The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  Except for the eerie hush. In the old days, when the printing presses were in the basement, manned by typesetters who could read and edit upside down and backward, the whole building had vibrated with their power.

  But even that was before her time. Now the presses were offsite, the building was quiet, and last-minute edits were all done electronically. Just like reporting, which sometimes was as much about sifting through data as it was about cultivating sources.

  At her desk, she unpacked her work bag, including the chrome .22 pistol and the black slab phone that Oliver had given her. She put the pistol away, but woke the black phone and tapped in the fifteen-digit alphanumeric password she’d memorized.

  As soon as the screen opened, she saw a message. VH was on Longview technology review board for five years, ending seven years ago. Passed all background checks for necessary security clearances. Confirmed as a POI. No current phone or address.

  VH would be Vince Holloway, but what the hell was a POI? Oh, person of interest. Government guys and their acronyms. And Oliver didn’t know where he was, either.

  She messaged a reply. Please send background check information. Everything you have. Maybe their docs would provide some clues.

  At least she had confirmation of Holloway’s connection to Longview. It made her feel better about pulling his face out of her memory and pasting it on some guy she’d interviewed more than ten years ago.

  All she had to do now was find the bastard.

  She checked social media on her phone, looking for a reply from his former partners at Sense Logic, but she’d gotten nothing. The beauty of social media was that you could send a message to almost anyone. The downside was that nobody had to answer. She sent another round of polite requests, then opened her laptop, plugged it into the big monitor, and started digging in earnest.

  Although she hadn’t had much luck earlier with her basic web search, June’s work with Public Investigations gave her access to a powerful set of subscription databases that let her research everything from individuals to corporate entities to specific industries to court systems at every level of government. She could even search municipal records, so if you had an unpaid moving violation or an active building permit on your house, that information was at her fingertips.

  In the days before the Internet, these databases had been built by accumulating information by hand in dark, dusty public records rooms all over the country. Now, though, they used advanced data-scraping techniques to pull all kinds of information off the web and into its servers.

  As a private citizen, June had to admit she found it a little creepy. But as an investigative journalist, she relied on these databases for everything from basic background information to following corporate money all over the world.

  She began by typing his name into the main search bar. The software kicked back thirty-one people named Vincent Holloway in the United States, and over five thousand people with related names. Five thousand wasn’t bad, she thought. It’d be a lot worse if he was John Smith.

  She went back to the piece she’d written about his company more than a decade ago. Even then, she’d been in the habit of typing up her notes and taking photos of her notebook. Yes, his name was Vincent Holloway, not Michael Vincent Holloway or Vinson Holloway, so she ignored the related names for now. If she didn’t find him in the first thirty-one, she could always go back.

  Refining the search, she eliminated anyone outside of her guesstimate of his age range. That left her with nineteen people. One by one, she pulled them up.

  The eleventh Vincent Holloway had the same employment history at Caltech and Sense Logic, the startup that made him a wealthy man. This was her guy. Now she dug deeper. Where the hell are you now, Vince?

  His most recent address was in Portola Valley, California, a small and very affluent hillside community just southwest of Palo Alto. Several founders of major tech companies lived there. The San Andreas Fault also ran through the middle of town, which was somehow fitting, June thought, given the violent shocks that the tech revolution had made—and was still making—in the modern world.

  She went to another database and looked up the Portola Valley property address. Turned out it was now owned by a cosmetic surgeon named Todd Schultz, who ran a group of clinics specializing in penis enlargement, apparently a lucrative profession in Silicon Valley. So much for Portola Valley.

  She went to a third database, found Holloway, and pulled up his complete work and financial history.

  Because of the evolution of online records, employment profiles tended to be pretty crisp in the present moment, but get fuzzier the farther back you went. For Holloway, oddly, this was reversed.

  His early years were an open book. Job history going back to what was probably a work-study appointment as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, which was evidently an early adopter of online records. As Holloway got older, his bank and investment accounts multiplied and their balances rose. He got more credit cards with higher limits, and a series of ever-larger home mortgages and car loans. After Sense Logic sold, he bought the eight-million-dollar house in Portola Valley and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle from Bentley Motors. Like a rapper after the first album goes platinum.

  Apparently he was kind of a dickhead driver, too. She found eight DUIs in ten years, along with dozens of speeding tickets and hundreds of parking citations, which she only discovered because Holloway ended up in municipal court due to—dude, really?—a hundred thousand dollars in unpaid fines. Reading between the lines, she assumed some seriously expensive legal firepower to finesse the system and allow him not only to stay out of jail but to keep driving. Another reminder that the wealthy didn’t play by the same rules as everyone else.

  But six years ago, everything stopped.

  The credit cards were canceled, the bank and investment accounts disappeared. No mortgage or car loan. It was like he fell off the modern map.

