Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(54)

Mr. Ruby’s face was drawn. “I’m not entirely sure we should share that.”

“Cops,” I said. “Always holding up their end of a bargain.”

“It’s an ongoing investigation.”

“Fine,” I said. “Don’t go banging on my door if you think of any questions you forgot to ask. And I won’t go banging on your door if I happen to think of anything I forgot to tell you.”

Mr. Jade glared at me. “Withholding information from federal agents is a felony.”

I glared back. “Go sit on your damn felony.” I started heading off in the general direction of Oakland.

“Nikki!”

I kept walking. Not looking back.

“Come on, Nikki. Wait.”

I stopped and turned to Mr. Ruby. “What?”

“You have to understand about Care4. You walked into quite the wasp nest.”

“I didn’t walk into anything,” I answered. “The wasp nest walked into me.”

“Karen Li wasn’t selling tech secrets on the open market or whatever crap Gregg Gunn told you. She didn’t care about that. Besides, she had enough money. The woman was very good at what she did and worked in an industry that throws more money at talent than the NBA.”

“So what did she want?”

Mr. Jade joined in. “She found out about something.”

“Don’t be too specific.”

“That’s the problem—there’s plenty to choose from. We believe Care4 has done all kinds of things wrong, everything from embargo violations to bribery. We’ve been building a case against them for some time.”

“So Karen was helping you?”

“Not at first,” said Mr. Ruby frankly. He scratched the side of his thick neck. “At first she refused, said she’d done nothing wrong, and that we should go find someone else and leave her out of it. Then, much more recently, she came back to us on her own. She had found out something new. Something worse—something bad enough that it changed her mind.”

“What was it?”

“We’re not sure, but it was urgent. Something extremely time sensitive. She had managed to hide some kind of evidence, but we have no idea what—could be anything from a warehouse full of gold bars to a single flash drive. We were supposed to meet her later in the week so she could give it to us.”

“She didn’t tell you anything else about what it was?”

People will die. Innocent people.

“Just a name. ‘In Retentis.’ Some kind of internal project. All we know is that it was enough to scare her, badly.”

It was the second time that week I had heard the strange phrase. In Retentis. The subject line of the e-mail that, according to Karen, had set everything in motion. “Can’t you find out what it means?”

Mr. Jade answered, absently braiding the hairs of his goatee. “It’s not so easy. According to Karen, whatever is happening is being planned abroad. We don’t have jurisdiction. We’re trying to get subpoenas and search warrants, but we don’t have enough solid evidence to take to the courts and start the process. Which is a disaster, given that she told us that whatever is going to happen will—”

He caught a glance from Mr. Ruby and stopped mid-sentence.

“Happen on November first,” I finished. “So if we don’t figure it out by then, it’s too late.”

They looked at me uncomfortably but said nothing. “Right?” I asked.

Their eyes met and Mr. Ruby gave a barely perceptible shrug.

“Right,” agreed Mr. Jade. “She told you, too?”

“Yeah. So any guesses what it is?”

Mr. Ruby answered. “We know that the CEO, Gunn, has been traveling recently to all kinds of rough places.”

“The kinds of places where bad guys sit around drinking strong coffee and planning how to get the next truck bomb into the next building,” added Mr. Jade.

“Terrorism?” I had thought about it and was skeptical. “What benefit could it possibly be for an American tech company to help terrorists attack Westerners? What’s the upside? Wouldn’t that just instantly make them our government’s public enemy number one?”

Mr. Jade nodded in agreement. “It’s anyone’s guess, but Silicon Valley is dead set on protecting client privacy at all costs. They’re notorious for it. These companies are like the Swiss banks of the twenty-first century.”

“We have to go through the courts just to open a goddamn iPhone,” Mr. Ruby put in bitterly. “As though some AR-wielding nutjob who just mowed down an office full of innocents needs to be protected from the big bad FBI.”

Mr. Jade wasn’t done. “Our best guess is that Care4 had gotten hold of information about some kind of cell or strike, quite possibly unintentionally. Only they can’t say anything or they lose the trust—and more importantly, the revenue—of their most lucrative clients. The Eastern Bloc pack, the oligarchs and Middle East petro-states, that crowd. No way those guys let Care4 do business in their countries if they think the company is passing any kind of info back to the States.”

I was still unconvinced. “So someone at Care4 essentially decided that letting a handful of Westerners possibly die was preferable to taking a devastating financial hit?”