Kill Shot

BY 3:10 P.M. EASTERN TIME, Hal Brognola had received reports of thirty-seven shootings on the West Coast, and the calls kept coming in. Even more disturbing was the fact that the snipers had targeted law-enforcement officials whenever possible. By 3:30 p.m. Stony Man Farm had received reports of more than one hundred shootings, the majority of which were law-enforcement personnel. The final count was 129 dead, 103 of whom were law-enforcement officers of various levels, ranging from a meter checker to a chief of police. There were 129 more murders and zero new leads. In each case the shooters had remained unseen, but they had gotten their message across—they could kill with impunity, and the only thing that the law-enforcement community could do about it was to be fodder for their rifles.

By the time reports of shootings started coming in from Alaska, Brognola had already flown to Washington to meet with the President. The big Fed had seen many different presidents dealing with many different crises, but he’d never seen a President who seemed at a loss as to how to proceed.

“Hal,” the President said, “what do I do?”

“I wish I could help you, sir, but I honestly don’t know.”

“I’ve got people on one side of me telling me to declare martial law,” the President said. “There’s a group of people in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who have already drawn up a contingency plan. But my instincts tell me that’s the wrong approach.”

“Mine, too, sir,” Brognola said. “It seems to me that whoever is coordinating all this, their goal is to create so much chaos that they force you to declare martial law. You’d be serving their goal, whatever that may be, by declaring martial law.”

“My thoughts exactly,” the President said. “But if I don’t declare martial law, what do I do? The American people expect the government to do something to stop this crisis.”

“I wish I knew the answer to that, sir, but I don’t. We’ve got our very best people working on this and for now that’s all we can do.”

“I understand that, Hal, but just between us, man-to-man, what do you think I should do?”

“I think you should level with the people, sir,”

Brognola replied. “You should go on television and tell them that we have a very dangerous situation to deal with, but that you think we need to go on with our lives. The American people need to be vigilant, but not fearful.”

The President pondered Brognola’s advice. “That might work for a short time,” he said, “but not for long. If we have a wave of shootings tomorrow, people are going to riot. If that happens, I don’t think I’ll have any options but to institute the Joint Chiefs’ plan.”

Quantico, Virginia

WHEN REPORTS OF SHOOTINGS in Hawaii started coming in two hours after the Alaska shootings, Mack Bolan was at the FBI crime lab in Quantico, Virginia, where a forensic team pored over the charred remains pulled from the Tahoe the soldier had pursued earlier in the day. So far the team hadn’t discovered much, but the corpses in the incinerated SUV were the only leads to a murder spree that had taken hundreds of victims in a matter of hours.

The coordination required to pull off something of this magnitude boggled Bolan’s mind. In some cases the hits could only have been pulled off by one or two individuals, but an unknown number of them had to have been carried out in teams like the one Bolan took out. That meant that there were hundreds of organized killers roaming the country, killing at random. To have an operation of this scope take place without alerting anyone—the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and most especially the cyberteam at Stony Man Farm—seemed incomprehensible.

Bolan watched the technicians examine the wreckage of the Tahoe and felt a weight descend upon his shoulders. He’d been fighting for justice for a long time, and it seemed like every time he made a step forward he was eventually pushed three or four steps back. It was like trying to push back the tide with a straw broom. The Executioner knew that he possessed an immense reservoir of inner strength. Over the many years he had been fighting this seemingly endless battle, he’d watched countless comrades crack and break under the stress. Yet he’d always remained strong, had always been able to draw on reserves of strength that so many others seemed to lack. He hadn’t thought the others weak; he just recognized that he had abilities that most people didn’t possess.

Usually, Bolan had at least some sort of an idea of what he was up against; this time there were no leads.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Patricia Jensen standing beside him. She knew very little about him—he’d purposely kept her in the dark all these years for her own safety. All she knew was that he worked for the Department of Justice, which wasn’t exactly true. He had worked for Brognola in an official capacity once, many years ago, but that had not turned out well for anyone involved. These days he was more of a lone wolf. But that information wasn’t something he shared with Jensen; the less she knew about the soldier, the longer she could expect to live.

The one thing she knew about him was that, regardless of everything else, he worked on the side of good. As did she. She’d returned the child to his mother earlier in the day, but instead of going home, she’d returned to the FBI lab in Quantico. Though she wasn’t on the forensic team investigating the charred Tahoe, she was under contract with the FBI and had top-secret clearance at the lab. She’d become involved with crime-scene investigation, and had proved to be a particularly adept investigator, one of the top forensic investigators in the nation, in fact.

