“Pulled him in.” Sparrow’s breath wheezed in, wheezed out, and Eve had the sudden thought that the bastard might die on her just through the power of suggestion. “Had the stupid son of a bitch convinced he was working for the HSO. Going to take over his brother’s position. He bought it. Change his face, make a few deliveries. Get to sleep with his trainer. He was a dunk.”
“I bet. Who took out the guy who did the face and body work? Kade?”
“No. No, she wouldn’t get her hands dirty. She had Bissel do it-Carter. She was good at getting men to do what she wanted.”
“But you were the architect, right? Not Kade, certainly not Blair Bissel. You’re not stupid enough to go around killing people right and left, but you knew how to pull the strings. He thought he had the comp worm. He thought he could sell it. Live off the proceeds the rest of his life. But he never had it.”
“Can’t have what doesn’t exist. I made it up.” His smile turned to a grimace. “I can’t take this pain, Dallas. I can’t take it.”
His whine set her teeth on edge, but she gave his hand another bolstering squeeze. “It won’t be much longer. There’s no worm?”
“Yeah, there’s a worm. It’s just not as advertised. I invented it, hyped it, documented the skewed data and intel. Doomsday’s been trying to create one, a fricking decade. Works in theory, but in practice it just self-cannibalizes or mutates when it hits the shields. You insert at port, it’ll mess up a unit, fry its ass, but it won’t network, and won’t infect by remote. But if it did…”-his pale, battered face shone for a moment with pleasure-”… it’d be worth billions.”
“So it was all just a con-on HSO and the global agencies, on Doomsday. You created the intel that supported the myth that the worm was real, that it was a threat. Then you planted your man with the project head of the company who nabs the Code Red. Feed the HSO data, sell same to interested parties. You’re raking it in on both ends, and all over something that doesn’t yet exist, and may never exist. But Securecomp’s working on it, and they might just create the worm for you. Yeah, you’re smart.”
“They were getting close. Roarke’s got some brain trust at Securecomp. I get what they’ve got together with what I’ve got, what I’m pulling from Doomsday, maybe I can put it together and get myself a nice bonus. You know what you make annually as an AD? You make shit. Just like a cop.”
“And being as we’re so underpaid, you didn’t figure the cops would dig too deep into the Bissel/Kade murders.”
“Served it up so neat and pretty. But things went wrong.”
“You could stall, though, pressure to have the locals turn over the investigation. And you had your goat with Bissel. He tries to sell the disc, and it’s worthless.”
“Figured the buyer would execute him, bury the body, once they figured out the worm wasn’t what he claimed. That would take some time, put some distance between him and me. He wiggled out of that, though. He talks a pretty good game.”
“But he can’t access his money without sending up a flag, to you. And even if he got desperate enough to try, we started finding and freezing his accounts. So he stages McCoy’s suicide. What did she have that he wanted?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where she fits. He should’ve slipped off, counted his losses, but the stupid son of a bitch panics, kills her, kills that stupid orderly, steals the body. What’s he think the cops’re going to do? Might as well have taken out a fricking ad on an airblimp.”
“How long have you two been doing the corporate espionage on the side?”
“What the hell does it matter?”
He was pouting now, she thought. Wimp was pouting because his big plans had blown up in his face and killed him.
“The more you give me, the deeper I can bury him.”
“Six, seven years. I’ve got a nice retirement fund, got a place on Maui, and another I’ve got my eye on in Tuscany. I’d’ve been set, living large, before I was forty. Had to start covering my tracks.”
“Eliminate your partners,” Eve agreed. “Better, smarter, have them eliminate each other. And move to a one-man, more profitable organization. All those listening posts planted in Bissel’s sculptures all over the world-and off-all yours alone now. You can gather your intel, invest, anticipate. Yeah, you’d’ve been sipping mai tais, and still raking it in. I gotta say, Sparrow, it’s brilliant.”
His damp eyes shone for a moment in pleasure. “It’s what I do. Crunch data, think up scenarios, blueprint dirty tricks to compromise or dispose of targets. You have to know how and when to use people.”
“And you knew how to use Bissel. Both of them. And Kade. And Ewing.”
“Wasn’t supposed to be so complicated. Bissel hits Kade, goes under. Was supposed to go under for a few weeks, then make the sale. But he went right after it. Didn’t give it time to settle, for me to see if it worked and cooled off.”
“Cooled off so you could make certain you didn’t need him, so he could be eliminated.”
“You don’t throw away tools until you’re sure they’ve outlived their usefulness. Terminations are part of the game. You know that. Death’s necessary. I’ve never killed anybody, and I wouldn’t have had to do him. Leak some intel, point the right person in the right direction. He’d be taken out. I’m not a murderer, Dallas. I just engaged a tool. Blair Bissel did the killing. Every one of them. I was at the Flatiron, corrupting his data units, when he did the hit on his brother and Kade.”
“Why go there?”
“I needed to upload any data he might’ve kept on the operation there, and to crash his units so he couldn’t use them. Just covering tracks. I wasn’t anywhere near Kade’s place when it went down, and I’ve got alibis for the hits on McCoy and Powell. Blair Bissel did the terminations. I’m going to die, but I’ll be damned if he’s going to hang me with murder.”
“I think we can make that conspiracy to murder, accessory to murder, before and after the fact. Multiple counts. We can probably throw in all sorts of nice pluses like obstruction of justice, tampering with government files, espionage, and that big mama, treason. I think you can say bye-bye to Maui, Sparrow, and those pretty hills in Tuscany.”
“I’m fucking dying. Give me a break.”
“Right.” She pulled her hand free of his and smiled. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Good news, from your point of view, is you’re not dying. I exaggerated your medical condition a bit.”
“What?” He struggled to sit up and only went sheet-white with the pain. “I’m going to be all right?”
“You’ll live. You might not walk again, and you’re going to have some serious pain with the physical therapy and treatments over the next few months. But you’ll live. Bad news? Doctors say you’re pretty strong and healthy otherwise, so you should last decades in a cage.”
“You said I was dead. You said-”
“Yeah.” She hooked her thumbs in her front pockets. “Cops’re such liars. I don’t know why you assholes believe us.”
“Bitch. Goddamn bitch.” He fought to raise himself, going white, then red as he strained against the stabilizers. “I want a lawyer. I want a doctor.”
“You can have both. Excuse me, Sparrow, I’ve got to go arrange for a meeting between your superiors and mine. I bet they’re going to have a high old time with this recording.”
“You walk out of here with that…” He gasped against the pain, and the fear. Eve read them both in his eyes. “You walk out of here with that recording, and I’ll have your records all over the media within the hour. Everything that happened in Dallas. Everything in that file, including the speculation that you committed patricide. You’re finished as a cop when I get finished spinning those records out to the media.”