The Kill Order
I
owe a debt of gratitude to the usual suspects who have helped me with some of the details that bring the best out in a story. Sometimes I have to stretch reality to fit my plot. Any factual errors are mine. Come to think of it, any fictional errors are mine, as well. To (retired) supervising Special Agent George Fong, FBI, who always ensures that my FBI elements are based on reality. To (retired) Sergeant Dale Miller, LPD, my expert on explosive devices, who has helped me through several books and short stories to ensure that anything that explodes does so with a semblance of believability. To author Susan Crosby, my friend who has faithfully read each of my books all these years, offering the best of advice that has added to the story. To my mother, Francesca Santoro, who has helped me with all the various European locations, those we visited together, and those with which she had personal experience. To my friend Paolo Magnanimi, of Rome, Italy, the owner of the wonderful restaurant Hostaria Antica Roma (who asked to be an assassin in this book! Your wish has been granted!), who kindly helped me with some Italian translations. Thank you all.
Of course a book wouldn’t be published without those who work behind the scenes. To my agent, Jane Chelius, for being there for me. To everyone at HarperCollins for all the hard work. And to my editor, Lyssa Keusch, (who always manages to make me laugh with some of her comments in the side margins), my books are always better because of you.
The only secure computer is one that’s unplugged, locked in a safe, and buried twenty feet under the ground in a secret location . . . and I’m not even too sure about that one.
Dennis Hughes, FBI
One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it has promised. Betrayal, though . . . betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope.
Steven Deitz
Contents
South San Francisco, California
P
iper Lawrence eyed the cigarettes in the pocket of the man sitting next to her on the bus. She’d given up smoking a year ago, because she couldn’t afford it
and
community college. Or anything else for that matter. Books cost a fortune. Food wasn’t exactly cheap, either. But sometimes people tucked money in their packs—she used to. Besides, pickpocketing kept her skills sharp, and in this case it wasn’t really going to harm anyone.
Her stop was coming up, and she waited for the bounce that always occurred as the bus crossed this particular intersection . . . Then, “Sorry,” she said, accidentally bumping into the man as she rose from her seat. She moved toward the front, holding on to the handrail. As the bus slowed, then stopped, she hurried down the steps, and the door swished closed behind her, sending a slight gust of air at her back as the bus took off.
The cigarette pack felt slightly heavier than it should, and she was curious, but figured it wasn’t wise to open it there, in case the guy discovered it missing too soon. She quickened her pace, turned the corner, and walked the two blocks to her destination, a small business park filled with warehouses, most subdivided into small shops. It was located in the city of South San Francisco, on the east side of Highway 101. Her friend’s shop wasn’t in the nicest of areas, but this time of night it was quiet.
About to open the pack, she hesitated when she saw a black sedan parked near the corner. The streetlamp cast just enough light for her to see two men sitting in the front seat, and a third man with gray hair standing at their open window. Apparently the conversation had concluded, and he started to walk away, but the driver called him back, saying, “Hey, Brooks.” The man returned to the car.
The vehicle faced the direction she was headed, and she couldn’t see the two men he was talking to, or hear what they were saying. For a moment, though, she thought this Brooks guy was the gray-haired man from the bus, waiting with undercover detectives to arrest her for pickpocketing. Then again, she’d been in the back of a few cop cars. Around here they drove those big Fords, she thought as the gray-haired man turned, looked right at her. She realized then that he was not the same person at all, and she chided herself.
How stupid to think they’d send out detectives over a pack of smokes, and she wondered why these men were here at all. This time of night, everything in the area was closed.
Drugs? Probably not. They didn’t look the type.
Since none of them seemed interested in her, she ignored them, crossed the street, and opened the cigarette pack, thereby discovering it contained a few cigarettes and a lighter, which was probably why it felt heavy.
Waste of talent, she thought, then pushed open the door of her friend Bo Brewer’s shop. Bo fixed things for a living. Today it was copy machines. Tomorrow it would be something else, depending on what he bought from the government surplus auctions. In the most recent lot, he’d purchased seven copy machines, all the same model, all in various states of repair. The fact he was able to buy perfectly good office equipment for so cheap was, in his opinion, why the government was broke. He’d quickly fixed two machines by swapping out parts, estimating that he could sell the pair for what he’d paid for the lot, which meant that he’d already recouped his investment.
