Hack, page 8
Spinks claimed that he had no knowledge the meat had been adulterated and that a disgruntled ex-trainer at the dressage-riding academy he operated had spiked the beef with horseflesh to get back at Spinks over a labor dispute. Spinks’s lawyer told Nik they had a videotape of the former employee caught red-handed in the act of tainting the meat and planned to submit it to the court. Nik wanted to get a copy of the video to post on Newshound’s site once it was in the public record.
At the front of the courtroom, lawyers for both sides exchanged documents and consulted with their clients as the judge reviewed the case file. Spinks, a squat man with a florid face, shaved head, and multiple chins, looked like he was dressed for a rodeo. He wore a fringed buckskin jacket, bolo tie, snap-button shirt, and dark-brown dressage riding boots, an interesting wardrobe choice at any time of the year but a particularly odd selection on a cold, sleety December morning for a courtroom appearance.
It was becoming clear to Nik the proceedings were not going to start on time, and he regretted racing across town to the courthouse, skidding around corners, and running at least one traffic light in order not to be late.
To kill time, he opened his laptop and scanned the headlines on Newshound’s site before switching over to the Washington Post and other media outlets. It didn’t take him long to scroll through the stories. Generally, the weeks around the holidays were a slow time of the year, news-wise.
Nik clicked on his email folder and was delighted to see a note from Sam. It had been a week since they had spent an evening together at Nora’s, and he was beginning to wonder if she was getting cold feet about their New Year’s Eve plans. He was relieved to learn she was not.
Nik—thanks for a wonderful evening, and I’m looking forward to our first official date and spending New Year’s Eve with you—Samantha.
Nik immediately zeroed in on the phrase “spending New Year’s Eve with you.” Was she suggesting they were going to spend the night together? He hoped so. Or was she just dangling a romantic possibility in front of him? If he weren’t careful, he knew he was capable of spending the next seventy-two hours tying himself in emotional and mental knots parsing the meaning behind what likely was nothing more than an innocent, quickly dashed-off line.
“Is it the court’s understanding that your client possesses a video recording that purportedly shows a former employee of King Kobe blending horsemeat with the beef?” The hearing was officially underway.
“Not exactly, Your Honor,” Spinks’s lawyer replied. “What we have is a video that shows the ex-trainer entering the food-processing area with a bucket from the stables and then, thirty minutes later, exiting the same area empty-handed.”
“That’s it?” the judge asked incredulously. “That’s the reason you petitioned for this hearing?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Motion denied. Any other matters?”
Nik sagged in his seat. He had squandered his morning when he could ill afford to take any time away from the Trident story. He cursed, shook his head, closed his laptop, and started to rise when he was tapped on the shoulder from behind.
Nik twisted in his seat. Sitting directly behind him was a man wearing a pair of yellow-tinted shooting glasses, an old maroon-and-yellow Washington Redskins beanie tugged snugly over his ears, with a matching scarf coiled around his neck. His nose and mouth were the only exposed features.
“You need to drive more carefully, Nik. You almost lost me back there when you blew through that stoplight at the foot of the Key Bridge,” Cal Walker said as he got up from his seat and headed out of the courtroom with the reporter nipping at his heels.
“I didn’t recognize you in the mummy getup, Cal,” Nik was saying as he tried to keep pace with Walker as they steamed out of the courthouse and across the street.
“Wasn’t my intention to surface so soon,” Walker said, “but after your big scoop that I was still alive, it changed the calculus.”
“Hey, thanks,” Nik said.
“It wasn’t a compliment,” Walker said.
Walker paused alongside his car and swept his eyes over the parking lot for any signs of trouble. “Follow me,” he said, “and try not to get lost.”
“Where we headed?” Nik asked.
“You’ll see,” Walker said and climbed into his car and sped away.
Chapter 18
December 28, Three Rivers, Michigan
Grant Dilworth was squatting just inside an old tumble-down chicken coop when he heard the van turn into the farm lane shortly before two a.m. on a cloudless night. It had snowed most of the day, and light from a waning moon sparkled off the snow and cast a glow as shiny as a new quarter over the ground and his surroundings.
The van coughed and spewed as it crept down the narrow strip, lights off, toward the barn at the back of the property where Grant had stashed the getaway vehicle, a nondescript fawn-colored Toyota Camry with 79,256 miles on the odometer. The car had been stolen from outside a Chicago shopping mall ten days earlier and wiped clean of nearly all identification and was virtually untraceable.
Sara and Grant had fought almost nonstop ever since Nukowski had shown up unannounced at their home. She was adamant that she did not want her husband to get any more entangled with Nukowski, and she certainly did not want him staking out the barnyard when Nukowski showed up to claim the stolen car.
“He’s a psychopath, Grant, can’t you get that through your head?” she had pleaded. Sara had relented reluctantly when Grant showed her the story from the Washington, DC, news site about authorities searching for two men driving a late-1970s Dodge van wanted in connection with the deaths of several people in a multistate area. Sara read the story carefully and noticed the reporter had included his contact information at the bottom of the piece.
