Alex sighed. “You can sleep on the couch tonight,” she said with a wry grin.
“As long as it’s not a jail cell, I don’t care,” Hawk said with a wink.
“Anyway, as I was about to say earlier,” she continued, “Walsh's phone proved to be quite the treasure trove for us. The fact that it wasn't more heavily encrypted underscores just how arrogant he was. I'm pretty sure he thought he was going to frame Hawk and get away without being caught.”
“What kind of information did you find that backs that up?” Blunt asked.
“There are several text message threads from different numbers, indicating that either Obsidian leadership is exercising extreme caution by changing phones every few days or that there are several people who were directing Walsh. Either way, it raises some serious questions.”
“Were you able to find out where those calls originated from?” Hawk asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I cross-checked them with data gathered from the NSA and found that they were in various parts of the city, except for one number. It was recorded as ‘not available', which means it was from someone inside one of our intelligence agencies as that's how calls in those sectors are classified when recorded.”
“It was one of our own?” Blunt asked.
“Every time we encountered Walsh, he warned us that Obsidian is operated by powerful people and that we don’t have any idea just how powerful they are,” Alex said. “I just ignored these inane statements for the most part until I came across a file of deleted voicemails. They were supposedly removed from the phone, but I know how to retrieve them.”
Blunt narrowed his eyes. “You have the perpetrator’s voice?”
“Sort of,” Alex said. “Listen to this.” She pushed the play button on a recovered message.
“You need to eliminate Brady Hawk,” a man said in a heavily modulated voice. “He needs to be framed for an attempted assassination. I will send you details on how to make that happen.”
The team all stared at one another with raised eyebrows and mouths agape.
“We don’t know who that is?” Black asked.
Alex put her finger in the air. “I was able to reverse engineer the modulation and come up with what the person actually sounds like. Here it is.”
The recording played again, this time without all the extra effects. When it finished, Blunt buried his face in his hands and sighed.
“I never would've guessed that,” he said.
“Walsh was right,” Hawk said. “There are far more powerful people than we ever could’ve imagined pulling the strings behind Obsidian.”
Blunt nodded in agreement. “Yes, but I never would've guessed that General Fortner would've been one of them.”
“But that’s not all,” Alex said. “I found another deleted voicemail and didn’t immediately recognize the voice. So, I put it into the NSA’s system and cross-checked it against their audio database.”
“Anyone we know?” Black asked.
“Tanya Starikov, the Russian billionairess who owns Sermo, the fastest-growing social media platform on the planet,” Alex said.
“How come I’ve never heard of it?” Blunt asked.
Alex chuckled. “The fact that you’ve never heard of a trendy social media company doesn’t surprise me. However, you’ll get a pass on this one since its users are primarily in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But they’re expanding here soon.”
“And she’s working in conjunction with Fortner?” Blunt asked. “That seems rather unlikely.”
Alex shrugged. “He’s probably working for her.”
“Now what?” Black asked.
“You and Hawk are going infiltrate Sermo.”
Blunt’s phone buzzed with a call. He glanced at the screen. “I better take this.”
* * *
BLUNT STOOD AND LUMBERED out of the room before accepting the call.
“Please stay on the line for the President of the United States,” a woman’s voice said.
After a few clicks, Noah Young’s smooth voice came through. “J.D., are you okay?”
“I’ve been better, but I’m alive. What about you?” Blunt said.
“Just trying to fend off this PR nightmare.”
“I wish I could help you, sir, but that’s not exactly my strong suit.”
“You owe me one after that stunt you pulled going around me and Fortner to get Agent Black back home.”
Blunt remained silent.
“What? You didn’t think I was going to find out about that?” Young asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. I couldn’t just leave one of my men out there, and I couldn’t exactly get help from anyone to retrieve him either since we don’t really do what we’re doing.”
“I understand why you did it and I’m glad it worked out for you, but you still usurped my authority. It’s bad enough that I once said that I’d negotiate with terrorists, even though I never did. But if this ever came to light that what I said was more than a statement taken out of context, the press—and any future political candidates I face—will eat me alive.”
“So what do you need, Mr. President? Just name it.”
“I need a win right now, and we just received some intelligence about Al Fatihin and what they're planning,” Young said. “I need you to capture Evana Bahar within the next month.”
“That’s a tall order, sir. You remember how long it took us to catch Karif Fazil?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think you could deliver.”
“But there are other problems we’re dealing with now and—”
“Nothing is bigger than this one,” Young said. “I think you know if I go down, the Phoenix Foundation is going to crumble into ashes and never arise again.”
Blunt sighed. “Okay, we’ll get on it, sir. I’m meeting with the team right now.”
“Thank you, J.D. You’re a great American.”
Blunt hung up and returned to the conference room.
“Was that President Young?” Alex asked.
“It was,” Blunt said. “And he’s got a different assignment for us.”
“There’s nothing more important than stopping Obsidian right now,” Hawk said.
“That’s not how President Young sees it. We owe him—and he wants us to catch Evana Bahar.”
Hawk nodded. “Well, in that case, it’d be my pleasure to accept this assignment.”
“And he wants it done within a month,” Blunt added.
“Well,” Hawk said, “I guess we better quit fretting over Obsidian and start making plans to take out Evana
