“You needed it,” she said.
“I’m starving.”
“We all are. Your wi—”
She caught herself. The corner of my mouth twitched in the slightest hint of a smile.
“Denise,” she continued, “said there’s a little corner store a few miles in town. You okay if I make a run?”
“Sure,” I said, pulling out my phone. When I opened it and saw my new notifications, I forgot about the hunger pangs in my stomach.
There was a message in the chat room.
Files in dropbox, it said. Not much, best I could do.
Thank you, I wrote back, fingers shaking. Then I killed the chat and opened the dropbox. It showed that just under 1 MB of data had been deposited within the last hour. If that was all text, it was a lot. If there were videos and images mixed in, not so much. I called Robert over to take a look. Someone must have found a deck of cards somewhere, because he was in the middle of a game of rummy with Denise and the kids at the kitchen table.
“Whaddya got?” he asked, sliding a chair over to the couch. The metal legs screeched against the yellowed, curling linoleum floor.
“Don’t know,” I said absently as I punched in my pass code. When it opened, I saw it was mostly emails and word documents, with some PDFs and a few scanned photos mixed in as well. No video.
“Is that all from Jeff’s computer?”
“Hard to say.” Sergei had taken the time to create separate folders based on the file type, but there didn’t appear to be any indicators about where they came from. I couldn’t complain. He did this job on short notice and at a discount. Like I always tell my clients: you get what you pay for.
I skipped over the heaviest folder marked “Emails” and opened the one marked “Documents.” This was a mix of scanned images, Excel spreadsheets, and traditional Word docs. After scrolling through the first dozen pages, it became apparent that Sergei’s haul was haphazard. Either many of the files to which Trish had access had already been deleted, or these were simply the ones he could access with no help and limited resources. Whatever the reason, it was a data dump in the most literal sense. Like trying to solve ten different puzzles with only a handful of pieces from each one, all mixed together in the same box. Still, the methodology didn’t change. How did you solve a puzzle? By putting matching pieces together. Find the corners, look for patterns.
For the next two hours, that’s what we did. Robert and I, side by side, while Erica went grocery shopping and Denise and the kids went about making Aunt Irene’s old homestead as livable as possible. Ethan sulked the entire time, which was actually kind of reassuring—it’s what a twelve-year-old boy should look like when dusting old furniture. Hopefully that meant he had come fully around from his shock last night.
“That goes there,” Robert said, pointing to the folder we’d created marked “Suspects.” Sorting through the jumble of evidence, the only pattern that emerged was that most of it revolved around either individuals or companies, so we created a new folder for each and were in the process of grouping them together. It helped that I was familiar with a lot of the names in both folders. Some were from my days doing executive search—those were mostly the American corporations—but the rest were from the network I’d built in the decade since. I was not at all surprised to see that the two often overlapped. Multi-billion dollar companies don’t get to that level by only doing business with Boy Scouts.
“This guy’s an arms dealer,” I said, pointing at a surveillance shot of a middle-aged Arab man getting into a car outside a nondescript office building. “Connected to at least a dozen militant extremist groups around the world.”
“Any in the US?”
I nodded. “A few.”
“There has to be a connection to the uranium there, right?”
“Maybe. Hard to say for sure. That’s not our concern right now anyway.”
“Not our concern? Preventing a terrorist from killing thousands of innocent people is not our concern?”
“No, it’s the task force’s concern.”
“The task force is gone, remember? You made sure of that.”
“Not all of them,” I said, ignoring the shot. “MI5’s agents are hopefully still alive. Besides, the uranium’s hidden away someplace safe, right? You made sure of that. Right now, my focus is on protecting the people in this house. That’s it.”
He clearly wasn’t happy with that answer, but he didn’t press the issue.
When we were done, there were 113 files in the Company folder, and 57 in the Suspect folder. Many of those files contained information about the same suspect or the same company. In all, there were maybe a dozen companies of interest, and ten suspects. I knew all of the companies and had dealt directly with four of them. All legitimate businesses with global footprints. The four that I’d worked with before were headquartered in America.
The word “legitimate” did not apply to the suspect list, which was full of career criminals. I knew them all. Their specialties were all over the map, ranging from robbery to murder. There was no common denominator. Two of them, though, stood out more than the others:
General Li Xin, former head of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
And Arthur Lynch, a serial entrepreneur who founded dozens of Silicon Valley startups before he renounced his citizenship and emigrated to Russia right before his businesses were all investigated for tax evasion.
Neither of them had been seen for years. They weren’t presumed dead, like Willem Van de Berg, they just sort of fizzled out, the way well-known people sometimes do when they step out of the public eye.
“So what’s the connection?” Robert asked, more to himself than to me. Knowing he wasn’t looking for an answer, I simply shook my head. If he wasn’t going to give up the location of his secret box, then I wasn’t inclined to share what I knew about Trish’s organization. Not yet, anyway. Besides, it was just a hunch that Xin and Lynch were part of her Board of Directors. I could be totally wrong.
We sat staring at the tiny five-inch screen on my phone, our chins resting in our hands, the universal image of the adult male stumped. It’s the same look I wore at some point during every Christmas Eve that I spent assembling an overpriced toy with eight hundred thousand tiny plastic pieces. Every now and then one of us would reach down and open a specific file, read it—or at least pretend to—then close it and resume the position.
“What’s the endgame here, Ben?” Robert said as he stood up, arching his back to stretch the muscles. Denise was at the stove, boiling water for a quick spaghetti dinner. The supplies in the country store had proven to be somewhat limited, but they were enough to provide a real meal. “Let’s say we figure out what all this means. How do we use that information to call off this Persian person you say is coming for us?"
“If we can figure out what the task force knew, maybe we can use it to leverage Trish to call off the hit. Clearly, whatever evidence they’d already compiled was enough to spook her pretty bad. And from what I know about Trish, she doesn’t spook easily.”
“That’s your plan? Try to ‘spook’ her?”
“I’m open to better suggestions.”
“My suggestion is dinner,” Denise said as she set paper plates around the table. “You both need to eat.”
As suggestions go, it wasn’t a bad one. Especially since Denise said it without sounding like she hoped I choked on the noodles. I’d take every small win that I could get.
