relative,” Lincoln said, to show he was following along.

“Which is relative, right,” Coleman said with a nod. “Very good, sir.” When she said that, Mike glanced over at Lincoln with an amused look and gave him a one-shoulder shrug that told him Coleman most likely didn’t actually
mean
to be condescending.

“A rock a thousand klicks out and moving towards you fast enough,” she continued, “matters a whole lot more than one that’s just about in your hip pocket but not moving at all. So just because something’s far away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. And in space, things can be really,
really
far away, and still matter.

“Sensor suites… they have to be a combination of active and passive. Active sensors shoot signals out, and measure whether or not anything comes back. But you can’t rely solely on those, because what if you miss, right? So you complement them with passive sensors, which just soak up whatever’s coming their way. And you can’t rely solely on
those
, because not everything’s emitting something for you to soak up, and also because there’s so much other stuff out there spewing radiation at you that doesn’t matter. You’ve got to filter out the vast majority of what you’re picking up. So you use the active sensors to check up on whatever the passives are telling you about, and vice versa. A passive sensor’s like ‘Hey man, do we need to be worried about this?’ and a couple of actives check it out and one says, ‘Nah, don’t sweat it,’ and another one says, ‘Looks OK to me’, and a third one says, ‘Man, I don’t even see what you’re looking at’. That sort of thing.”

Lincoln was beginning to wish he’d just taken Coleman’s word for it. She must have read it on his face, because she held up her pointer finger and nodded.

“I know,” she said. “Hold on, you’ll see how all this matters in just a minute. One more thing, and then I’ll get to the good part, promise. To make things even more complicated, your long-range active sensors have to have a really tight beam to make sure the signal doesn’t dissipate over distance to the point that it becomes useless. The problem is, space is really,
really
big, so at the distances we’re talking, a thousandth of a degree of variation in your tight-beam sensor might be the difference between seeing a hundred meter-wide rock hurtling at you and missing it completely. Even the vibrations from normal operation can make a sensor beam hit an object one second and miss it the next. You can’t count on sensors being able to consistently track the same object. So you have to sample it, take an aggregate, do all kinds of crazy math to figure out whether or not it’s something you should be worried about.