“I’d lie low for a day or two. What are your plans?” Wesley asks.
Todd’s answering grin is huge. “With this kind of money? I’m retiring at 32, buying a beach house and filling it with girls and booze.”
“Classy,” I snort.
“I am who I am,” he shrugs. “All right. Well, I’m out. Good luck cleaning… uh… all this up.”
As Todd strides from the room, hands shoved in his pockets, humming something happy, we all turn to the last remaining issue. Fred. “What do we do with him?”
Six people regard the tied up, passed out man with varying degrees of anger.
“You will need his fingerprint,da?” Dimitri asks, palming his knife.
“You’re gonna… cut it off? So we can carry it around? No. Ew.” I shake my head. “No, there’s a password. The fingerprint is just a secondary authentication option. We’ll be able to do it as long as we have his phone. We can clone the app and use his credentials and change them to guarantee ourselves access.”
“I know you guys can stop the hits, but is there a way to… I don’t know, add him to the list?” Nicole suggests.
I grin, liking this neat bow she’s come up with. “Hell yeah. Kind of a fitting end to be a victim of the machine he helped create and sell. But how do we keep the other signing keys from blocking his name?” I wonder.
“I have a suggestion,” comes a deep, familiar voice behind me.
I whirl, and Felix is in the doorway. His stance is protective, and the look on his face is a little wild and urgent.
“Felix? How did you know we were here—” Mac begins.
“Your big ugly van is parked outside, and this was the only room with lights on,” he replies, like it’s obvious.
“What are you doing here?” Dimitri growls.
Felix glances at him, then directs his next statement at me. “So… things… escalated. You’re all gonna want to get the hell out of here.”
“What? Why?”
Felix’s grin is positively feral. “Boom,” he says, doing the appropriate hand motion to demonstrate.
“What? Why?” Wesley repeats, much more alarmed than when I just said it.
“Uh… ‘cause I want to?”
“I told you, they have government contracts! The military police will—”
Felix cuts in with a noise of exasperation. “You can stay here and yell all you want, but I’m getting the fuck out, and I’m here to make sure she gets out,” he nods at me. “The building next door is gonna blow, and you really don’t want to be in here when that happens.”
With that, he disappears, and we all turn again to look at Fred.
“We could just… leave him here,” Mac suggests.
We’re halfway home, most of us piled in the van, when the car shakes. I spin in my seat to look out the back window and find a pillar of smoke in the night sky that glows an eerie shade of red as it reflects the fire from the explosion.
“That was it?” Mac pouts.
“If you are close enough to be impressed by an explosion, it will be the last emotion you ever feel,” Dimitri returns sagely.
“Google doc?” I suggest to Wesley, who grins and nods.
46
Wesley
