Parker

“Tell Monica to push my eight a.m. back to eight-thirty tomorrow,” I said to my personal assistant over the phone. I climbed the stairs to the private club I belonged to and nodded to the doorman.

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of that immediately. I also need to talk to you about-”

“Not now. I’m stepping into a meeting.”

“I don’t have that in your schedule,” Timothy said in confusion.

“It’s a private meeting. No interruptions the rest of the night. If something comes up, handle it yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

I turned off my phone and walked through the lounge to the back of the club where my meeting would be held. We had a lot to discuss tonight, and only a short amount of time to get through it all. The security that had been hired when we started this project was already here. They were to sweep the room for listening devices and cameras, along with sticking around and providing security during the meeting. We couldn’t take any chances right now. We were too deep into this and there was no pulling out now.

The head of the biotech firm SynGen was already here. It had taken a lot of money to get her on our side. Helen Taylor was a tough negotiator, but I could tell when I first met her that she could be bought. I had to bring on more senators so that I could afford the funding. Essentially buying her help was not a cheap way to go, but it was our only option. We needed a lab that was privately owned and would be willing to work around certain guidelines that were set forth by the government, the same government that I was working to protect. 

The rest of the senators filed in over the next few minutes. A security guard came in and took all our phones and checked each of us for any kind of recording devices. The only thing that was allowed was already pre-approved by security. That was a single laptop. We all had to log into it when the meeting started. Only then could we all be held accountable. It was my insurance policy to make sure that no one got cold feet and decided to turn on us. 

“Let’s get started,” I said, drawing everyone’s attention. “I’ll have Ms. Taylor fill us in on how the project is coming along. Then we have some details to discuss.”

Helen nodded to me and stood in front of the rest of us. There were six of us in total. “Thank you, Richard. The project is on target. The trials are going well, and I think we’ll have a viable product in the next month. The researchers assure me that they are working hard on all aspects, but we are running into some complications with the second half of the project. It…may delay things, but there’s nothing that can be done about that. We’re moving as fast as we can, but if we don’t have everything we need in place, the first half of the project won’t be feasible.”

“You’re telling us this now?” Senator Nicholas Samuelson asked. “You know how much money we’ve put into this project, and now you’re telling us we might have to scrap it?”

“I promise you that the researchers are working as hard as they can-”

“Make them work harder,” Senator Nathan Brunswick cut in. “Our asses are all on the line here. We’ve already put things in motion. We can’t afford any slowdowns. This plan needs to be put in place in two months.”

Helen pursed her lips, but nodded and took her seat. 

“Nathan, what do you have for us?”

Senator Brunswick was our inside guy on the committee for the Department of Homeland Security. He was able to get our security for us and ensure that our plans were shared with only the people that we knew were loyal to the cause. 

“I’ve been digging into the man that broke into Senator Blakely’s house. As you all know, we believe the initial information that Senator Samuelson brought to him was being kept there in his safe. Senator Blakely had a camera hidden in his study. It wasn’t hooked up to his security system, so no one saw it when the feds tore apart his house after the murder. It’s taken me months, but I’ve finally put a name with the face of the man that broke in and killed the senator that night.”

“Good riddance,” Senator Cheryl Allen muttered. “We’re better off with Blakely not around. He would have destroyed us.”

“We have bigger problems than Blakely at the moment. The man caught on camera was Hudson McGuire, former military who disappeared off the face of the earth after he escaped from his transport to Leavenworth.”

“For those of us that don’t know who that is, please explain,” Senator Alex Cortez asked.

Cortez was a new kid and a pain in the ass, but he was ambitious, had some money, and he was eager to make his stamp on the world. In other words, at the moment, he had no morals.

“McGuire was sent to Leavenworth after he was convicted of killing some of his superiors when they were profiting from deaths overseas. He was a loose cannon that was supposed to be jailed. After he escaped, most people assumed he had gone to a non-extradition country. We kept a watch out for him, but he vanished. However, he popped up on our radar years later when he died, or so we thought. There was a fire in an old hotel building. Two bodies were found inside. One matched a man named Jensen, who had served with McGuire overseas. The other was only identifiable by dental records, which belonged to Hudson McGuire.”

“So, what makes you think this was him?” I asked Senator Brunswick.

