The kind of people she made a career out of apprehending.
Though, if tonight was any indicator, apprehension wasn’t exactly her specialty.
“Well, thanks,” Reed said, almost adding ‘I guess’ to the end, pulling up just short.
If the story she’d shared upstairs was even nominally true – the scene in the room certainly indicating as much – she’d gone out on a limb to put down the sniper that was trying to end him and his partner. Odds were, he would have been okay, Greene and Gilchrist both nearby, but there was no denying she had moved when she saw him taking fire.
For that, she deserved his thanks, at the very least.
Turning to openly appraise him, Rye raised her eyebrows, a hint of surprise coloring her features.
“Damn, bet that stung to get out.”
Not expecting the retort, Reed felt his own face harden. “Starting to.”
A faint smile played across Rye’s face, a hint of mischief present, before the look vanished, her attention going back to the building before them.
“I should say good work to you too,” Rye said. “It’s not easy avoiding a trained shooter firing at short range. If that mess on your face is any indicator, things could have gotten ugly fast.”
A crease of confusion appeared between Reed’s brow before lifting. In the commotion of the last hour, he had forgotten about the dried blood still crusted to his face, the effects of the shattered picture frame in Alice Hartong’s apartment.
“Yeah, they could have,” Reed agreed, not bothering to fill her in on how close that round had come, or the trick he’d pulled with the mirror.
Right now, they had a new direction to be going.
Already, it was after midnight, both operating under a timeframe that would like to see things finished by morning. At the very least, a solid heading established.
If the events of the last eight hours were any indicator, the opposition – Gerard or otherwise – was growing bolder.
And they were now both being targeted.
“So, any ideas on where we go next?” Rye asked.
Noting both her asking him for input and her use of the first-person plural pronoun we, Reed matched her glance.
The pairing was not something he surmised either one was especially keen on, though the events of the day did seem to keep driving them together, making it clear they could move forward together, or keep tripping over each other along the way.
Neither sounded especially appealing.
“One,” he eventually said. “You up for a drive?”
Holding the look for a moment, Rye shifted her attention to the two dogs beside them.
“Always, but I have a feeling unless we want to see the Nature Channel play out in the backseat, we should probably go separate.”
Chapter Fifty-One
“Where the hell did you bring me?” Sydney Rye asked, her stance and tone making it clear that when Reed told her they were going on an excursion, this was not at all what she had in mind.
An eventuality he had expected in the fullest, finding it far from the first time the place had evoked such a response.
Slamming the front door shut of his sedan, he heard a slight moan from Billie in the backseat in response. Having been to the place on multiple occasions, it was the first time she had ever been forced to stay in the car, a direct response to Blue’s presence rather than any shortcoming of her own.
Walking around to the front bumper, he fell in alongside Rye, the two of them staring up at the quaint little house on the edge of Hilliard.
“What, does your grandmother live here?” Rye asked.
Reed didn’t bother pointing out that he never knew one of his grandmothers and the other had been gone for decades. Instead, he replied, “Well, not mine exactly.”
Leaving it at that, he walked straight up the narrow concrete strip to the front door, hearing the smack of Rye’s boots as she jogged a few steps to catch up before falling in beside him.
“You are aware we’re under a bit of a deadline here, right?” she asked, her voice lowered slightly, a response, Reed assumed, to the quiet and darkened street they were on.
Far and away the first bit of self-awareness she had displayed since they’d met.
“I am, which is why we’re here,” Reed said, again cutting himself off short.
Whatever time pressures she was feeling, he felt reasonably certain his were even more pronounced, the urge to tell her that, and to possibly add some of the colorful language she was so fond of, right on the tip of his tongue.
The fact that he was able to contain it being something he chalked up to what Riley used to refer to as personal growth.
Reaching the front step, he paused slightly, turning to Rye. “Do me a favor and stay quiet when we step inside here. His grandma’s asleep, and it isn’t pretty if she gets woken up.”
Her face twisting into a mask of confusion and incredulity, Rye said, “So it is your grandma’s house?”
Her voice in a harsh whisper, Reed didn’t bother responding as he pushed the door open and stepped across the foyer, turning to see Rye do the same, pulling the front closed behind her.
A moment later, he pushed through the hall entry to the basement, leading the way down.
“Close the door,” he whispered as he descended the steps, hearing it shut behind him, replaced only by the sound of the stairs creaking. Joining it a few moments later was the clacking of computer keys, one of the rare instances Reed could remember entering when first-person video games weren’t the soundtrack of choice.
“What the hell?” Rye whispered as they continued to lower themselves into the basement, the room coming into view on either side.
Ignoring the comment, Reed raised his voice just slightly, saying, “Deke? You here?”
In response to his inquiry, the sound of typing ceased, Deke’s head popping up from behind the bank of monitors across the room, his hair sticking out from his head like fronds on a palm tree.