Bo looked up as she walked in. “Hey,” he said, then bent back down over his keyboard, typing something into his computer.
“You realize there’s two guys sitting in a car out there? Some guy talking to them. Kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“Saw it there earlier. Probably the cops. I think the auto repair shop next door is dealing in stolen car parts.”
“Doesn’t look like a cop car.”
“If they’re undercover, it wouldn’t.”
“I brought you something.” She set the cigarettes and lighter on his desk.
“Who’d you steal that from?”
“Some guy on the bus.”
He went back to work.
After a long stretch of silence, she said, “Let’s go somewhere. A movie.”
He didn’t answer. It wasn’t that Bo was ignoring her. It was more that he was intent on what he was doing. A week ago after he’d finished breaking down the remaining machines, determining which could be used for parts and which would be repaired, he made the unfortunate-for-her discovery that the federal government had left the hard drives in the copy machines. The moment he tapped into a few, he’d become obsessed with reading what was on them. Especially one machine from the San Francisco FBI office because it had something on it besides the usual reports on bank robberies and white-collar crimes. A page filled with nothing but a list of numbers. Bo figured it was a code of some sort. Because he was a semidecent computer geek, it was now his mission in life to learn what it was, and he’d searched every which way on the Internet, even running it past one of his geekier friends.
He balked when the guy wanted to see the whole thing. He was paranoid. Nothing was safe on the Internet in his opinion, and so he never showed the entire list.
He did, however, give it to her to read, but it meant nothing to her. Numbers just sat in her head, literally and figuratively like dead weights, refusing to go away.
And tonight, he was still at it. Piper watched him for a few minutes, bored to tears, hoping he would have moved on. She liked him, a lot, but he didn’t seem to notice the attraction. In fact, the only time he seemed to pay attention was when he needed her to memorize a list. Like the stupid numbers.
Piper had an eidetic memory for anything she read, including long strings of useless numbers, the result of an injury to her left hemisphere at the age of twelve. Unfortunately all it did was turn her into a novelty when anyone found out, especially at parties. Bo was the only one who seemed not to be fazed. Until he’d found this list.
“Bo, you promised we’d do something tonight,” she said.
“We will. Soon.”
She sat on the edge of his file cabinet, eyeing the computer monitor. “Why are you still working on those things?”
“I think it’s some sort of program code. Why would they have copied it, unless it was something important?”
“At least take a break.” He started typing, and she wondered if he even knew she was there. Hell. Did he even know she was a woman? “You want to have sex?”
He stared at the computer, not hearing a word.
“We could do it right here. On the desk.”
“Wait a sec,” he said, typing fast.
“Isn’t that stuff supposed to be classified or something? It’s from the freaking FBI. What if they catch you?”
“This from the girl with the sticky fingers? They shouldn’t be leaving this stuff on hard drives if they don’t want someone reading it. Lucky for them it’s only me and not some terrorist, right? Besides, I erased the hard drive so I could reinstall it in the copy machine after I fix it.”
She hopped off the file cabinet and moved to the window, peering out the slats of the vinyl blinds. The car was still there, the two men sitting in it, but the third man was gone. “Maybe those guys waiting outside are the FBI. Coming to arrest you.”
“Yeah. Right. Besides, one touch of the button, this thing’s erased. They’ll have a hard time proving their case.”
“Can you play with this later? I’m hungry.”
“I called in for pizza right before you got here.” He held up his car keys. “I’ll share if you go pick it up . . . ?”
She took the keys, gave an exaggerated sigh of discontent—not that he paid the least bit of attention—then said, “Money?”
“Upstairs. And don’t take all of it!”
“Have a little faith, Bo. I don’t steal from my friends.”
She walked through the dark shop, then on up the stairs. Bo lived in the loft above the warehouse shop, even though the area wasn’t zoned for residential. Maybe not the nicest view out the second story window, unless you liked to watch cars on the freeway, but the neighborhood was quiet. And since the commercial warehouses closed at night, Bo had considerable privacy, something Piper cherished, since her own apartment complex had paper-thin walls and nosy neighbors to the extreme. She turned on the light, found his wallet on a mirrored tray at the kitchen counter, took out enough money for the pizza, then stopped. The strangest feeling swept over her, and she looked around, not sure what was wrong. And then it occurred to her that the window was open.
