Chapter 39 Wesley
Wesley
We don’t get much done for the rest of the night—despite Madison’s declaration, we quickly passed out on the couch, tangled in each other, exhausted by our emotions—but in the morning, Madison proves how foolish I’d been.
Working with her is seamless. I’m comforted by her quiet presence next to me—the only sounds are a periodic, thoughtful noise or puzzled muttering, and the soft clacking of her keyboard.
I feel energized. More productive and focused because she’s here.
Having her at my side, speaking the same language, being so entirely and completely understood and supported…
Working with her is a dream I don’t want to wake from.
“So you tried searching his alias, obviously. I think a top-down approach makes the most sense, given the breadth of the data, don’t you? Let’s start filtering things until we get a more manageable list. Age, physical location, background…”
It’s hard not to smile. “That’s what I’ve been working on. I’ll continue. You look into Fred.”
“Roger that,” she salutes me and gets to work. “I’m going to look for Todd, too, just in case. I don’t think he’s involved too deeply in this because he’s kind of an idiot, but you never know.”
It’s just before noon when Madison’s plan pans out.
The listening device we sent to SmarTech with Todd has been mostly relaying static and the muffled sounds of being carried around in a pocket. I’ve been able to hear voices, but the tones have always been of a polite greeting or casual conversation. Until now.
I lean forward, shut off my headphones and turn up the volume on my speaker so she can hear it.
“—sure this is it? It’s from her computer?”
“That’s Fred’s voice,” Madison confirms.
“Yeah… and… uh, she wasn’t dead, like you said she was.” Todd’s voice is awkward, but accusatory.
I lift a brow at her and she shrugs. “We knew he’d tell,” she points out.
“What?” Fred is surprised. “How do you know?”
“Because she caught me with her computer and tied—uh, she threatened me with a gun.” Todd narrowly avoids admitting to being tied up by a woman smaller than him. “I don’t know where you got your information—”
“She caught you, but this is her SSD? I… I’m confused, Todd. Tell me what happened.”
As Todd launches into a completely fabricated tale of his own heroism, fighting off the cowardly attacker and stealing the SSD card to bring to SmarTech with his own prowess and cunning, Madison chuckles. “Such a pendejo. At least he didn’t mention you, or what we did to the card.”
“So she’s alive,” Fred repeats, sounding distant and lost in thought.
“Yeah, but that’s not my fault. I did what you wanted, right?”
“Sure, yeah…”
“So, my promotion?”
“What? Oh, of course. Thanks for this. I’ll shoot a note to Nancy in HR letting her know about the title change by the end of the week.”
“Awesome. Thanks, Fred.” He clears his throat awkwardly. “I mean Mr. Harvey.”
“You’re welcome, son. Now, excuse me, but I have an important lunch meeting.”
We wait in silence, listening hard as the door closes Fred in. A few seconds later, he speaks again. “I have it, but she’s still alive. It was Todd. Yes. Yeah, I agree. We don’t need him anymore. I’ll take care of him.”
Madison and I exchange a look as he hangs up. We hear the creaking of an office chair and heavy steps across the room, and the door shuts.
Madison grimaces. “Poor Todd. He’s a world-class tool, but he doesn’t deserve to die.”
“Yes, ‘taking care of him’ is probably not a good euphemism in this case,” I agree.
She gives it a moment of contemplative silence, then moves to the heart of the matter. “So Fred is in on this, but he’s answering to someone,” she assumes.
“Do you think they’re just using SmarTech’s data?” I wonder.
“What’s the alternative?” she asks. “SmarTech is controlling a hitman website? Why would a security company be ordering hits on people? It still doesn’t make complete sense to me…
Although... I mean, the resources required to run the hitman forum are massive—even just from a power consumption standpoint. ”
“True.”
“It’s gotta be SmarTech. And from the sounds of it, it’s multiple people there.”
I feel the certainty settle in my gut, and I know she’s right.
That means we have the confirmation we need to start planning our next move.
“Who does Fred answer to? You and I can start there. And we can get Mac and Dimitri started on surveillance—learning Fred’s routine.
If we can get our hands on him, I’m sure we can get him to tell us what we still need to know.
Like how they’re running the program and where they’re keeping it. ”
“And the why. That’s what I still want to know,” Madison adds. She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head and stretches, leaning so far over the back of her chair that I hear her spine crack. “Let’s take a break—we’ve been at this for hours. I think I smell lunch and I’m kind of starving.”
