by Dan Ames
“Can you tell if they’re shutting down Evans’ network, or the entire Store network?”
“Everything is being shut down.”
He thought about it. If the person closing down the system was an ally of Evans, the focus would be Evans’ history.
And then it hit Mack all at once.
He knew what was going on.
“Shit,” he said.
“Someone didn’t set us up. They set him up,” he said, pointing to the screen of the now dead Bernard Evans.
59
Reese Stocker sat on the sand on the coast of Belize, watching the waves roll in. He had a glass of rum in his hand and the thought brought a smile to his face. He hadn’t had a drink of rum in years. Doing it now, he felt like a pirate.
He was glad to be out of Silicon Valley, happy to have exacted his revenge on Bernard Evans.
Most of all, he was glad he had gotten away with it.
With his computer skill, discovering what Evans had been up to was easy. Finding the owner of the Store had taken a lot more time and effort. And then selling some of his stock in Burn in order to fund the killing of Terry Piechura had been even more difficult.
But Bernard Evans had been a genius. And he had told Stocker many, many times that money could buy anything.
Anything.
In this case, it had bought Reese Stocker the sweetest revenge known to man. Because Burn had been his idea. Not Evans’s.
Evans had ripped him off, stolen the spotlight, used his technical genius to take over the company.
So Stocker did what he did best. Avoided a face-to-face confrontation and used his massive intelligence to program a solution.
Setting up the crazy hacker who’d come up with Store was the most dangerous part. Stocker knew the man had a partner, people who probably did the guy’s dirty work.
But like all great ideas, there was risk involved.
In this case, the potential rewards won out.
Now, he was on the beach with hundreds of millions of dollars in hidden bank accounts and a foolproof identity.
Maybe he would get a part-time job. Like an anonymous offer to help law enforcement better police the Internet.
“Ha!” he laughed out loud.
There was no one around.
He owned near a half-mile of beach here. It was as private as beachfront property could get.
A shadow crossed the sun and he momentarily missed the warmth. But the sun was there, over the horizon.
He looked up, into the face of a startling beautiful woman.
She smiled at him.
But the gleam that flashed in his eye wasn’t from her smile.
It was from a long knife held in her right hand.
“They call me Butterfly,” she said.
“You don’t–” Stocker began to say.
Butterfly drove the knife directly into Stocker’s heart.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes I do.”
THE END
Afterword
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About the Author
Dan Ames is an international bestselling crime novelist and winner of the Independent Book Award for Crime Fiction. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.
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