Mike Maden - River of Gods

“But it was more than that. You were right about her, Mikey. She was the real deal. I actually started to believe again. And then she was forced to resign. Politics as usual.”

“And then what?”

Pearce blew out a long breath. “I ran, I guess. Hid in the work. At least, the humanitarian stuff.”

“How was that working for you?”

“Okay, until a few days ago.”

“What happened?”

“The last job went sideways. One of my guys got killed.”

“I thought you weren’t working security anymore.”

“That’s the hell of it. We weren’t. For just that reason. We were trying to track a few rhinos. Johnny got killed anyway.” Pearce didn’t describe the condition of Johnny’s corpse when he found it. “I wasn’t there when Johnny needed me. He paid the price.”

“He signed on. He knew what he was in for, working for you.”

“Should’ve been me, not him.”

“Someday, it will be. You know that. So do I. It’s just that his ticket got punched before yours did. You’ve got to let that go.”

Pearce thought about that for a while. “If Cella left, though, you’d leave, right?”

“I’m a huge fan of Mossa, but I’m a bigger fan of my wife and kids. If you can convince her to vamoose, I’m on the next flight out of here with the two of you.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Early laughed. “Good luck with that.”

Pearce’s cabin

Near the Snake River, Wyoming

10 May

Myers’s body craved a good run, but her common sense told her to stay put and out of sight. Heaven only knew what kind of resources may have been deployed to find her. Even George Clooney owned his own spy satellite these days, but at least he was putting it to good use keeping tabs on African warlords. By now her disappearance had raised alarms with whoever was behind the Tanner suicide. She had to assume they were still looking for her.

Neither she nor Ian had slept in the last few days as they applied digital brute force to the vast data sets she had proposed in their search for the identity of Tanner’s blackmailers. In lieu of sleep, Myers resorted to periodic yoga stretches and body-weight exercises to keep the blood flowing and her muscles taut, fighting the inertia of countless hours of software writing and data analysis. She found a couple of crates and rigged up a crude standing desk to do her computer work. She’d read recently that sitting for more than three hours per day increased heart disease by sixty-four percent, among other pathologies. Sitting, apparently, was the new smoking.

Myers checked the clock on her computer. It was almost time for Ian to check in. She’d passed on her assigned data analyses as they were completed over the last two days, but she still kept crunching data sets, following other leads that popped up. There was no question in her mind that the person or persons behind Tanner’s death were political, and most likely American, though international criminal syndicates had been known to play powerful roles in American political life, especially at the state and local levels both in the past and recently.

The one solid conclusion she had reached was that her old friend was as clean as she thought he had been. She’d known Tanner and his family for years and knew him to be an honorable judge and wonderful father and husband. But Myers was after his killer or killers, so she went after his records hammer and tongs, pulling out all of the stops, digging down to the subatomic level. To her great relief, she found absolutely nothing. With Ian’s help, she had been able to secure Tanner’s FBI background checks—as president, she’d only been briefed on the glowing summaries—and discovered that the FBI couldn’t believe his pristine personal and professional life. More than one of the FBI’s interviewees had referred to him as “Saint Vincent.”

Meyers had even managed to find one of Tanner’s fourth-grade report cards posted on the Internet—someone had found it at a garage sale and put it up, inappropriately, on Pinterest. Even then, according to his teacher, Tanner was an outstanding young gentleman with impeccable manners, social skills, and high academic potential. Taken together, her inability to find any dirt likely meant that the blackmail “evidence” used against the esteemed jurist had to have been manufactured out of whole cloth.

For a brief period of time she began to wonder if Tanner’s death was somehow pointed at her, some kind of payback for a slight—real or imagined—committed by her while in office; but she’d been out of office and out of the political loop long enough that she eventually dismissed the idea. What would be the point now? Besides, if these people were powerful enough to get a man of Tanner’s character to put a gun in his mouth and blow his own brains out, she knew that they could have just as easily come after her with whatever “evidence” they had concocted against him.

Her monitor dinged. Ian was checking in. “Here, Margaret.”

“Good to see you, Ian.” Myers saw that he looked as tired and baggy-eyed as she did. The two of them had hardly slept the last two days as they sorted through the mountains of data they had compiled. “What do we have?” Myers asked. She had forwarded her findings to Ian and he had spent the last two hours cross-referencing their results.

“There is a lot of outrage in American politics, isn’t there?”

“Yes, unfortunately. Some of that is ginned up by the politicians themselves to rally votes, but mostly it’s bad policies by a failed government that’s hurting millions of Americans fueling that rage.”

“I don’t know if this is the right list or not, but based upon everything we discussed and the search results we have generated, there are four congressmen, three senators, and five corporate CEOs that rise to the top of the outrage list. These are some very hated people.”

“Then those are our targets. Any connections between them?”

“Funny you should ask that. There is one senator and one CEO that are very closely connected. Both go by the surname Fiero.”

“As in, Senator Barbara Fiero?”

“Précisément. Her husband’s name is Anthony. These are very rich people, by the way.”

“I’ve met Senator Fiero. She is many things, including extremely intelligent, ambitious, and beautiful, but the one thing she is not is a computer programmer. She isn’t our super hacker.”

“Maybe she has her own private Edward Snowden in the NSA,” Ian joked.

“Edward Snowden wasn’t in the NSA. He worked as a private contractor for the NSA. That’s a big difference. What do you know about the senator’s husband?”

“A little mysterious, that one. He’s a private hedge fund manager with many international connections.”

“Is he a computer guy? Or does he have access to one?”

“He’s not a computer guy, but he appears to be connected to a very savvy data outfit known as CIOS. It’s a first-rate shop. The best, really, run by the best software engineer in the business. Answers to the name of Jasmine Bath.”

“Better than you? That’s hard to believe, given what I’ve seen you do and what Troy has told me about you.”

“I’m no slacker, but I don’t have the background and experience she’s had in the TAO. She is to computer spying what Peyton Manning is to your American football.”

“So CIOS and this Jasmine Bath computer genius could mount an operation like the kind we’re talking about?”