“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.”
He understood her frustration, but this wasn’t an easy situation. This wasn’t something they could simply shine a light on and the problem would burn away in the sun. Unfortunately this problem would burn a lot of people they cared about if it was put in the light.
It would lurk in the background. It would be something they would all have to live with the rest of their lives. He missed the comfort of her hand in his.
“All right. I’d like to take a look at the data.” Kim seemed to pull herself together and Solo was back in the house. He’d come to think of her as essentially two people—his Kim and the Agency’s Solo.
She’d had to compartmentalize to do her job, to survive in the harsh world they’d lived in for so long. Even here at McKay-Taggart there were hard calls to make.
Had she found a softness in Malta that she missed? This was the first time since he’d seen her again that Solo had come out. How hard was it to bring back her cast-iron persona?
“I can walk you through it all,” Jax promised. “It really is good news, Solo. If Levi’s out of power, there’s not much he can do to you. Given the fact that we can prove he manipulated this data, I can’t imagine a scenario where he keeps his job. Not only did he threaten to point a finger at some people who did support McDonald, he implicated people who didn’t. And he hid the actions of people who could help
