Play To Kill aka Shoot To Thrill

where your chance of failure is about as good as your chance of success.'

'She would say we're noble, gallant, right-fighters. Maybe even modern-day superheroes. She has to think that way, because she picked the same field we did.'

'Masochism?'

'Yep.' He pulled into Harley's driveway and parked behind the airport-rental Fed-mobile that obviously belonged to John Smith, then smiled a little when he saw Roadrunner, waiting anxiously on the front steps for them.

'Damnit,' Gino said under his breath. 'I can't get used to seeing the skinny guy in jeans. It's just wrong.'

Roadrunner waved as they approached, then held out his hand. 'Hey, guys. You have a disk for me?'

Magozzi handed him a CD in a plastic sleeve and gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. 'Three clips of the same two kids at three of the box sites. How long do you think it's going to take?'

Roadrunner's brow wrinkled. 'I don't know… the program is pretty bloated, out of sheer necessity. We've tweaked it a little since the last time we used it, but it could still take a while. Come on in, make yourselves at home, I want to get started on this right away.'

Roadrunner ignored the elevator and took the stairs three at a time up to the office, while Gino headed straight for the kitchen, Magozzi on his heels. They startled John Smith, who was standing by the refrigerator, drinking a glass of orange juice. The poor man looked almost embarrassed for having been caught in the midst of a perfectly normal, human act. 'Good afternoon, Detectives.'

Gino's eyes scanned the empty countertops in disappointment. 'Afternoon, Agent Smith.'

'Good work with the surveillance footage. Let's hope it will help bring this situation to a quick resolution. I was informed that five of the boxes have been cleared.'

Magozzi nodded. 'That's right. No explosives, plain glycerin in the jars.'

'So eight more to go.'

Gino snorted. 'Eight more that we know about. There could be another hundred out there that we just haven't found yet. Or maybe the frigging bastards are still out there planting the things, we don't know. Nobody's taking a powder on this thing. Not your guys, not ours.'

'How is your murder investigation progressing?'

'It's not,' Magozzi said.

Smith looked troubled. 'Last we spoke, you mentioned a Minnesota connection with the seven male murder victims, which seemed like a promising detail.'

'We're still working that angle,' Gino said. 'Nothing so far.'

'But it's quite a coincidence, you must admit.'

'You're telling me. Minnesota is suddenly up to its eyeballs in Web-related homicide, and now this crap with the boxes.' He shoved his hands in his pockets and regarded his shoes for a moment – an innocent pair of physical ticks that meant nothing to anybody except Magozzi, who knew his partner's pre-attack body language better than his own.

'And as long as we're on the topic of coincidences,' Gino continued, as Magozzi knew he would; 'here's another one. A week ago, you rode into town for a cyber-crime sting before you even knew about the Minnesota connection. Or did you know?'

John blinked a few times, genuinely blindsided, in Magozzi's opinion. 'We absolutely did not know. We never even considered the fact that the Web murders could be related until Monkeewrench found the pre-posts. And, frankly, just because they were all pre-posted doesn't mean they're related. As I'm sure Dr. Thomas mentioned to you, there is a great potential for deviant communities to form and escalate on the Web. The fact that seven of the victims have ties to this state is really the most compelling evidence for a connection we have so far.'

Gino frowned. 'So maybe we've got a deviant community escalating right here.'

'It's a possibility.'

'So why did you pick Minneapolis for a base of operations if you didn't know anything before you got here?' Magozzi picked up Gino's pass.

Smith almost smiled. 'You two are an impressive interrogation team.'

Gino puffed out his chest a little. 'Thank you.'

Smith nodded graciously. 'We're here because Monkeewrench is here. Regardless of the competency of our Cyber Crimes Division, we felt it critical to utilize all resources available for this investigation. And I think we can all agree that there is nobody better at what they do than Monkeewrench. We did offer to set them up with an office in D.C. for this assignment, but they preferred to work from their home office. We agreed to accommodate them.'

'So this really is just a coincidence?' Gino asked.

Smith frowned. Apparently he was as uncomfortable with the word coincidence as everybody else in law enforcement. 'It appears that way.'

Grace, Annie, and Harley all pulled up chairs next to Roadrunner and watched as he loaded the clips from the surveillance footage onto a dedicated computer that ran the facial-recognition software.

'Are you going to limit Web-search parameters, buddy?' Harley asked.

'No.' He turned around in his chair. 'Should I?'

'It's gonna take forever if you don't. Start out small and match against a few social networking sites first.'

'Okay. I'll start the search with MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. They're the biggies.'

Annie, who was looking particularly fetching in a floral- printed silk caftan today, gave Harley a rare compliment. 'That's the most sensible thing that's come out of your mouth in days.'

Harley waggled his eyebrows at her. 'Everything out of my mouth is sensible. You're just finally getting it, doll face.'

'Keep the dream alive, Harley,' she snipped back. 'Sophistry becomes you. And don't ever call me doll face again, or else I'll…'

Grace tuned out the ongoing tete-a-tete between Harley and Annie and let her eyes drift up to the wall- mounted television they rarely watched but had kept on since the box fiasco had started. Every channel, on network and cable, was still running nonstop coverage of Minneapolis in chaos. How long would it take before this scenario replayed itself in other cities across the country, and across the planet? Probably not long. Global interconnectedness had seemed like such a great idea at its inception, but like all powerful things, it had its dark side – a seriously big dark side – and they were on the frontlines.

Annie had apparently burned out her war of words with Harley, because she was watching the television now, too, her lips pursed in a glittery pink pout that matched the shimmering silk poppies on her dress. 'This is just plain craziness. Look at those freeways – plumb full of nice people who are scared to death to stay in their own city. That's not right, and we need to do something about it.'

Grace sighed. 'The only real solution is to change human nature, and that we can't do. The Web might be inciting bad behavior and providing a global audience, but in the end, we're still talking about bad people, not bad technology.'

'The thing that drives me crazy is there are too goddamned many places on the Web where the bad guys can hide,' Harley grumbled. 'If we took away their hiding places, maybe they'd think twice.'

Roadrunner spun his chair around. 'I just launched the facial-recognition software. Now it's a waiting game.' He looked at Harley. 'And there's nothing we can do about their hiding places, Harley.'

'Oh yeah?' Harley grumbled. 'There's lots we can do, if we have the cojones to do it.'

Roadrunner rolled his eyes. 'Oh yeah? Like what? We've been tap-dancing in and out of these hostile servers and sites for the past week. The people we're looking for know how to stay stealth, and every single post that predicted crimes has been bounced around the globe through anonymity software, botnets, networks of firewalls, you name it. There is such a thing as untraceable.'

'I know that, dipshit, I worked with you on all the traces we tried. My point is, we need to cut off the head of the hydra. There are foreign servers we know about that are protecting bad guys seven ways to Sunday and won't grant access to law enforcement. So what are we supposed to do, play nice? Follow international laws that promote cyber crime? Hell no. We shut 'em down. Every time we find a foreign server tag associated with a crime? Bang! Denial-of-service attack. Viruses. Whatever. And we'll just keep shutting them down the minute they go back on-line.'