The In Death Collection Books 16-20 - J. D. Robb [430]
“So it was all just a con—on HSO and the global agencies, on Doomsday. You created the intel that supported the myth that the worm was real, that it was a threat. Then you planted your man with the project head of the company who nabs the Code Red. Feed the HSO data, sell same to interested parties. You’re raking it in on both ends, and all over something that doesn’t yet exist, and may never exist. But Securecomp’s working on it, and they might just create the worm for you. Yeah, you’re smart.”
“They were getting close. Roarke’s got some brain trust at Securecomp. I get what they’ve got together with what I’ve got, what I’m pulling from Doomsday, maybe I can put it together and get myself a nice bonus. You know what you make annually as an AD? You make shit. Just like a cop.”
“And being as we’re so underpaid, you didn’t figure the cops would dig too deep into the Bissel/Kade murders.”
“Served it up so neat and pretty. But things went wrong.”
“You could stall, though, pressure to have the locals turn over the investigation. And you had your goat with Bissel. He tries to sell the disc, and it’s worthless.”
“Figured the buyer would execute him, bury the body, once they figured out the worm wasn’t what he claimed. That would take some time, put some distance between him and me. He wiggled out of that, though. He talks a pretty good game.”
“But he can’t access his money without sending up a flag, to you. And even if he got desperate enough to try, we started finding and freezing his accounts. So he stages McCoy’s suicide. What did she have that he wanted?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where she fits. He should’ve slipped off, counted his losses, but the stupid son of a bitch panics, kills her, kills that stupid orderly, steals the body. What’s he think the cops’re going to do? Might as well have taken out a fricking ad on an airblimp.”
“How long have you two been doing the corporate espionage on the side?”
“What the hell does it matter?”
He was pouting now, she thought. Wimp was pouting because his big plans had blown up in his face and killed him.
“The more you give me, the deeper I can bury him.”
“Six, seven years. I’ve got a nice retirement fund, got a place on Maui, and another I’ve got my eye on in Tuscany. I’d’ve been set, living large, before I was forty. Had to start covering my tracks.”
“Eliminate your partners,” Eve agreed. “Better, smarter, have them eliminate each other. And move to a one-man, more profitable organization. All those listening posts planted in Bissel’s sculptures all over the world—and off—all yours alone now. You can gather your intel, invest, anticipate. Yeah, you’d’ve been sipping mai tais, and still raking it in. I gotta say, Sparrow, it’s brilliant.”
His damp eyes shone for a moment in pleasure. “It’s what I do. Crunch data, think up scenarios, blueprint dirty tricks to compromise or dispose of targets. You have to know how and when to use people.”
“And you knew how to use Bissel. Both of them. And Kade. And Ewing.”
“Wasn’t supposed to be so complicated. Bissel hits Kade, goes under. Was supposed to go under for a few weeks, then make the sale. But he went right after it. Didn’t give it time to settle, for me to see if it worked and cooled off.”
“Cooled off so you could make certain you didn’t need him, so he could be eliminated.”
“You don’t throw away tools until you’re sure they’ve outlived their usefulness. Terminations are part of the game. You know that. Death’s necessary. I’ve never killed anybody, and I wouldn’t have had to do him. Leak some intel, point the right person in the right direction. He’d be taken out. I’m not a murderer, Dallas. I just engaged a tool. Blair Bissel did the killing. Every one of them. I was at the Flatiron, corrupting his data units, when he did the hit on his brother and Kade.”
“Why go there?”
“I needed to upload any data he might’ve kept on the operation there, and to crash his units so he couldn’t use them. Just covering tracks. I wasn