“Dude,” Deke said, raising his hands above his head and stretching, his bony arms protruding from the sleeves of a plain white t-shirt. “Thanks for not waking grandma. She’s a bear if she doesn’t get her rest.”
Waving the comment off with a hand, Reed said, “Thanks for getting us in so fast. Appreciate it.”
Hearing his use of the term us, Deke seemed to for the first time realize that Reed wasn’t alone, or that the companion by his side wasn’t Billie.
Dropping his hands back into place, his palms slapping against his hips, his eyebrows rose, a quizzical look on his face.
“Oh, hello.”
“Uh, hello,” Rye replied, casting a glance over to Reed.
Every part of him wanted to let the awkwardness stretch as long as possible, some small modicum of amusement passing through him at the sight of the two trying to size each other up, neither having much luck with it.
Just as fast, he let it pass, the enormity of the moment returning to mind.
“Deke, this is Sydney Rye, a federal agent also working the double homicide,” Reed said. The explanation was a bit scant on details, but was arguably the truth, or as much of it as he was willing to delve into.
“Sydney, this is Derrick Chamberlain, otherwise known as-“
“Deke,” Rye finished, her gaze now on Deke, or what could be seen of him from behind the screens.
“Right,” Reed said. “Guess I already covered that.”
Still looking in the opposite direction, Rye said, “No. Well, yes, but that’s not what I meant.”
Taking a step forward, she let a smile play across her face. Extending one foot at a time, she walked toward him, swinging wide so she could see him fully.
A view Reed was certain involved boxer shorts and wool crew socks, the look one that Deke had turned into an art form over the years.
“Twenty-four months ago, an organization I was working for hired you on recommendation to develop a security algorithm,” Rye said, pulling up just shor
t of the bank of computers. “The way they talked about it, you’d have thought they landed the God of Cybersecurity to handle the job personally.”
Reed didn’t bother pointing out that they weren’t far from the truth in their assessment, giving the conversation a few extra moments, letting his unorthodox pair of colleagues get acquainted.
In its own way, no different from the snarling and sniffing that had occurred between Billie and Blue earlier.
“Twenty-four months,” Deke said, ignoring the title Rye had lobbed in his direction. Tilting his head back, he glanced at the exposed floor joists above. “That would have been 2015, so...London?”
“London,” Rye said, nodding once, the smile growing a bit more pronounced. “Impressive.”
“Thank you,” Deke said. “If I remember correctly, that was some high-end stuff you guys were working with over there.”
What exactly he was alluding to, Reed would love to know, just as he would enjoy nothing more than delving a bit deeper into the backstory of the woman by his side.
Yet another task for another time.
“I stopped by earlier and asked Deke if he could do some digging for us on Gerard,” Reed said, neither of the other two bothering to look his direction.
“Who would have thought the famed Deke was based here,” Rye said, extending a hand to either side. Shifting her attention to Reed, she added, “Or that you had him on speed dial.”
“It’s kind of a long story,” Reed said, hoping they could push past the introductory period and cut to the heart of the matter, the omnipresent clock in his head ticking with increasing ferocity.
“Aren’t they all?” Rye replied.
Chapter Fifty-Two
When Sydney Rye first pulled up to the house in some no-name suburb outside of a Midwestern town she only knew nominally more about, she thought for sure Reed Mattox was messing with her. That he had found out about the true state of the organization she was purported to work for and was now taking her to some sort of safe house where people were held indefinitely.
Or made to disappear for even longer.
She’d made a crack on the way in to appear cool, to even add a bit of irony to the situation, but the entire walk to the door had been spent with her index finger tapping at the Sig Sauer on her hip.
The trip down the stairs with her hand in full grip on the butt of the weapon.
Throughout, every possible permutation of what could happen had played through her mind.
That they were pissed about what happened at the apartment earlier.
That they didn’t believe she had acted with good intentions.
That she should have insisted Blue make the trip down the stairs with her.
Even as they descended, Mattox playing it cool, seemingly unaware of any trepidation she had, her every thought had been on how to extricate herself.
Not until she saw the bank of computers set up in the room, the den of arrested development stretched to either side, did she consider that they were going to visit an asset.
Or that the asset would be someone as renowned as Deke.
Knowing him only by his first name, she had been underselling what he’d done for the crew in London a bit, leaving it as barren as possible, not wanting Mattox to hear any more than necessary and start getting nervous.
Cops tended to do that when they heard stories of child pornographers being tracked down through dark websites and tortured to death.
The way the others had referred to scoring assistance from Deke had arisen a healthy curiosity in her, something only sated by doing some research.
Some research that had revealed nothing, the man’s skills at hiding built to match his abilities behind a keyboard.
Which made sense, when she got down to it.
More than once at the time she had tried to envision who this ethereal being was, what they looked like, where they might live.
To be honest, none of it coincided in the slightest with the awkward guy standing before her, a fact that only added a bit to the mystique.
Skills were skills, regardless what kind of package they came in.
