Page 17 of Bulletproof Jack: Hunting Lee Child's Jack Reacher

Not that this was new information or startling in any way to the well informed.

Most of the world, friends and foes alike, believed secret weapons development was ongoing among warmongers and the scientists who supported them.

Which was actually true.

Governments barely bothered to refute the crazy conspiracy theories. Mostly because those theories were useful.

As long as tinfoil hat types were jousting at fictitious ideas, they were not focused on finding the real threats.

But the real development programs were much more deadly than the fictitious ones. The journalist had come too close to several ongoing projects with the help of his unnamed sources.

There were substantive mistakes in both the older Dark Web and the newer Secret Weapon articles. Which made the whole pieces somewhat less threatening.

Counterintelligence operatives could point out provable errors and cast doubt on the remaining facts.

The mistakes were there. They couldn’t be denied. TheTimesdid have defenses. Could have been related to bad intel from the whistleblowers. Or maybe the journalist was just plain sloppy.

None of the excuses mattered. The articles were out there for anyone to find. And they did, one way or another, contain top secret intel that simply must not be exploited.

Morin extracted and eliminated both articles from the world wide web, the deep web, and the dark web as well.

Which wasn’t like the old days when papers could be burned out of existence.

Digital pieces couldn’t be totally removed. People who had already discovered them still existed. The articles had been downloaded and stored in places Morin couldn’t even hope to find.

Morin was tracing them as best he could, but the process was difficult. As a practical matter, it would take too long to eliminate all traces of the two articles.

But he could close the loop at the open end and ensure that the journalist didn’t write more drivel on the sensitive projects.

Morin knew precisely how to make that happen.

He had hired Fox. Who targeted the journalist, along with his sources, for removal.

The first phase was done. The first target had been eliminated last night in Detroit. Lucas Stuart.

Phase two was well under way. Fox would find the journalist and eliminate both the man and his work soon enough.

Morin eventually noticed the silence in his kitchen. His wife had finally wound down and headed toward the shower.

He flipped on the TV and ran through the various news reports, looking for last night’s story.

Several murder reports led the broadcasts in various places around the country.

Not surprising.

Crime rates had been rising for a while almost everywhere.

None of the reported murders Morin found during his quick channel surf were committed in Detroit.

Which could mean that the body hadn’t been discovered.

Or the report could have been suppressed.

Or maybe there were too many murders in Detroit last night to report them all.

Could Morin possibly be that lucky?

He grinned briefly.

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