Free The Killing Kind by Chris Holm

rather than the other way around. Half the time, the folks he approached had no idea they’d been marked for death until Hendricks told them. Some refused to believe him. Some believed him but decided to go it alone. Some bought in right away. The ones who declined his services didn’t always come to a bad end, but their survival rate was less than stellar. Those who paid fared significantly better. In the three and a half years he’d been doing this, he’d yet to lose a single client.
    The key was identifying them early enough to scout the job and make the proper approach. Early on in his career, Hendricks had simply tailed known hitters and identified their targets by hanging back and watching—but that made his margin for error razor thin and damn near got him killed a couple times. One particularly nasty job ended with his client safe, his target dead—but not before the bastard buried an ice pick three inches deep in Hendricks’s chest. After four days holed up in an abandoned warehouse, trying to keep the bleeding under control while he waited for the antibiotics he’d boosted from a veterinary clinic to take effect, Hendricks decided it was time for a new approach. That’s when he brought Lester in.
    Back in Afghanistan, Lester had been the tech-head of the unit. There wasn’t a system he couldn’t hack, a wire he couldn’t tap, a cipher he couldn’t crack. And when the grit and wild swings of temperature between heat of day and aching chill of night got the better of their equipment, Lester never failed to jury-rig a fix. A handy talent when you’re four days out from your nearest base to resupply— and no less handy if you intend to kill people who kill people for a living.
    Every criminal organization on the planet had some kind of underground communications network. The Russians, for example, favored the old classified ad routine, hiding coded messages in Craigslist posts and the tawdry personals you see on the back pages of alternative weeklies. The Armenians buried lines of garbled nonsense in the source codes of various Internet forums they own—a basic substitution cipher any twelve-year-old with a knack for puzzles could solve, if he or she knew where to look. But no twelveyear-old would waste their time right-clicking and combing the HTML of some random muscle-car chat room.
    Lester would, though. Or, at least, his systems would.
    The Korean network, he identified in weeks. Ditto the street gangs of LA, who were anything but subtle in their messages. The Polish and Lithuanian families—who used anonymous remailers bounced off half a dozen proxy servers around the globe—took longer. But the Holy Grail of mob communications, the toughest nut to crack, had been the Council’s. All but the most stubborn or paranoid of their member organizations used it, and why wouldn’t they? It was safe, reliable, and damn near impossible to hack—their very own illegal information superhighway.
    Take the printout Hendricks was glancing over now, for instance: a set of race results from Northville Downs, a small-time harness track about a half hour west of Detroit. Big winner of the day was a mare named McGurn’s Lament.
    Only there was no such horse as McGurn’s Lament. And if you were to try to make sense of the day’s stats, you’d find that they’d resist sense-making. That’s because those stats aren’t stats at all.
    They’re a book code.
The Council’s member organizations have been passing messages this way for years. Got their fingers in a half a dozen race sites so they could spread the bogus results around, avoid raising any hackles. They used made-up horses as code names indicating the nature of the message—Brown Beauty if they were moving heroin, Luscious Lady if they were talking whores, and so on—with the pertinent details encrypted in the results that followed.
    McGurn’s Lament signified a hit. An in-joke of sorts, Hendricks supposed. McGurn had been Capone’s chief hitman,