Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(47)

“You two would make a cute couple,” Charlotte says.

“Yeah, we’re a regular Mothra and Godzilla.”





18

“This is a mistake, Cole.”

Cole looks at the paper cup of coffee trembling in the armrest next to him. He’s pretty wired already, so maybe his director of security is right. Maybe he should lay off the caffeine. But surely that’s not what Ed means. The man wouldn’t care if Cole were guzzling whiskey on the way to this meeting.

It’s the meeting he objects to.

And he’s probably also a little pissed Cole refused to let several well-armed members of their private security team travel alongside them in the leather-upholstered passenger compartment of this spacious helicopter. But he’d never say so directly. Ed’s nothing if not loyal, one of the only holdovers from his father’s era who’s never treated Cole with anything less than respect.

He’s a giant of a man, a former deputy chief for the LAPD who headed up their counterterrorism and special operations bureaus before entering the far more lucrative world of private security. His shiny bald dome reflects the morning sunlight streaming through the panoramic windows with such intensity Cole’s afraid to remove his sunglasses. Because the man’s mouth rarely changes from a thin, determined line, Cole’s left with no choice but to view the slight grimace Ed’s worn since they took off as a sign the man’s truly afraid of what Dylan might be capable of.

“Are they in place?” Cole asks.

“We’ll have snipers north and south.”

“Not east and west?”

“West of the site’s mostly flat wash with a slight downhill grade until you get to the freeway. Nearest mountains are way too far from the site to have any good perches. Same situation to the east. Also, never a good idea to have snipers staring right into the sun. And given that it’s Arizona, the nearest tree is probably in Flagstaff.”

“Or Sedona. Strike team?”

“Fifteen minutes out. Best we could do given the absence of cover. Which I imagine might be why he picked the place. He’s got a Special Forces background aside from being a mad genius, right? Might explain some of what’s in here.”

He pulls a stack of pages from his canvas briefcase. It’s held together with a giant paper clip, which tells Cole it was printed out just before they took off from downtown San Diego. Whatever’s in it, his security director didn’t want to share it over e-mail.

Good call, he thinks as soon as he starts reading.

It’s confidential information about the biker massacre in the middle of the Arizona desert. There are some initial police reports from the first investigators to arrive on scene; reports pulled off law enforcement servers the public would like to think are a lot more secure than they actually are. They’re followed by a transcript made up of a series of fragmented conversations. The name of the person speaking is provided wherever possible, but in most cases, the hackers made educated guesses, such as Officer 1, Possible ATF Agent, as they dipped in and out of the mobile devices being carried by the investigators on scene, eavesdropping for as long as they could before the cyberdefenses of whatever telecommunications company they’d penetrated got wise to their presence.

This is one of only a few instances in which Cole’s ordered the off-the-books digital services team of their private security contractor to hack into the mobile phones of strangers. He doesn’t even know the company’s name, and Ed insists they keep it that way. Plausible deniability and all that. But in those other instances, he’d been out to disprove rumors that former employees had stolen proprietary science. And he had, sparing the targets a great deal of trouble and jail time and God knows what other ruin the board would have elected to unleash on them. In other words, he’d used evil for good. Now he’s using it because lives have been lost.

Ed’s highlighted chunks of the transcript in green.

Cole holds up a page marked by four different highlights so Ed can see it. “What’s the theme?”

“Officers and agents on scene speculating bikers couldn’t have pulled it off. They used words like mercenary, Special Forces. Special ops. Trained killer. All words that could be associated with Dylan Cody’s background. The explosion knocked most of the guys flat, broke some bones on the others, but only killed a few of them. The rest of the work was close-range gunshots.”

“But there’s no mention of Dylan.”

“Unless you consider rapid-fire, close-range gunshots delivered minutes after a C-4 explosion to be part of his skill set.”

“It is. Any ID on the bikers in the video he sent?”

“One of ’em. The one who got a shotgun blast through his middle did fifteen years for aggravated rape. He has a long-standing relationship to the crystal meth community in the American Southwest.”

“Huge surprise. And the girl?”

“We think it’s an alias.”

“An alias?”

“We matched her image to an Arizona driver’s license photo for a woman named Charlotte Rowe, but Charlotte Rowe only popped into existence about a year ago. I want them to keep looking before I show you anything.”

“I could still use a preliminary report.”

“They do better work when they think you’re waiting. And losing patience.”