Scott Matthews - The Assassin's list

Drake pulled into his building’s parking garage, entered the security code and drove up to his second-floor parking space. At the door to his old condo, he buzzed his secretary to let her know he was entering from the back stairs.

When he walked into his office, Margo greeted him from her desk.

“Good morning, or should I say, good afternoon,” she said, without looking up.

Margo was the first secretary assigned to work for him when he’d joined the D.A.’s office ten years ago. She was a senior secretary then, and only available because the man she’d worked for had recently died of a heart attack. She’d been bitter, depressed and difficult to work with at first, but they had gradually warmed to each other and become a great team.

She was fifty, black, and a woman you did not want to mess with when she was in one of her moods. Her short hair was graying, but her eyes were as dominant behind her silver wire-frame glasses as they had ever been. Her dress code was always law-office professional. Behind her I’m-in-charge-here attitude, however, she had a warm heart for anyone who earned her trust.

“All right, Margo, cut me a little slack here. I’ve been away for a day and a half, and this morning has all been work.”

“I’d be the last to know, as your formerly trusted and relied-upon secretary. As I’ve been telling your clients, I’ll let you know how and where he is when I see the whites of his eyes, if they are still white, that is.”

“Enough. I should have called. You win. Bring two cups of coffee to my office and we’ll talk,” Drake surrendered.

He walked up the stairs to the loft and waited for Margo to follow. The space had been the upper level of the bookstore and also served as the store manager’s and bookkeeper’s office. Now it contained his desk, bookshelves and a leather couch he slept on when he worked late and didn’t want to drive home to the farm. From the half wall of the loft, he could look down on Margo’s work area and the waiting area.

Margo walked in and set his coffee on the desk blotter. She sat down carefully, with her own cup, in one of two chairs in front of his desk.

“So talk,” she said.

“I met with the manager at ISIS. Not a nice guy. He said I should look at the head of security at Martin Research. He didn’t seem concerned at all that their security system malfunctioned and someone was killed there. When I drove here, they tried to follow me. And to top it off, when I got here I found my beloved secretary had developed a severe case of insubordination.”

“Actually your secretary isn’t insubordinate. She’s scared, and isn’t skilled at hiding it. Turn on the video cam and take a look at our friend outside on the bench.”

The old bookstore owner had been pistol whipped by a robber and had installed a security camera over the front door. There were two monitors for it, one next to Margo’s desk and another on the wall next to his.

Drake switched on his monitor and stared, clenching his fists. A muscular black man, wearing a black Trail Blazer T-shirt, black jeans and black running shoes sat on the bench, glaring at the front door through wraparound sunglasses.

“Doesn’t look like a potential client, does he? Maybe I should see what he wants.”

“Be careful. I doubt he’s here because of your legal acumen. If he is, please refer him to someone else.”

Drake dashed down the stairs, through the waiting area and pushed through the front door. In less time than it took for the watcher to swivel his head from a pretty girl passing by, he covered the distance to the bench.

“You need an attorney? You’ve occupied this bench for more than twenty minutes, without feeding the parking meter over there.”

Drake stood with the sun at his back, a six-foot-two shadow looming over the thug. He noticed a crescent moon tattoo on the man’s forearm, and calloused knuckles on both hands. Possibly a Muslim, but definitely a martial arts devotee. Drake resisted the urge to step back when the man stood, all six-foot-eight of prison-yard muscle and meanness.

“You got a problem, me being here? This a public place, ain’t it?”

“Sorry,” Drake said, as their eyes locked in stare down, two feet between them. “I thought you were trying to get up your nerve to come in and see me. If all you want to do is sit and stare at my front door, be my guest. If you change your mind, come in. And tell your boss he’s welcome too.”

Back in his office, he studied the watcher on Margo’s security monitor. The man pulled a cell phone off his belt, talked for a few moments then walked off.

“Wish our security system included audio. I’d like to know who our watcher reported to,” Drake said. “You okay?”

“Sure. You want me to send Paul a picture of this guy and see what he comes up with?”

“Couldn’t hurt, although I doubt we’ll see him again. He was here to let us know they know where we work. But let’s be careful. I’m not sure what’s going on. Keep the front door locked unless you know who it is.”

Drake asked Margo to get Sam Newman on the phone and returned to the loft. He liked Newman, but he’d only talked with him for thirty minutes or so. Still, as a prosecutor listening to felons and to their attorneys, he had developed a pretty decent internal polygraph. Sam Newman didn’t make his needle quiver.

Before he was halfway through the phone messages on his desk, Margo buzzed and said Sam Newman wasn’t available, that she’d left a message for him to call.

Since he’d learned Janice Lewellyn had been murdered, Sam Newman had not been able to sleep. Nothing on any of the surveillance tapes showed anyone in the building. The tapes were not just blank, as in nothing there blank, but as in turned off and nothing recorded blank. That could only happen if someone deliberately turned the surveillance system off, or the system malfunctioned. He guessed some hacker could have shut the system down, but there was no reason for anyone to do that. Everything that had any industrial value like research data, product development information-the company’s intellectual property-all of it was secure and safe.

There was something he was missing. He just couldn’t grab hold of it. He left the office early to think, trying to get away from the emotion numbing everyone at Martin Research, and returned home to walk his golden retriever, Copper. The mile-and-a-half walk with his tail-wagging companion hadn’t helped much though.

His small bungalow in the upscale Orenco Station community was warm and professionally decorated, but it was just a place to live. He had retired from the Palo Alto police force after twenty-five years with a ruined marriage. Then he had been hired by his brother-in-law to make sure Martin Research and its employees were safe. In that he had failed.

Newman gave his dog fresh water, poured himself a double Smirnoff on the rocks and settled into his leather chair to watch the recorded video of his San Francisco Giants playing the Arizona Diamondbacks. Four to nothing, top of the sixth. He needed to see someone winning, because he sure as hell didn’t feel like a winner at the moment.

He kept going back to his conversation with Drake, the attorney Martin had hired for crisis management. It didn’t make sense that ISIS employed felons, but that’s what his experience told him they were doing. He’d run all the background checks and found nothing. The men he suspected had clean records, but he didn’t believe any of it for a minute. Prison changes men, and these men had the look of hard-time criminals.

Newman had pushed himself up out of his chair to refill his drink when he heard Copper bark and then whimper. His subconscious mind replayed the moment, identified the sound of a silenced pistol, then signaled danger just as a hooded man stepped from the kitchen in front of him. The 9mm Glock aimed between his eyes didn’t waver when the man motioned with his other hand to back up.