Chapter Four
Several hours later, I was seated in a cheap motel room in front of a laptop. I was extremely careful in my line of work, and I made sure that I had had a place to go and a car after the job was complete. Aside from the benefit of having a place to run to, I had set it up so that I could go over whatever data I recovered.
See, clients are just as dangerous as marks in my business. In the “clandestine services,” itchy trigger fingers often led to dead freelancers, and I found that usually people were more likely to be twitchy if they had asked me to steal something especially important.
To avoid situations that would end with sudden and acute lead poisoning (which probably wouldn’t kill me, but it’s not like I would enjoy the experience) I made it my policy to examine anything I stole for a client. If the information was too dangerous for me to know, I disappeared. I’d done it three times in the past, all when extremely dangerous people wanted to know extremely dangerous things.
One of them, it turned out, had been planning a terrorist attack. I managed to piece together the details of what they were going to do, and turned the information over to the Secret Service anonymously. They must’ve stopped the plot in its tracks, because I never heard anything about it again. If you live in Virginia, you’re welcome.
Anyway, this time was different. I wasn’t just looking for something that was vaguely dangerous, I was looking for something that would lead to three unarmed people attacking a paramilitary organization. So I read with as much attention as possible, thoroughly going through each document I had recovered across a full terabyte of data.
And it was freaking boring.
Do you realize how much a terabyte of data is? When most of what you’re looking through is emails, that’s an insane amount of things to read. To put it in perspective, it’s about three hundred and fifty thousand copies of War and Peace. More, if they’re compressed adequately.
I paid closer attention to messages that had been sent in the past couple of months. If there was anything dangerous, it would probably be recent; most of this stuff pertained to jobs already completed. So I read.
And read.
And read.
The light in my hotel room, half a state away from the seedy motel where I had stayed during the job, was uneven and particularly annoying. One of the lamps flickered occasionally, and, frankly, it drove me nuts. I glowered at it every so often, trying to impress upon it the scope of my displeasure. The lamp remained unimpressed, and continued to flicker lamely at me.
No respect.
It took the rest of that day and half of the second, about thirty hours before my deadline, for me to find something that made my heart race.
I read through the email chain carefully, blinking away my weariness. Then I shook my head, got up, and made a pot of coffee in the little one that the hotel provided. I splashed some cold water on my face while it brewed. Then I made myself a cup, took a few sips, and sat back down, rubbing my eyes. I took another few minutes to make sure that I was firmly awake, alert, and conscious.
Then I read through it again.
By the time I finished, a cold weight had settled in the pit of my stomach.
Shit.
The email chain was similar to the others. It was calm, quiet, and extremely professional. The sender had requested an estimate of costs for a contract, and Josh and his cohorts had provided a simple, conservative bid to complete the job.
Words like “disposal,” “cleanup,” and “covert” jumped out at me. Plans for digging large, bafflingly huge trenches were included. Diagrams showing the exact dimensions and estimates for the total amount of volume clearly showed the practicality of the plan. Timelines, work schedules, and all of the logistical data were included, in a coolly professional manner.
One word was used just a single time, in the initial estimate request: “cadavers.”
Someone had requested an estimate for the secret disposal of a large number of corpses.
An impossibly large number of corpses. Thousands. Tens of thousands.
And they wanted it completed out of sight of any surveillance satellites.
Mass graves. Burning trenches.
Thousands of people. The population of several large towns, or a small city was going to die.
This was something that someone would want to cover up. This was worth attacking a facility like Blackstone’s, if they were looking to erase their trail—or if they were trying to track down whoever was responsible.
But no, that didn’t track. They had had grins on their faces, and two of them had actual burst into laughter. If they were looking for clues, they probably wouldn’t be so happy about it. Unless they were insane or something.
Information. I need more information.
Resolute, I began searching for other messages pertaining to the chain of emails.