He let out a sigh and clicked on something on the laptop. He turned it to face us. “This is Garrick Knight, a known assassin that spent several years doling out his own form of justice and reaping the rewards. He, coincidentally, died about the same time as McGuire. The problem is Garrick Knight and Hudson McGuire have the exact same face. So, when I ran facial recognition and not one, but two dead men popped up in the system, I was more than a little curious. I did some digging and found out that a third man that goes by the name of Hudson Knight is currently working with Reed Security outside of Pittsburgh. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to get him the proper identification and make sure that he wouldn’t be linked to either of his former selves. But they couldn’t completely wipe him from the record. In today’s digital age, nothing ever truly goes away.”

The fact that he said that had us all pausing to consider the implications. Would someone be looking into us one day? No, I had to believe that if we played this right, no one would ever know what we had done. Besides, nothing was really recorded anywhere. We were being very careful not to leave any trace behind of what we were doing.

“How does this affect us?” I asked.

Senator Brunswick heaved out a sigh. “This man has records that implicate Senator Cortez. As of right now, it’s in no way a solid lead toward anything. There are bank records that look fishy, but nothing that would lead directly to us. There were also lab tests,” he said, glancing over at Senator Samuelson. 

He had been the one that thought it would be a good idea to bring Senator Blakely in on all this. But the senator wasn’t interested in getting his hands dirty on this one. He just stole the lab results and locked them away. No one had thought of killing Blakely to get that information back. We all assumed he would be a thorn in our side that we would just have to deal with. Now, it appeared we were in deep shit.

“That doesn’t mean he’ll figure anything out,” Senator Allen pointed out.

“You don’t understand,” Brunswick said angrily. “This guy isn’t just some random citizen that we can intimidate. He’s a former assassin. He’ll kill off anyone that he sees as a threat. If he even sees you coming down the street, he’ll gut you like a pig and send you back as a message.”

“So we kill him first,” Senator Cortez said. “We kill him and we chop off the head of the snake.”

“He has proof of what we’re doing,” I reminded him. “Even if we kill him, we don’t know who he’s talked to or showed that paperwork. We need those documents and we need to bring him in to interrogate him.”

“He’s got security all around him. He rarely leaves the Reed Security property, and even when he does, you won’t get the drop on him. He’s way too good.”

“Then what the fuck did we hire security for?” Samuelson barked. “Send them onto the property at night and kidnap him.”

Brunswick chuckled and pulled up another screen on the computer to show us. “This is the Reed Security property. They have sensors around the entire property, which happens to be several miles in all directions. They were involved in a war with the cartels a few years back and have since barricaded themselves in so they’re ready for any attack. All employees live on the property so they’re ready at a moment’s notice. They have mounted machine guns and drones that continually scan the property and look for threats. They have the firepower of a small country on that property. There is no slipping in and kidnapping him.”

“What about the family?” Senator Allen asked.

My head snapped to face her and I slowly shook my head. “No, we aren’t going after his family. Are you trying to start a war before we even launch? You heard the man, he’s surrounded by security. He’s a former assassin. Do you want him coming after you in your sleep?”

“If we take his family, we expose his weakness. He’ll be so devastated over the loss that he’ll do anything to get them back.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Brunswick said. “If you go after his family, I can guarantee that he will come after you and take out not only you, but everyone you love. This will not end in us getting what we need.”

“I agree.”

“I say we put it to a vote,” Senator Allen said.

“No,” I said firmly. “We don’t do anything to draw more attention to ourselves unless necessary. We don’t know that he’s even put anything together based on the information he has. If something comes of it, we can make that decision then, but we will not risk everything now when we have no information on what he knows.”

“And what if he goes to someone?” Helen asked.

“A former assassin? A man that is doing his best to lay low? You think he’s going to ruin all that, get sent to prison all to talk with someone in power that might rat us out? Based on what?” I asked. “He has nothing right now. Let’s not poke the hornet’s nest.”

“We know where he is,” Brunswick said with a nod. “I think our best course of action right now is to wait and watch. We know he’s at Reed Security. If we find an in, we take it, but unless we find out that he knows something, we move on with the project as planned.”

“Alright,” I said, standing up, “now that we have that cleared up, let’s move on with the meeting.”

I saw the fear in the others’ eyes, so it was best to push this aside like it didn’t matter. We would continue to monitor the situation, but I couldn’t have them dwelling on it. Fear made people do stupid things, and I couldn’t afford for any of them to be stupid right now.