Page 11 of Talk to Me

“Keep it up, big boy,” I teased. “Sure, you can, but if we’re just gonna log in to play a game somewhere, I need to switch headphones.”

“Hmm…there’s something sexy about imagining you plowing through the bad guys in Fortnight.”

“I prefer Halo, though the new Fallout was pretty damn sexy too.”

“Sugar Bear, keep talking to me all gamer-like, it’s turning me on.”

“Hmm-hmm. Spill, what did you need the special appointment for?” John McQuade was a lot of things, but he wasn’t frivolous and he didn’t waste time. When he asked for specific appointments, he usually had work to do.

“Promise to not get mad at me?” He sounded so hopeful, like a child who’d done something wrong and knew it.

“No,” I informed him. “You tell me what you did and why it’s now my problem and we’ll go from there.”

“Damn,” he said. “Here I was hoping to avoid the doghouse.”

“What did you do, John?”

He grunted something that sounded vaguely like German. Maybe Dutch. I took another sip of the tea and waited.

“Got a job,” he finally admitted. “Feels off. Did the research, still feels off. Want you take a look at it for me?”

“You did the research?” I raised my eyebrows. “You cheating on me, John?”

“I would never, Sugar Bear—most of the time.” That nickname was going to stick, wasn’t it?

“Uh huh.” I clucked my tongue at him. “Why didn’t you just ask me to look at it in the first place?”

A file popped into my dropbox and I was already opening them.

“I don’t want to take all your time with business. Sometimes, I like talking to you for fun.”

“Big Boy, I am more than capable of handling you and more besides, who did you go to for this?”

I was already separating out the different file components. The job description. The company. The targets. Incorporation papers were there, founding, board of directors?—

It was strange because it was way too clean. Everything was—perfect. Humans were innately flawed. Everyone had secrets, and no one who succeeded at that level in business was quite that squeaky clean.

Not when they handled equipment, pharmaceutical, and weapons sales of both the legal and illegal variety. They were very good at burying their various deals and holding companies beneath a complicated and intricate series of shells.

“Marcus,” he finally admitted. “He’s good.”

“I’m better.” It wasn’t bragging. “Marcus is a surface skimmer. He won’t dig too deep unless you tell him to.”

“I did tell him to go deep,” McQuade complained. “Problem is, he said the deeper he went, the more nothing he found.”

“But you don’t believe that.” It wasn’t a question. I didn’t believe it either. The deeper I dug, the more shells I found. Back tracing them was creating an intricate puzzle. What secret were they trying to hide behind this web of deceit?

“No,” he admitted, and there was a growl punctuating that word. “Learned a long time ago to trust my gut. Doesn’t matter how clean it is or how much they doctor the logo, if it feels like a cheap knockoff?—”

“It probably is. Now this is interesting…”

“What?” I had his full attention.

“Each series of shells is covered by three more. It’s almost like a shell game within a shell game, within a shell game. Each time I track to the next, it splits off again.”

“Someone doesn’t want us to know where everything ties back to.”

“No, they don’t,” I said as I worked on a program to break through that algorithm a little faster. “It’s also set up to create phantom shells. One in three of these are legit, but they are cloning them, then using a replicating pattern to keep the real ones hidden. It’s a really sexy little game of dress-up.”

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