Page 116 of Lone Wolf

Evan sat in the darkness of his parked truck with his hands on the steering wheel. Smooth resin against his palms. Press of fabric against his legs, lower back. Cramp high in his shoulders, knitting up the base of his neck.

He tried to breathe his way back into himself, back into a state of the world he recognized enough to operate efficiently in.

DONCHA WISH YER GIRLFRIEND WUZ HAAAWT LIKE ME?!

The ringtone. Still had to change it.

He reached in his cargo pocket, withdrew the phone.

Joey.

He said, “Go.”

“The mission just got a whole bunch easier.”

She texted something over to him with a ping. A video.

“A confession. Well, not a confession. But a smoking gun. No—more than that. Caught on film. Leaked by an anonymous worker. Case closed.”

“Okay.”

“This wraps it up with a bow,” she said. “But I’m gonna keep whacking into Allman’s Solventry files. I’m making good headway. And now it’s personal.”

“Okay.”

He hung up. Played the video.

YouTube, 1,495,993 views.

Nathan Friedhoff in what looked to be an empty conference room, glass walls, a massive Citizen Kane table, and a whiteboard wiped clean. The angle suggested that he was being filmed through the camera of a laptop that had been left on the table.

He was partially turned away, speaking in a hushed voice into what looked like a burner phone: “Yes,” he said. “You’re greenlit for Dr. Hill. Usual fee. Nothing that can trace back to me or this company. Cut with wide margins.” He hung up the phone, cupped his hand over his mouth, tugged down so the edges of his eyes sagged. He looked deeply upset, on the verge of screaming or sobbing or vomiting.

He took two deep breaths, screwed a calmer expression onto his face, and exited the conference room.

Evan refreshed the video.

It had crossed the 1.5 million mark.

He turned the engine over, slotted his pickup into drive, and headed for Friedhoff’s place.

Nathan Friedhoff was in his bathroom, leaning over the Carrara marble of his ex-wife’s vanity, staring at himself in the mirror. It was as though he’d never seen his face before. He regarded his features as if he hadn’t looked at them every day of his life, as if they belonged to someone else.

His eyes had flattened; they looked beady, untrustworthy. When his face contorted in grief, the crow’s-feet forged down into his cheeks and he saw a premonition of what he would have looked like as an old man. What he’d done he’d done for the right reasons. He’d started out with good intentions. At bottom he was an engineer, a maker of things. He’d brought new technologies and capabilities to the world, and maybe some of them could still be used for good, to stop the avalanche he’d helped create.

“You’re a good man,” he told himself in the mirror. “You’re a good man.”

He almost believed himself.

His phone rested on the marble by his hand, teed up to the poster frame of the video of himself ordering Dr. Benjamin Hill’s murder. Already it was storming through the World Wide Web, the children atwitter on Twitter.

He picked the phone up. His portal to his work, his life, the universe.

He dropped it on the matching marble floor. The screen shattered pleasingly.

On numb legs, he walked out of his master suite. Down the hall. His daughters were up—did they ever sleep?—the bluish glow of screens casting a faint light on June’s partially opened door.

He stepped inside.