“Jail’s doubtful, but the hurt on my license … Hell.” Roland pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Might be okay there. It’s the first ding on my record.”
Brooks lifted his shoulders, let them fall. “Might be.”
“I’m not usually sloppy. I figured the look-around for a breeze. I didn’t spot the cameras.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. They weren’t there until after you stopped by Abigail’s.”
“Uh-huh.” Now, Roland’s eyes met Brooks’s in perfect understanding. “She, her dog and her Glock scared the hell out of me.”
“You scared her. She’s a city girl still,” Brooks lied cheerfully. “Alone out there, no close neighbors. Add to that how she makes her living. I’m sure you know that already. Working security, always looking for how people get around it and do what they do? She’s a bit jumpy.”
“You’d have to be to have security cameras in the woods.”
“Oh, she’s always experimenting, running programs and what she calls scenarios. It happens you walked into one. Shook her up enough to have her lock herself in the house till I got home. You know, in case you were some ax murderer instead of a lost photographer.”
“She didn’t look shook up,” Roland muttered.
“Well, Abigail, she puts on a good front, and the dog helps her confidence. She told me about you, and I had to wonder. You gave her your real name.”
“ID was in my pack. She had the gun. I didn’t want to annoy her with a lie if she checked my pack. But I didn’t consider she, or you, would run me.”
“Cops. We’re just naturally cynical and suspicious. So, Roland, here’s the thing. I know who’d hire a PI from a fancy firm to poke around at Abigail, at me, at the Conroys and the hotel.”
“I can’t confirm or deny without my legal counsel.”
“I’m not asking you to, I’m telling you. Lincoln Blake would do close to anything to get that asshole son of his off, including hiring out for somebody to plant false evidence, make false statements.”
Where he’d been slouched and sulky in his seat, Roland now straightened. “Listen. I don’t go there, not for any client, not for any fee. Neither does the firm. We wouldn’t have the reputation we do otherwise.”
“Off the record, I’ll say I believe that. But on it?” Brooks gave a careless shrug.
“Is there a deal coming along?”
“Might be. Russ Conroy’s my oldest and closest friend. His parents are family to me, and his mama broke down and cried after she saw what that fucker and his friends did to that suite. It’s considerably better now, but …”
Brooks picked up a file, handed it to Roland. “We took those after Justin Blake and his idiot friends got done with the place.”
“Jesus,” Roland muttered, as he examined the photos.
“That kind of damage? That’s not careless or stupid or childish. It’s downright mean. That’s just what Justin Blake is.”
Brooks reached over to hand the file back. “And when the fucker managed to make bail, he comes out to the house of the woman I’m in love with, stoned, armed, in the middle of the night. He was stupid enough to take a jab at me with the knife he’d brought to slash my tires with. He upset my woman, and, Roland, that upsets me.
“You might see why she reacted the way she did when you came hiking on down to the house.”
“Yeah, maybe. Yeah.”
“Justin caused over a hundred thousand in damages to that suite, he punctured my tire, tried to puncture me, and scared my lady. And that’s over and above him being a pain in my ass since I took this job. He’s going down for what he’s done, Roland. I will make it my mission in life to see to it. He’s earned it, and if I gave a rat’s flea-bitten ass, I’d say he needs it. He’s got something twisted in him, the kind of thing we’ve both seen in others who end up dead or killing somebody.”
“I’d like to say something, off the record.”
“All right, then. Just between you and me.”
“I don’t like working for Blake. He’s a son of a bitch. There’s nothing about his son you just said I don’t agree with. I’ll take my lumps on this if I have to, but I hate taking them on behalf of those two dicks.”
“I can’t blame you a bit. So here’s the deal, before the lawyer gets here. Go away, Roland. I don’t just mean leave town—though as I said you come back to visit with your wife, we’ll be happy to see you. I mean go away from this. It’s upsetting my friends, it’s upsetting my lady. And you’re wasting your time, because Justin Blake isn’t going to slide his way out from this one. I don’t blame anybody for doing a job they’re hired to do—on the right side of the law, that is. But this can go pretty hard on you, and I can make it so your firm takes a hit. Maybe it’s not much, considering, but I don’t know why they’d want the bad publicity.”
“I have to turn in my reports.”
“You go right ahead on that. You didn’t find anything on me, on Abigail, on the Conroys, because there’s nothing to find. But if you keep poking at us, I’ll find out, and it’ll go different. You got far enough in this to know computers are Abigail’s playground.”
“There’s a threat buried in there.”
“I’m not burying a thing. I’m giving you the facts as I see them. I can let this go. You keep your clean record, you turn in your reports, and go home to your wife. Your lawyer’s not going to cook you up a better deal.”
“Why are you?”
“For the reasons I just gave you, and one more. I don’t much want to lock you up, Roland, that’s another fact. If I’d gotten a different sense of you, if I thought you were the kind who enjoys working for a man like Blake, who’d edge over more than crossing a property line or going into a locked room to take a look around, you’d be in a cell right now. I’d work to keep you there.”
“I’d like to call my boss, give him the status.”
“Go ahead.” Brooks pushed off the desk.
“I met your mother.”
Brooks leaned back again. “Did you?”
“I walked down—getting that sense, like you said. That house, it’s amazing.”
“We’re partial to it. Go ahead and make your call,” Brooks told him, and strolled out.
26
Abigail put everything else aside and focused entirely on the creation of the virus. She’d made numerous attempts to piggyback it on the worm she’d already constructed, but the results weren’t satisfactory.
She could do considerable damage with the worm, but with the worm boring openings into the Volkov network, the virus that followed, spreading through those openings, would devastate.
To accomplish everything she needed, it had to be very fast, very complete, and trigger no alerts.
She’d always considered the project a kind of hobby, one she’d hoped would one day pay off.
Now it was a mission.
If she had time to build more equipment, or the luxury of hiring another skilled tech, or two … But she didn’t, so speculating proved useless. This was only for her.
In any case, over time she’d developed her own programming language—the better to thwart anyone who attempted to hack into her files—and even if she could hire on, she’d have to teach someone her language and techniques.
Faster, more efficient, to do it herself.
She ran the next test, watched her codes fly by, and thought, No, no, no. It remained too unwieldy, too separate, took too long.
She sat back, her hair twisted up off her neck and secured with a pencil. As she studied the screen, she drank iced green tea for clarity of thinking.
The tea, the two yoga breaks she’d made herself take, the absolute quiet, didn’t appear to help.