Free Storm Killer by Benjamin Blue Page A

desk within the Control Center building. This allowed her to coordinate the investigation, have immediate access to the department heads, and be able to easily meet with Brad, Adam, and Greg for scheduled status meetings.
    They all preferred face-to-face meetings in the Control Center rather than teleconferencing from various sites within the dumbbell. Even with encryption, someone who really wanted to overhear such electronic meetings could break the cipher and listen in.
    Until more was known about the criminal or criminals, security measures would stay at the highest levels.
    Currently, Brad, Adam, and Greg were taking shifts to act as a guard at the mainframe computer complex. As personnel cleared interrogation and a rapid but thorough background check by ground-based CORTEX and governmental agencies, they would be assigned to this guard duty. Until then, only the three trusted executive personnel would do the guard duty.
    Since Brad had come down with a bad case of the flu, Adam and Greg had split his shift. Brad had gone to Dr. Cruz, was checked out, given a medication, and told to go to bed for twenty-four hours.
    Lt. Randall James outranked her, but with the orders written by the Storm Killer Director, Kim assumed full command authority. Lt. James was not happy about this, but he did his duty.
    Lt. James had experience and background with electronic surveillance. He’d been an operative from one of the numerous intelligence agencies that had sprung up in the years following the earliest terrorists attacks in the United States. His special area of expertise was electronic surveillance. He had perfected this skill spying upon the various radical organizations in the western United States.
    He’d left the intelligence organization after what most people called the ‘Waco II incident of ’15 occurred. He’d never been able to shake the feeling of guilt in his role in the death of all of those people.
    Even though his role had been minor and he had not raised a weapon against them, he was haunted by the cold, calculated way his field commander had ordered the death of over sixty save-the-Earth cult members whose only apparent crimes were failure to pay taxes and possession of a small cache of ancient automatic rifles that no longer worked.
    He was already hard at work reviewing the sticks’ memory using computer technology that scanned each recording and only displayed images when movement was detected. Each recorded scene of movement was being copied to a chronological file by location.
    The third member of the Storm Killer security team was Dan Hoch, a strapping six foot six inch shaven head former beat cop from New Orleans. He had resigned from the police department after the televised beating of an elderly man after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city. He had participated in that incident much to his sorrow.
    After Katrina, he had lost his home and young family to the floods. He worked over two weeks with only a few hours of sleep. The pain and hurt in his life had welled up in him until finally, just like New Orleans’ levees, his mental levee had broken. He snapped and, with the three other police officers at the scene, had beaten the man, causing extensive internal injuries and broken bones.
    After lengthy therapy, he understood his loss and his fragile mental state. He went to the man he had beaten to apologize and seek his forgiveness. The man had looked at Hoch and saw his anguish. He raised a hand to stop Hoch in the middle of his apology and simple said, “Be well. Go, my brother, and do some good.” The man had dropped the charges pending against Hoch. The police department had allowed Hoch to resign with nothing being placed on his immaculate record. After a lengthy rehab period, Hoch felt he was ready to ‘do some good’ and sought employment with CORDEX security.
    Hoch had investigated several warehouse pilfering cases and had been key in breaking up an international ring of thieves