Blue Warrior

It also didn’t bother her one whit to dig wherever she was told to dig, especially by The Angel. What did it matter to her that she generated lists for him of Dark Web porn downloads, offshore painkiller prescriptions, or secret organ-donor purchases of certain committee chairmen, Treasury Department undersecretaries, and Senate staffers? Politics was a game of sharp elbows and vicious cross-checks. Bath wasn’t playing the game. She wasn’t even keeping score. She was just supplying the sticks and blades for a hefty fee.

That morning she had received a new research request from The Angel. “Lane, David M.” She knew the name. Had watched his pathetic announcement a few days earlier. The congressman seemed earnest and sincere in his speech, but those qualities in politics were about as useful as a floppy drive on a MacBook Air, so she dismissed him out of hand as a loser.

So why the research query from The Angel?

Hers not to reason why, only to cash the checks. She ran her searches, a digital colonoscopy. But Lane came up clean.

As in, nothing. As in, not doctored or laundered or sanitized, or even a fictional legend concocted for some CIA spook needing a cover. Nope. Nothing.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Then you need to create some catastrophic filth. Put it out there in a credible way, the way you do better than anybody else.”

“No problemo.”

“Get started on that right away, but don’t let it out. Yet.”

“You got it.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

Lane, David M. Sincere, earnest… lame.

Like Justice Tanner. Tanner killed himself, sure. Jasmine looted the coroner’s hard drive. Saw the crime-scene photos. A bloody mess. Jasmine hated that. But it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t put the gun in his mouth, did she? Or pull the trigger? No. But maybe she supplied the bullets, metaphorically speaking.

Screw the metaphors.

Screw Tanner. And David Lane.

Not her problem.

Her problem was Margaret Myers. The former president was a software engineer in her own right and owned her own software company. The truth was, the two of them had a lot in common. In another reality, or a J. J. Abrams parallel universe, the two of them could’ve been friends.

But Myers wasn’t her friend. Myers had been sniffing around the Tanner suicide for weeks. The initial queries had been clumsy, almost like a drunk walking into a plate-glass door he had trouble seeing. But Myers came back, slowly, cautiously, and from new directions, using bots, mostly, tapping into a wide variety of public databases, then breaking through passworded accounts and, finally, private nets, all unaware of Jasmine’s presence monitoring her searches. Or, at least, so Jasmine hoped. What was clear to Jasmine, however, was that Myers was assembling the right data set. But just to be sure, Jasmine broke into Myers’s toy box and took a look around. Then there was no question.

Myers knew, or at least was on the verge of knowing.

Jasmine informed The Angel. Now Myers was his problem.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“The only way to be metaphysically sure is when the feds come rolling up to your driveway in a fleet of those big black Suburbans.”

“Can’t you steal her database? Drop a virus into the network?”

“If she has any brains — and she does, believe me — she’s got hard copies of everything, or cloud backup, or both. But even if she didn’t, once I broke in there and stole everything, she’d know that we know, so you’d alert her and she might be forced to act or go deeper. I think it makes more sense for me to sit tight and watch what she does. If she alerts the black-Suburban boys I can let you know, but there are a whole lot of intermediary steps she’ll be taking before she gets to that point, and right now I’m completely invisible to her.”

“Sounds like a plan, so long as you’re sure you’re invisible to her.”

“Guaranteed,” Jasmine wrote. “Trust me.”

14

Myers residence

Denver, Colorado

6 May

Vin Tanner was the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice to commit suicide while in office. That’s how he would always be remembered in the history books. Myers chose to remember him only as her friend.

She’d known Tanner for twenty years before she nominated him to the Supreme Court. Knew his wife and kids well. Their two skiing families vacationed together in Vail several times. Justice Tanner sent her a handwritten note when her son had been killed, and enclosed an old Polaroid of their two young boys in soccer jerseys, skinny arms draped over each other’s shoulders, gap-toothed smiles and sweaty foreheads, best friends forever.