30

By morning, Callie had her deal.

Bourne expected Shadow to resist, but instead she shrugged off the need to let Callie go, telling him that was how the Washington world worked. You made compromises. You gave your enemies what they wanted in order to get what you wanted. In this case, what Shadow wanted more than anything else was the Files.

Callie and Shadow sat across from each other at a table in Shadow’s Beverly Hills hotel suite. The two women shared breakfast and mimosas as if they were friends ­now—​­friends who would put a knife in the other’s back if given half a chance. Bourne stood by the window, eyeing the Wilshire Boulevard traffic below him. He wanted to rip the champagne glass out of Callie Faith’s hand and get her to talk. Now. Every day, every hour, put Tati at greater risk. The clock was ticking, and he knew Cody wouldn’t hesitate to send another graphic example of what he would do to her if much more time passed.

“How did it all start?” Shadow asked finally, sitting back in her chair. “Give us the details.”

Callie used a fork and knife to cut a miniature raspberry tart in half. She looked on top of the world again, now that she had immunity and her seat in Congress was safe. “Vix came to me. Not in person, of course. I didn’t know who she was at that point. She made contact with me anonymously.”

“Why you?” Bourne asked from the window.

“I was only one member of the intelligence committee, but I’d gotten a lot of attention online and in the press.”

“Yes, you’re very good at that,” Shadow commented.

Callie shrugged, ignoring the jab. “I’d made it very clear ever since I was elected how I felt about corruption in the U.S. intelligence services. I wanted to give them a buzz cut. Start over from the ground up. I’d also gone public with my belief that Chinese social media platforms were nothing but fucking spyware designed to brainwash our kids and gather personal data that could be used against us. My hearings focused on TikTok and Jumpp, among other apps that had foreign ownership. Of course, at that point, I had no proof of what was in the code, and they all denied it.”

“So what happened?” Shadow asked. “How did Vix make contact?”

“I found a message one morning on the front seat of my car. Someone wanted to meet me at a DC parking garage. It was very clandestine, very All the President’s Men. I suppose it was stupid to go alone, but I went anyway. I parked where the note told me to park, and a woman met me. I never saw her; she never got in the car. But I had the window down, and we had a conversation. She told me I was right.”

“Right about what?”

“Right about everything. The spyware. The hacking. When I asked how she knew about this, she said that she’d worked inside two of the companies that were involved. One was Jumpp. The other was this word puzzle game, DicTrace. She said she’d spotted anomalies in the code that opened up huge vulnerabilities for users. But it wasn’t just about stealing data. She said the scheme was much worse than I thought. That was when she told me about the AI engine the Chinese had built, how it could take reams of unrelated raw information and extrapolate personal secrets. It was scary as hell. She’d actually used it. She’d seen what it could do.”

“Why did she go to you and not the FBI?” Shadow asked.

“Blame yourself for that,” Callie replied. “She hated the intelligence agencies. FBI, CIA, all of you. That was another reason she turned to ­me—​­because I felt the same way about you corrupt assholes. She said she’d run her boyfriend through the Files and found out that he was working on behalf of a spy organization called Treadstone. She said people close to her had died as a result.”

“Did you know she was talking about Garrett Parker?” Bourne asked.

“No. She didn’t give me any names. That would have exposed her identity. But she said she wanted my ­help—​­not just to take down the Chinese operation but to take down Treadstone, too.”

“And you were happy to oblige.”

“I was.”

“What did you do then?”

“I asked her for proof,” Callie said. “It was a good story, and it confirmed most of what I already suspected. But I told her if she wanted my help, she needed to show me what the Files could do. She was already prepared for that question. She had information that she thought would interest me.”

“Wilson Scott,” Bourne concluded.

“Exactly. She had incriminating information about ­him—​­that he’d hired a hit man to kill his terminally ill wife. That he’d found this contact via a porn website involving Russian escorts. This was explosive. I asked how the hell she knew any of this, and she ­said—​­that’s the Files. That’s what the AI engine can do. If something’s hidden, the software can find it. If you’re hiding a secret, that sneaky little robot can parse a trillion bits of data and figure out what it is. Needless to say, I was impressed.”

“And you used the information against Scott,” Shadow said.

“Sure. You would have done the same. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t. If Wilson Scott resigned, I could make the dominoes fall in a way that put me in control of the intelligence committee. From there, it would give me the chance to take on my enemies. The country’s enemies. So yeah, I destroyed him. I don’t apologize for that. If you’ve got a weakness, someone will find it and exploit it. That’s how the game is played. Scott should have known better.”

“And Vix kept feeding you more dirt?” Bourne asked. “Al-­Najjar? The general on the Joint Chiefs? A Space Coast CEO in Florida? And about a dozen others? Was that all you and her working together?”

