Page 44 of Assassin's Prey
Abby agreed with her first bite of the perfectly spiced steak as we sat around the table with my brothers back at the safe house, plates full of food in front of each of us.
“Better than the foie-whatever and champagne you had at the dinner?” Eli asked.
“God, yes,” Abby moaned around a mouthful. “You can’t imagine how many of those god-awful plates I’ve had through the years. This is better by miles.”
When our bellies were full, we took our beers into the living room. Much as I’d rather focus on the soft weight of Abby curled against my side, I knew there was too much to discuss tonight. “What have you found, E?”
“You saw the whitewashed bio I sent, right?” he asked, referring to Redding, then shook his head, knowing the question was unnecessary. “I don’t know a lot for certain—Hacr Tech deals in advanced technological concepts, including government research contracts, so information isn’t easy to come by.”
“Not yet,” Remi pointed out. And he was right; give Eli enough time and he could hack anything, no matter how much security was involved.
Eli rolled his eyes, hisduhsilent but obvious. “Redding is CEO of Hacr. I’m assuming that’s how he got involved with Chadwick; they’d have worked together once the trust went under Chadwick’s control.”
“So he’s a scientist?” Abby asked.
“He’s a politician. He’s the decision maker at Hacr, so he’d have his finger in all the pies there.”
“And Chadwick has majority control of the company shares because of the trust,” Remi added. “Between the two of them, that’s pretty much unbreakable control of the company.”
“And a shit ton of money,” Eli said. “Hacr has grown exponentially in the past twenty years since Redding was appointed.”
“Are they working on anything that would warrant murder?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. Plenty.” Eli crossed the room to a desk in the corner and riffled through some papers. “Over the years the teams at Hacr have garnered dozens of patents, published research in all the most prestigious journals—”
“Wouldn’t Redding’s position as CEO gain him a fortune of his own?” Abby asked.
“Of course.” Apparently finding what he was looking for, Eli brought a stack of sheets to me. “I’ll know more tomorrow about which projects are currently viable, but if rumor is right, this”—he pointed at the papers—“might be the reason Redding has gotten trigger-happy.”
I glanced over the models and graphs with bleary eyes. “What is it?”
Eli humphed. I gave him a tired glare, Abby’s yawn beside me punctuating my point.
Sitting on the coffee table, Eli picked up his beer. “It’s a completely secure, completely unhackable system for super-sensitive communication.”
“Bullshit.” I flipped a couple of pages. “Nothing is completely hack-proof.”
“This is. Or would be.”
I set the papers on the table. “Give me theCliff Notesversion. Please.”
“It’s a concept called quantum entanglement communication.”
From the looks on Abby’s and Remi’s faces, they didn’t understand Eli’s words any more than I did.
“The most basic explanation is that you have two photons that are created together, like twins. Two halves of a whole. What happens to one, happens to the other, no matter how far apart the photons are geographically.”
“Like telepathic communication, except with particles?” Remi asked.
“I’d need to be a scientist to know how it works, douchebag.”
Remi grunted.
“Anyway, you have a line of these particles in one location, and the photons’ ‘twins,’ for lack of a better term, in a different location, in the exact same order. Like a computer, you can alter the particles so they each turn ‘on’ or ‘off’—”
“Ones and zeros,” I put in.
“Yeah, it reads as ones and zeros. When you turn one on or off, its twin responds too.”
