Chapter 8
Chapter 8
W hile Frank was dead, our problem was not. Frank had built his empire on the backs of seven generals. Men, and possibly women, he’d blackmailed. As best as I could piece together, all seven were powerful people who had committed some illegal act of which they were ashamed. And had been caught. By Frank. If the act were made public, the consequences could ruin them, demanding both public shame and long prison stints. When alive, Frank had held whatever evidence he’d obtained—probably high-def video and sound—of their sadistic crimes as leverage, using it to get what he wanted. Everything he did was predicated on those seven people doing what he wanted when he wanted, however he wanted. But by killing Frank, we had opened Pandora’s box.
And yet, in a weird twist, Frank used that same leverage to make those seven individuals very wealthy. So while they wanted freedom from Frank, they liked the money, which in turn made Frank otherworldly wealthy. The deckhands are less likely to mutiny when the hull is full of gold. This created an odd tension in the down line of his pyramid scheme. Each of the players wanted off the devil’s ship—but what about the money?
Frank’s death had temporarily “freed” those seven people from the shallow electronic grave in which Frank held them. Or had it? What if Frank had programmed an electronic timer to go off in the event of his death and populate the internet with video of their crimes? A data dump of the worst kind. Further, what if he’d told them that would happen to incentivize them to keep him around? To not kill him? The twists here were many.
The question that had kept me awake all night was simple: What would happen now? In my experience, evil people with power usually want more power, and they are willing to commit whatever evil is needed to get more of it. Evil is the currency. Power the prize.
For decades, Frank had kept seven identities a secret. From the world and one another. They were never in the same room. Never in the same state and probably not even in the same country. This blind separation strategy was key to Frank’s evil genius. Keep the inmates in solitary. Lockdown. Don’t give them windows. But now that he was gone, what would they do? Would they ride quietly off into the sunset with their billions and just hope the video evidence of their previous crimes stayed buried with Frank? Hope that while they’d done the crime, they’d also done the time Frank had demanded—and given this, maybe, just maybe, Frank had been kind enough, or maybe indifferent enough, to let it go.
I tended to doubt it. This was the same man who had kept a running list of all the priests who’d abused him and then returned to hurt them. One by one. Savoring each broken bone. No, Frank was not about to let it go.
But how do you prevent mutiny, or prison break? One answer quickly rose to the surface. Fear. Which brought me back to my internet explosion theory. If I were Frank, creating an empire based on blackmail, I would have programmed some ticking electronic time bomb hidden in cyberspace that was set to go off in the untimely event of my death. And I would have made sure the seven knew of its existence. Meaning, if Frank wasn’t around to routinely reset the timer, let’s say every few weeks or every couple of months, time would expire and an explosion would occur that would then populate the internet with high-res pics and video. Destroying all their lives. This, in turn, would pretty much guarantee none of the seven would attempt to off him. But what if someone else did? What then?
Further, what if any one of the seven had somehow discovered the identity of any of the others? Would they go to war or form an alliance? Seemed like an alliance came with certain risks but would serve them better, at least in the short term.
The more I thought, the more the questions mounted, and I had answers for none. All I knew for certain was that Frank had successfully blackmailed them and done so over a prolonged period of time, suggesting he had enough evidence to keep them submissive and under his thumb. But where was that evidence? It was not in his data vault. Eddie and the team had made sure of that. Which meant he had buried it someplace else. Someplace separate. And while I wanted to find it, I was pretty sure there were seven people who wanted it far more than me and were tripping over themselves to get it.
I walked back through the problem in my mind. Free from Frank’s tyranny, what would the seven do? I felt safe in assuming they would want to keep the evidence a secret, which meant they’d fight to find and erase it. But how far would they go? What happens when the inmates run the asylum? My thoughts raced, answers eluded me, and Bones’s absence weighed heavy on me. I needed Bones now more than ever. Everyone at Freetown was looking to me for answers. I had none. If I was honest, I wanted nothing to do with Freetown. Didn’t want to return. Didn’t want to walk the streets. And I certainly did not want to walk into Bones’s Planetarium. Too many memories. Each one ripping the scab off the last.
When in DC, I liked to run the monuments. Washington. Lincoln. Jefferson. Early morning hours when I could watch the sun rise over the Mall. Doing so helped put things in perspective. At 4:00 a.m., I pulled on my sweats and turned left out of the hotel. I needed to clear my head, and doing so would require sweat and prolonged exertion. When I looked at Gunner sleeping on the end of the bed and motioned toward the door, he lifted his head, grunted, and laid his head back down on Summer’s foot.