Once the initial introductions were done, a rare and fleeting moment of awe passing, Rye allowed Mattox to push the conversation back on course, over to the reason for their stopping by.
“Vinson Gerard,” Deke began, returning to his seat behind the bank of computers, the wheels rolling atop a hard plastic mat under his weight. Once he was in position, he slammed his heels down, stopping him before the largest center screen.
Moving out to the side, Rye positioned herself so she could see, Mattox filling in behind her.
“A man so paranoid, right now the ghost of Richard Nixon is applauding,” Deke said.
Smirking lightly, a crack about the current administration passed through Rye’s head, though she opted to let it pass.
Not the time.
“How so?” Mattox asked.
There was a time when Rye could have rattled off most every detail about Gerard, the spectrum covering every carefully scrubbed morsel put out for public consumption, and quite a few others that he would love to keep hidden. Most of those involved his son, though, the rest stopping abruptly two years prior, when her interest in the family ended.
What he had been doing in the time since, she hadn’t a clue, beyond the apparent obvious of obsessing about her.
Though, to his credit, he did have good taste.
It wasn’t like he was the first man to have spent his time in that way.
Or the last.
“Vinson Gerard, born in London, 1953, at the Queen’s Hospital,” Deke rattled off, his voice taking on a detached tone, knowing the information did nothing to add to their case. Pushing ahead, he continued, “Started off as a low-level businessman, owned a junkyard, which became three junkyards, which soon included a few tugs to transport stuff-“
“Which ended in a scrap metal empire,” Rye added. “Estimated net worth last I saw, just over forty million euros.”
“Which has continued to grow,” Deke finished, “to more than forty-five, or as we would say here-“
“Fifty million dollars,” Mattox finished. “Damn, that’s a lot of soda cans.”
Snorting slightly, Rye remained silent, knowing it was only sarcasm.
The breadth of Gerard’s empire was impressive, but hardly a point of focus here.
“Right,” Deke said. “I start there, just so you understand, this guy has damn near unlimited resources. Rumored to have fingers in the drug trade, human trafficking, the London Mayor’s Office, even Parliament.”
Raising her eyebrows slightly, Rye nodded along, remembering the surprise she had felt originally as she looked through this information.
Proof positive that the golden rule the world over had nothing to do with politeness or manners or any of that other shit parents tried to tell their parents.
All it really was was he who has the gold, makes the rules.
“So how’d he end up here?” Mattox asked.
“The why, I don’t know,” Deke said. “I’ve only been at this a couple of hours, and this guy’s holding companies have holding companies. I feel bad for whoever he has watching the books for him.”
Knowing he wasn’t exactly the tax paying sort, Rye wouldn’t bother losing much sleep on the notion. If somebody was close enough to see his finances, they knew what he did for a living, likely deserved anything that got tossed their way.
In fact, it was her goal to be the one that did some of it in the very near future.
“So after an hour or two of fruitless digging,” Deke said, “I decided to work backward. Start with any unusual transactions in the area, piece it back from there. Didn’t take too long after that, one thing leading to another.”
Pausing, he glanced up, Rye still watching him, certain Mattox was doing the same behind her.
“See, the problem most people like Gerard have is they start to believe in their invincibility,” Deke said. “The
y have guards, politicians, police officers, whoever, on the payroll, so they get to thinking they’re untouchable. They deal strictly in the physical world, unaware that that stuff went out the window a decade ago, if not before.”
Shifting her focus to the screen, Rye listened without comment, watching a series of insets appear before them.
“They get cocky, and they trust their cybersecurity to low-budget hacks that aren’t worth a damn,” Deke continued. “They only see things in one direction, not thinking about who could be coming around from the other side.”
Clicking on his mouse twice more, he pulled a real estate listing up before them. In it was a sprawling home, the picture revealing only the front entrance, stairs and columns framing an enormous double door.
Below it was listed the sale price and a few of the property particulars, information such as land size and square footage lined out before disappearing below the bottom of the frame.
“Take this for instance,” Deke said. “This house has been for sale over two years, and suddenly a corporation that has no known shareholders, board members, product, or tax history walks up and pays cash.”
Clicking on a second window, a spreadsheet with only numbers appeared, each line dictating an amount of money, the sums growing exponentially larger down the page.
“Which itself seems suspicious, so they hide the company behind a false front,” Deke said. “Helps them sleep at night, makes them feel good about things, but it doesn’t take much to ferret out that this new company is owned out of the Cayman Islands, backed by an account with money flowing in from London.”
Leaving it on screen, Deke raised his hands behind his head. Lacing his fingers together, he rotated to look at them, seemingly finished with his report for the time being.
Glancing between him and the screen, Rye processed what he’d just said, thinking things through.
“When was this acquisition made?” she asked.
“Just over two months ago,” Deke said. “In the first two weeks thereafter, the place underwent a massive remodel. Since then, all the trucks rolled out, place has gone quiet.”
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