Cyber Division, Zombieland
As it turned out, spread over the three retail outlets—EuroOptic, Mile High Shooting Accessories, and Sinclair International—there had been nine transactions that dispatched product to an 871×× zip code. Of the nine, three had received two shipments, so it amounted to six different addresses spread over the four Albuquerque area codes, but to a single name.
“Sounds generic,” said Chandler. “Brian Waters. Mean anything?”
“Not sure,” said Bob. “Maybe a whisper of a buzz. Keep going.”
Taken together, the nine separate orders amounted pretty much to an advanced kit for the care and feeding of an Accuracy International .338 Lapua Magnum, but more or less camouflaged as a series of small orders of no significance.
“Here’s an interesting one,” Swagger said. “He orders the Wilson bullet seater and neck sizer in one package, but he orders the .367 neck-sizer bushing in another. Yet for the system to work, you need both, meaning he’s putting together the reloading kit but in increments that nobody would ever notice, save for Chandler’s 8-7-1 pickup.”
“So the implication is that ‘Brian Waters’ is putting together the reloading kit but wanted nobody to know it, particularly snoopers coming at it from cyberspace—namely, us.”
“Not only that but this 8-7-1 has ponied up for a ballistic engine, that is, a handheld computer prekeyed with possibilities and algorithms for figuring out corrections for wind and distance. You pop in .338 Lapua Mag, Sierra 250-grain HPBT MatchKing bullet, 89 grains of Hodgdon H1000 powder. Wind south-southwest at one-half value, barometric pressure at 30.12, humidity at fifty-four percent, range: 1,922 meters. Push a button, and it gives you a solution based on your zero, which you’ve preentered. It’ll say something like ‘windage left: 12.7 mil dots, elevation: 14.44 mil dots.’ You crank your knobs—elevation and windage—to that location and squeeze. Nineteen hundred and twenty-two meters away, something falls dead.”
“I think we’ve connected.”
“More here. To one address, a Whidden Bullet Pointing Die System. It’s a new, hot lick by which you can ‘sharpen’ the bullet point, which assists greatly in long-distance shooting. And, if I’m not mistaken, this other thing is an electric annealing machine, by which you heat-treat prefired brass and make it more consistent.”
“This guy must read all the gun magazines,” said Chandler.
“No, this stuff ain’t been in the magazines yet. He’s that far ahead. And that fits in neatly with Juba’s patient, plodding, one-step-at-a-time methodology, very thorough, not rushing, not making any mistakes. Both Mrs. McDowell and Mr. Gold make that point. All t’s crossed, i’s dotted. Not that he did the ordering, but he provided the operating plan and the security requirements to whoever was working with him on this.”
“So here’s my thought,” said Chandler. “Let’s run the addresses for each of the six locations and see what we turn up.”
“Good move,” said Swagger.
It didn’t take long to pull the data free.
“No homes,” said Swagger. “They’re all FedEx Office or UPS outlets, all places that take packages for people.”
“Yes, and though usually those places rent you a post office box,” she said, “in this case Brian Waters requested or paid extra not to list a P.O. box but just the street address of the little shop. I suppose that was part of the camouflage operation.”
“Yeah, and, moreover, most mail-order places won’t ship to post office boxes, only to residential addresses. But it’s not a rigorous system. The guy at the sending end isn’t going to check. If it’s just an address, he doesn’t have the time or the interest to make sure the street address is a house, not some retail thing.”
“Well, let’s run the credit card number that paid for all this stuff.”
Another quick discovery: Brian Waters again.
One man with six addresses, each FedEx Office unknown to the other five, had ordered all the goods.
Swagger went to his list of competitors.
“He placed highly in the thousand-yard championships at the NRA range in New Mexico. He’s a shooter. They had to use him as the fulcrum of their operation, alive or dead, probably dead.”
He thought of this fellow. Shooting geek, maybe a little private money, lived for nothing more than putting five .338 bullet holes inside a couple of inches at a mile. To what purpose? If you weren’t a sniper, it had no purpose, it was just damned hard to do, and he had decided he’d become one of the few men in the world who could do it on demand, off a cold barrel. That’s all his life was: he lived in a world of numbers and weights, and certain refined body movements, and one night someone snuck in and put a silenced bullet through his brain. They took his rifle and reloading stuff and shipped it secretly to Syria, where a cold-minded fellow named Juba became him, mastered his rifle, learned his tricks, all with some dark purpose in mind that would leave a lot of other people dead. Swagger shivered.
Mrs. McDowell wants you for her son. The Israelis want you for the bus. The Marine Corps wants you for Baghdad. But I want you for the shooting geek, who never did no harm and got sucked up and spit out for something he couldn’t understand.
“Now he’s here, he’s got the rifle, he’s used the credit card to reorder the stuff he had in Syria but was too bulky to smuggle in. So they’ve been replacing it.”
“Whoa!” she said. “Isn’t that leap a little far?”
“No,” Swagger said. “His name was Brian A. Waters. In the burning shop in Syria, I saw his gun case in the second before the flames took it. I saw the two initials, A and W, the B was already roasted. They need a pigeon. He’s the pigeon. Somehow, some way, this is going to turn on him. I mean, what good is an assassination conspiracy without a Lee Harvey Oswald?”