Midnight Fever (Men of Midnight #5)(44)

Fuck fuck fuck! The drone had been programmed to follow Hammer's face and it focused on him exclusively. It could have swooped around Hammer, taken footage of the woman's face, identified her, but no. Smart as the drone was, it wasn't smart enough to change the mission parameters mid-mission. And the mission had been to follow Hammer and take him out.

Which the drone had done.

It was supposed to be a smooth, clean taking out of a potential enemy, a flawless operation that would leave no traces. Instead it had turned out to be messy, and with a witness.

Hudson watched for the tenth time as Hammer died, gasping for a breath that never came. Baker watched again and again as the woman reached with a visibly shaking hand to get the flash drive from Hammer's hand, then disappeared through the door into the building.

Not even on the tenth attempt did Hudson manage to glimpse more than a fraction of the face of the woman. Definitely not enough for facial recognition.

Well, if ten iterations didn't work, the eleventh wouldn't either. There had to be another way. He sat back, drumming his fingers.

Baker could have sent the problem to his cybersecurity team in Vladivostok. A group of ten highly gifted and larcenously expensive hackers who seemed to be awake 24/7. If this were a normal mission, he would have, and then charged his client ten times what the hacker collective, known as Badboyzz, charged him. In this case, he was his own client and this was the motherlode. His most lucrative business, what in a few years would make him ludicrously rich. The Boyzzz were wicked smart and dedicated, but didn't understand boundaries, and they were amoral. They were perfectly capable of adding two plus two to make a billion, and they were also perfectly capable of blackmail.

And they were ten thousand miles away, which was awkward if he needed to eliminate them. Not to mention, he had no idea where their base was in the city of over four million inhabitants.

No. Try to deal with this in-house, he told himself. Keep the circle small. So far, the operational circle was him, Frank Winstone, who could cook a fatal viral cocktail in two hours as long as he had viable DNA, and two drone operators who were paid so much money they would never talk. Baker was making them very rich, very fast. There wasn't that huge a market for ex-military drone operators, and they knew they'd lucked out with him and weren't going to endanger that.



       
         
       
        

So. The drone footage was useless with regard to the identity of the woman who had incriminating information. Who, indeed, was the origin of the incriminating information via the Indian woman. That flash drive had gone from Anand to her to Hammer, not the other way around. The woman had very dangerous knowledge.

Who the hell was she?

She had to have come from somewhere.

Baker's hacking skills weren't bad. The CIA trained its operatives well and he'd been taught a lot of tricks by the best. It was probable she'd come from Clement Street, down the alleyway, then turned left. Clement was lousy with video cameras and she was wearing a distinctive turquoise color.

The last the drone had seen of her had been at 10:02. Hudson hacked into the citywide security-cam system and carefully checked the tapes of security cams on Clement starting at 9:30 a.m., fast forward and reverse and slow motion. Over and over again.

He bolted upright when he saw what he hadn't seen before. Nine twenty-one a.m. A tiny stripe of turquoise blue at the outer reaches of the security cam at the corner of Clement and Drummond.

Mystery Woman had somehow known to avoid the cameras. Hmmm. Had she been trained? Was she an operative? Was there someone in the security apparatus-CIA, Homeland Security, FBI, NSA, any of the other alphabet soup agencies-who was on to him? That upped the stakes considerably.

What was on the street? He checked an internet map. Four restaurants, eight boutiques, two jewelry stores, a big department store connected to an even bigger office building, a hotel. The Astoria. Where had he heard that name?

Oh God. His blood ran cold. The Astoria Hotel was where the World Virology Conference was being held, right now. As a matter of fact, Frank was going fly in to deliver the concluding speech. She couldn't be staying there, could she? If she was …

Hotel security video was amazingly easy to hack into. Unlike city footage, a commercial entity like a hotel, with no known security issues, wouldn't keep footage for more than 48 hours, so he had to be thorough. Luckily, if she was there, it would be footage of this morning.

He accessed hotel security and put in a time frame: 7 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. The color resolution was crap but it would show turquoise. He checked the breakfast room, putting it on fast forward. A lot of fat tourists and dandruffy scientists scarfed down an amazing quantity of coffee, croissants and yogurt. No slender lady in a turquoise pantsuit. He ran it back and forth, as they comically rushed from the tables to the buffet and back in quadruple time, like ants.