Jay headed for the keep’s library. He saw no one, the librarian had fled, and it was but a matter of moments before he found the lambskin scroll for which he had come. He looked it over, saw the information he needed, and nodded to himself. He left the scroll where he’d found it — it would do no good to take it, he couldn’t show it to anybody in the real world. Possession of the information on it in the RW would make him guilty of a crime, and he couldn’t use it as evidence in any event. But he wasn’t looking for evidence, he was looking for knowledge. Different critter.
“I have you now!” he said, trying for Darth Vader’s resonant voice.
“The King’s Army approaches,” called the dragon.
“End scenario,” he said.
Jay sat, and without a word, touched a control on his flatscreen.
The holoproj appeared over the computer, and he turned the instrument around so that Thorn could get a view of the image from the front.
“Natadze,” Thorn said.
“Yes. I used the three pictures we had and had the SC run a scan on images from television, newspapers, and magazines, and there he is. It’s from American Businessman, six months ago.”
Thorn looked at the picture. Natadze, in a dark gray business suit, stood among a group of other men dressed similarly.
“Watch this,” Jay said. He tapped at the flatscreen and the image shifted so that Natadze and the others shrank and were relegated to the background. In the foreground, two men appeared. One of them was obviously presenting some kind of plaque to the other. They were smiling and shaking hands for the camera.
Thorn knew who one of the men was. “Samuel Walker Cox,” he said. “The oilman.”
Jay nodded. “Yep. The other one is Andre Arpree, of the International Chamber of Commerce, based in Paris. The award is for fostering business relations between Europe and the U.S.”
“And what is our man Natadze doing there, watching such a thing, do you think?”
“He works for somebody connected to the event.”
Thorn nodded. “Yes, that would be my guess, too.”
Jay didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked nervous.
Softly, Thorn said, “But you aren’t guessing, are you, Jay?”
Jay sighed, then seemed to come to a decision. “I figured that Natadze worked for Cox or for Arpree. The thing is, neither of their corporate records are, um, accessible without a federal warrant.”
“Uh huh.” Thorn had an idea where this was going.
“And getting a warrant based on a picture of a guy standing in the background of an award ceremony is likely to be, um, difficult.”
Thorn nodded. “Yes. If it was my company, I’d have a platoon of lawyers screaming bloody murder, trying to convince a judge that Net Force didn’t have anything, they were just fishing and hoping.”
“That’s what I figured. We can’t really make this guy into a terrorist, so the country isn’t really at risk. Opening up the records of two major corporations, one of them French? Not likely.”
Thorn’s expertise was in computers, and he had been a hacker before he started selling the software that eventually made him rich. He knew where this was going.
“And even if you got it, we couldn’t use it in court, Jay.”
“I know.”
“Legally, they’d fry us.”
“Yeah.”
Thorn took a deep breath, let half of it out. There was the law. And there was justice.
“So, okay. Who does he work for?”
Jay couldn’t suppress a slight smile. “Cox. Our hitman Eduard Natadze is head of Special Security for Samuel Walker Cox.”
Thorn stared at the holoproj. Wow. Wasn’t that an ugly can of worms?
31
General John Howard was not surprised that Gridley had come up with the information; nor was he surprised that Thorn was being very circumspect about how such knowledge had come into their possession. Howard lived by a moral code based on the Ten Commandments, he was a religious man, and he knew that morality and Caesar’s Law sometimes diverged. When in doubt, he followed God’s laws — come Judgment Day, those would be the ones that counted the most. The wicked should be punished, and this man Natadze, and whoever set him upon his immoral chores, would certainly be among them.
On the other hand, if he and Net Force could be the instrument of that punishment in this world, he had no problem with that.
“The government will need a lot more evidence before this gets turned over to the AG for prosecution,” Thorn said. “You don’t kick in a billionaire’s door and arrest him without a case as solid as a block of depleted uranium.”
The others in the room — Jay, Abe, and Julio — nodded.
“So, here is the situation. We know who the shooter is, and we know — but can’t prove — who holds his leash. We’ve done what we were supposed to do. What we should do now is turn it over to the FBI and let them run it down.”
Every man in the room must have heard the unspoken but implied word.
Abe got to it first. “But?”
Thorn looked around. “This is tricky. For one thing, we have a personal stake in it—”
“Amen,” Gridley said.
Thorn continued without speaking to that: “—and it would be nice if we could package it up neatly before handing it off to the FBI and the locals in whose jurisdiction these events took place. The fed gets first whack at it, but the city and county will have felony charges, too.”
“And is our personal involvement enough reason not to turn it over?” Abe said.
Howard spoke up: “Well, I see where the Commander is going. It’s not that we don’t trust the feebs and the locals to do a good job, it’s just that we don’t trust them as much as we do our own people.”
Abe didn’t say anything, but it was obvious he had some problem with the idea.
Thorn said, “So, we can hand it off, or… gather a little more information ourselves first.”
Howard smiled. Alex Michaels would have made the latter choice, and he’d have suited up and gone out into the field, too. Howard said, “You’re the Commander, and it’s your choice, but if my opinion counts, I’d say we collect a little more data on our own.”
He saw Julio and Jay nod. Abe kept his face carefully neutral.
Thorn said, “There’s more to it, as well. This guy, Natadze, came after Jay for a reason. What’s more, the guy he works for sicced him on Jay for a reason. That means that they knew what Jay was working on, and that means that somehow they have access to information they shouldn’t.”
Again, heads around the room nodded.
“You guys have worked with the regular FBI more than I have,” Thorn went on, “but I haven’t seen anything in the files to indicate they could be the source of a leak.”
“They’ve always been solid, if not quite as good as our own people,” Howard said.
“Still, once this goes over to them, there will be records. In short, people, once this gets out beyond us, it becomes more likely that the guy we’re after might just learn that we’re on to him. And if that happens, he’ll crawl into some deep dark hole and hide. We’ll never get him, then.”
“So we keep it, then?” Howard asked.
Thorn nodded. “For now. We know the players. We know where they live. The shooter isn’t likely to go home and just let us collect him, but if we can put the two men together, that will give us something substantial. Why don’t we see if we can do that much?”
Their van was disguised as a plumbing truck, parked not far from the front entrance to the rich man’s estate. The vehicle smelled like pizza, which is what the driver had gotten for lunch on the way there. Not as luxurious as the RV they’d used before, but a better fit for this area.