The 13th Target by Mark de Castrique Read Free Book Online

employee, drove a real Fed Ex truck, and delivered the merchandise. As soon as the recipient signed for the delivery, Mullins placed him under arrest while a backup team raided the premises.
    The operation was a big success, so much so that Amanda was assigned to more and more sophisticated electronic crimes. She crossed over from the government to the Federal Reserve when security concerns multiplied in proportion to the skills of hackers and the discontent of the populace that saw the Federal Reserve as the cause, not the solution, of the country’s financial woes.
    “Where’s your car?” he asked.
    “Right beside yours.” She grabbed his arm. “Lead on.”
    They took the stairs to the second level and Mullins stopped behind his Prius. A Lexus sedan was on one side and an Infiniti SUV on the other.
    “Which one of these limos is yours?” he asked.
    “Neither. Let’s sit in your car.”
    Mullins laughed softly and scanned the parking deck. The only people in sight were a mom and a toddler getting into a minivan six spaces away. He unlocked the Prius with his keyless remote.
    Amanda slid into the passenger’s seat and set her purse on the floor. “I don’t think I was followed, but they could have put a bug and tracker in my car. I parked in Alexandria and took the Metro to Clarendon.”
    Mullins studied her for a moment. She was an attractive woman in her early forties, five or six years younger than he. He knew she was married to the novelist Curtis Jordan. Mullins had read some of his international thrillers, entertaining if a bit far-fetched. Either Jordan was a pseudonym or Amanda had kept her maiden name. Mullins suspected she provided Jordan with procedural and protocol information for his complex plots.
    Today her confidence seemed shaken. He’d never seen her unnerved before, and the fact that they were sitting in his car told him she had no confidence in the normal channels of communication.
    He decided to meet her head on. “Paul Luguire was murdered. I know it and I’m going to prove it.”
    She jerked her head around, eyes wide. Then she laughed. “You’re amazing. Here I thought I was going to have to convince you. How do you know?”
    Mullins reviewed everything he told Detective Sullivan: Luguire’s mood, the plans for the Saturday ballgame, the withdrawal of one hundred dollars from the ATM, and the “tough-ass” insertion in the suicide note. “But you have something more concrete,” he said. “At least that’s what your precautions indicate.”
    She nodded. “Three days ago, a flag went up.”
    “A what?”
    “An alert. I’m developing a security system that reviews transactions that are perfectly normal in every way except for frequency. Proper pass codes, account numbers, protocols, and hierarchy of approval. The theory is if someone hacked into the payment system somehow an increased frequency might be the first indicator of the breach.”
    “Makes sense,” Mullins agreed.
    “I’m in beta testing to set the parameters so that we’re not swamped and paralyzed checking out false alarms. We’re limiting the scope to Richmond before expanding. Three days ago a transfer of funds from the Federal Reserve in Richmond to a member bank in southwest Virginia popped up as an anomaly.”
    “Just one?”
    “Yes. Everything was proper except in this case even one transaction tripped the alert. The order for the transfer came from Luguire. Such a matter wouldn’t originate with him. It would be handled strictly out of Richmond.
    “The bank, Laurel, is a small Virginia concern with interstate operations in western North Carolina and east Tennessee. It’s had its share of problems, mainly due to loans for mountain land development that crashed in 2008 and 2009, but they’ve weathered the worst of it. I hesitated to bother Luguire with it because he might have initiated the loan somehow, but it just didn’t feel right.”
    “He was high enough up someone probably thought the