Dilworth hadn’t gotten a good look at the van’s driver the night Nukowski had appeared on his porch, but the description of the vehicle and the passenger matched. While he felt certain the driver would resemble the news-story description, he needed to confirm it for himself.
As the van approached, Dilworth could easily make out Nukowski sitting in the passenger seat, but just as the vehicle drew alongside the chicken coop, the driver turned to look at Nukowski, and all Grant could see was the back of his head.
The van rolled past and pulled off into a small clearing. The driver parked the van at an angle, obstructing Dilworth’s view even further. He heard doors open and slam shut, and he saw Nukowski round the back of the van toting a bulging canvas gym bag, which he suspected was full of weapons.
“Why do we need to wipe it down if he’s going to chop it?” Dilworth could hear the driver ask Nukowski.
“Just do as I fuckin’ say and make it quick,” Nukowski replied.
Nukowski pried the license plate off the back of the vehicle and stashed it in the bag. “Let’s go,” he commanded and climbed into the Camry. Dilworth still had not gotten a good look at the driver, and now, when the car exited the property, he would be on the opposite side of the chicken coop where Dilworth was stationed.
He heard the car start and saw its headlights sweep across a stubble field as it made its way back toward the road. Dilworth had all but given up hope he would see the driver’s face when the car came to an abrupt stop and the driver leapt out and slip-slided on the snowpack back toward the van.
Nukowski rolled down his window and called out, “What now?”
The driver opened the van’s door and tossed something inside. “I almost forgot to leave the keys.”
“Get the lead out of your ass, Cooley. We need to get on the road,” Nukowski said. Cooley slammed the van door shut and ran-shambled back to the Camry, providing Dilworth with a full-on view of his face, cartoonishly long neck, and bullet-shaped head.
Cooley, Dilworth thought. Good, now I have a name to go with the face.
Dilworth could hear the low-riding Toyota drag bottom as it made its way slowly down the weed-choked lane toward the road and past the chicken coop. The car dipped down into a little hollow in the lane and momentarily disappeared from his view.
He drew a deep breath, exhaled, and started to relax. His next breath got caught in the back of his throat when he saw the brake lights flash and heard a car door open. The next thing he knew, Nukowski was standing in the lane holding a weapon the size of a bazooka in his right hand.
Nukowski stood still as a post, panning the ground all around him with his eyes. He slowly lifted his head and stopped when his gaze came even with the chicken coop.
Cooley cracked his window. “What is it, Nuky? You see something?”
Nukowski didn’t answer, just kept staring straight ahead. Dilworth was certain he had covered all traces of his footsteps in the snow, but he knew Nukowski to be an expert tracker who would stalk prey for days when hunting, to say nothing of his marksmanship skills.
“You’re starting to make me nervous, Nuky,” Cooley persisted.
“Shut the fuck up, Cooley,” Nukowski barked.
Dilworth crouched into a shooting position and squirmed backward in the coop as far as he could scoot. He was a lousy pistol shot and would almost certainly miss Nukowski at this range with the .32 he clutched in his hand. Give him one of his custom-made hunting bows with its modified scope, and he could thread a needle at a hundred yards, but he bordered on incompetent with an open-sight handgun at any distance. He had considered bringing the bow but knew he’d be too constricted by the dilapidated outbuilding to get a full extension on the pull, and, besides, a gun gave him multiple chances to hit his target.
“Grant,” Nukowski shouted. “You there?”
If Dilworth fired first and missed, which he surely would, Nukowski would return fire and knock over the falling-down chicken coop with that rocket launcher he was holding and then finish him off with the next round. Better to sit tight and see what played out, he reasoned.
The wind whipped the car’s exhaust, and it encircled Nukowski’s legs. One minute he was standing there, the next he disappeared into a bank of vapor. Dilworth’s heart pounded against his chest, and he cursed himself for not listening to Sara’s pleadings to stay home.
In the next moment, he heard a door shut and saw the taillights flash again as the car continued its slow crawl toward the road.
Dilworth crumpled on the coop’s floor and reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a black fob the size of a garage door opener with a small screen and thumbed it on. A green light blinked, indicating the GPS unit attached to the Camry was activated and tracking the car as it headed north.
Chapter 19
December 28, Northern Virginia
Nik followed Cal Walker’s car as it snaked through the back streets of Arlington, down George Washington Parkway, back across the Key Bridge, into Georgetown, and then across the Maryland state line, where it finally pulled into a dilapidated industrial park clogged with decommissioned tractor trailers, aging heavy earth-moving equipment, and lifeless railcars sitting on an abandoned spur. Walker hustled out of his car and into a side door of a warehouse and motioned Nik inside.
“What is this place?” Nik asked as he stepped through the door.
“It’s a redundancy site,” Walker said, switching on overhead lights that flooded the cavernous interior, revealing stacks of servers sitting behind locked cages.
“I thought you’d have everything in the cloud,” Nik observed.