  She went to her specialty database for tracking money. Moving wealth was easier than ever, because of electronic banking systems. But it was harder to hide those transfers, because of government-mandated anti-money-laundering and anti-tax-avoidance compliance measures. You had to prove your identity repeatedly along the way, especially when moving cash across borders. Although, again, if you had a great deal of money, there were plenty of ways to slide through the gaps in the regulations. Many wealth managers and financial institutions, both large and small, specialized in exactly these kinds of wealth transfers for people who could afford their enormous fees.

  Of course, Holloway didn’t have any overseas accounts that she could find, at least not under his own name. She’d have to look at the records for his old accounts to see where he’d transferred money into, and she wouldn’t get those without a court order.

  Any accounts Holloway controlled would almost certainly be held by offshore trusts that didn’t have to disclose their contents. There would be shell companies, themselves formed expressly for the purpose of owning other shell companies, on and on in an endless hall of financial mirrors. There would also be overseas stock swaps and luxury real estate bought by one captive entity to be sold to another, not to mention a variety of other muddy techniques that were more or less legal and nearly impossible to trace in the busy global economy without both a microscope and direct knowledge of the transactions.

  Usually the point of these maneuvers, at least in the case of the average Russian kleptocrat or Chinese oligarch, was to hide the bulk of your wealth but allow yourself to live in the open and in luxury. Some even tried to buy a little respectability with big charitable donations.

  Holloway, however, had hidden not only his money, but himself.

  Even with a court order to tell her where to start, it could take her years to find him.

  Because of the connection to the Longview Group, June was now certain Holloway was the man at the market, and that he had engineered th
e theft of Longview’s data. Why else would he have disappeared?

  She just needed a handle. A single thread to pull, to start unraveling the weave.

  What about Pinnacle Technologies, that weird little California-registered company that owned the copyright to his Wikipedia photo?

  According to her corporate database, it was no longer active. She went through the filing and dissolution papers and found nothing new. No financials, no corporate officers. Same phone number for Gary, but he wouldn’t answer at this time of night, even two time zones away.

  Still a dead end.

  She checked the black slab phone for a reply from Oliver. No luck.

  She hoped his background docs on Holloway would give her more threads to pull. Given the nature of the Longview Group, the research was probably pretty exhaustive. But most of it would be more than ten years old. And Holloway would have used the information he’d provided as a kind of reverse blueprint for hiding out. Nothing there would be relevant. Not that she wouldn’t follow every thread to make sure.

  Her working hypothesis was that Holloway had turned himself into a de facto corporate entity, made up dozens or even hundreds of shell companies, and registered out of Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands, with the same kind of anonymous agent of record he’d used in California. All that money made it easy.

  When she found him—and she would find him—his home of record would turn out to be a PO box inside the anonymizing office that had registered the company. He’d have corporate credit cards in multiple names, and signing privileges on corporate bank accounts. None of which would have his real name listed anywhere unless June found the actual bank and either got a court order or convinced someone to show her the paperwork. She’d still need to know the name of the company first.

  Unless he got a very good legit driver’s license under a false name, like Peter did. Backed up by a real social security number.

  In which case, he could be anyone, anywhere. And she’d never find him.

  What the hell had happened six years ago?

  Her phone pinged with a message. She’d finally gotten a reply from one of Holloway’s former partners.

  Haven’t talked to Vince in years, he never did have much use for humans. Only idea is a former girlfriend, Holly Gibson. She got married and moved to England seven years ago, but Vince was still talking about her when he dropped off the radar. I think her husband ran a restaurant?

  June got back on the computer. She doubted Holly Gibson in England would know how to reach Holloway after all this time, but it was worth the follow-up, as long as Holly Gibson was still Holly Gibson and her husband still ran a restaurant. But lo and behold, she was, and he did. June sent a message. Sometimes things were easy. Because normal fucking people had lives on the Internet.

  As for the rest of Holloway’s Sense Logic partners, she’d dig up their phone numbers in the morning. Hell, yes. It was time to get off the desk and talk to actual human beings.

  But when she stood up from her chair to stretch, she glanced over the top of her cube wall and saw Dean Zedler walking toward her. With a manila file folder in his hand.

  She was tempted to crawl under her desk, but he’d already seen her.

  33

  By the time June shut her laptop, tucked her notebook into her pocket, and shoved her database printouts into her backpack, Dean was approaching her desk.

  “You’re working late.” He was smiling, but he’d obviously looped around so that he stood between her and the elevator. He wore his cashmere sport coat. She didn’t look at his shoes.

  “I was just leaving.” She pulled on her raincoat. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You’ll want to see this,” he said. “I think I found our market Samaritans. They look a little rough.”

  He pulled a photo from his folder and laid it atop the nearest of the long gray file cabinets that lined the aisles.

