Total pages in book: 155
Estimated words: 146417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 732(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 732(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“She didn’t know his real name, of course, and everything they did was online.” Hutch seemed to force himself to go slower. “But after the job was done some scary stuff started to happen, and lucky for us like many hackers, Reva’s completely paranoid. So to put it plainly, Levi hired a hacker to get into Kronberg’s systems and upload material he wanted there. At the time Reva needed the cash, and it didn’t seem to be such a crazy thing to put a couple of names in a pharmaceutical company’s backlog of investors. She admitted she didn’t read a lot of it. She knew what she was doing was wrong, but she considered it to be rich people fucking each other over.”
“When did she figure out it was something more?” Ezra asked.
“Is she safe?” Kim asked at the same time. “You said she had kids.”
“Answer Kim first, please.” Hutch would likely answer the question that interested him first, but Beck wanted Kim to be comfortable.
Hutch stopped and looked Kim’s way. “Reva’s good. I don’t even know where she is. She’s changed her name, moved, and she told me she feels comfortable that whoever hired her back then doesn’t know where she is.”
“Then why is she willing to come forward?” Kim asked. “She would have to testify.”
“Ah, but she won’t,” Hutch said. “Because she’s got this, and she’s still got the original.”
“And what is that?” Beck was pretty good with computers, but even he didn’t quite understand all the tech stuff Hutch and Jax and Adam had spewed in the first frenzied moments after they’d walked into the conference room.
“She basically took a snapshot of Kronberg’s systems before she touched them. She’s got everything. It’s a beautiful job,” Hutch said with excitement. “She didn’t leave anything behind. It proves what she put in and what was real. This was as much a cover-up as it was a reveal.”
Damn, he’d worried about that. “If he could prove some of it was true, he could slip the lies in and no one would question it. That’s what he was trying to do with Kim. The question is how we use it.”
“We use it to fuck Levi over,” Tag announced with a shit-eating grin. “This is what our Berlin guy was telling us. Do you understand how close we are to another election? How this could bring down his soon-to-be father-in-law? He’s running and he’s probably going to be his party’s candidate. If the Agency has to pick between a potential president and a man who could bring them all down, I know who they’ll choose.”
They would choose the candidate who was ahead in the polls, and then hold it over his head and serve themselves.
“Or we could expose them all,” Kim said.
“If we expose them all, we expose McDonald’s drug.” Charlotte got to the point of the problem. “If we do that, none of us is safe. I understand the impulse. In a perfect world we could do it and justice would be done.”
“In the world we live in, it puts targets on the Lost Boys.” He had to be honest. There was a reason they hadn’t taken the whole thing to the press in the beginning. McDonald’s work had to stay in the dark. “There would be agencies who would think experimentation might lead to discovery.”
He didn’t want to state it blatantly since Jax was sitting right there. There might be people out there who would take a chance that the Lost Boys themselves held the secrets of McDonald’s drugs. And those experiments would be painful and lead to the death of the patient. He couldn’t let it happen.
“I think I can speak for all of us when I say we would prefer our names didn’t get leaked,” Jax said solemnly. “We’ve talked about this over the years. It might be braver to put it all out there, but it would also open doors none of us could close again.”
Kim’s eyes had gone wide. “We can’t let anyone know. They could come after their families, too.”
Now he did what came naturally. He reached out and offered his hand. She clutched it like a lifeline.
“But we can send this intel to someone in the Agency. We can let them know someone has to be held accountable,” Ian explained. “I have a friend who handles oversight at a very high level. He’ll take care of it. They’ll do one of two things.”
Beck knew exactly what Tag was talking about. “They’ll take care of the problem or they’ll interrogate him, find out everything he’s ever done, and then they’ll take care of the problem. Either way, they won’t put McDonald’s research out there and we’ll be safe.”
Kim’s hand came out of his and she sat back. “All right. We do this and then we hope they arrest Levi in order to cover their own crimes, and then we all go back to our corners and the mutually assured destruction sets the balance again.”