Perfect killer

CHAPTER 92

The stale air had begun to choke me by the time the truck stopped. I struggled not to cough as the cargo door rumbled open.

"Okay, the undercarriage and engine compartment are clear" I heard a voice, not Rex's.

"This looks like more wine than the order specifies," said a second unidentified voice.

"I've got another delivery after this one," Rex said without missing a beat.

The footsteps grew close, then stopped. The box above my head shifted; daylight filtered through a growing crack. I grabbed for the HK.

Parked under one of the few trees in the middle of a large vineyard slightly northwest of Castello Da Vinci, Jasmine sat in the pickup and listened anxiously for some word on the walkie-talkie. But nothing came through.

In her mind she checked off her action list: All four of the radio-controlled aircraft sat in the pickup's bed, under the camper shell, fueled, loaded with their half sticks of dynamite. She needed only to connect the detonator wires to be ready to fly at a moment's notice. The vineyard access road they had parked on was actually a little better than the one she had tested all four planes on.

In the distance, she caught glimpses of a steady procession of limousines and the occasional motorcade as they headed for Braxton's event. Behind her, sprawled across the truck's backseat, Tyrone clacked at the keyboard of the new laptop.

"Yes!" Tyrone startled her.

"What?" She was irritated at having her thoughts interrupted. "I'm in!" "In where?'

"Braxton's network"

Into the WiFi?"

Tyrone shook his head. "All the way in."

"You're kidding!"

"Nope."

"How?"

"Cool new update of some crackware called airpwn," Tyrone said. "Uses raw frame injection. One of my network cards listens on one channel, and the other card injects custom frames with perfect replies. If you tickle the size of the replies just right, it works so perfectly that the connection functions so well nobody on the other end can detect the intrusion unless they're watching a packet sniffer real-time."

"I don't understand a thing you're saying."

"That's okay," Tyrone said. "The important thing is that they can't block me without blocking legitimate traffic. So I get in through the wireless and look for a machine that's connected to both the wireless and the hardwired network. Happens all the time. Anyway, I have some custom modifications to the Ethereal packet sniffer along with a MAC spoofer and a custom password cracker I wrote a while back that let me grab all the data I needed to get into the primary system."

"You told Kilgore you were rusty at this."

"I lied. He knew that. Like I said, its a new technology and really hard for even a talented user to close off all the holes. This one also didn't even bother to change the default password on the router."

"And what does that get us?"

"Eyes and ears."

"Say what?"

"Look at the screen here."

"Oh my God!"

Despite his age, his Parkinson's, and his having had little rest and nothing to eat or drink in more than twenty-four hours, Frank Harper startled Dan Gabriel with a whoop of joy when the next to last stack of barrels came thundering down. A fortune in cabernet sauvignon pooled ankle deep in the cave and made a visible current as it drained under the door.

"That should get somebody's attention," said Harper who had moved to the back of the cave as Gabriel worked toward the door.

"Not too many somebodies, I hope," Gabriel said.