“Oh, but that’s not all,” Jay said. “You have to figure that a guy like Junior wouldn’t just go off and start shooting congressmen on his own, for no reason. He’s got to be working for somebody.”
“And…?”
“And so we ran Junior’s picture and various fake IDs through some other places. Since he’s a shooter, we hit all the public gun clubs we could find in and around his last known place of residence, which was, by the way, in the District of Columbia. Up and down the east coast.”
Jay paused dramatically.
“Okay,” Alex said when he didn’t go on immediately. “Are you going to drop that shoe or stand there holding it all day?”
Jay grinned. “We found that Junior is a member at four shooting ranges, including one in New York City. Under different names.”
“Uh-huh. Get on with it.”
“And so we ran membership lists of those clubs, with the idea that maybe we might come across a name of somebody else we recognized there. Just on the off chance.”
“Come on, Jay—”
Jay slid another sheet of hard copy across the table. On it was a list of names, one of which was highlighted in yellow.
Michaels looked at the highlighted name. “No,” he said. He shook his head. “No way.”
Both Toni and Jay grinned like baboons.
Jay was gone, and Michaels sat at the conference table with Toni. Something was nagging at him, but he was still distracted enough with all the legal paperwork he was dealing with that he was having a hard time coming up with what it was.
He stared at the hard copy. “It’s just a coincidence,” he finally said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Why would a guy like Ames stoop to something like this? He doesn’t have to.”
“Somebody hired our boy Boudreaux,” Toni said. “I don’t know why he’d be shooting up biker bars and cops, but Congressman Wentworth was leading the fight against CyberNation on the House side, wasn’t he?”
“Hon, that’s a stretch on the order of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Maybe. But what if it’s true? You have to check it out.”
“Come on, Toni. You know what that will look like? Us going after the lawyer who is suing us over wrongful deaths for a Net Force operation?”
“Well, we’d have to be careful.”
He laughed. “Careful? This is a guy who can subpoena our records, e-mail, phone logs, everything! If we start snooping into his background, we have to
“No, we don’t. Technically, all he can ask for is material regarding operations against CyberNation. Investigating him for potential conspiracy charges doesn’t necessarily fall into that category. Maybe he hired Junior for something else. We wouldn’t know until we got there, would we?”
Michaels shook his head again. “One misstep and we’d be drawn, quartered, and our heads mounted on pikes on the city walls.”
“So we watch where we put our feet.”
He thought about it. It probably was nothing more than coincidence. The shooter belonged to four clubs. Between them, the memberships at those four clubs totaled more than two thousand people. He didn’t have to have any connections to any of them. But — what if he did? And what if Ames was the connection?
It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, as far as Michaels was concerned. Maybe Toni was right. At the very least, they should check it out, right?
“If we can find this guy Boudreaux,” Toni said, “and persuade him to talk to us, that would be good.”
“And how are we going to do that?”
“Jay is working on it even as we speak,” she said. She smiled.
In that moment, he was very glad she was on his side. There was something of a hungry she-wolf in that expression.
Alex nodded. Something was still nagging at him.
He glanced at the list of names again, looking at the one that was highlighted. “Oh,” he said. “Of course.”
“What?”
He shook his head, thinking. “Hon, can you bring up that hacker’s statement?”
Toni went to the flatscreen computer on the conference room’s table. She hit a few keys, inputting her login code, and then called it up.
“Got it,” she said.
“Read his description of the guy who hired him.”
There was a pause while Toni scanned for that section and then read it. A moment later her eyebrows shot up.
“Alex,” she said. “It’s Mitchell Ames.”
Alex nodded. “Or his twin,” he said. “Get some photos down to that hacker, and include one of Ames in the mix. See if he picks him out of the batch.”
“I’m on it,” she said, already heading for the door.
“Oh, and Toni?”
She paused and turned back to face him.
“Good work, hon. And tell Jay I said so.”
She flashed him a big grin, nodded, and went out the door.
35
Ames subscribed anonymously to a very expensive netweb service called HITS — a specialized search engine, updated twice a day, that kept track of inquiries on major databases and servers. He didn’t know how they managed it.
It was probably illegal, but he didn’t care. All that mattered to him was that it provided him with valuable information. He simply plugged in a name and, after a couple of minutes, the seekbot came back with records of inquiries about that subject on the web search engines it covered. These included those open to the general public, as well as some supposedly restricted to military, police, and federal agencies. It also searched a few that were subscription-only, for hospitals, medical record companies, and the like. While not totally comprehensive, the coverage was very wide.
With all those sites being covered, he had to be careful in his construction or he would download an enormous number of results. A lot of people shared names. Ask it about “John Smith,” and he’d be a long time reading the list. It was best to narrow things as much as possible. Ask about a specific person for example, using first, middle, and last names if he had them. Even then it was a good idea to limit the time to one day or less, otherwise, he might be elbow-deep in hits.
Ames felt that if somebody was asking questions about him or his people, he needed to know about it. He also needed to know who was doing the asking so he could try to determine what they wanted. HITS was his insurance policy.
It was with a cold, stomach-twisting dread that he looked at the computer image floating over his desk. The HITS program had come back with more than a dozen queries after the name of “Marcus Boudreaux,” and the databases being searched — police, prison, rental car, and hotel agencies — made it chillingly clear that the searcher was some kind of law-enforcement officer, and that the Boudreaux in question was none other than Junior.
One of the hits was about a cop-killing in Atlanta, Georgia. Another for a dead policeman in Baltimore. And there were inquiries about the congressman in California, too.
