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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828
It’s almost evening before Larsen gets back to his Anaheim hotel room and positively evening by the time he finishes showering, letting the dirt and dust wash way.
He looks at his reddened palms and notes the start of two small blisters.
Getting soft, the thought comes to mind.
He steps into his business suit, adjusting his tie in front of the bedroom’s big mirror, and he decides to shop for another set of casual clothes tomorrow. He’s already packed his dirty clothes and the shoes he’d been wearing into the plastic bag supplied by the hotel for laundry. He’ll throw these out, and he’ll dump the field operations burner in the trash too, some place right, next time he goes out.
There’s no reason to keep this field operations phone because the only person he calls on it won’t be answering any phone ever again. He removes the SIM and twists it until it’s torn, and then he cracks the phone by leaning it at an angle against a baseboard and hitting it with a fast kick of his foot.
He is wearing his dress shoes. He is wearing the suit he would have worn on the trade floor today, or for any other sessions he will say he attended, not that there’s any chance anyone would ever ask, but good cover means thorough cover, so he’ll head down to the bar where he’ll likely find some other conference attendees and chat them up about what they thought of one or another of the afternoon sessions.
First, though, he’s got other business to take care of, so he sits at his hotel room’s small desk and opens up his laptop and signs onto a VPN redirect service. He accesses his email persona account and contacts his man at the law firm to ask for an update from his morning’s request to get some private agencies on to Cynthia Wainwright’s trail, a request that had included a backgrounder on Cynthia Wainwright he had been sure to run through a metadata stripper before he headed out past Barstow.
He keeps his email’s tone calm, although he’s annoyed there isn’t an update already waiting for him in the email box of his untraceable persona.
He needs to exercise caution in his relationship with the clerk since the relationship is young, and he doesn’t want to spook him.
Spook him, Larsen scoffs. Or spoof him.
Larsen is in fact spoofing him, in that the email persona is fictitious but by all appearances a real person’s account, and as far as Larsen is concerned this serves his interest in this guy Madaki not knowing anything about him. Only a systems analyst could dig deep enough to find that his emails aren’t actually going through the firm’s email server.
The first email he sent this morning had contained a malware insertion that will alert him if a security review is done because any decent review will show the law firm’s network is compromised. This insertion routine carries timestamps well past his previous consult work, and the insert routine is a new one beyond the protection he had recommended, not that the network admin likely has implemented all his recommendations yet. He wants to roll his eyes, but such sloppiness in the system administration works in his favor. No one will seek any connection between his recent security audit and the intrusion, and all and any efforts to find out who created his fictious email persona will be unsuccessful. Covering one’s tracks takes redundancies, although he thinks that any of these routines ever being discovered remains a negligible probability. His false identity email asks Madaki for a locate update on Cynthia Wainwright.
This shouldn’t have to be asked, but the law firm contact is one of the junior clerks, an immigrant who loves cloak-and-dagger bullshit.
He also loves the anonymous cash drops, Larsen considers, and as far as Larsen is concerned, that is a comforting state of affairs, although that cash has already ended, even if the guy is clueless the spigot is closed now. The persona who Madaki thinks he works for is itself just one step away from disappearing completely. Unfortunately, the clerk is not a natural at this sort of work, and the guy’s earlier reply to a query from Larsen is as good an example as any of the guy’s lack of experience, because what he now gets back from the clerk is almost unintelligible, and this annoys him, but at least he has learned there are three investigation services engaged.
He is going to flag another service for Madaki, and he’ll tell the clerk it’s another BOLO agency hire but will ask him to use the codename Birddog. He explains in his email that this other service the clerk could be hearing from will use the codename because it’s from a guy he knows, a person doing him a favor, but the guy can’t be named because of a noncompete situation, and the guy is a bit paranoid about doing this favor for him, worried it could end up biting him on the ass. Larsen adds that this person will get paid directly by him, not Madaki, for services rendered.
Larsen needs to keep Madaki in the dark about the purpose of the contractor he intends to hire, but Madaki will need to share location information for the target, assuming one or another of the legitimate investigation services succeeds.
So don’t mention him to the other services, please, Larsen adds, along with instructions to keep Birddog in the loop on any results from the other services. Don’t care how many agencies on board, but your email doesn’t include progress. Anything on the locate yet? Anything on official sources? Larsen finishes with in his reply to Madaki.
He looks at his watch. He’s got to get down to the bar while the getting’s good.
Update in real time, he ends up adding, but then erases that and writes out more clearly what he wants. Keep me informed of every and any updates on the location effort, including monitoring of official sources, news items.
Larsen knows his own access to law enforcement wires is minimal, but he’s been hoping the legitimate agencies hired will have connections, maybe even to the national network used for interstate law enforcement requests. He’s already set up a bot search on one of the California nets and a couple of others, but he doesn’t know if or when there will be any public-facing information.
Of course, he already knows she never showed up for the meeting, his gaining this confirmation from a call he’d made to the investment group posing as a Carbon’s End staffer.
Another reason to dump that burner.
He knows the Craigson target never showed, of course, having got his face shot off by that idiot.
He spends a few minutes checking his alerts but sees there is as yet not all that much in the news, despite his leaking ploys. He knows law enforcement is already looking into the shooting, but how fast and how effective these entities will be is an important consideration. He’s second-guessing his leaking the phone texts angle, nervous about how well these might survive scrutiny, but he wants to keep the lovers’ murder/suicide premise upfront of the developing new stories. He doesn’t really expect anyone to check to see if the texts are external insertions, and he’s already seeing some mention of the embezzlement angle he’s engineered in the few news reports out already, which impresses him given he only put this into action this morning. Unfortunately, his crypto balance is now dangerously low, having forked over a good chunk to one of his subcontractors to another dark web service, but at least it is one that’s been reliable in the past, and he can’t complain about the fast turnaround. With any luck, the leaks being orchestrated will keep pressure on the target.
With any luck, Jesus, he scoffs. The possibility that the young woman still hasn’t yet contacted the law has become the centerpiece of his Hail Mary hopes. His play now is to beat the law enforcement agencies to her because things will get very messy very quickly if he can’t bring resolution, and Rocky won’t like that. There’s little or no chance of trace-back, but Rocky doesn’t like fuckups. Larsen has to find out where the hell she is as soon as possible and get this mess taken care of.
The bar and the conference chatter will have to wait a bit more. He’s still got to get online and secure a contractor for this extreme prejudice action.
That contractor needs to know where to find her, of course.
Go Birddog, go.