That wasn’t why I was drinking water. Beer probably wouldn’t go well on a mission and I had a feeling we were revving up for one.
“Yeah, Joe?”
“You want to fill me in on some details? It sounds like we’re dealing with three-fifths of an assassination.” Now and then I liked pulling Bug’s leg a little. He got so serious when he was working.
“What? No. No, Joe. We’re dealing with at least three deaths and I think maybe two more that need confirmation. And if MindReader is right, we have at least five more diplomats who could be dead by the end of the week.”
All the jest went out of me that quickly. No one likes the idea of that sort of national crisis. “Talk. Tell me why this is Department of Military Sciences, so I can convince Mr. Church.”
We don’t get to pick and choose our cases. They are picked for us, but when something comes along and Bug tells me we should be interested, I do what I can. That means I need to be able to prove my point to the boss.
“So, here’s the thing. A week ago, Hiro Tanaka, attaché to the Japanese ambassador, was found dead in a hotel room in New York. He was there for a business meeting with Walker Financial. Typical business. The same sort of thing he does all the time. He’s found in his hotel room, alone, the doors locked, the room high enough up that the windows don’t open.
“Two days later, in Boston, Alejandro Humbre, a bigwig in the Spanish ambassador’s security detail, was also found dead in his room. Doors locked, windows closed, no signs of forced entry. No explanation as to why he was there, but the ambassador was supposed to be visiting so it’s a safe bet he was there just to do his job.
“Next day in Philadelphia we have the same sort of situation with the personal secretary to Belgium’s ambassador.
“Same day in D.C. we get the exact same scenario with the aide to the personal attaché to South Africa’s ambassador, only this time there’s a difference.”
“Wait. All of these are supposed to be natural causes?”
“Joe, most of these aren’t even supposed to get autopsied. I only have information about the cause of death because of MindReader. In three of the cases, the description comes down to internal organs that have been liquefied. As in several ribs not shattered but turned into powder, and the organs in the abdomen and chest turned into a meat frappé.”
That sort of visual is how Bug gets his revenge for paperwork. I’m convinced of it.
“But in one case, Joe, we got something different. We got a scale stuck in the fabric of the victim’s robe. The robe he was wearing when he died.”
“A scale? What kind of scale?”
“Not the kind you weigh stuff with. More like a snake scale, only in this case, it’s completely synthetic. I pulled a few strings and got a schematic of the thing. It’s not organic, but it’s also not standard plastic. This thing is designed to do something; I’m just not sure what without more of the big picture.”
“So we have a plastic doohickey in the shape of a scale. That might not be enough to get Church all kinds of excited.”
“That was in Philadelphia, Joe. Here in D.C. there are ten more of those scales, three of them found embedded in the victim’s chest and flesh. Currently they’re on their way to DCPD Forensics. You think Mr. Church might be able to get a couple of them sent my way?”
I smiled. That was the sort of information that made Church a happy man. It was the kind of information he could sink his teeth into.
“So why does MindReader think all of these are connected? What was the red flag here?”
“Joe, all of these guys move in the same circles, right? But none of them really have a reason to be hanging out together. It could be coincidence if all of their bosses were hanging around together and doing their political dances, but each and every one of these people has been together every other month on the fifteenth in places where their employers were not hanging around together. MindReader caught on to that. MindReader also caught on to the weird cause of death.”
Bug was sounding like a proud papa again. He should have been. He was the one who built MindReader from the code up, and his creation was capable of pulling together algorithms that no one else knew existed, because MindReader could get into programs that no one knew were out there in the first place while completely hiding its trails. Believe me when I say this: MindReader made everyone who knew it existed a little nervous, and the list of people who knew about it was very small.
“Let me talk to Mr. Church. We’ll find out what’s going on from there.”
Three things about that case made me happy. First, Bug had just proven the value of MindReader beyond a reasonable doubt. Second, there was a chance we could stop a burgeoning international incident from exploding all over the faces of the right people. Third, I got a good reason to hold off on finishing my paperwork.
I talked to Church.
He agreed. We had to get on it.
The problem with multiple possible targets is that there are multiple possible targets. All we had was a list of five names that might be targeted for assassination by someone who had successfully avoided every security tape and file in places known for their overzealous use of security cameras, apparently crept into rooms that were secure (and in two cases had chains or slide locks across the doors), and then left again with no obvious cause of death to the victims. Aside from the synthetic scales that Bug was going crazy over, there was no proof beyond the state of the corpses that any kind of attack had happened. And whatever the cause of those deaths, it wasn’t chemical, electrical, or connected to any known firearm.
Piece of cake, right?
Without the right information, without any real understanding of how the assassin was working, there was nothing we could do.
Once again, Bug is the real hero here. Well, with a little help from Circe.
When he got back to me, he was babbling like a kid for three minutes. After that, I told him to calm down and explain.
“Okay, so, with just a little bit of current running through one of the scales two things happened. First, they’re photosensitive in a way that is crazy. I mean cray-cray crazy. They don’t actually disappear, but they take on the closest colors to them. They’re a little bit like the skin of a chameleon.”
“So, invisible?”
“No, just super well camouflaged. You can find them, but you have to look. After we figured that out, we checked the footage from the previous victims’ hotels from around an hour before their deaths and for about an hour after. In two cases there’s a definite distortion. It moves slowly. Very slowly. I’m not saying whoever it is couldn’t be seen, but you seriously have to be on the lookout for something to spot.”
“Yeah, that’s not gonna be a problem.”
“Actually, it won’t. It only works in the regular spectrum. IR and UV are loud and proud. So there’s that. You’re gonna have to run with goggles, but it’s not going to be impossible to see the target.”
“That’s a plus. What else?”
“They vibrate.”
“Excuse me?”
“The scales vibrate, Joe. I mean they seriously run hard-core, at a speed that is insane. We activated one and it was like watching an ice cube in a hot pan, floating on a field of boiling oil. That sort of vibrate. The damn thing bounced halfway across the room the first time. Took me five minutes to find it again. I’ve never in my life seen technology like this. I can’t completely tell if it’s synthetic or organic or maybe even a blend. It’s the sort of thing that makes me believe in intelligent life on other planets.”