She couldn’t find it. She’d been lost in her own pain, her own disbelief, wanting only to escape it, to rewind the clock and get another chance at keeping her gramps alive. But Nick had made the recording. Ronan had played it for her even as she could see that he didn’t want to.
Nathanson, report.
Is it done?
Nathanson, do you copy?
She heard the voice in her nightmares, heard it during almost every waking moment.
Declan and Clay walked into the room, Declan wearing sunglasses, Clay carrying his laptop.
“Hey,” Declan said.
“Hey.”
Elise entered the room holding a steaming mug in one hand. Ronan was right behind her, carrying a folder stuffed with paper.
“Good, everyone’s here,” he said.
“Tell me those guys in New York got something off Nick’s recording,” Clay said.
He was probably as excited about the technology as he was about the possibility of finding out who had been behind the attack on them at her gramps’ house. Julia didn’t fault him for it. Guys like Clay were a breed all their own, something she knew from all the years she’d been surrounded by tech geeks when she’d been a network security specialist.
“We got a hit on Nick’s recording,” Ronan said.
Clay shook his head. “Goddamn…”
Biometric voice recognition was still on the cutting edge. Clay didn’t have the equipment, but apparently Ronan had allies in New York who did.
Ronan walked to the board and removed Mark Gordon’s photograph, sticking it off to the side along with Seth Campbell and Congressman Moran and every other lead they’d already run through.
In its place, he taped a picture of an older man with silver hair, at least seventy, wearing sunglasses and what looked like an expensive suit as he exited a limo. In the photograph he was reaching up to adjust his sunglasses, a thick gold ring with some kind of medallion visible on his finger.
“That’s the guy?” Nick asked.
“No,” Ronan said, taping another photograph next to the first one. This one depicted a middle-aged man with thick dark hair and a goatee. “This is the guy on the headset.”
Declan shook his head. “I’m confused. If Goatee is the guy on the recording, who’s the other guy?”
“Goatee is also known as Daniel Weiss. He was the one in charge of the tactical team sent in to John’s house,” Ronan said. “He also happens to be the long-standing personal security guard for Yael Dohan.”
“Who’s Yael Dohan?” Elise asked.
“He’s the head of the fucking Federal Reserve,” Nick said.
Ronan pointed to the picture of the older man with the ring. “Bingo.”
“You think Yael Dohan ordered the attack on my gramps’ house?” Elise asked. “And that Daniel Weiss coordinated it?”
“Dohan fits the profile of the men at the top of the Manifest hierarchy,” Ronan said. “He can ignite or tank the world economy with a few strokes of a pen, but he’s so under the radar the average person would never know he was the one who’d done it.”
“You think this is the guy?” Nick asked. “The guy behind it all? The kidnappings, the auctions…?”
“I don’t think any one man controls everything,” Ronan said. “But I’m willing to bet Dohan is the figurehead at the top.”
“The head of the snake,” Julia said.
Ronan looked at her. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“And they’re sure?” Nick asked. “The people in New York?”
“The technology’s hard to come by, but a couple of the guys in their lab were part of the team who refined it for the NSA and DHS. They’re sure,” Ronan said.
Julia’s eyes were glued to the picture of Daniel Weiss.
Is it done?
She turned her attention to the picture of Yael Dohan. Weiss was the one on the recording. He was probably the one who had planned the assault on her gramps’ house.
But he’d done it on Dohan’s orders, and if Ronan was right, everything else had been done on his orders too.
“So what now?” Clay asked.
“I don’t know,” Ronan said. “I’m still thinking about it. I just got the results this morning.”
“What do you mean you’re still thinking about it?” Declan asked. “What’s to think about? We go after these guys, take them out the way we planned.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Ronan said.
“The hell it is,” Declan said.
Julia could see that Ronan was fighting to maintain control. She knew he wanted to make these men pay as much as anyone. She saw it in the way he looked at her, his pain a mirror to her own, his pain caused by her own.
But Ronan wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to take a shot at someone like Yael Dohan unless he was sure it was going to hit the target.
Missing could be the end of them all.
“It’s won’t hurt to take twenty-four hours,” Nick said.
“We don’t know that. Another team could already be on the way,” Declan said.
Ronan had increased security measures around the house, even hiring a couple of the guys they used as contractors to watch the place from the street for suspicious activity.
“If they are, another day won’t make a difference,” Ronan said. “Whatever move we make, it will take at least forty-eight hours to put into play.”
“That’s bullshit. We should — ”
“We’re taking the day.” Ronan cut Declan off. His jaw was set like granite, his tone making it clear this was where the argument ended. The brothers might have been equal partners in the firm, but Ronan would always be the oldest. “We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Declan got up and stormed out of the room. Julia watched him disappear into the hallway, her mind already working the problem of Yael Dohan. How to take down one of the most powerful men in the world, a man who could call unfathomable resources to his aid?
