“You’re telling us this now?” Senator Nicholas Samuelson asked. “You know how much money we’ve put into this project, and now you’re telling us we might have to scrap it?”
“I promise you that the researchers are working as hard as they can-”
“Make them work harder,” Senator Nathan Brunswick cut in. “Our asses are all on the line here. We’ve already put things in motion. We can’t afford any slowdowns. This plan needs to be put in place in two months.”
Helen pursed her lips, but nodded and took her seat.
“Nathan, what do you have for us?”
Senator Brunswick was our inside guy on the committee for the Department of Homeland Security. He was able to get our security for us and ensure that our plans were shared with only the people that we knew were loyal to the cause.
“I’ve been digging into the man that broke into Senator Blakely’s house. As you all know, we believe the initial information that Senator Samuelson brought to him was being kept there in his safe. Senator Blakely had a camera hidden in his study. It wasn’t hooked up to his security system, so no one saw it when the feds tore apart his house after the murder. It’s taken me months, but I’ve finally put a name with the face of the man that broke in and killed the senator that night.”
“Good riddance,” Senator Cheryl Allen muttered. “We’re better off with Blakely not around. He would have destroyed us.”
“We have bigger problems than Blakely at the moment. The man caught on camera was Hudson McGuire, former military who disappeared off the face of the earth after he escaped from his transport to Leavenworth.”
“For those of us that don’t know who that is, please explain,” Senator Alex Cortez asked.
Cortez was a new kid and a pain in the ass, but he was ambitious, had some money, and he was eager to make his stamp on the world. In other words, at the moment, he had no morals.
“McGuire was sent to Leavenworth after he was convicted of killing some of his superiors when they were profiting from deaths overseas. He was a loose cannon that was supposed to be jailed. After he escaped, most people assumed he had gone to a non-extradition country. We kept a watch out for him, but he vanished. However, he popped up on our radar years later when he died, or so we thought. There was a fire in an old hotel building. Two bodies were found inside. One matched a man named Jensen, who had served with McGuire overseas. The other was only identifiable by dental records, which belonged to Hudson McGuire.”
“So, what makes you think this was him?” I asked Senator Brunswick.
He let out a sigh and clicked on something on the laptop. He turned it to face us. “This is Garrick Knight, a known assassin that spent several years doling out his own form of justice and reaping the rewards. He, coincidentally, died about the same time as McGuire. The problem is Garrick Knight and Hudson McGuire have the exact same face. So, when I ran facial recognition and not one, but two dead men popped up in the system, I was more than a little curious. I did some digging and found out that a third man that goes by the name of Hudson Knight is currently working with Reed Security outside of Pittsburgh. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to get him the proper identification and make sure that he wouldn’t be linked to either of his former selves. But they couldn’t completely wipe him from the record. In today’s digital age, nothing ever truly goes away.”
The fact that he said that had us all pausing to consider the implications. Would someone be looking into us one day? No, I had to believe that if we played this right, no one would ever know what we had done. Besides, nothing was really recorded anywhere. We were being very careful not to leave any trace behind of what we were doing.
“How does this affect us?” I asked.
Senator Brunswick heaved out a sigh. “This man has records that implicate Senator Cortez. As of right now, it’s in no way a solid lead toward anything. There are bank records that look fishy, but nothing that would lead directly to us. There were also lab tests,” he said, glancing over at Senator Samuelson.
He had been the one that thought it would be a good idea to bring Senator Blakely in on all this. But the senator wasn’t interested in getting his hands dirty on this one. He just stole the lab results and locked them away. No one had thought of killing Blakely to get that information back. We all assumed he would be a thorn in our side that we would just have to deal with. Now, it appeared we were in deep shit.
“That doesn’t mean he’ll figure anything out,” Senator Allen pointed out.
“You don’t understand,” Brunswick said angrily. “This guy isn’t just some random citizen that we can intimidate. He’s a former assassin. He’ll kill off anyone that he sees as a threat. If he even sees you coming down the street, he’ll gut you like a pig and send you back as a message.”
“So we kill him first,” Senator Cortez said. “We kill him and we chop off the head of the snake.”
“He has proof of what we’re doing,” I reminded him. “Even if we kill him, we don’t know who he’s talked to or showed that paperwork. We need those documents and we need to bring him in to interrogate him.”
“He’s got security all around him. He rarely leaves the Reed Security property, and even when he does, you won’t get the drop on him. He’s way too good.”
“Then what the fuck did we hire
