Page 78 of Mr. Match

Dammit. I really didn’t think he’d catch on to that. “Yes,” I say.

“Dating site data?” He scoffs.

“Credit cards,” I say. “Emails, addresses, phone numbers. You’d be surprised at how much personal information people share on a dating site.”

“Yeah,” Pax says. “I get it. It’s not totally worthless. But the threat to you is way too low, Mr. Match.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Hitmen? Really? I mean, surely you understand you probably have an alibi for every single hit—if, in fact, there ever were hits. They can’t possibly have covered all their bases. Your explanation…” he says, trailing off to think about his word choice. “While it doesn’t completely ring false, it doesn’t completely ring true, either. So why don’t we go into that little room of yours and you can show me the other half of the truth you’re hiding.”

I let out a long breath and take a few moments to think. “Look, Pax—”

“No,” he interrupts. “You look. I’m on your fucking side, asshole. I’ve had your back for ten years.”

“Eleven,” I say. “Did you even notice that another anniversary went by?”

He pauses and I know he didn’t.

“Neither did I,” I say. “Until today.”

“Go on,” he says.

I get up and motion for him to follow me with a nod of my head. “You wanna see? OK. There’s really no point in hiding it anymore. We’re already in the middle of it, Pax.”

“Middle of what?” he asks, following me over to the door on the other side of the room.

“The shit hit the fan some time ago, brother. It’s all over us and we never even smelled it.”

I open the door and we go through the ritual of entering the SCIF down on the third floor. When we’re inside, there’s just that one laptop sitting on the stainless steel table. I sit down on the stool, flip it open, and then log in.

The black command prompt box opens and I type in the code to bring up what I didn’t show the other guys yesterday.

“What am I looking at?” Pax asks, data scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

“Code.”

“Obviously, asshole.”

“Just give me a second,” I say, my fingers flying on the keypad. A beep comes from a cabinet just to my left. Pax reaches over and tries to open the door, but it’s locked.

“That’s just the secure server coming online. It’s nothing.” I type for another three or four minutes, then press Y, to initiate the final command, and a website pops up.

“What’s this?” Pax asks, leaning in to get a better look at it.

“That,” I say, turning the laptop so he can see the screen better, “is the real Hook-Me-Up website.”

“You’re using Tor?” he asks. “An onion domain.” He looks at me. “You have another deep web marketplace? This is more than hitmen, isn’t it? That’s what you’re hiding?”

I sigh and shrug at the same time.

He points to the screen. That’s an advertisement for—”

“Counterfeit money. Yup.”

“So it’s real, then? You sell all this shit?” He points to another forum. They are all stacked neatly up into rows on the page. “All this illegal shit? Prostitutes, and drugs, and—”

“Not me,” I say, disgusted. “I’m not selling any of this shit.”

“Wait,” Pax says. “This is where Cindy gets her ‘clients?’” He makes air quotes again.

“Yeah, about that. Look, she’s talented, OK? She’s sneaky and smart and she figured us out pretty early. She got in, we couldn’t realistically keep her out because we cannot—let me stress this hard—we cannot fuck with this code. I’m not lying about that part.”