Devoted(76)
He sat on the wide coping that capped the two-foot-high wall of the pool, shielding the lens of the flashlight with two fingers of his right hand and directing the beam at the floor between his feet, as it had been stipulated that he would.
Haskell Ludlow and Dorian Purcell had been friends since junior high school, when they had both been kick-ass hackers and beardless code writers, planting rootkits in the poorly defended computer systems of major corporations, gleaning all manner of compromising information from the emails of reckless executives who didn’t yet understand the eternal nature of electronic correspondence. There were unlimited potential income streams if you were too young and too clever to be daunted by the word extortion. Balzac had written, “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime,” which was both a cliché and a lie. However, Haskell and Dorian had taken steps to ensure that if ever an origin story of Parable were written, no author would be able to follow a single thread back to the clichéd truth in their case. Haskell Ludlow, though always keeping a low profile, owned the second-largest block of voting stock in Parable, and he would take nearly any risk, as he was doing now in this crumbling mall, to protect his fortune and his good name.
Dressed in black, wearing night-vision gear that penetrated the darkness, as silent as souls that had shed their bodies and had no weight to strike footsteps from the floor, the two men from Tragedy materialized before Ludlow at 2:15 a.m. According to the agreed-upon plans for the meeting, they were to follow him into the mall at two thirty. In fact, they had been here since half past midnight.
He did not look up from their shoes, but held out the driver’s license in his left hand. It was an excellent forgery in the name of Alexander Gordius, an identity used by him and Dorian Purcell, one buried under more shell corporations and sedimentary layers of false data than the geological strata that overlaid Jurassic-era fossils. It was the phantom Gordius who paid the Dark Web masters of Tragedy to perform five carefully crafted exterminations over the years.
Returning the driver’s license, one of the agents of Tragedy said, “What kind of name is Gordius?”
“My dad’s,” said Ludlow, getting to his feet and leaving the bright flashlight on the pond coping.
The two men were lithe bulls, the kind who looked like they could crash through walls or slip through cracks, whichever method of attack was required. They wore black hoodies, and their faces were smeared with a nonreflective black grease. Their night-vision goggles now dangled from their necks.
Their Tragedian names were Keith Richards and Roger Daltrey, but their real names—which they thought undiscoverable—were Frank Gatz and Boris Sergetov. The entire Tragedy staff consisted of only six people, for it was wise to limit a murder-for-hire operation to as few potential rats as possible, and these two were the founders of the organization.
Having informed their client of the breach of security that made them vulnerable to exposure, they were prepared to kill—for no fee—the hacker who had jacked the Gordius ID and had evidently been trying to put together evidence regarding Tragedy’s activities, in particular seeking details related to one of the five hits for which Gordius had contracted.
The “real” Alexander Gordius—alias Haskell Ludlow and Dorian Purcell—had insisted on this meeting to learn the identity of the hacker and to devise a mutually agreeable plan for the extermination of same. Tragedy operated out of a warehouse in Stockton, and this shuttered shopping mall, little more than fifty miles from their headquarters, served as a convenient rendezvous point. They surely researched the ownership before coming here; but they couldn’t have found any tie to Dorian or Parable among the American divisions of a trio of foreign conglomerates that each had a piece of the property.
Working off nervous energy, Ludlow paced as he talked. “So who is the bastard?”
With a Russian accent as rich as beluga caviar, Sergetov said, “Gospodin, the deceiving bastard person is indeed a bitch.”
“Say what? Are you serious? Some geek twat was almost able to get a knife to our throat?”
“No offense, man,” said Frank Gatz, “but that kind of thinking is prediluvian.”
“It’s what?”
“Prediluvian—out of date, ancient, before Noah and the Flood, white male thinking at its worst.”
“I’m not white.”
“All I’m saying is that women can do anything a man can do.”
“Piss standing up?”
Gatz sighed. “If that’s the way you want to be.”
As if making a philosophical point to all present, Sergetov said, “Woman is possible to be both brilliant and still svoloch.”
“Whatever. I’m not the one who screwed up here,” Ludlow said, pacing ceaselessly. “Tragedy screwed up here. You screwed this up. Where is this bitch?”
“She exists not two hours from here, gospodin,” Boris said, “but you might never to have heard the village called Pinehaven.”
Indeed, Ludlow had never heard of the place.
“Her name,” said Gatz, “is Megan Bookman. You may recall her husband, Jason, was a problem we solved with a helicopter crash.”
Suddenly the mall had a Gothic quality. If it had seemed like the ideal venue for a highly private meeting beyond the eyes of any chance witnesses, it now struck Ludlow as more sinister, a nexus where past deeds and consequences met at last. Could it be that Megan Bookman—looker, painter, pianist—was a quadruple threat, also a white-hat hacker, a data pirate who was buccaneering through the Dark Web in search of justice?