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And Hale felt blood rush to his head when he saw the message of,Not her, not anyone, not ANYONE, but NOT HER!then clicked on the attachment and saw the selfie he took of him and Elsa, with angry digital red markings scratching out her face.
“Kateri says, whoever this is logs into Gmail all over the city, including Manhattan, Queens, Harlem and Brooklyn,” Jamie explained. “And it’s always untraceable at internet cafés or in libraries where she, or he, has given a false name and sometimes ID. They have different descriptions of the person who is short, tall, young, old, man and woman, even Caucasian and Asian. Though this is probably because time has elapsed, and people have no real memory of who used their internet on any given day. On tracing every email, including this one, Kateri has hit a brick wall.”
“CCTV?” Tom asked.
Jamie shook his head. “She, or he, picks carefully. Places without cameras, or they know where the cameras are and they’re wearing bulky coats and hats and keeping their back to it. But some of the footage from where the older emails were sent is just gone because not many places have the capacity to store footage for that long.”
He hadn’t taken it seriously before.
Staring at Elsa’s face obliterated with those angry swirls of red, he was taking it seriously.
“So what do we do now?” he asked, handing Jamie back his phone.
“Report it to the police,” Jamie told him. “Kateri’s resources are better than theirs, and she has more time to take it seriously. But you need a complaint on file, just in case.”
“Then what?’ Hale pressed.
“Then you keep your security poised, because the minute another email comes in, it needs to be traced and someone sent out to where the IP address is located in hopes of catching them in the act or at the very least getting a decent description of them,” Jamie said.
“Which brings us to topic one of why I wanted you here tonight,” Tom butted in. “You need more security.”
This again.
He already had enough intruding in his life, he didn’t need some guy following him around everywhere.
“Tom—” Hale started.
“No. Hell no, son. It isn’t just whoever this person is. You can’t go for a jog without fifteen photos surfacing of you running down the sidewalk. There are people out there who are not right. Your father never went anywhere without a bodyguard.”
“I’m not my dad,” Hale said tightly.
“I know you’re not,” Tom returned. “But you aren’t immune to the anger people have about anything they can dream up. He made more money than any one person should own, and you’re finding good ways to use it. You’d think no one would have an issue with that. But I’m a father. I worry. I look at the shit people say about you, and it makes my skin crawl. There are alt-right crazies who think you’re the devil incarnate. They’re pissed about your position on the environment. They’re pissed you give money to pro-choice organizations. They’re pissed you give money to justice initiatives. They’re just pissed they’re not you. And a lot of those assholes have guns.”
Hale had no response because all of it was true.
“Kateri tells me your team feels the same way,” Jamie added. “You’ve got ex-Delta Force who used to look after your dad pinned in a room vetting email and watching monitors. If you didn’t pay them so much, they’d leave. And they still might. These are not men to sit in a room.”
Hale glanced at Rix, who was studiously looking at his knees.
He then moved his gaze to Judge, who immediately said, “It terrifies Chloe.”
“Fuck,” Hale bit.
“And Genny, Sasha, Matt, Mika, Cadence, Duncan, Sully, Gage, Dru, Nora,” Tom put in. “It’s as simple as giving a team you already have who know what they’re doing the go to do what they do best.”
Shit.
“I’ll sit down with them tomorrow,” Hale promised.
Tom stared at him hard for a beat, then ascertaining Hale would be good on his promise, he nodded.
“What’s topic two?” Hale asked, even if he didn’t want to.
Tom didn’t delay. “You work too hard. You need to ease up or learn how to delegate.”
“Tom—” Hale tried, and failed, again to intervene in what Tom was trying to push.
“I know you feel like Corey gave you the power to save the world, but he didn’t. The world has to have some part in saving itself. In the time since we lost your dad, which hasn’t been long, every single arm of his business, of any business he owned majority shares in, and any organization he held sway in at all, you’ve forced them to rewrite hiring, diversity, equality and harassment policies and demanded gender and race neutral remuneration. This has cost them millions, because they had no choice but to bow to your demands or be exposed for having shit policies in the first place.”
