Morin first awakened with the alarm clock blaring in his face half an hour ago. Sunlight entered the room from large windows without blinds. He tried, but he couldn’t get back to sleep.

He dragged himself into the shower and downed a couple of cups of coffee while he ignored his wife’s droning report of her latest family drama.

There was always something going on with her big extended family and most of it was neither positive nor interesting. Today’s babbling report was no exception.

He tuned her out and focused on his own issues.

Morin had heard nothing from Fox since the completion of the first transaction. Flight time from Detroit to Los Angeles on a non-stop Delta jet was less than five hours. He must have reached Los Angeles.

Fox had booked the red eye, departing after midnight. Even with the usual air travel snafus, he’d be on the ground by now. He’d have connected with his ground support and acquired the weapons and equipment he needed to complete the job.

But it was three hours earlier in California where the world was just waking up. Which probably meant Fox hadn’t approached the target yet.

The target should be easy to locate and even easier to eliminate.

Ashley Westwood was a journalist. Worked for theLA Times. Once upon a time, maybe five years ago, he’d been the science editor.

Until he was demoted for “failures in journalistic integrity.” Whatever that meant.

Curiously, theTimeshad kept him employed while shuffling him off the front pages and out of supervisory roles.

Now he called himself a science reporter, a description that seemed to cover a variety of frivolous in-depth reporting slated for the lifestyle and classified sections of the paper.

Three weeks ago, Morin had pulled up the journalist’s last dozen articles online.

Most were what Morin would call junk science. Health reports based on fraudulent weight loss supplements and baldness cures and the like.

Westwood’s other recent articles were so called “whistleblower accounts,” claiming corporations were polluting the drinking water or poisoning employees or pushing bad nutrition for dogs and babies. Things like that.

Click bait. Alarmist and inflammatory and poorly researched and designed to generate the ever elusive buzz that kept the national conversation lively and vacuous.

Nothing new or particularly threatening in most of Westwood’s whistleblower pieces.

But Morinhadfound two articles that concerned Brax.

One was published five years ago. It purported to be anexposéof the Dark Web, which the journalist had seemed to confuse with the Deep Web. That alone made Morin wonder how thorough and knowledgeable the guy really was.

But Westwood’s shortcomings didn’t stop there. His allegedexposéhad failed to explain how the Dark Web was a depraved and scary sub-set of the Deep Web.

Five years ago, the Dark Web was a known haven for the kind of illegal activities theTimeseditorial board probably didn’t deem suitable for exposure in a family newspaper.

Hell, the Dark Web wasn’t a family-friendly place. If anything, the cesspool had grown exponentially more depraved over time.

Because the journalist’s Dark Web article was old, Morin might have ignored it. But the internet’s search engines made finding old reports like that one a simple matter of a few keystrokes these days.

Which meant Morin simply couldn’t afford to let the old one go.

Any barely computer literate intern could find the journalist’s poorly drafted article and twist it to suit and destroy. Worse, the journalist might take it into his head to update the prior article. He could write a much better one this time.

No, the stakes were too high to take that risk, on the first Dark Web article alone. Even if that had been the only problem. Which it wasn’t.

The bigger problem was presented by the second piece.

The journalist’s second article was more recent and based on facts allegedly gleaned from another whistleblower.

This one was anexposéabout secret weapons in development by private contractors inside the US.

The gist of it was that government funding was illegally funneled to private firms for the purpose of avoiding oversight and building what the press liked to call the war machine.