Callie shrugged. “Al-­Najjar, yes. I wanted to be sure Vix hadn’t found out about Scott some other way. That the Files were really as powerful as she said. So she gave me al-­Najjar, and I was satisfied. But I had nothing to do with the rest. They all came after.”

“After what?”

She hesitated. “After Vix was killed.”

“Who killed her?”

“I have no idea. Someone killed her and took the Files. That’s when the rest of the extortion started, not just in Washington, but around the country. Except now the heat is on, and whoever has them is trying to sell.”

Bourne approached the table and stood over Callie. “What happened to Vix?”

“She approached me a little over six months ago. She finally introduced herself and told me who she ­was—​­that her father was Mr. Yuan, that he’d built the AI engine and masterminded the entire hacking operation. After the Chinese betrayed him, she’d spent the past year undermining their plan from behind the scenes. Except now she was sure the Chinese were closing in on her. She’d already sent her sister in Shanghai into hiding. She wanted my help in getting free. Money. New identity. In return, she’d give me a laptop that included the AI engine. I’d have the Files for myself.”

“You took the deal,” Shadow said.

“Of course.”

“But you didn’t have the money.”

“No. I didn’t. Twenty million dollars? I couldn’t bury something like that without someone like you sniffing it out. But I figured she was desperate. The Chinese were hot on her trail. I cobbled together a couple hundred thousand dollars. Cash. Plus, I used a contact in the ­FBI—​­one of my ­whistleblowers—​­to arrange for a passport and other documents. Once I met with her, I was going to tell her it was the best I could do. If I could get more later, I would. But I was sure she’d take the money and run.”

“Because she didn’t really have a choice,” Shadow concluded.

“That’s right.”

“How did it go down?” Bourne asked.

Callie drummed her sharp fingernails on the table. She glanced at Shadow. “The deal covers everything I say? Right? Plus any ­actions or omissions related to other crimes? I don’t want you coming back at me with obstruction of justice charges.”

“What did you do, Callie?” Shadow asked coldly.

The congresswoman poured herself another mimosa from the pitcher. She sipped it, put it down, and picked it up again. “Vix was planning to leave the country. She’d booked herself passage on a freighter through the Port of Long Beach. She didn’t tell me where she was going, and I didn’t ask. Probably somewhere in South America. We were going to meet, exchange money and documents, and I’d walk away with the laptop.”

Bourne waited. He felt a strange sense of horror growing in his chest.

“And?” he asked.

“I rented her an Airbnb in the hills where she could hide for a few days,” Callie said. “Fake name, fake everything. I set her up there under the name Debbie Robertson. Pretty generic ID, thousands of people with the same name. It was a ­wild-​­goose chase if anyone went looking for who’d really been staying there. Nobody could ever trace the reservation back to her or me.”

The horror in Jason’s gut spread. Why? Why did he know that name?

Debbie Robertson.

Shadow got to the truth first. She remembered the name, and her voice sank low. “The La Sienta fire.”

Callie’s face darkened. “Yeah. The house I rented for her was in the La Sienta Ranch development outside Malibu. I flew into town to meet Vix, and I was on my way to the rendezvous when I saw the smoke. I turned on the radio, and it was all over the news. A massive fire. It kept spreading, and they couldn’t stop it. It engulfed the whole town. My God, more than a hundred people died! I knew it wasn’t an accident. Someone got to Vix first. They killed her, they took the laptop, and they started the fire to cover it all up.”

“But you said nothing,” Shadow murmured.

“What was I going to say?” Callie retorted. “You think I was going to admit any of this? I was paying off a source and helping her leave the country, all to grab a laptop that I was planning to use against my enemies. Instead, a town was destroyed, and dozens of people died. It would have been the end of my career.”

“But now you’ve cut a deal and saved your neck,” Bourne hissed.

“That’s how the world works.”

“Are you sure Vix died?” he asked. “Maybe she started the fire herself to fake her death. Maybe she knew you were going to ­double-​­cross her about the money, and she walked away with the laptop.”

Callie shook her head. “There was a body found in the house where the fire started. They weren’t able to identify it, but the corpse was female. It had to be her.”

Jason backed away.

The hazy wave of horror he’d been feeling came into focus and became a monster. A fire demon. He went to the window and tried to find breath in his chest, but he could barely inhale. It was as if the smoke of the fire were choking him, poisoning his lungs.

He knew.

He knew what it meant. Vix. The Files. The La Sienta Ranch fire.

There were no coincidences. There was only a ­cold-​­blooded scheme to make sure the truth never came out. The trouble was, one woman had stumbled into the middle of it by writing a book that was going to get her killed.

Abbey.