“Not a chance. That’s what they expect you to do,” Walker said.
“Is this where you’ve been hiding out?” Nik asked.
“No, and hold off on the questions for just a moment.”
“Okay, but you’re going to need to tell me what this is all about,” Nik said as he trailed Walker down a narrow corridor.
Walker stopped at a large metal-plated door and punched a code into a keypad. “In here,” he said and closed the door after Nik entered.
It was a small tomb-like space, maybe eight by eight, with dull gray walls, a fluorescent light in the ceiling, and a folding card table and chairs in the middle of the room.
“Hardened against electronic surveillance,” Walker informed Nik when he saw the quizzical look on his face.
“Ahhh, I see,” Nik said, pulling out one of the chairs. “Little paranoid, aren’t we?”
“Maybe, but they didn’t try to blow you up, did they?” Walker said and grabbed the other chair.
Walker removed the shooting glasses, Washington Redskins beanie, scarf, and the peacoat he was wearing. His brown hair was now a steel gray, cut short, and his signature giant pinecone-shaped beard was gone. It also looked to Nik like Walker had lost weight.
Nik pulled a notebook and pen out of his satchel. “Who exactly is the ‘they’ you refer to?”
“For starters, the two guys in the van,” Walker said and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Beyond that, I don’t know for certain.”
“But you’re convinced that bomb was intended for you and wasn’t an anarchist or some domestic terrorist trying to send a message to the government by striking a soft target?”
“Absolutely.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I was intentionally lured to my office for a meeting at six p.m., exactly the same time the explosion occurred. It was just sheer dumb luck that I ran out of coffee and decided, at the last moment, to dash down to that little country grocery to resupply. Had I not, I would have been sitting at my desk when the building came down.”
Nik was racing to keep up with his note-taking. “Who was the meeting with?”
“I don’t know. It was an anonymous caller promising me dirt on the government that would help my lawsuit. I’ve gotten plenty of similar calls in the past,” Walker said. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and played the voice mail for Nik.
“Can I get a copy of that?”
“Sure.”
“You recognize the voice?”
“Nope, but that was the first time the tipster was a woman.”
“Any thoughts on who the guys in the van are?” Nik asked.
“No idea. Button man, or men, I’m guessing, recruited to carry out a hit on me.”
“Assuming that’s the case and that bomb was meant for you, who would want to kill you and why?”
“I think the why is obvious. They want to take control of POOF, and I’m standing in the way.”
“Cal, the federal government doesn’t go around hiring hit men.”
“Don’t be so sure about that. I worked in the intelligence community, and I can tell you our government does a lot of shit it’s not supposed to do.”
“Come on. It’s one thing to accuse the feds of trying to steal your software, it’s a whole other matter to accuse them of attempted murder. I report something like that, I might just as well draw up my resignation papers now.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t think the feds tried to bump me off—at least, I don’t any longer,” Walker said and pushed back from the table, stood, and started pacing around the claustrophobic room. “Fact is, I don’t know who’s trying to kill me, but I’m developing a new theory.”
“Oh, and what might that be?” Nik asked suspiciously and jotted down “conspiracy” in front of “theory” in his notebook. Nik was feeling panicked that Walker might launch into yet another tangled tale of intrigue that would be impossible to prove or, even more maddening, disprove. A dull, throbbing pain started forming just above his eyes, and he pinched the bridge of his nose to ease the tension.
“That it’s much bigger than the US government. That it’s an international plot.”
The dull throb Nik felt inside his head turned into a pulsating tremble, and he thought, The skeptics are right. Walker’s delusional. Why didn’t I listen? I should have steered clear of him and OmniSoft. Countless hours spent on the story wasted, my career in tatters. He thought he might start weeping.
Before Nik could respond, Walker said, “I know what you’re thinking, but stay right where you are. There’s someone I want to introduce you to.”
He stepped out of the room. Moments later, he reappeared with a stout Asian man wearing a three-piece suit and Nike running shoes.
“Nik, I’d like you to meet Mr. Liu Li, the former deputy chief of intelligence for China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s premier espionage agency.”
Mr. Liu looked at Nik seated at the table, blinked, and bowed slightly.
What the fuck, Nik thought and slumped deeper into his chair, where he remained for the better part of an hour trying, but failing, to pry any meaningful information out of Mr. Liu.
Chapter 20
December 31, Washington, DC
It was nearly seven p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and Mia and Mo were at their cubicles in Newshound’s office, having spent another fruitless and lonely day trying to track down the mysterious colonel Nik had encountered at Trident Office Park the night of the explosion.
Mia had combed through scores of military databases looking for the elusive Colonel Calkins while Mo had worked his human sources in Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the FBI. Mia came across a handful of Calkinses, but, compared with Nik’s description, they were either too young, too old, or deceased. Mo’s sources had never heard of or knew a Colonel Calkins, and Nik, while he said he was sure he would recognize the man if he saw him again, wasn’t able to provide much of a physical description beyond the yellowish mustache and eyes.
