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“It’s the bowels that release.”
She paused midchew to stare at him with disgust. Dog the dog threatened another return, so she flung a second Cheeto over her shoulder. “You are the CEO of TMI.”
“Three Mile Island?”
“You areliterallyhopeless. As in: without hope.” She reached behind her and let the sandwich fall to the floor. It hit out of sight with a wet thud. Evan heard the scrabble of excited canine paws. Joey wiped her hands on a napkin and then dabbed delicately at the corners of her mouth, presumably for his benefit. “Now,” she said. “I called you last night and you didn’t answer. And youneverdon’t answer that phone. Where the hell were you?”
He told her.
It took some time.
When he was done, she said, “WUT?!” flattening the vowel into textspeak. “I know you’re not joking, ’cuz you have no sense of humor. Really—you’re like a charisma vacuum. So that must’ve messed you up bad, like, mentally.”
“What did you find on Luke Devine?”
“Skillful redirect, X. But seriously. You messed up from all that?”
“Language,” Evan said, I’m fine.”
“Don’t forget you have a negative EQ,” Joey said. “Which means you don’t know how you are.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” he said. “Luke Devine.”
“Well, I don’t have all my hardware with me, but with my spec’d-to-hell EuroCom Sky X9C, I can do pretty much anything. And this guy? He’s like a wet dream for conspiracy theorists. All kinds of crazy global business dealings and legal teams and, like, VIPs in his orbit.” She leaned in to stage-whisper, “That stands for ‘Very Important People.’”
It had been at least fifteen seconds since her last insult. Her consistency was reassuring.
“So I get why President Prissypants is all panty-knotted over him. He’s, like, a ruling member of the Urinati. I’m sending you a bunch of other intel I gathered for Your Holy Thanklessness while I was inelegantly nourishing myself.”
All around Evan the OLED screens flurried into action, folder after folder depositing themselves on his server. Having long given up on trying to keep her out of his system, he’d resigned himself to letting her joystick it remotely from time to time. He stared at the proliferation of spreadsheets, documents, and reports. It seemed like a lot of work.
“I don’t care about all this business stuff,” Evan said. “Shady or not. Anything about him seem like …”
“What?”
“Like something that might draw my interest?”
“You? As in: the Nowhere Man, savior of the desperate and lost, champion of the downtrodden, paragon of White Knightery?”
“Just answer the—”
“Dead parents, no siblings, never married—Devine’s kind of a blank slate. Though his security detail’s a bit sus.” She leaned forward once more, her breath fogging the lens as she typed. A series of fresh documents tiled the Vault wall to Evan’s left. “Private army of seven, led by this guy.”
At Joey’s remote urging, a dossier came to the fore.
Derek Tenpenny. A cluster of photographs captured him fromvarious angles. It was rare to see a man that tall and that slender, like a normal guy stretched by a funhouse mirror. He had to be at least six-six. Brown old-fashioned mustache, elongated plain suits, a side-part haircut at least two decades out of style.
“So here’s what’s weird. The other six? Private military contractors. They’re former marines, dishonorably discharged in the wake of a trophy-photo scandal. Pardoned by Andrew Bennett, our favorite dead president.”
Evan fiddled with the mouse, clicking through Tenpenny’s underlings, memorizing faces and names. “They posed with enemy corpses?”
“Yup,” Joey said. “They Abu Ghraib’d their way through a village outside Kandahar. Farmers and civilians, teenage males and a twelve-year-old boy. Of course they documented it on their phones like the dipshits they are.”
“Not dipshits.” Evan scanned the dossiers, noting each marine’s deployments. “They’re battle-tested—plenty of life-or-death hours combing through caves and heaps of rubble for high-value targets.” He focused on the photos of the leader. “So Tenpenny, he was their staff sergeant?”
“Way more menacing. Media fixer. Worked behind the scenes at a few of the big cable-news stations, even did a stint for Al Jazeera in Qatar. Payouts and settlements, private security, that kind of stuff. What the hell does a world-mover like Devine need with a dirty cadre like these fuckers?”
“Language,” Evan said. “And the answer’s in the question.” A smirk caught him off guard.
