“What did she tell you?”
“Nothing. Which tells me a whole lot.”
“Her dad has always had someone around to protect her. I’m just surprised it’s you, that’s all.”
“It was a gig. I took it. I’m home as soon as I can get there.”
“I’m flying out in five days. Come with. Trust me, Cella will be fine. Especially with Mossa and his men around.”
“You sure? The noose is tightening around his neck, in case you haven’t noticed. That’s why she sent her kid away.”
“What kind of mother does that?”
“The kind that loves her kid.”
“Then why didn’t she go with her?”
“If you know Cella, you know how fierce she is. She’s devoted to the old man.”
“How did she ever decide to raise a family out here? You’d think she’d move back to Italy just for the sake of her daughter.”
“She’s a complicated lady. You’d have to ask her.”
“That means the noose is tightening around your neck, too, you know.”
“I got a big neck. Stiff one, too.”
“Seriously. You might not walk away from this one.”
“Can’t help that. I’ve been hired to do a job. I’m going to see it through. So would you, if you were me. I think.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Unlike me, a handsome Army Ranger on a grand adventure in the Sahara, you look like a steaming turd recent shat out of a cat’s anus, a dim shadow of the CIA stud I used to know. What the hell happened to you?”
“After the Myers thing, I kinda lost it. Did some shit I probably shouldn’t have done, but had to. You know how it is. “
“Yeah, I do.”
Words like “duty,” “honor,” and “loyalty” were more than just slogans for men like Pearce and Early. Early heard rumors that Pearce had gotten his revenge on the Russian responsible for the death of Myers’s son.
“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.”
43
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.”