And how to do it without bringing those resources down on the heads of Julia and everything — everyone — she held most dear?
25
Ronan woke up in the middle of the night and flung out his arm for Julia, then opened his eyes when he realized the bed was empty. It wasn’t the first time he’d woken to find her gone, and he lay there for a few minutes contemplating whether to check on her. More often than not she was with Elise, both of them struggling against sleep, but that had been before John Taylor’s death, before Julia had watched him die protecting her and Elise, before Julia herself had almost died.
Both of the sisters had been shaken up by the attack, but Elise had been venting her grief. After months of silence, her emotions locked behind an impenetrable facade, the death of her grandfather had let loose the floodgates on Elise’s emotions. It wasn’t uncommon to find tears streaming down her face as they ate dinner or while they walked on the beach, and Elise spoke often about how much she missed her gramps. She’d even been sleeping again, her tears and grief hollowing her out, finally allowing her the sleep that had eluded her since her return to Boston.
Ronan had the feeling her grief went even deeper, that John’s death had opened the door on all the feelings she’d kept bottled since her abduction and imprisonment. It pained Nick and Declan to see her cry, and his two brothers had taken to sticking close to her, waiting on her hand and foot, showing they were there for her in the only ways they knew how.
But if John’s death had released Elise’s pent-up emotion, it had done the exact opposite for Julia. She felt unreachable to Ronan every moment of every day except when they were in bed, her body warm and pliant under his, her mouth and hands hungry, as if she was latching onto the one thing that could make her forget.
He wasn’t complaining, but he was worried.
He flung his feet over the side of the bed. He had a feeling Elise was sleeping, which meant that Julia was alone somewhere in the house.
He bent to pet Chief on his way out of his pr
ivate quarters and continued down the hall, past Declan and Nick’s room and the guest room that had become Elise’s. He thought he might hear the TV as he approached the shared living area, but it was quiet as he stepped into the space, the room empty.
He found Julia sitting at the island, her fingers moving like lightning over the keyboard of her laptop, her gun on the counter next to her computer. It was another new development: not that Julia carried her gun — that had started after the pictures from Manifest showed up on her doorstep — but that she kept it so clearly within reach.
He moved into her line of sight, not wanting to spook her by speaking or approaching her from behind.
Her hand crept instinctively toward her gun as she caught sight of him, and he held up his hands.
“It’s me.”
She nodded and returned her eyes to the keyboard. “Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Not really,” he lied, wanting to stay with her, to be there in the event that she needed to talk or vent or, as unlikely as it might be, cry. “Want some tea?”
“Sure.”
He put the kettle on, took down two cups from the cabinet, and dug around in the tea cupboard. “Lavender chamomile?”
“Sure.”
She was humoring him, letting him feel useful. She didn’t care about the tea, probably wouldn’t even drink it. He didn’t mind. Making it made him feel less useless.
“What are you working on?” he asked, taking the stool next to her.
“Doing some digging on social media,” she said.
“What kind of digging?”
She stopped typing and turned to look at him. “Did you know there are all these people, like regular people online, who do their own investigative journalism?”
He shook his head. He wasn’t really a social media kind of person.
“There are.” She tapped some keys on her computer and turned the screen so he could see it. “This guy helped break a story about the CEO of McKinsey Pharma bribing doctors to subscribe opioids to patients who didn’t need them.”
Ronan looked at the guy’s profile: Dan Wheeler, @nosecrets, independent journalist, contributor @wapo, @cnn, @buzzfeed, @theguardian.
He sorted through the information Julia had just recited. “So this guy — Dan Wheeler — he looks for his own stories, does the legwork, and then publishes with the mainstream media?”
“Not always,” Julia said. “He has a blog and a newsletter too.”
“A blog?” Ronan kept his voice even, trying not to sound skeptical or like he was worried Julia was losing it, both of which may or may not have been true.
She shook her head. “The blog is where he posts the information that helps him break the stories. You can read it in real time while he’s piecing it together, even if it doesn’t make it into the mainstream media.”
The kettle started to whistle and Ronan walked over to the stove and turned off the heat. He poured water into the two mugs and carried them back to the island.
“So not everything makes it into the newspapers and online sites mentioned in his bio,” Ronan said.
Julia looked perplexed by the question. “Well… no. Not always. The mainstream media has much higher burden of proof.”
Ronan nodded. Potential litigation forced mainstream outlets to vet their information. If they weren’t a hundred percent sure the story would hold up against a libel suit — that meant on-the-record witnesses and informants — they wouldn’t risk it. A lot of stories went unprinted because of it, but Ronan understood the concern. A big libel suit could stop the presses on a newspaper forever.
Ronan nodded. “So he does all the legwork and tries to build a verifiable story, then tries to sell it to one of the papers, and if he can’t it just sits on his blog.”
“That’s the thing,” Julia said, her voice rising with excitement, “it doesn’t always happen that way. Like the McKinsey Pharma story? That didn’t get picked up by the mainstream outlets right away, but all his followers ran with it on social media.”