  It was grainy, printed on plain paper, but the image was clear. A tall, rawboned white guy with dark shaggy hair, and a brown-skinned menace with a panther stride. Both wore dirty work clothes and watchful faces, searching the streetscape for something only they would recognize. Peter and Lewis walking toward the coffee shop.

  She could feel Dean watching her. She didn’t say anything. She knew what was coming.

  He laid out another photo beside the first. The same two men seated at the sidewalk table. With June.

  She could deny it, of course. She could say she didn’t know them. That they’d asked if she minded sharing the table. She could come up with a whole story. She didn’t even open her mouth.

  Dean laid out a third photo. The three of them talking, faces intent. June closed her eyes. She thought of more lies she could tell, but it would be pointless.

  When she opened her eyes, he’d put down three more photos. One with her hand on Peter’s arm. Another of him leaning over to kiss her. The pained expression on her face as they turned away. Had she really looked like that?

  “These are closeups of the actual footage, of course,” he said. “June, who are these guys? And what’s your relationship to them?”

  His face was kind, open, and friendly. But he wasn’t her friend, not now. At the moment, he was only a reporter.

  “Dean,” she said. “It would really be best if you stepped away from this.”

  He tapped the photo of her face, the image from the moment she had watched them lope across the street after the man with the rifle under his jacket. “You look pretty uncomfortable here, June. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “Dean, leave it alone. I need you to trust me here.”

  “I do trust you,” he said. “And I hope you know that you can trust me. Truly. How long have we known each other? If you’re jammed up, I can help. Just talk to me.”

  That goddamned Weaponized Nice. She almost believed him.

  But what on earth could she tell him? She couldn’t say, This is a much bigger story than you know. That would only egg him on. She definitely couldn’t say, Someone tried to kill me twice today and now I’m trying to find technology stolen from a secret government program.

  Because that would be ridiculous.

  And because Dean would just follow the story, no matter where it led.

  She’d always admired that about him.

  He was watching her face right now, and reading it like a book. He waited for her to say something. It was a reporter’s trick, waiting out the silence. But June just shook her head.

  He tapped the photos with his index finger and tried a new tactic. “June, you know I can publish these tomorrow. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but some kind of comment from you would go a long way to explaining this. Explaining why you didn’t tell the police that you knew these guys. In fact, we should go talk to the bosses right now.”

  She’d always known the end point of his argument. Not for the first time, she looked toward the glassed-in editors’ offices along the west wall and tried to imagine how that conversation might go. What the ramifications would be for her position with Public Investigations, or for Peter. Whatever would happen, it wouldn’t be good. All their chickens coming home to roost.

  “Please, June. Talk to me. I’m trying to help you.”

  Maybe that was true. But she doubted he would bury the photos to protect her. He was chasing the story. Chasing the truth, or as close to it as he could get. Along with his own ambition.

  June couldn’t blame him.

  Wouldn’t she have done the same thing?

  She wanted the story as much as the next reporter, maybe more.

  But would she have done it like this, by leveraging a friend?

  She hoped not.

  She thought about calling Oliver, but knew it would get her nowhere. He had been very clear that she and Peter were on their own. She could tell the paper’s editors everything she knew,
but she couldn’t corroborate any of it. Or she could take the hit and say nothing.

  Either way, Dean would dig until he found Peter. Who would almost certainly end up behind bars.

  And that would kill him.

  Thankfully, she didn’t have to decide.

  Forty feet away, the elevator dinged, the chrome doors slid open, and Mr. Cheerful stepped into the newsroom.

  He wore a fresh white dress shirt, untucked over jeans. His face was lit with a smile.

  In his right hand, he carried the double-bladed axe.

  And he was staring right at her.

  34

  EDGAR

  Edgar stood in the elevator, going up. He liked the pressure under the soles of his feet. Edgar didn’t believe in heaven, but maybe this was what it was like to get there.

  Man, he felt good. Ready to go. His cheeks ached with the size of his grin.

  The nice man in the lobby had given him good directions to the newsroom. All Edgar had to do was smash the lock on the side door and jump over his desk and knock him off his stool and cut off his hand with the axe. After that, the nice man told Edgar everything he needed to know.

  It was a real shame he’d crashed his van into that tree. He’d liked that van. But when he saw that the two workmen wouldn’t use their guns unless he ran straight at them, he knew he’d get away. They’d never believe Edgar would run full-speed through that tall thorny hedge. It wasn’t hard, it just took commitment. And a cool pair of sunglasses to protect his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  While they wasted their time looking stupid places, Edgar had hopped the fence into the next backyard and out of sight.

  Then he’d worked his way up the block toward the reporter, one fence at a time. He still had a job to do. Edgar loved his job. He was lucky to be an American. Not many people got paid to do something they loved.