Strange, since Bo wasn’t the fresh-air sort, especially in winter, when he was paying for the heat. And it definitely was cold in here.
Shrugging it off, she turned out the light, and was just starting down the stairs when she heard the swish of the shop door opening.
She stopped in her tracks. Looked down the stairs, and though from up here she could see only their legs as they both headed straight for Bo’s office, she knew without a doubt they were the two men from the car. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize they weren’t there for a late night sale of used copier parts.
“Bo Brewer?” one said.
“Who’s asking?”
“You got something of ours. We traced it to your computer.”
“Are you the police?”
“We’re much bigger.”
Piper’s heart started a slow thud, and she stepped back in the shadows.
Please don’t let him get in trouble . . .
“The numbers you were running? Where’d you get them? And what are you trying to do with them?”
“I—I found them. I don’t even know what they are.”
“That right? From where?”
“A hard drive. I wasn’t doing anything with them. I just wanted to know what they were.”
“Where is it? The hard drive?”
She imagined him pointing to the bin on his desk as he said, “But it’s erased.”
“Listen real careful. I need to know
every
copy you made.”
“Just there. On the computer. But it’s erased. I swear.”
They were going to arrest him. Would they arrest her, too? She stuffed Bo’s keys in her pocket so they wouldn’t rattle, then backed up the stairs.
“Does anyone else know about this?”
“No. I swear.”
“What about the girl we saw? What does she know?”
“She’s, uh, upstairs. She looked at them, but that’s all,” Bo said.
Piper’s heart constricted. Why had Bo implicated her in this? She had at least two stolen credit cards in her apartment, and she wondered if they’d go there and search it.
“Get the computer.”
“Hey— Look. I’m erasing it. See? You don’t need to take that.”
“What the— Get that computer. Shut it off.”
Suddenly a hand clamped down on Piper’s mouth. Someone pulled back, hard. She waited for her neck to snap, wondered if she’d feel it. Her pulse thundered in her ears as he clamped tighter.
A gunshot echoed through the warehouse.
And before she could even grasp that Bo had been shot, that she was next, her captor put his mouth next to her ear, whispering, “I’d like for us to get out alive. So
don’t
make a sound.” He lowered his hand.
She was almost afraid to turn, but her would-be rescuer took her by the hand, pulled her to the kitchen area. She caught a glimpse of someone tall and broad-shouldered, in black clothing. “On the counter,” he whispered.
This didn’t make sense. She eyed him, and he pointed up. She looked, realized he was going to lift her into the rafters. Her gaze swung to the open window, and suddenly things started to make sense. And here she thought she was the cool thief. He’d climbed in the window, had hidden in the rafters, and had probably watched her when she’d walked upstairs to get the money.
He took her by the waist, lifted her onto the counter, followed, then hoisted her so that she could grasp on to the lower crossbeam in the rafters.
What she couldn’t do was pull herself up beyond hanging there with the beam beneath her armpits, and then she heard that voice from the office. “Look for the girl upstairs. I’ll look down here.”
“Right.”
Her rescuer was unfazed. He gave a hop, grasped the lower beam, pulled himself up, swung one leg over so that he was straddling it, reached down and pulled her up the rest of the way. And then, as if he did this all the time, he stood, held on to the rafter, and reached out to help her to her feet.
She looked down, her heart racing as she heard the heavy footfalls of someone on the stairs. A moment later, the gunman was there in the loft, a flashlight beam bouncing around as he searched the walls. She kept waiting for it to aim upward, reveal them, and she glanced at her rescuer, surprised to see a gun in his hand. Was he a cop? The two men who shot Bo obviously weren’t. Or if they were, they sure as hell weren’t on the side of the law.
What had Bo gotten into?
The gunman’s flashlight swung up and she gripped the wood tighter, certain he was going to shoot them, but then heard a soft click as he turned on the light in the main living area.
He shoved the flashlight in his pocket, and gun in one hand, he walked toward the kitchen. She glanced down, saw her reflection in the mirrored tray right beneath her where Bo’s wallet sat, and she prayed the intruder wouldn’t notice.