It was worth a shot.
Michael sat down at his laptop and logged into his newly created e-mail.
He had one message, from Koshi: [The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.]
That was Koshi for you. Mister sunshine. Michael fired back an e-mail so Koshi knew things were working: [Daddy drinks because you cry.]
He was interrupted by the jarring ring of the voice-over-IP phone.
“Michael, what do you know about the stiff you had me check on?” Ken launched, skipping pleasantries.
“I told you — why…what did you find?” Michael’s stomach lurched even as he asked. He’d known Ken a long time, so he knew what was coming next. Or at least, he thought he did.
“All right. Here’s the scoop. The ME confirmed death was caused by a massive myocardial infarction. But he also found very subtle bruising on the lower back. Judging by the amount of subcutaneous clotting, his preliminary assessment is that your boy sustained a blow there immediately before he croaked,” Ken reported.
“Like someone rabbit-punched him in the kidneys…” Michael thought out loud.
“And it was the shock of being slammed that gave him the heart attack. That’s where the coroner went with it as well. The corpse had several dislocated fingers and a pretty messed up face, but that looks like it happened when he hit the floor. But it was the blow that started it all. So we’re changing this to a 187,” Ken finished.
“Shit.” Michael didn’t have anything to say beyond the expletive.
“I’ll second that. We’re going back and getting CSI to do a once over on his flat, but after the EMTs stomped around there for half an hour getting the body out, I’m not optimistic,” Ken said.
“No, I can see that would make it tough,” Michael said, from a million miles away.
Ken was all business on this call.
“Since we’re now sure this was a murder, or at the very least aggravated assault, why don’t you take a few minutes from your busy schedule and tell me everything you know about it?” Not so much a question as an order.
Michael told him the whole story, omitting only that he was in possession of the manuscript that was deleted from the e-mail. And that every lethal organization in the world was implicated in Abe’s death. He didn’t see how his suspicions after reading the mystery document would alter the course of the investigation into Abe’s murder.
“And you have no idea who sent the communication, or who planted the listening devices?” Ken asked, for the record.
“Not a clue. But Ken, Abe told me the e-mail attachment was the most important book of his career and would implicate a lot of government and powerful interests in widespread criminal activity,” Michael offered. He chose the words very carefully, to give Ken maximum possible info without actually revealing he was now up to his neck in something that seemed to be turning into his worst nightmare come true.
There was no way he could say anything more without divulging he was the man who knew too much — and that guy usually wound up dead. He had to assume that if the rot went as high as the manuscript claimed, every detail in the police report would be known by the black hats within hours of it being filed.
“Powerful interests, you say — well that’s nice and non-specific,” Ken observed.
“I wish I had something more I could tell you,” Michael said. And he really did. The problem was that telling Ken he suspected covert U.S. Government hit squads, or the Mob, or Iran, or terrorists, didn’t really narrow things down in a helpful way.
“Lemme know if anything pops up in your memory that you forgot,” Ken ventured. He smelled the odor of rat but couldn’t be sure Michael was holding out on him, or if it was something else.
“You’re at the top of my speed dial list. Ken, thanks a million for pushing this. I had a bad feeling when I found the wiretaps and Abe turned up dead. Are you going to hit his office too, and jerk the bugs? Maybe those will give you a lead,” Michael suggested but immediately regretted the condescending flavor. Ken was good at what he did, just as Michael was.
There was a significant silence.
“Never occurred to me,” Ken said drily. “Anything else?”
“Sorry Ken. I…I know you’ll cover all the bases. No offense intended.”
“None taken.”
After terminating the call, Michael stared at the handset still gripped in his now sweaty hand as he calculated the variables. His eyes slowly drifted across the room and fell on the manuscript. Fucking thing might as well be made out of plutonium — being exposed to it was just as fatal.
He looked at his watch. Assuming the worst, a crew had been in Abe’s office last night, dusting for prints to see if anyone new had shown up once Abe had expired. That would put Michael and Jim at the scene the following day.
Only it was likely worse than that. They’d probably dusted the night before as well, when they inserted the bugs, just to identify everyone who’d been in Abe’s inner sanctum, and then wiped everything so only new prints would appear on the next night’s scan. That would put Michael there both before and after. The leader of any team looking for information or leads on where the disappearing manuscript had gone would already have run those prints to get names in preparation for a little chat. And Michael would be the first appointment, he was sure of that.
His instinct to lay low once he sensed he was being watched turned out to be prescient — the intuition that had saved his ass in combat was thankfully still fully operational.
That was the only silver lining so far.
Michael’s gaze returned to the sheaf of papers. What had he been doing before Ken called?
The e-mail address. Right.
He logged onto his e-mail and sent Koshi a message asking how best to contact a blind address without it being traceable — assuming the inbound address might be compromised, or a red herring or even a bad guy. Michael knew it wasn’t prudent to divulge his sending address when he contacted the manuscript’s author — if it was the author’s e-mail.
That done, he needed to formulate a strategy.
If he believed in miracles, he could delete the document from his hard drive, burn the manuscript and pretend he’d never seen it.
That was fine, except he ran the considerable risk that he’d soon be on the receiving end of an interrogation that would get ugly quickly. He had to assume they knew Abe had printed the document if they’d been able to get into his computer to erase all the tracks, which meant they wouldn’t start a discussion unless they planned to end it with a bang, so to speak, whatever he told them, most probably.
Putting himself in their position, he wouldn’t stop until he’d located the document and neutralized it, along with anyone who’d seen it. If they were thorough, that would mean everyone Abe had been with since he’d downloaded and printed it. There was just no other way they could be sure.
Then again, maybe he was over-thinking this. Perhaps they’d be more cautious and wait to see if anything else surfaced. That was a strong possibility as well.
Reality was, there was no way of knowing how conservatively they would react. Which meant he had to assume the worst.
He went through his mental checklist.
He’d need to take effective countermeasures and become untraceable. Fine. He removed the battery from his cell phone, knowing that doing so wouldn’t make it invisible to someone like the National Security Agency — but it would make it impossible to trace for anyone but the NSA. He’d need to pick up several clean phones to communicate with — this one was history. Ditto for his credit cards. They all had a chip in them which could be read in a multiplicity of ways. Of course, he couldn’t use them anyway, as he had to believe his pursuers could access most databases. So time for the cards to go missing, too.