Page 5 of Magnum, Volume 2

“How the hell do you have so many cars available to you?” I asked partway through the process of getting back.

“It’s why we cost several grand a day,” Ember said. “It isn’t just us, there’s a team of people you don’t see.”

“But you said this was a favor. No charge. Do I need to pay? I will. I don’t want to take advantage.”

“You risked your life for this,” Sloan said. “And yeah, it’s your job and you’ll make money from it eventually, but this is bigger than most independent journalists can handle. We had to go to Aaron Drake, giving him broad brushstrokes without specifics to give him plausible deniability, but we have some company resources, within reason, we can use. If we need to go above his limits, we’ll discuss it, but for now, we’re good.”

“Watching you edit video, plan the broadcast, and then quickly figure out the best spot for lighting, dealing with the sound…” Ember shrugged. “Your job is way more complicated than it seems, and that’s just the part where you share what you’ve found out. Most of your job is running down the stories, chasing the bad guys, and not backing off when they want you dead. You’re as much of a badass as anyone in the security world. I really hope you and Magnum work out, not just because I can see how much ya’ll care for each other, but I want you close, so we can be the kind of friends who go shopping together, get drunk together.”

“I’d like that, too, but I have to be careful not to bring attention to the bikers. It’s possible I’ll never be able to go around them publicly, ever again.”

Because two guards were dead and another in critical condition. Seventeen men had infiltrated a large property with thirty armed staff, thirty-five victims, and eighty guests. They’d disabled over one hundred people and only killed two in the process. Seemed like pretty good odds to me, but some in both law enforcement and the media were all over the vigilante murder thing. Most people were so horrified by what’d been happening, they were saying whoever had rescued the fighters deserved medals and not jail time, but it wasn’t clear just yet which opinion was going to win out in the legal system.

In my broadcast that morning, I’d pointed out that calling in law enforcement to handle this ahead of time meant the possibility the bad guys killed all the victims and wiped all traces of them ever being there, and it was too big of a risk to take. So, the decision had been made by others, not me, though I agreed with the decision, to call in experts who could rescue the victims before we went public.

And I stated that there were more people than me looking for the victims, some of whom had the funds to hire the kind of people who could actually pull this off.

We needed people to believe a professional team had done this, not a bunch of bikers.

Because in three months, if I started being seen with a biker, no one could think the men of the RTMC had been part of it.

Chapter 3

Storm

My attorney called the FBI first thing the following morning to negotiate me coming in to talk to them. Hours later, I donned a business suit and walked into a federal building shared by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, with my attorney at my side, and I answered questions for five straight hours before my attorney told them we were done for the day — and they believed him. I hadn’t known he could do that and really wished he’d done it hours earlier.

The agents were pissed because I was holding the hard drives hostage. I wanted immunity from any charges in exchange for turning them over, and they were threatening obstruction of justice charges for withholding them. My attorney had known they would, and he’d said it was my best bargaining chip, and to hold firm. So I did.

Once we were away from the building, I asked him why he hadn’t stopped the nightmare hours sooner, and he told me, “You have to keep answering their questions until they’re assured the answers won’t change. I waited until I thought there was a good chance enough time had passed that they’ll be ready to offer immunity when they all sit down to talk. We’ll see if I’m right when we arrive tomorrow.”

I stayed in a nearby hotel that night, with Ember in the room and Sloan nearby keeping watch, and I barely managed to catnap. We were in Virginia, so it was legal for me to have my gun, and it was basically my comfort object — like a stainless-steel teddy bear, but wearing a holster instead of a fancy vest.

The next day, they had immunity paperwork signed when we arrived, but my attorney wasn’t happy with the wording. An hour later, the wording was to his liking, and I handed them a key and gave them the address where they could find the drives. No one left, but they handed the key to someone outside the door, so I figured people outside the claustrophobic little room would handle retrieval.

I’d brought snacks with me on this day. If I was going to have to answer the same questions over and over, I wanted something to do with my hands. I had grapes, bananas, blueberries, potato chips, butterscotch hard candies, and five bottles of unsweetened tea. Oh, and some little snack cake things, the log rolls you can unroll before you eat. More stuff to do with my hands, and a reason for more bathroom breaks, where I did little grounding meditations to calm myself. I also talked to Magnum in my head on those trips, imagining what he’d tell me if he was there. Asshole’s gonna asshole, but you’re doing fine. Don’t forget to breathe. You’re smarter than them, and you’ve got this.

The agents alternated back and forth between nice guy and smart-assed motherfucking bastard, and I turned it into a form of people-watching in my head, rather than taking it personally. As my attorney had explained, it was their job to ask these questions in exactly this way, and the calmer I could remain while answering every question without getting flustered or contradicting myself, the better. So I answered slowly and carefully, even when they tried to rush me. I was polite even when they weren’t.

And I stuck to the damned script.

That night, I called my dad. I couldn’t tell him everything, but I gave him the highlights — though I couldn’t tell him about the bikers’ involvement, of course. Still, it was good to talk to both him and my mom. They’d been worried when I’d dropped off the face of the earth, but the phone call had given them something to hold onto.

They’d been so relieved when I’d gone on the air a few days before, and were even happier to hear from me now. “You’re still in danger,” my dad told me, “but you’ve managed to stay alive this long, so keep being smart.”

“You taught me to be smart,” I told him, my eyes watery. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

The following day, I was interviewed by a number of news shows and wished it’d worked out for Nickie to partner with me at this stage, but Bud had nixed any discussion of that because it would tie me to the RTMC.

I was just as careful on the news shows as I’d been with the FBI, and that meant a whole lot of having to tell them I would protect the people who rescued these victims with my dying breath, if it came to it.

The governor didn’t bother stepping down. She and her husband went missing. Not even her security detail knew where she was, which I didn’t believe even for a second. I started researching flights, but it turns out others were doing the same thing. Someone followed them to the Fiji Islands, but no one could find them past that. I could see that they moved money around in their two havens, but they took a great deal of cash out while they were at it, which means they could be anywhere on the planet. Someday, maybe I or someone else will discover property they bought under another name, or a plastic surgeon will admit he changed their faces, but for now, those two are probably in some tropical paradise in their worst-case-scenario back-up plan.

I tried to figure out how to use the blackmail video to pull them out, but other than playing a few seconds of it, zoomed in on him so the woman didn’t show (and so YouTube didn’t yank my account), and then telling him to contact me unless he wanted me to release the whole thing on a porn site, nothing came to mind. I didn’t go that route though, because if we ever found them, I’d want to have it in my secret toolbox.

Magnum, Gears, and Skippy worked together to lock down their funds, and managed to deprive them of about a hundred and twenty million dollars. It’s possible we fucked up their plans, but it’s also possible they had just as much somewhere else we couldn’t find. A handful of charities were a lot better off, though. Actual charities I’d personally vetted, not the kind where the founders get rich.

Life isn’t fair, but you do what you can to make it so. Those two were out of reach, but they weren’t the only two with blood on their hands.