The Last Protector(Clayton White #1)(30)

“I just received news that we have eyes on Clayton White, sir.”

“Okay, good work. Ask your guys to pick him up and have them bring him to a hotel somewhere in the city.” Hammond looked at his watch. “I’ll meet White in about four hours. Did you get my last message?”

“Yessir,” Girdner confirmed. “The men are already staged not too far away from the target building. Just in case you called.”

“Thanks, Tom.”

“I thought we’d put this all to bed six years ago. I’ll call you again once I hear back from the team,” Girdner said before ending the call.

Leadership required hard decisions, and as much as he’d hated going along with the assassination of Maxwell White, he’d known what he was doing was for the good of the country. But he couldn’t help but think about what it now meant for his daughter. There was so much Veronica didn’t know about him, and if she ever came to learn what he had just agreed to, it would obliterate their relationship.

Forever.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


Palo Alto, California

Krantz wasn’t a tall man, but the width of his rowing shoulders made him appear taller than his five-foot-eight stature. His hair was dark brown, like his scruffy beard. His powerful body moved with the athletic grace of a man confident in his physical strength as he jogged across Independence Avenue and bumped into the young man he’d been following for the past ten minutes.

“I’m so sorry,” Krantz said as he smoothly slipped his right hand into the man’s jacket pocket while tapping the man’s shoulder with his left. “That’s on me, my friend. I should have looked where I was going.”

The young man looked confused and pissed at the same time, but he didn’t say anything. Even as he was walking, Krantz had noted that the man’s eyes had been glued to his phone nonstop for the last minute or so. From the stupefied look on his face, Krantz guessed that the man was watching the news and had just learned about the attempt on Veronica Hammond’s life.

“Have a good one,” Krantz said, waving the young man goodbye and pocketing the key fob he’d taken from him.

For the Palo Alto operation, he had changed into a pair of dark jeans and had thrown a leather jacket over a black turtleneck. Holstered on his right hip was a .45-caliber Heckler & Koch USP Compact Tactical. Two spare magazines were secured in magazine pouches on his left side. Since the ammunition for the pistol was subsonic, the gun was extremely quiet, especially when used in conjunction with a suppressor like the one Krantz carried in his jacket. The rest of the equipment he would need to complete his mission was in the black backpack slung over his shoulder.

He had parked the Jeep Cherokee he’d rented one block south in the parking lot of a busy café near West Middlefield Road. He had spent the last four days scouting the area and conducting surveillance and countersurveillance on the eight employees of SkyCU Technology. In addition, he had installed four miniature sticky surveillance cameras whose feed he could watch from an app on his smartphone. It allowed him to keep an eye on the comings and goings, even from his motel room a couple of miles away.

Palo Alto was the backup operation. Krantz had known Oxley long enough to know the man wasn’t into half measures. Veronica Hammond might have been the brain behind Drain and the one with the influence to push for its global adoption, but SkyCU Technology had designed and distributed the app. Getting rid of Veronica would have been a major setback, perhaps enough to postpone the upgraded app’s official release indefinitely—but it wasn’t guaranteed. That was why he was in Palo Alto now. To take care of the what-ifs.

Krantz’s phone vibrated in his pocket. It was his mobile surveillance app. He tapped on the notification and watched the second-to-last SkyCU employee exit the building. This employee would walk to the next block and catch a bus to San Jose, where he lived in a three-bedroom condo with his mother and sister. Krantz looked at the time. In another ten minutes, the last employee would, in turn, leave the office and walk to his car. If Krantz had been unsuccessful at lifting the key fob from the young man he had bumped into, the employee taking the bus would have been his plan B. There was also a third option in case the first two failed, but it required a more permanent solution with the last employee.

Krantz picked a bench that offered him a good view of his target building. Though he wasn’t a smoker, he pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his breast pocket and lit a cigarette. He puffed on the cigarette but didn’t inhale its toxic smoke. He casually but methodically studied the windows of the businesses across the street. He was looking for anything out of the ordinary that would tell him he was under surveillance or that the FBI was on to him. Krantz didn’t believe they were.

Right on schedule, he watched the last employee exit the building. Satisfied federal agents weren’t about to pin him to the ground, and that the SkyCU offices were now empty, he tossed his cigarette into a storm drain.

It was go time.

SkyCU Technology occupied half of the third floor of a three-story white rectangular building. The main entrance to the building was through a pair of double doors facing the street. Apart from SkyCU, the commercial space was home to a pair of real estate agencies that shared the first floor and a computer repair shop that occupied the entire second floor. Thanks to his surveillance cameras, Krantz knew the building’s doors locked automatically after six o’clock and that a key fob was needed to unlock them. There was parking in front for customers, and a slightly smaller lot at the back for the employees of the businesses. Both parking lots were well lit, but there were no more lights visible in the windows of any of the building’s businesses.