“Chock-full of good ideas,” I say, smiling.
“Now he gets it.” She winks, stands, and holds out her hand to me.
Hand in hand, we head out to the kitchen and find the four others together, sitting around the glass table in the kitchen, chatting and eating some sort of casserole I can see on the stove. All of them turn to look at us as we enter the room.
Mac grins, arm slung over Eleanor, lounging. “Wes! Mads! Sit. We were just talking about how the 3 Musketeers got together.”
Eleanor pipes in, “Yeah, I realized I’ve never heard the story.”
Nicole nods, taking a hearty bite of her salad. “Me either. I bet it’s really interesting—three hitmen, from such diverse backgrounds.”
“Color me intrigued as well,” Madison agrees, loading up a plate and joining the group. I follow her lead, taking the seat next to her.
Mac rubs his palms together. “Right, so. How far back you want me to go?”
Eleanor shrugs, picking at her steaming pile of veg.
He grins. “Okie doke. I was born on a stormy April night at 10 pounds, two ounces—”
“Feel free to skip forward some,” Eleanor interjects.
“10 pounds?” Nicole repeats, wincing. “You owe your mom an apology.”
“That’s what she says!” Mac replies, grinning.
“Okay… skipping forward… Well, I was a Special Forces sniper for eight years, and when I got out, I hopped from job to job. Lots of guys end up in private security details, but you have to put some time in before any of the good companies will look at you. I was bouncing at a club when this guy,” he claps me on the shoulder, “showed up. Offered me something way better. Better pay, better hours, better life. All I had to do was what I was best at—shoot the bad guys. What was I gonna do, say no?”
He grins at me, and you’d have to know the whole story to even detect the brief tightening around the corners of his eyes.
Because I know the whole story, I see it. I smile back like I don’t.
“It was similar for me. Wesley came to me,” Dimitri says, shoveling a giant forkful of plain chicken into his mouth.
“I know you’re not a storyteller, but you can do better than that,” Eleanor teases.
Dimitri chews, swallows, and narrows his eyes at me.
I’m not sure if he’s trying to remember, or if he’s deciding how much to tell.
“I had to flee Russia for… reasons I can neither confirm nor deny,” he says, throwing Madison a look that makes her grin.
I’ll have to ask about that inside joke between them later.
“When I got here, I was still on the run.
My contact who helped bring me into the country was caught and sent to prison before he could provide the documentation I needed to start over.
I had nothing except a name I could not use and the wrong sort of men after me.
“There is not much you can do in America without the proper paperwork, but I found odd jobs. I was on one such job when I received a curious note under the door of my motel room.”
I smile at the memory. I saw Dimitri’s stats in the file I found in the Russian prison database, but panicked a bit when I came face to face with the real thing.
There’s a world of difference between reading 6’8” and seeing it up close.
Frankly, I was concerned my offer wouldn’t be enough for him, and he’d wring my neck with his bare hands.
“He offered to buy me pie,” Dimitri continues, a faint smile on the corners of his mouth.
“He bought me a cup of coffee,” Mac interjects. “Did he take you to a terrible diner, too?”
“Da. It was very bad pie—too sweet.”
I laugh. “What can I say? American diners fascinate me. And pie is supposed to be sweet, by the way.”
Dimitri’s lips twitch. “Over terrible pie, he told me of this job, and he told me his handler would pay handsomely for the same work I was already doing—and that they would create a new identity for me. But what convinced me was the offer of a team. At this point he had already recruited you,” he adds, nodding at Mac.
Mac and I exchange a look. “I didn’t know that,” I say. I’m oddly touched.
But Dimitri shrugs dismissively and starts cutting off a new bite of his chicken breast. “I was used to the Bratva, where everything is done with a partner or in a small group. I missed having someone to look at my back—”
“Watch your back,” Nicole corrects.
He nods at her, and I’m so taken aback by the lack of a defensive, knee-jerk that is what I said that I almost miss the next bit.
“I did not like being alone. I knew there was a possibility that this team would be bad, but I joined and found it was not so bad. We work well together. We watch each other’s backs.
It has the camaraderie I wanted in the Bratva, with an additional benefit that no one is trying to kill me for my position. ”
Dimitri takes another bite, apparently done with his story. All eyes turn to me, clearly expecting me to go next.
I consider each person in turn and settle on Madison.