“Am I thinking like myself, or like Bissel?”
“Like you.”
“A small apartment in a lower middle-class neighborhood where no one pays attention to anyone else. Better, something just outside the city, convenient to public transportation so I could get back and forth easily.”
“Why not a house?”
“Too much overhead, too much of a paper trail. I wouldn’t want to waste my capital on the roof over my head, or deal with lawyers and so forth. Just a simple, short-term lease on a modest couple of rooms where I’d be invisible.”
“Yeah, that would be smart, and patient.”
“Which means you think he’s likely in the heart of the city, in something more suited to his taste.”
“Yeah, I do. Something big enough where he can work. Someplace with plenty of security where he can lock himself up, stew, rant, plot.”
“You probably don’t need to be told that there are countless places in the city that fit those requirements.”
“You should know, you own most of them. And I…” She trailed off with a forkful of eggs halfway to her mouth. “Jesus, would he be that dumb? Or that smart?”
She shoveled in the eggs, snagged her coffee as she rose. “Let’s roust the team. I want to check something out.”
“You may want to put some shoes on first,” Roarke suggested. “You look like you’re about to kick some ass, and there’s no point in bruising your pretty pink toes.”
“Cute.” But she winced when she looked down at her feet. She’d forgotten about the pink toenails. Hauling open a drawer, she yanked out some socks and hastily covered all evidence of pedicure.
“Lieutenant?”
She grunted as she pulled on her boots.
“It feels good to know you and I are a team again.”
She reached out, took his hand. “Let’s go kick some ass together.”
Chapter 22
As the techs outnumbered the nontechs on her team, Eve took the briefing to the lab.
She didn’t understand the nature of the work, or the purposes of the tools meticulously arranged on work counters and workstations. She couldn’t decipher the patterns of the color-coded boards, the gibberish scrolling by on screens or the constant hum and clack that was the odd communication in the network of machines.
But she knew what she was looking at was a great number of man-hours and a large dose of brainpower.
“You’ll kill the worm.”
“We will, yes. It’s already failing.” Roarke glanced at the lines of code and commands on one of the screens. “It’s a clever bug that can look more dangerous than it is.”
“You can say that makes it plenty dangerous.”
“You could,” he agreed. “Its limitations don’t negate the fact that it can and would play hell with most home units. We’re tracking it back to Sparrow, and its origin.”
“Tokimoto’s largely responsible for that,” Reva put in.
“I’m hardly working alone. And,” Tokimoto added, “wouldn’t have researched or explored that possibility of origin without the data supplied to me.”
“Which is what Sparrow counted on. He creates the worm, then assigns Bissel to play double agent. Our side believes Doomsday has the worm, they believe our side has it. Both sides, due to his planted intel, believe the worm is more powerful than it actually is, and shell out a lot of money. Bissel funnels the money, or most of it, back to Sparrow through Kade.”
“A good con,” Roarke commented. “And might’ve been a tidy one in the short haul. He’d have been wiser to keep it on a smaller scale, induce a couple of corporations to haggle over it rather than involving the HSO and the like.”
“Ambitious guy. And greedy,” Eve added. “He supplies the data on the progress Securecomp’s making on the worm, and in that way can cover himself any time the direction the R and D’s taking gets too close. Good setup for him.”
“But his thinking was narrow.” Roarke watched the codes whiz by, noted the progress. “He believed he could control it all, without getting his own hands bloody, and keep Bissel on a leash until he was of no more use.”
“Coward.” Eve remembered how he’d wept and wailed in the hospital. “Bissel’s getting blackmailed and wants more. Kade wants more. And Securecomp’s getting close to ending his nice, profitable enterprise.”
“He gives Bissel a new assignment that solves all those problems.” Peabody shook her head. “It’s way over the top, and Bissel’s too dim to see the frame going up. Sorry,” she said to Reva.
“No problem.”
“Not just too dim,” Eve added. “Too egocentric. He’s living his fantasy. He’s got his license to kill.”
“Sir!” Peabody beamed. “You’ve been boning up on Bond.”
“I do my homework. But now he’s in hip-deep. He can’t go to the HSO. He can’t go to the other side. He waited too long to run, so his accounts have been located and frozen. He killed to stay dead, but that cover’s been blown. He took a hit at Sparrow, but he missed. Instead of being dead, Sparrow’s in custody, and he’ll use whatever juice he can to cut a deal and bury Bissel. He’s lost his fantasy job, and all the glory and polish he garnered from his art.”
“If you can call that crap art.” Reva grinned when everyone looked at her. “Hey, Blair isn’t the only one who can fake it. I never liked his stuff.” She rolled her shoulders as if shedding weight. “Feels good to be able to say that. It’s starting to feel good all around.”
“Don’t get too happy yet,” Eve warned. “He needs to make a statement, but first he needs to lick his wounds, to reassert himself and find some satisfaction. Reva, you said his art was his genuine passion.”
“Yeah. I don’t see how that could’ve been faked. He’s worked for years, studied, pursued. He’d sweat days over a piece, hardly sleep or eat when he was in full mode. I might not have liked the shit he turned out, but he put heart and soul into it-his black, withered and rotting heart and soul. I’m going to be bitter for a while,” she continued, “and take as many cheap shots at him as humanly possible.” She grinned again. “Just FYI.”
“I think it’s healthy,” Tokimoto said. “And human.”
“So his art, such as it is, is the real deal to him. They can take away his fantasy job, but he’s still an artist.” Eve nodded. “He can still create. He has to create. McNab, do a tenant search, look for any connection to Bissel. Target the Flatiron.”
“Of course,” Roarke murmured. “I can help you with that, Ian,” he said to McNab, but he continued to look at Eve. “He’d want to be close to his work, to where he’d felt powerful, and in charge. If he had another place in the building, it’s possible Chloe McCoy knew of it.”
“Guy like that, he’d want to take her there, to ball her, sure, but also to show her how important he was. Look, I’ve got this secret place. Nobody knows about it but you.”
“And then things went wrong and he needed the place,” Peabody finished. “She had to die, just because she knew it was there.”
“Lieutenant.” Roarke tapped the screen where he worked with McNab. “LeBiss Consultants. LeBiss is an anagram for Bissel.”
“Yeah, he’d want his own name. Another ego thing.” She leaned over Roarke’s shoulder. “Where is it?”
He gave a command and a diagram of the Flatiron came on screen, revolved, then magnified a highlighted sector. “One floor below his gallery. He’d have enough skill to be able to go between floors with minimal risk should he want to access his studio.”
“Fully soundproofed, right?”
“Of course.”
“And privacy shades on the windows. Monitors. Add another level of security and he’d be able to know if anyone tried to get on the elevator or through the door. He could muck that up, the way Sparrow did on the night of the first murders. Then clear out before anybody got in.”