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.”
“I’ll head to Minneapolis to see if I can learn anything at the VA hospital,” Bolan said. “The electronic records may have been destroyed, but maybe there’s still some information hidden in the physical records.”
Bridgeport, Connecticut
THE FEAR EVERYONE ACROSS the United States felt as noon approached the following day hung over the country like the shimmering haze created by the unseasonably warm spring weather. Much of the country had, in fact, shut down, and work ground to a halt because many people were too afraid to leave their houses.
Jim Parkinson counted himself among the fearful who remained indoors as noon approached, though that wasn’t too difficult for him since he worked at home. Parkinson really wasn’t afraid of the squads of snipers that seemed to have descended on the entire nation. In fact, he was secretly grateful; the chaos couldn’t have come at a better time. For the previous decade Parkinson, a British expatriate, had been embezzling huge sums of money from the publishing house for which he worked, for which he’d been the CEO for twenty years. About ten years earlier he’d been punted aside, replaced by a much younger man and given the lofty title of “Senior Vice President of Global Publishing.”
Senior vice president of nothing, Parkinson thought. If he went into the offices once per month it was a busy month, and if he skipped his monthly visit, he was dead certain that no one missed his presence. He’d been replaced because the then-new owners of the company had wanted to hire someone who was more resourceful. It was at that moment that Parkinson decided to show them the meaning of the word resourceful. No one knew the intricacies of the publishing house’s finances like Parkinson—he’d been the one who set up the system back when he’d been the company’s original comptroller. He was the only person who really understood how it worked, and he also knew how to skim large amounts of money without anyone ever finding out. For the past decade he’d been siphoning off over $1 million per year and laundering it through a dummy corporation in the Cayman Islands.
Now, with the country roiling from the turmoil caused by the previous day’s sniper attacks, he had the perfect opportunity to bail out, go spend the rest of his days sipping icy rum cocktails on a sandy beach of his choosing. He was at that very moment checking flight schedules, planning to get out of the country before all flights in and out were canceled. In his address to the nation the previous night, the President had said that he intended for business as usual to continue, but there were rumors that the federal government was making plans very much counter to the President’s public statements. Parkinson had heard that those plans included shutting down all international airports.
Parkinson looked at the clock on the right side of the lower toolbar on his computer screen and saw that it was one minute until noon. He sat at the kitchen table of his seventh-story apartment where he had a terrific view of Bridgeport Harbor, sipping a cup of coffee while he scheduled his flight. At exactly noon he looked outside to see if he could detect any action. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t see anyone dying, and he didn’t see any terrorist snipers. Most importantly for him, he didn’t see the man on the roof of the building across the street, aiming a high-powered rifle at his kitchen window. And he didn’t see the .30-caliber bullet that sped directly at his forehead, spraying his brains across the stainless-steel appliances and leaving more than $10 million orphaned in the account of a fictional company headquartered in the Caymen Islands.
Kansas City, Missouri
PETER SCHLETTY DOUBTED his career path. He’d wanted to be a cop since he was old enough to know what a cop was. He’d excelled in the police academy and had landed a sweet job with the Kansas City Police Department upon graduating.
