Alix popped open another file, trying to get a feel for what she was seeing. She laughed out loud. “This is interesting. Some of the company names are connected to potential campaigns that Dad’s got ready to roll, just in case… Like BSP expects something bad to happen and wants to be able to pitch as soon as it does. They’ve got a whole section here for environmental disasters: chemical-plant explosions, toxic leaks, pipeline breaks, drilling platforms exploding…”
Moses leaned close. “Did they do the BP oil spill?”
“I don’t think so,” Alix said. “My dad was making jokes about them when the Gulf thing happened. I think he was pissed that they hired someone else instead of him.”
She looked up at Moses. “This is too big. It’s like the tobacco files. There’s millions and millions of documents, but a lot of them look totally legit. It’ll take time for us to comb through it all. Is there someplace you want to start? Some way you want me sort all of this? Start alphabetically? Go after Big Oil? Big Pharma? Big Ag?”
Moses nodded seriously. “Let’s start with Kimball-Geier. Let’s find out what’s up with Azicort.”
“Well?” Lisa said, leaning back from her laptop and turning to Mr. Banks. “I told you they’d try something like this.”
They were in Williams & Crowe’s Data Integrity Monitoring Center, watching red flags pop up as the kids started accessing files.
“Well?”
Mr. Banks’s jaw was clenched, holding back an ocean of roiling emotions as he watched the pair poking around in the BSP central file servers.
Lisa waited patiently for the man to come to the conclusion that was inevitable.
Frustratingly, he seemed unable to make the call. A minute ticked by.
Lisa pressed gently. “We’re going to need to shut them down. You have clients who are at risk. Williams & Crowe has clients at risk…”
“I want him gone,” Banks said through clenched teeth. “I want him away from my daughter.”
Lisa nodded, pleased. “Once we have them, we can arrange for him to disappear.”
“I don’t care how you handle it. I just don’t want him near my daughter ever again. Make it happen.”
Lisa hesitated, then pressed again. “We’ll need to address your daughter at some point as well.”
“I’ll deal with her.”
“We have clients who will need assurance…”
He gave her a cold stare. “I’ll take care of Alix.”
You’re in denial, Lisa thought, but all she said was, “Of course.”
Lisa pulled her encrypted phone and dialed through to the response team. “Timmons? We’re on. Targets are in the building. Tenth floor. Mr. Banks’s private office. No. You don’t need to be that careful. We just want the girl. It doesn’t matter what happens to the other one, but nothing can happen to the girl. The other one… we don’t want to hear from him again. And we don’t want news. Just silence, understood?”
She waited, listening for the response. She turned back to Banks, who was still staring transfixed, watching as his daughter and the boy who had turned her against him rummaged through his files, one by one.
“We’re up and running,” Lisa said.
“How long?”
She shrugged. “Not long. Our people are very good. We’ll secure the building, then lock down the tenth floor. Then we’ll move in.”
Banks nodded sharply. “And it will be quiet?”
“By the time they’re done, there won’t be a trace of him. It will be like he never existed. None of this will have happened at all.”
“Don’t do anything to the boy in front of Alix.”
“The team understands.” She stood up. “We have a car waiting. You can be near the offices in fifteen minutes. You’ll want to be there when they bring out Alix.”
41
MOSES WHISTLED. “I NEED ANOTHER hard drive,” he said.
Alix handed another terabyte drive across. Moses swapped out the one that he’d just filled, and Alix dumped it into the duffel bag. It was more than she’d expected. Huge amounts of information, and they were still going.
“I think we ought to be going soon,” she said. “We’ve already been here for half an hour.”
Moses shook his head. “We’ve still got a lot here. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they have just on Azicort. Kimball-Geier has reams of studies that say Azicort causes comas if body-weight dosage goes off by much. And sometimes it happens anyway, and they still can’t figure out why it is. They’ve even got transcripts of emergency room interviews that they had investigators do. They know that this is happening. This is how Tank ended up in the hospital! They’ve known there were problems for years. They’ve been putting out studies blaming other drugs and patient diets—”
Alix interrupted. “We don’t have time for this, Moses. Just get all the info.”
“This isn’t just the smoking gun,” Moses protested. “It’s the whole smoking arsenal! Just the Azicort information is worth millions maybe even billions in class action lawsuits. I mean, you should see the nondisclosure agreements on this stuff. It’s amazing. Tank’s alive, but his sister died because they were hiding this….”
Moses went on, scanning documents. “It’s worse than I thought,” he kept murmuring. “They’re insane. When we broke into the safety-testing labs and stole Kimball-Geier’s rats, the thing we should have stolen was their test data. Azicort’s just a straight-up coma drug. That is, if it doesn’t just stop your heart completely…”
“That’s great, Moses, but let’s get this done and get out.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know.” Alix rubbed her arms. “I just don’t like being here. I thought we were going to get in and get out. Fifteen minutes, a half hour, tops. Time’s up.”
She went to the window and looked down, hoping that no one could see what was going on. That no one would think the glow of a computer screen was suspicious at 3 AM.
You’re being paranoid, she told herself. Lots of people work late in DC.
“Just hurry up,” she said to Moses.
“Okay, okay, but there’s terabytes here. BSP went full digital. All their old files are scanned. Everything. It’s a paper trail that goes back to tobacco.” He popped open a file. “Check this out. It’s like a treasure trove. I’ve got CEOs signing off on things that they’ve denied for years. It’s Eldorado. People could go to prison. There’s a ton of stuff on Marcea in here. With this, I might be able to file a civil suit. Wrongful death or something, and go after a CEO. I might be able to go after the actual people!”
“Not if we get busted trying to get it out,” Alix said. “So hurry it up, will you?”
Moses looked back at the computer. “This just takes time. I’d hook up more drives, but they’ve got only two USB ports on this computer. If I had Kook, maybe we could rig something faster…”
Alix wasn’t really listening as Moses rambled on about what Kook and the rest of the crew would have been able to do. She stared down at the street.
Were those shadows moving?
She squinted, trying to tell if she was seeing human forms down in the darkness, moving along the edges of the building. They didn’t look like regular pedestrians. She blinked and stared more closely. Maybe she was imagining them.
Or maybe not?