Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(83)
He was starting to consider the eyeball option.
But first he thought he’d try the direct route, hiring Nicolet on Chip’s own nickel for the negotiations, to further insulate himself from both client and professor and thus ensure his own anonymity. Chip had known Nicolet for a half-dozen years, and the man had no problem with wheels-within-wheels, his personal ethics firmly firewalled from his business practice.
Chip’s last two offers were far more than he could afford to pay, but by then it was more about her reaction, seeing who he was dealing with.
Hazel Cassidy was a tough nut.
When she stopped answering Nicolet’s emails, Chip decided there was only one way through. Cut the Gordian knot.
Or more to the point, kill the professor.
Then his operators could walk in with government credentials and a cutting torch and clean out her office. Which is exactly what happened.
They’d taken boxes of paper files and stray hard drives. They’d taken an odd-looking aluminum crate the size of a dorm fridge, loaded with computer components and cooling fans. They couldn’t take the lab’s servers, a long row of liquid-cooled Crays too big for a pair of operators to physically remove in the middle of the night, and the credentials Chip provided wouldn’t stand up to loading a box truck in the light of day. So they’d uploaded Chip’s virus via flash drive and gotten the hell out of there.
The supergeeks were very impressed with the aluminum crate, which they called a mini-supercomputer, something Cassidy had apparently designed and built herself. But it was an empty jar, completely wiped.
The virus got them remote admin access to the servers, which were packed to the gills, but not with anything useful.
They still couldn’t find Chip’s algorithm.
The next obvious step was the daughter, but somehow Smitty’s team had screwed up taking her off the street. Chip never did get a good explanation out of them, and now they were dead in the fucking mountains. The mystery man, whoever he was, had taken out Chip’s top tactical team, and the daughter was in the wind. Chip was certain she had the algorithm.
Soon enough, however, he’d have her. And the goddamn mystery man.
That’s why he was heading back to his office.
If traffic weren’t so fucking bad, he’d get there before the ball dropped. Watch the whole thing from the dashboard cameras. Bert had a helmet-cam, too.
Chip really wanted that code. More than he’d wanted anything in his entire life.
He deserved it. He’d worked so fucking hard to get here. Stepped over a lot of bodies.
He was thinking about the next steps as he ran his card through the security reader and walked through the door to his private office suite.
Where he saw Shepard sitting behind Chip’s handmade tropical hardwood desk, sitting in Chip’s own exquisitely tuned ergonomic chair.
41
SHEPARD
Shepard watched the salesman open his office door and see his chair already occupied. It was a deliberate provocation on Shepard’s part, an information-gathering strategy.
He had the big wall-hung monitor turned on and mirroring the desktop computer. The screen was split, each side showing a night view of a residential street from opposing viewpoints. This, too, was a provocation, and also a reminder. Shepard had bypassed four escalating levels of security to get into the office, and three password log-ins to access the video.
The salesman’s reaction was impressive, Shepard had to admit. His enormous rage was only visible for the briefest moment before it was mastered and suppressed. The anger beneath the salesman’s slick veneer, thought Shepard, was the engine that powered him forward. It was not the first time Shepard had considered this.
He could also see the salesman’s fear, but in a much smaller proportion. A far smaller proportion than it should have been, thought Shepard. This was useful information.
“Nice of you to show up,” said Chip. Without removing his raincoat or appearing to glance at the big monitor, he dropped himself into one of the leather club chairs facing the desk. “Long day?”
Shepard indicated the monitor. “You haven’t seen this, have you?”
“No,” said Chip. “I was in a meeting. How’d you get in here?”
“I told you to let me handle it,” said Shepard. And clicked Play.
On the split screen, two vehicles were parked on opposite sides of the road, facing each other, perhaps eighty yards apart. Each vehicle was visible in the other’s dashboard camera. On both screens, trees swayed slightly in the wind. Raindrops accumulated on windshields.
After fifteen seconds of this, the left screen abruptly flared white as the camera’s sensors were overwhelmed by a burst of brightness. On the right screen, the distant vehicle was lit up with muzzle flashes, silhouetting a dark figure beside the Explorer with a long gun spitting light through the windshield.
Shepard had recognized the shape of the medical boot on his first viewing.
The left camera feed went blank almost immediately, hit by a stray round. The right camera jolted as the driver stepped on the gas and the distant vehicle got quickly closer. The figure slipped around the front of the vehicle with the dead camera. Then, faster than should have been possible, the same figure appeared from behind the rear of the same vehicle, firing toward the oncoming Explorer in disciplined bursts. The windshield starred immediately, obscuring the view, but the muzzle flashes were still visible, closer and closer. Then the right camera flared white.