Perfect killer

CHAPTER 63

Tyrone Freedman lived in a battered single-wide trailer perched drunkenly on cracked and broken cinder blocks. Blue tarps sagged from the roof. A drunken old hay barn squatted nearby, one corner touching the ground, the rest cleared for storage and garage space.

The Yalobusha River levee rose steeply beyond a grove of pecan trees. "Damn," I said softly.

"I've seen worse," Jasmine said as she steered us into a cleared space in the old barn. "Some people can't afford tarps."

I shook my head, turning to keep the trailer in view.

As Jasmine turned off the ignition, I spotted a utility pole next to the trailer with the usual phone and electrical wires and at the top, an oval, open-grid dish. "Check it out," I pointed, "Wireless broadband."

Jasmine laughed. "Looks like something from the old Max Headroom series, you know, the weird old couple with the television studio in that decrepit bus." "I haven't thought about Max Headroom in years," I said.

"I loved it."

"Me too."

We looked at each other for a moment, grew uncomfortable way too fast. I bailed out of the moment and opened my door.

Jasmine's door opened as I picked my way through the barn's clutter, located the rusted old Allis-Chalmers tractor, and found the trailer key on top of its engine block right where Tyrone had told me it would be.

Inside the trailer, the floor sagged from piles of books. Tarps draped from the ceiling made it feel like a tent. It was cool inside; the compressors of at least two window air conditioners thrummed unseen. I turned on the lights.

"Check it out." I pointed to a computer in the corner of what passed for the trailer's living room. Behind the computer, which had no cover, a router and a hub sprouted Cat-5 cable in cable-tied bundles stretching to the ceiling and along the trailer's long hallway. "You surprised?"

I walked to the computer and pressed the monitor's power button. Instants later the screen gave me a homemade screen saver with logos for Red Hat Fedora Linux and Apache Web server software. A quick look at the hardware showed the computer had been cobbled together from components others had discarded as obsolete.

Jasmine and I followed the overhead cables to another book-jammed room, this one crammed with file cabinets, medical books, and another home-brewed computer. I followed Tyrone's instructions and turned it on. It was another Linux machine. Jasmine ran her fingers along the open frame of the computer.

"It always amazes me how much some people can do with so little." Then she covered her mouth as a broad yawn made its way across her face.

"Oh! Sorry."

"Don't be. We need to get some sleep before we leave tonight."

"What time do we need to leave?"

"About eleven thirty, get to Itta Bena around midnight."

"Why so early? We're meeting Shanker at three a.m."

"Gives us time to make plans in case something goes wrong."

"Going wrong. What a cheery thought."

"Prepare for the worst; pray for the best."

"Uh-hmmmm."

"Three hours seems like a long time, but once we're there, it'll go faster than greased lightning."

As the computer booted, I looked around the room and spotted Arthur Guyton's classic human anatomy book I had used in medical school. One of the keenest intellects on the planet, Guyton had chosen to live in Jackson, taught at the med school there, and mentored too many new physicians to name, me included.

I pulled the text and showed it to Jasmine. "He helped turn my life around."

I opened the book and flipped through the pages. As Jasmine moved closer to see, she rested her left arm on my shoulder. The firmness of her touch warmed my skin.

"If it hadn't been for him…"

I remembered Dr. Guyton's kindness and knew I had never thanked him enough.

On the monitor the command line appeared and demanded a password and user name.

"Here goes." I put Guyton's textbook down and entered the account data Tyrone had given me.

"ArrOwcaTCHer666homeINtHEwoods," I mumbled to myself as I entered the characters precisely.

"That's awfully long."

The longer the sequence the harder it is to crack."

I concentrated even harder on the password: 5149VmB9a65P7baDhOmbreNOtXarb.

Instants after hitting the enter key, the KDE graphical user interface appeared, customized with my name and a link, which I clicked.

A long note from Tyrone appeared in OpenOffice.

"There's an alert at the hospital for maximum staffing. It's about you. They think you're one bad dude and they want us ready for casualties. There's even a Life Flight chopper stationed on the roof. What the hell did you do before med school?

"Anyway, because of this, I'll be camping out in the imaging lab. All hell's broken loose. Feds and Army everywhere. John Myers came in to have his shoulder looked at. The paramedics who brought him in looked like they had had a near-death experience.

"The blond kid with the really pink skin and all the freckles looked even whiter than ever, which is hard to believe. A really creepy guy in SWAT gear stood in the emergency room the whole time. John didn't say a word to me the whole time I worked on John's shoulder. If you click here you'll see why John was so damned quiet. We debrided things and the paramedics gave him a ride home."

I clicked on the hyperlink that took me to a plain IP address: 216.226.157.157, no domain name, just a twelve-digit IP address that clearly was not Tyrone's server.

"Oh, hell!" Jasmine reacted when a page of thumbnail photos came up. She pointed to one showing an Army Blackhawk helicopter. We skipped over John's documentation of the sniper and shooting scene we had witnessed firsthand and went to images of Humvees, Suburbans, troops, and SWAT-clad Feds.

The photos were the typical low-resolution images produced by a camera phone, but the detail was sufficient to show us what had happened. Finally, we read John's text messages Tyrone had posted on the Web page.

I closed Mozilla and immediately a dialogue box appeared: "Please wait: WEBsweeper is permanently removing all cache and history data and permanently sanitizing all associated disc sectors in accordance with NSA and DOD data security standards."

Moments later the box disappeared and we continued reading.

"I've edited the hospital server's access logs to delete my tracks in uploading this Web page. It and the photos are on a server outside the U.S. and outside its sphere of influence. The path to the servers are totally hidden using a second-generation onion routing system called Tor.

"If you need it, lift the carpet in the hallway directly underneath the furnace's air return and you'll find my firearms. To open the combination to the lock, take the password from this machine. Count backward and pull out the first four digits. There's a little range I set up out back by the levee in case you want to kill some time.

"Good news: Lashonna's conscious and doing better than expected."

"Thank you, God," Jasmine said softly. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "And thank you, Doctor."

Her kiss cheered me for a fleeting instant, then I read the next paragraph.

"I wish I had better news for you regarding Camilla, but you should probably click here to check out the new images. The files are on the hospital's server, but don't worry, a series of proxies accessed through dark IP addresses sanitizes the access."

My admiration for Tyrone's technical prowess in covering his tracks and hiding Myers's evidence slipped beneath the darkness in my soul that gathered as I paged through the images.

Camilla had died when I wasn't looking.

I cried.