“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 security for?” Samuelson barked. “Send them onto the property at night and kidnap him.”
Brunswick chuckled and pulled up another screen on the computer to show us. “This is the Reed Security property. They have sensors around the entire property, which happens to be several miles in all directions. They were involved in a war with the cartels a few years back and have since barricaded themselves in so they’re ready for any attack. All employees live on the property so they’re ready at a moment’s notice. They have mounted machine guns and drones that continually scan the property and look for threats. They have the firepower of a small country on that property. There is no slipping in and kidnapping him.”
“What about the family?” Senator Allen asked.
My head snapped to face her and I slowly shook my head. “No, we aren’t going after his family. Are you trying to start a war before we even launch? You heard the man, he’s surrounded by security. He’s a former assassin. Do you want him coming after you in your sleep?”
“If we take his family, we expose his weakness. He’ll be so devastated over the loss that he’ll do anything to get them back.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Brunswick said. “If