“Okay. Keep an eye out.” He grunted again but didn’t move.
A block from my hotel, I noticed company running in the shadows over my shoulder. Dark sweats. Hoodie. Thick shoulders. Ran like a cat. I smiled. I liked Camp.
Camp was ex-military. Navy SEAL. He was active duty until an IED detonated beneath the vehicle in which he was riding, detaching both retinas and rattling his noggin. Surgery repaired both retinas and his vision, but between that and the concussion, he had been medically discharged. Mind you, against his wishes. So he used the military’s money, went back to school, and floundered in the business program until he took a basic computer class and discovered his second set of skills. From there he dove into computing languages and took to them like a fish to water. Ever since, he could get into and behind anyone’s computer. Including the president’s. Which he did. Leaving him an electronic yellow sticky plastered in the middle of his screen. The note read, “I’m keeping my promise. Your security needs some work. Almost as much as your golf game.” Then he listed his name, rank, and phone number. Since the president had hung a few medals around his neck, they didn’t bury him beneath the prison. Instead, after a rather lengthy interview, they thanked him for the heads-up and hired him to work in cybersecurity. After eight years and bored with the political arena, Camp aged into his late twenties and kept looking for the excitement he’d been robbed of when the bomb went off. He’s unmarried, lives alone, and visits his grandmother on the weekends.
I hoped he’d stick around but I also knew it’d be tough to keep him. A guy with his gifts and pedigree could get hired anywhere or run his own show. I had a feeling he’d been wanting to talk to me about his departure since we accomplished the job for which he’d been hired—that is, killing Frank. Summer had cautioned me that this conversation was coming. I guessed this run was about to be that talk. I appreciated that he waited until after yesterday. It spoke volumes.
Three miles in, I spoke over my shoulder. “You gonna stay back there by yourself or come up here and keep me company?”
He trotted alongside. “Just giving you some space.”
He was barely breathing. The presidential helicopter zoomed low overhead. Not an uncommon sight. It was headed in the general direction of the White House. I tried to break the ice. “You thought about what you might do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you three—Jess, BP, and yourself—did what we hired you to do. Frank’s gone. I’m sure each of you have offers. I just want you to know I really appreciate what you—”
“Are you firing me?”
This caught me off guard. “What? No, I just—”
He stopped. Faced me. Again, proving I was breathing harder than he was. His face took on an intensity I seldom saw. “Is there work yet to be done?”
“What?”
“Is everyone free?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then, unless you’re firing me, I’d like to stick around.”
“You’re not quitting?”
“No.”
I was confused. “You’re not running alongside me because you want to give me your two weeks’ notice?”
He shook his head. The look on his face suggested that was a ridiculous notion. “No. Why on earth would you think I’d do that?”
“Well, I just thought...” A pause. “Honestly, Camp, I don’t know what I thought. That’s been one of the difficulties without Bones. Knowing what to think. And maybe even how to think.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Murph, it’s okay to not know. It’s okay to hurt. We’re all hurting. We’ll figure it out. All of us. Together. We’ve got your back.”
Man, I really liked this guy. “So you do want to stick around?”
He laughed. “Yes.”
We started jogging again. “Good, because good help is tough to find these days.”
He laughed again.
I tried to correct my word choice. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I don’t look at you as ‘help.’”
“No offense taken.”
“You should probably know when I was at the academy my superiors wrote in my file that I didn’t ‘play well with others.’”
“Yeah, I read that.”
“You did?”
An honest shrug. “I do have a top-secret security clearance.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You learned to work alone. I learned to work with a team. Both have their place.” A mile later, he cleared his throat. “There is one thing I’d like to talk to you abou—”
This time I stopped running. “You want more money?”
More laughter. “No.”
I was so confused. “I’ll pay more.”
“Okay, great, but that’s not what’s got me—”
“Then what?”
“I wanted to ask your permission.”
“Permission? Permission to do wha—?”
No sooner had the words exited my mouth than a black SUV pulled up sharply alongside us and a man in a dark suit exited, wearing an earpiece. He stood next to the door, his jacket bulging with the imprint of a submachine gun hanging from a single-point sling. He nodded at me. “Murph.”
“Bill.” Bill Stackhouse had worked the vice president’s detail for over a decade. Ashley’s top man. If Ashley had sent him, there was a problem.
“Copper Top requests your presence.” The fact that he used the vice president’s code name revealed this was not a personal call.