Mr. Dark 4 (Tamed #4)(16)

Scott turned and, while not exactly gracefully, at least walked back to his car. I watched him go, and turned, a tear trickling down my face. There were two reasons for the tear. Part of it was frustration, I was so aroused I thought I could wear out a fresh set of batteries on my favorite vibrator at that point and still not be satisfied. But the other part of the tear was the happy side, the side that thought that perhaps, in accepting the frustration, I was seeing the chance to have more than just sexual satisfaction, something I’d dreamed of for a long time.





Chapter 8





Sophie





"You really want to work on Saturday?" I asked, as Mark and I walked up the stairs to the bell tower at Mount Zion. "Are you planning another operation or something?"

"No, it was just something that I saw in the minute I glanced at your final pile yesterday before we went to lunch has been on my mind all day since I woke up, and I wanted to do some cross checking," he said. He sealed the steel core door that was at the bottom of the staircase, and we went up to the top, which had thankfully been refitted somewhat since he had first brought me there. The thin foam mattress was gone, replaced by a full workstation along with locked steel cabinets for the small arsenal we kept at Mount Zion. While the bell tower was not our main strike base, the fact was, we could easily outfit ourselves to take on just about anything short of an armored assault with what we kept there. "I just didn't think I could get it out of my mind until I had done this one thing."

"Okay, but why the tower? You could have used your pocket computer with any of the in-house monitors, you know that."

"Just a gut feeling," Mark said, sitting down and turning on the small cubical computer he used for secure purposes. Barely bigger than a deck of cards, it was the twin of the one we had at our main offices, and backed up with it nightly.

I'd come to trust Mark's gut, because usually what Mark called a gut feeling was more due to the constant awareness of everything that went on around him. One time, when we were on our trip through Eastern Europe to facilitate my training, he allowed me to test his awareness. I went into a hotel room, and put the items exactly the way I wanted. He hadn't ever been in the room before. When I was ready, I took photographs and stored them on a camera. Mark then walked through the room and spent thirty seconds walking around, looking at things. We then went into an adjoining room and described the room.

His recollection bordered on freaky. He started with interesting but not outlandish things, such as that the television was a Samsung, and that the clock radio's display was green. It then went on to borderline amazing, as he noted that the toothpaste tube visible in the bathroom had a pink label, and that the gel inside was dark red. By the end though, it was almost totally insane, as he recalled things like a stray hair I had laid on the pillowcase, and how it was on the opposite side of a crease that I had caused by running my hand across the upper corner of the pillow. He even saw things that I had missed, like the light tea stain on the carpet next to the window, so faint that I had to go back into the room and look more closely, as it hadn't shown up on the digital photos I took.

Mark's ability to gather information was just as sharp when it came to business and facts. He'd read the newspaper, and make connections between stories that sounded almost paranoid, but they would either turn out to have connections later, and would affect the investments he moved around in response to his connections. Sometimes these connections were so subtle even he couldn't put a name to them, and they were gut feelings. So when Mark told me he had a gut feeling, I didn't discount it in the least.

Mark pulled up the spreadsheet of the hacked companies he'd stolen from the Confederation servers a few nights before, and then next to it my final list of candidate companies for our next round of investments. He blinked a few times, then tapped a few controls. It took the computer less than a second for words on both windows to flash bright blue. "I thought so," Mark said as he tapped the screen.

"Pressman Contractors," I said, reading the screen over his shoulder. "HVAC company. I remember the portfolio, actually. Good ROI, small, ticked all the right boxes."

"Except for one," Mark said, sighing. "They're a front for the Confederation. It's not unexpected, I didn't know every company that fronted the Confederation and there was bound to be some that matched everything else we're looking for. It's the biggest problem with the Confederation."

"They're a Hydra, with more heads than we know about," I said. "What about Owen Lynch?"

"Lynch's power is more concentrated, and more narrowly focused. Taking him down is different in that he isn't worried about money or traditional things like that. He just wants control and power. Which kind of makes sense. I mean, seriously, after the first couple of million, what is more money to a man like him? If you can buy three Ferraris, who cares about being able to buy a Bentley as well? He uses his money like we are, using it to finance power. The Confederation though, with so many players, has to care about money more, and has more little things like this."

"So what are we going to do?" I asked. Mark clicked on the file on Pressman Contractors, reading what he had gathered. "What is Pressman?"

"On one hand, they're a pretty typical money laundering front, using construction contracts to filter Confederation money in and out of circulation. They've got the receipts here to back that up, the bank transfers and other stuff. This is full of second level connections that I'm going to need weeks to fully analyze, with all these companies. But there's a few other things here that concern me."