Lock In (Lock In, #1)(43)

Basically, at the tender age of twenty, Cassandra Bell was compared to Gandhi and Martin Luther King by her admirers, and to various terrorists and cult leaders by her detractors.

Baer’s and Kearney’s actions at Loudoun Pharma would not be helping her image at the moment, and people were already beginning to thump on Hadens, including her, for the walkout. I scrolled through her recent comments and proclamations to see what she had to say about the bombing.

On that, she was, for the moment, silent. This was not helping her in the media. Still, possibly better to be silent than to say something stupid.

On reflection, it seemed strange that I had never met Cassandra Bell. We were two of the most notable young Hadens in existence. But then the majority of her notoriety began to accrue around the same time I was trying to step away from the limelight and to have something like a private life.

Also, be honest, I said to myself. You’re the establishment. She’s the radical.

And that was true enough. Through my father and his activities, I was in the physical world more than most young Hadens. Cassandra Bell, on the other hand, was never in it, other than by reputation.

I set aside Cassandra Bell for a moment and went back to Jay Kearney, who had blown himself up on Karl Baer’s behalf. A scroll through his client list confirmed, as Vann had said, that Baer was indeed a client of Kearney’s, with three appointments in twenty-one months. The last of these was eleven months ago. According to Kearney’s appointment notes, they went parasailing.

But aside from brief notes on the nature of their appointments, there was nothing apparently connecting the two that I could see. Three appointments in two years was evidence of a prior relationship, but it wasn’t much of a relationship.

The FBI had gotten warrants for every scrap of Baer’s and Kearney’s lives the instant it was clear they had done the bombing. I reached into that data trove to pull out messages and payment records. I wanted to see how much cross talk there was between them, either in personal correspondence or in a financial trail of crumbs that suggested that the two of them interacted in any significant way.

There was very little. The messages clustered around integration appointments and discussed things like potential activities, how much Kearney would charge for his time, and other pedestrian affairs. Likewise, their financial records coincided at integration appointments only, when Baer would pay Kearney for the appointment.

This lack of a trail didn’t mean that the two of them didn’t meet or plan the bombing. It only suggested that if they did, they weren’t idiots about it. But it didn’t seem a lot to go on.

I stopped and looked up, and stepped back from the wall of images and searches I had constructed, looking for the structure in it, and in the connections. I imagine to a lot of people it would look like complete chaos, a mess of pictures and scraps of news.

I found it calming. Here was everything I knew so far. It was all connected in one way or another. I could see the connections out here in a way I couldn’t see them when they were jumbled in my brain.

Next steps, I heard Vann say in my head. I smiled at it.

One. There were two nexuses of interaction that I saw. One was Lucas Hubbard, to whom Nicholas Bell, Sam Schwartz, and my father connected, and with whom Jim Buchold argued on a matter related to their mutual business.

The other was Cassandra Bell, to whom Nicolas Bell, Baer, and Kearney were connected, whom Buchold was antagonistic toward, and Hubbard, possibly, based on his argument with Buchold, was sympathetic toward.

So: Dive into both, particularly Cassandra Bell. She was the only person in all of this whom I had not physically met. Arrange an interview if at all possible.

Two. Baer and Kearney: Still unconvinced about the connection here. Dig deeper.

Three. Johnny Sani. Find out what he was doing in Duarte and if anyone knew him there. Learn if there was a connection between him and the City of Hope.

Four. Two outliers in this tangle: My dad and Brenda Rees. I was pretty certain my dad was not up to no good, running for senator notwithstanding. In any event I had a massive conflict of interest if I wanted to investigate him.

As for Brenda Rees, might as well get an interview with her and see if she had anything useful to say.

Five. Nicholas Bell. Who said he was working when he met with Sani, but also appeared to have been there to integrate with Sani, even though it was impossible, because they were both Integrators and because the headset was fake.

So what the hell was really going on in there?

And why did Johnny Sani commit suicide?

Those were the two things that taking all these data points out of my brain and spreading them out into space didn’t make any clearer.





Chapter Thirteen

A LIGHT PING ECHOED through my cave. I recognized the tone as a noninvasive hail, a call that would be delivered if the recipient was conscious, but not if not. Hadens, like anyone else, hated to be woken up by random calls in the middle of the night. I pulled up a window to see who it was. It was Tony.

I cleared the call, audio only. “You’re up late,” I said.

“Deadline on a gig,” Tony replied. “I had a hunch you might have been lying when you said you wanted to sleep.”

“I wasn’t lying,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

“What are you doing instead?”

“Trying to figure out a whole bunch of shit that unfortunately I can’t tell you much about. And you?”