She pointed to a stat at the top of Wheeler’s profile: 694.8k followers.
“And then what happened?” Ronan asked.
“It picked up momentum. They created hashtags and those hashtags started trending, and then the mainstream outlets started digging into McKinsey.” Her eyes shone. “And Wheeler’s not alone. There are hundreds of people online who are doing this kind of work, who will pick up the threads of a potentially explosive story and post about it, and some of those stories are picked up by the mainstream media within days.”
“You think this is a tactic we can use against Yael Dohan,” Ronan said.
“Think about it,” she said. “We send all the data we’ve gathered about Manifest to these independent journalists and let them break the story.”
Ronan took a drink of the tea, stood, and took a bottle of bourbon down from the cupboard. He tipped some into his own mug and held the bottle over Julia’s mug, pouring after she nodded her assent.
“This isn’t what MIS does,” he said when he sat back down.
“I know. But twice now we’ve been caught unaware by Manifest and — ”
“Every one of the men who attacked us in Monaco and at your grandfather’s house ended up dead,” Ronan reminded her.
“I know.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “But we took losses too — Nick with his leg, my gramps…”
Ronan took her hand. “Even if we do it this way, there’s no guarantee they won’t still come for us. You know that, right?”
She nodded. “I’m not even opposed to it. Revenge has sounded pretty good these past few days, but it’s not just about that. It’s about Elise and Nick and Declan.” She squeezed his hand. “It’s about you.”
“I’m not afraid of Manifest,” Ronan said.
“I know, but I am. I want justice, but not at the cost of losing you or Elise or anyone else I love.” She met his eyes. “This way is better than just taking out Dohan. If we do that without compromising Manifest, someone else will step up to fill his shoes.”
“Then we’ll stop them too.”
“That could go on forever, Ronan. You know it as well as I do.”
He thought about the ring in his dresser, about his dream of a family that looked like Julia and a noisy house full of their children. None of it could happen until they’d ended Manifest for good.
He nodded for her to continue.
“This will put real heat on them, and most importantly, a spotlight. People will be paying attention once Dohan’s ties to Manifest get out, not to mention Seth Campbell, Congressman Moran, and all the men on the board at the Whitmore Club,” she said. “Even if it takes a while for the story to gain steam — and I don’t think it will, it’s too big — they’ll know they’re too visible to risk an attack. Plus that’s not all we have on our side.”
“What else do we have on our side?” he asked.
“Braden and Nora and their friends at the FBI.”
“No guarantee that will expedite things,” Ronan said.
“I know, but it’s a possibility. We can ask them to put the word out about the story once it breaks on social media, see if someone at the Bureau can take a look.”
He took a drink of the tea, glad he’d laced it with the bourbon, and tried to imagine feeding the plan to Nick and Declan. Nick would buy it. Julia wasn’t wrong. It was a good plan. Different than how they usually operated, but that didn’t mean it was bad.
Declan on the other hand was out for blood, more because he was young and reactionary than because blood was the best play. He would be outvoted, but he wouldn’t be happy about it.
“How would we do it?” Ronan asked.
“Put together digital packages that outline the evidence and send it to the most influential independent journalists, plus some hungry traditional journalists on the off-chance any of them get curious,” she said.
“We’ll be outing ourselves,” Ronan said. “They’ll dig into MIS too.”
<
br /> She shook her head. “We’ll set up anonymous social media accounts and emails, run them through a VPN to make sure it doesn’t get back to us.”
“How can anyone who calls themselves a journalist trust information coming from anonymous sourcing?” he asked.
“They won’t. Not at first. But as soon as they start digging into the data, they’ll see that it’s all provable. After that it doesn’t matter who gave them the lead,” she said.
He nodded. “So we send out the digital packages. Then what?”
“Then we wait for it to pick up speed.”
Ronan didn’t love the idea of hitching their cart to a bunch of people who were nothing more than online names and stats, people he had no control over, people who may or may not actually move on the data they were sent.
“What if it doesn’t?” he asked.
“We resume business the MIS way,” she said. “That will always be an option.”
He was glad that she was showing signs of life for the first time since John had been killed, but it made him nervous too. Was she thinking rationally, her opinion that this was the best move based on logic? Or was she so anxious to do something she was throwing everything at the wall to see if it would stick?
He looked at her and knew it didn’t matter.
He trusted her. He loved her. He would do anything for her.
“We’ll talk to Nick and Declan tomorrow,” he said. “You can work with Clay to start putting the data together.”
She exhaled. “This is the right thing. I know it.”
He nodded. She was right that they could always take Yael Dohan by force if her method didn’t work, but if a single source called Dohan to ask a question, he would start to lock down Manifest. After that, their chances of nailing him — of shutting down Manifest — would get slimmer and slimmer until the door closed completely.
26
Murphy’s Love: Murphy’s Law Book Three Page 10