Though she wasn’t officially involved with this investigation, she was lending her expertise to help out. Not that she’d been much help. There wasn’t a lot left to investigate. The team had identified the vehicle, but it had been reported stolen earlier in the day. The theft was legitimate—someone had boosted the Tahoe and modified it for the shooting. The dealership placard that had been mounted in place of a license plate had obviously been stolen, but since such placards were literally worthless and were almost always thrown away after the actual license plates for a new vehicle arrived, no one had reported the theft.

That left the bodies themselves, and there wasn’t much left of those to investigate. So far, all they knew for certain was that each person in the vehicle had had their teeth fixed in a manner that precluded identifying the bodies through dental records. All this told the investigators was that they were dealing with extremely sophisticated perpetrators, one with access to their own dentists. This only confirmed the vastness of the conspiracy against which they did battle.

All that was left was to perform a thorough autopsy on the bodies recovered from the wreck. If they were extremely lucky, there would be some sort of clue, something that the perpetrators hadn’t counted on. They needed a break.

CHAPTER THREE

Mack Bolan awakened in Patricia Jensen’s studio apartment and carefully extricated himself from her embrace. He took a quick shower and went out to see if the forensic team had discovered anything overnight. Upon stepping out of the apartment he was accosted by a team of technicians, all speaking at once.

“Quiet!” he ordered, and everyone quit speaking. “Can one of you tell me what’s going on?”

“We were unable to extract dental records from any of the corpses,” the woman in charge of the team said.

“I knew that last night when I went to sleep,” Bolan said.

“We learned a bit more overnight. Each of the corpses had recently undergone extensive orthodontic surgery, not to repair any damage, but solely to prevent identification through dental records. But they all had one other thing in common—each corpse had been fitted with a hollow false tooth.”

“Did you find any cyanide capsules in the hollow compartments?” Bolan asked.

“No, but we did find traces of cyanide. Each person must have had cyanide capsules in that tooth, but the fire destroyed the capsules.”

“That means that if we capture any of the shooters alive, we’d better act fast to make sure they don’t kill themselves before we can interrogate them,” the soldier said, more to himself than to the woman. “Were you able to learn anything?”

“Only that one corpse had stainless steel hardware in his left leg,” the woman said. “Pretty high-tech stuff for such a young man. Appears to be military.”

“How can you tell?” Bolan asked.

“From the serial number on the hardware. According to production records the manufacturer shipped the hardware to the Veterans Administration hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

“Did you identify the person who had the hardware installed?” Bolan asked.

“We can’t legally gain access to medical records,” the woman said. She gave the soldier a look that said she knew that sort of technicality might not impede him as much as it did her, but remained silent.

Bolan went back into the apartment to call Stony Man Farm on his secure cell line.

Jensen was just getting out of the shower when he returned. The apartment was set up like a hotel room, with a kitchenette between the bathroom and the bedroom area. He watched Jensen towel off her naked body, missing rivulets of water rolling off her blond hair and down her back between her shoulder blades. He stepped into the bathroom, took her towel from her and wiped off the water from her back. She was really a lovely woman, with a body that bordered on perfection. She turned around to kiss him, but instead of responding to her lips, he said, “I need you to do me a favor.”

“What?” she asked, obviously disappointed. She had hoped for another session of lovemaking.

“Go out and get me a newspaper. The New York Times.” Bolan had no need of a newspaper, but he did need some privacy to call Stony Man Farm. It wasn’t because he didn’t trust Jensen, but what he needed to discuss with the crew at Stony Man was top secret. She clearly didn’t appreciate being sent on such a menial errand, but she got dressed and left without questioning Bolan. He wished he’d been able to think of a better excuse for getting her to leave, but at least it had worked.

After she’d dressed and left, Bolan called Kurtzman at Stony Man and told him what he’d learned. “Can you get into the VA records?” Bolan asked.

“The problem is that the VA has been slow to switch to computerized record keeping, so most of the VA information is likely in a filing cabinet at the VA hospital in Minneapolis. But if the guy was active military when he had the surgery, which seems likely, given his age, his records should be on file with the Pentagon.”

“Can you hack into those records?” Bolan asked.

“I already have,” Kurtzman replied, “or at least what’s left of them. They appear to have been altered.” He paused. “Well, altered isn’t exactly the correct word. Destroyed would be more accurate. I found a record of the hardware being delivered to Minneapolis, but no purchase order, no information on who ordered it and no information on the end user. All that information appears to have been purged from the system.”

“How is that possible?” Bolan asked.

“It’s not, at least in theory,” Kurtzman replied. “Whoever did this had some help in extremely high places.”

“How high?” Bolan asked.

“I’d almost have to say as high as the office of the President,” Kurtzman said, “but that’s highly unlikely.”

“Where do we go from here?” Bolan asked.

“We’ll start looking into possibilities at the highest level of government,” the computer expert said. “And I mean the highest.”