Chapter 17
Jack
After making her cum more times than I can count, I smile at my wife, so determined to save me. At her insistence, we’ve put all Patten’s facial-recognition servers to work trying to find her ghost. Even with all that CPU power, we may come up short. Without more intel, we may never find this Philip. My real hope is Grayson, once he lands in New York, will call in a favor with the NYPD. They can legally search passports and driver’s licenses. I’d rather go that route than find someone to hack into their databases.
Sitting in the safehouse kitchen, Blake stares morosely at her laptop. “I was so sure Philip said he worked for Jackson Pharmaceuticals. I can’t believe they have no record of him. He must’ve lied about them, but why?”
When I massage her stiff shoulders, she leans her head back and closes her eyes. “Mmm. That feels so good… But what if its Jackson who’s lying and Philip who actually told the truth? If I were a giant pharmaceutical company, I’d do just about anything to keep a secret and save billions.”
“Where’re you goin’ with this?” I stop massaging when she turns to capture my gaze.
“Maybe Philip told half-truths. He probablywastasked with investigating the deaths of those kids anddidfind incriminating evidence. However, we know hedidn’ttell the Feds.Why? If you were him, what would you do?”
I shake my head, remembering what it was like to be penniless and a bit of a thief. “First, I’d go to my employer and try to shake him down. However, not until I had a whole lot of evidence to blackmail him with.”
“Oh my God. That’s it! I totally forgot. When I asked Philip why the kidnappers didn’t just kill him outright, he said he gave evidence to a friend at The Post… or was it The Times? Shit. I can’t quite recall but wherever it was, Zheng’s gang must’ve believed him.”
I lift her out of her chair and kiss those sweet, adorable lips. “You may have just saved my ass. Give me a second.”
I type some constraints into the computer and suddenly the facial-reco software starts spitting out images.
She jumps up and points at the photo of a small man standing in front of the Empire State Building, then going into another one nearby. “What’s this building, here?”
I grin. “The New York Times. We’re going home.”
We get tickets online and I call Grayson from the air. “We found Blakely’s Philip but his real name is Lance, Lance Barlow. Blakely’s certain he’s friends with a journalist working for The New York Times.”
Patten sounds relieved. “That’s great news. At least we know the man exists.”
Blakely pipes up, mouth full of pretzels. “You had doubts?”
He chuckles. “What I meant to say is now, we have something to show the FBI. But what makes you think you can find his journalist friend. The Times is a huge organization.”
I field this question for her. “We had Slate do some cross referencing. There’s a blogger working there who went to college with Lance. It has to be him. He’s agreed to talk with us.”
“If they’re friends, why would he agree?” Grayson has an excellent point but I already thought it through.
“When this story breaks, we’ve promised him exclusive rights to an amazing story. He was thrilled. Listen. We’re landing. I’ll call you when we get there.”
The rest of the flight is blessedly uneventful. Having no luggage to claim, we call an Uber and go straight to Forty-First Street. Holiday traffic is in full swing and it takes us over an hour to get from downtown to midtown.
Finally, Blake pays the taxi driver and says, “We can walk from here.”
She grabs my hand and rushes up the street, ignoring gloriously decorated windows, festive tourists, and skyscrapers. Her mind is set on one thing, finding Lance. She pushes twenty-two in the elevator and smiles up at me a little nervously, her cheeks red from the run in the cool air. “We’re almost there.”
“Uh huh. We got this, luv.”
A millennial with spikey hair and a Comic Con t-shirt meets us at the elevator. “Hi, I’m Mike Kane.”
“I’m Blake and this is Jack.” After we all shake hands, Mike takes us into a conference room namedAssociated Pressand pulls out a flash drive. After setting his laptop onto a glass table, he plugs it in and scrolls through his file explorer.
“This is all Lance sent me.” He turns the screen, clicks on a file in the drive, and a popup waits for a username and password.
The young man points to the waiting window. “Lance said if he died, I’d receive the credentials needed to access these files. Until then, this is all I got.”
Blake’s eyes go wide. “That’s pretty cloak and dagger stuff.”
He shrugs, wrinkles his nose, and the ring in his right nostril dances. “You’d be surprised how often shit like that happens.”
