Going over, she sat down in the spindly chair and took out the SanDisk.
Before she plugged it in, she reached around the back of the laptop and disengaged the modem wire. Then she logged on and disabled Wi-Fi.
“I’ve got to be out of my mind.”
She shoved the flashdrive in and the AutoPlay pop-up appeared in the center of the screen. Out of the options for Removable Disk (E:) she chose “Open folder to view files.”
“What the…hell?”
The file directory was so big, she had to scroll down. Word documents. PDFs. Excel spreadsheets. The titles were alphanumeric codes that were clearly part of an organizational system, but they made no sense to her.
Picking one at random, she double-clicked, and frowned, pivoting into the screen.
The data appeared to be…dossiers of men, with their pictures, names, dates of birth, height, weight, eye and hair color, medical details, training certifications, and assignments—God, the assignments. Arranged by date, and with notes about countries and targets…and exterminations.
“Oh, my God…”
Shifting back to the directory, she opened another file, which seemed to detail sums of money, huge sums of money…and another, coded one about contacts in Washington, D.C., and the “favors” these individuals had asked…and still more about recruitment and training…
You want the story of a lifetime? You got it.
As the daylight dimmed and night came over Caldwell, she sat at her childhood desk and read everything.
Eventually, she returned to the dossiers, and this time, she took it slowly.
In a way, the men were all the same, their faces and ethnicities blending into one archetype of aggression and effectiveness. And if these assignments listed were true, she’d read about the deaths, some of which had been defined to the international public as “natural causes” or “accidents” or “counter-insurgent attacks.” Other targets she thought were still alive…but perhaps that was just a case of the worldwide news machine not yet catching up with reality?
Was it possible this was legit?
Sitting back, she took a drink from her now room-temperature Snapple, and tried on for size the concept that maybe, just maybe, this was real.
Okay, assuming it was, Matthias’s paranoia didn’t seem unjustified…and it would also explain why he’d been on the run the night she’d hit him with her car. Also might explain why the identity he’d had was someone else’s—and the reason that even with his amnesia, he’d had sensed that the house at the address on his driver’s license hadn’t been his own.
And maybe this was what was behind him killing that man down in the basement of the Marriott. If Matthias had been part of this organization—and this level of access seemed to suggest he most certainly was—then it made sense if he were on his way out of it that someone would be sent to kill him.
And he’d have to defend himself…
Going through the dossiers a third time, she noted that each one had a red, green, or orange check by the name—
Jim Heron was among the men. Which somehow wasn’t a surprise.
And he had an orange marking. Which, assuming the traffic-light connection was correct, meant he wasn’t alive, but he wasn’t dead either.
Interesting.
Continuing on through the listings, she gasped. About seven men down, she found a red-marked name with the notation, Caldwell, New York, RECLAIMED and the date of the night before last.
It was the dead guy. From the Marriott.
Who Matthias had shot.
And look…here was another. An orange mark by the name, last contact in Caldwell, New York, twenty-four hours ago.
What did she want to bet that he was a second man sent for Matthias?
Mels took another hit of the Snapple and grimaced at the sickly sweet taste. As her heart started to beat hard, she knew it wasn’t from the caffeine.
What if it had been real, she thought again. All of it…
Going back to the directory, she carefully reviewed the other files again and started to piece together the structure of the organization, including its recruiting strategy and the way its funds flow worked. There was nothing about where its headquarters were, or what kind of administrative support they had, or exactly how its “clients” knew to contact them.
Was this organization affiliated with the government? Was it private sector?
She grabbed a pen and scribbled some notes on a pad.
Given the identities of the targets that had been effectively eliminated, she was struck with a chilling sense that this shadow organization—which had no logo, no title even, on any of the documents—went very high up. Those who had been taken out were largely political figures overseas, suggesting an international agenda far too broad-based to be generated by a private citizen, a common-interest group, or even a large, multi-national corporation.
This was the business of a whole nation.
And with her knowledge of current events over the last three years, it was pretty clear that the exterminations forwarded America’s position across the globe.
Tapping her pen on the desk, she thought of other special ops groups, like the Navy SEALs, for example—or the Rangers. Those men were heroes, legitimate soldiers who functioned within rules of engagement.
This network of killers was completely outside of that.
The final spreadsheet was probably the most chilling one: a list of all the missions over the previous decade—and the dead, including a column for collateral damage.
Not a lot of that. Not much at all. And no women or children—at least, not that were listed.
Considering how this operation worked, she had a feeling the latter was not the result of any moral objection, but rather out of a directive to stay under the radar.
And again, for the men who had been killed…she knew ninety percent of the names, and they were evil…pure evil, the kind who slaughtered their own citizens or headed up brutal regimes or set in motion events of horrific proportions.
She imagined that the few she didn’t recognize were of the same ilk.
This group of exterminators had done good work in a bad way, she supposed: Hard to argue that their efforts weren’t justified, given the résumés of the targets.
It was like her father’s ethos on a global scale…
Mels returned once more to the dossiers.
Matthias was nowhere to be found in the pictures or the names.
But she had a chilling suspicion as to the why.
He was the basis of it all, the driver. Wasn’t he.
When it came to you, and being with you, I always told the truth—that was real, the only real I’ve ever had.