Page 74 of Midnight Secrets

He just shook his head.Not giving it to you, sorry.

Isabel rounded on Metal. “Joe told me your story, Metal. How you lost your whole family on 9/11, father and brothers. And your mother dying of a broken heart later. Your entire family, wiped out. What would you do if you could find the men who did it? Actually come face-to-face with them? What would you do?”

“I’d rip their hearts out,” Metal answered.

“And I will rip Hector Blake’s heart right out of his chest,” she replied, meaning every single word.

Metal let out an audible breath. He was with her.

“Honey, listen—” Joe began.

“If you go to the press now, if you confront Hector Blake without a plan, you are letting him win,”the metallic voice from the monitor interrupted.

Isabel twirled. “What do you mean?”

“I think that the Massacre was just the opening salvo of a bigger campaign. Hector Blake has enormous resources. If you face him alone, you will lose. And your testimony will be lost, too. And we will lose any advantage we have. Right now Blake has no clue anyone is on to him.”

Strong fingers cupped her chin. Joe turned her head toward him. “He’s right, honey. We need to go after him carefully. We don’t know where he has allies. And if he’s got allies in the CIA, we could end up incarcerated, at a black site or dead.”

Isabel stared him in the eyes. “He cannot be allowed to get away with this.” She looked around. “He cannot be allowed to get away with this,” she repeated.

Her bedrock bottom line.

“No,he cannot be allowed to get away with this,”the metallic voice answered. It was really hard to read emotion into the altered voice, created by software, but somehow an underlying determination came through.

“Do you have any hard evidence to bring him to the authorities’ attention?” she asked the computer. She gestured with her thumb to Nick. “I think we can count on Nick to push this through the FBI. It’s the country’s top law enforcement agency. If you’ve got something, they can run with it.”

“Bet your ass,” Nick growled. “If the Massacre was planned and carried out by Americans, they are going down. I won’t rest, none of us in the Bureau will rest, until justice is done.”

“Blake has covered his tracks well.”

“If you’ve found something, others can, as well.”

“Mainly what I have is a money trail. Which could disappear not overnight, but in the course of two minutes.”

“That’s true,” Felicity said. “I can almost guarantee that there will be another set of anonymous accounts where Blake can drain his money and pour it into them. And he can do it fast. A hint of the fact that someone is on to him, and he’ll be gone and it will take months to find him. As a matter of fact, with the right software and with someone who knows what he’s doing, or someone who can hire someone who knows what they’re doing, he could create a shell game, keep the money moving from account to account so that you might know where the money has been but you never know where the money is going to be. So you’ll never nail him.”

Just the thought of Hector moving his blood money around and getting away with mass murder made her sick. Made her shake with rage, as if every cell in her body were alive with fire. And yet if she knew one thing about Hector, she knew he was smart. If Felicity said that it was possible to keep his money moving, then it was on the move.

“He needs to confess,” she said.

“Riiight.” Jacko’s deep voice chimed in full of sarcasm. “All we have to do is ask him. Nicely. And he’ll spill the beans on everything.”

“Wewon’t ask him,” Isabel said. As she spoke, certainty settled in her bones. She could do this and she was going to do this. “I will.”

“The fuck you will,” Joe said immediately. “You’re staying a continent away from this guy. He killed hundreds of people. He’s not going to stop at killing you. He’s already tried anyway.”

“Joe is right,” Mystery man said. “Stay out of this, Isabel.”

Isabel’s spine shot up straight as if someone had given her a shot of adrenaline. “Excuse me? Because you all have done such a good job of catching him, exposing him. Look at you, you don’t dare use the CIA and you have to call the FBI in surreptitiously. And Nick is here as a simple citizen, not representing the Bureau. You’re all scared to death that you are going to stumble on a mole or that he will be warned. Has anyone thought that he was going to run for the presidency as my father’s political heir? And he could have won, too. We could have had a mass murderer and traitor as our president! Has anyone thought of that?”

“Every day,”the voice said. “Every fucking day.”

“We have to stop him. Right now. Because if he is part of a conspiracy, they are planning something else. Or else he’s going to be happy with his billion dollars and is going to disappear to a Thai island.”

“We’re going to stop him,” Nick said. “Guaranteed.”

She whirled on him. “You are one man. You’re here alone without the force of the Bureau behind you. I know Joe and his friends called you because that guy—” she pointed a shaking finger at Felicity’s laptop, “wanted someone from the FBI and Joe knows you’re one of the good guys, like he is. Like everyone here is. But you are part of a huge security machine that involves congressional oversight. I’ve been around politicians all my life and they talk. They love to talk. Can you guarantee that a juicy bit of news that the man who was supposed to be the next vice president before the Massacre, a possible presidential contender, was behind the Washington Massacre will stay secret? Can you guarantee that?”

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