Rex’s blotchy face grows a shade or two paler than I’m used to seeing it, and his forehead furrows into fat, worm-like ridges. He takes a step back, glances at me, then once again at the cop.
It’s an interesting threat, but I wonder if it’s true. It’s one thing to threaten to leak damning evidence against Rajesh to Alliance news networks. It is quite another to leak it to networks like CHN in the Coalition. Coalition news nets are harder to get to and harder to threaten into silence. That, and Coalition brats see themselves as the champions of all things goodness and light, so they might actually risk life and limb to expose Rajesh.
“You’re bluffing,” Rex decides.
That’s my bet, too. It would be hard to get a journalist to sit on scandalous evidence and not do anything with it, especially a Coalition journalist, who would see it as their moral duty to expose a criminal like Mohinari. And that means that the news networks don’t have the evidence. Not yet. Someone still needs to send it to them. Which brings me back to Omar’s wife as the next link in this chain of misery.
“I’m not bluffing. It’s all ready to go. All it takes is one whisper of a thought from me, and your boss goes down,” Omar says.
“So why haven’t you pulled the trigger yet?” Rex asks.
“You’re jamming my access to the net.”
“And you’re the only one with access to the logs?”
“Yes.”
I don’t believe that for a second. His wife must have them, too. If something happens to Omar, he’d want her to have them. And vice versa.
Omar goes on, “I’ve scheduled hypercomms to send the evidence to all of the right people. If I die, or anything happens to my family, those comms get sent as scheduled. If I’m alive and well, I can still cancel them and reschedule for tomorrow, or some other future date.”
“You leak so much as a frame of those logs, and we’ll make you wish for something as peaceful as death.”
“And then your boss goes to prison for reconditioning. Nobody wins.”
Rex’s jaw zigzags for a few seconds, as if he’s literally chewing on Omar’s words. I can see that he’s getting frustrated. His tiny little brain is overheating. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. He’s supposed to torture and threaten Omar, and then Omar gives in. Easy job. Maybe even fun. But Omar isn’t backing down.
A smile quirks onto my lips. I can’t help it. I’m starting to like this guy.
“Talk to your boss. Get him to plead out to the domestic violence charges, and I’ll make sure the rest of it goes away—until something happens to me or my family, in which case everything gets blown all over the net.”
Brilliant. Don’t go for the jugular, just kick him in the balls and keep the knife at his throat for insurance. Maybe Omar isn’t a scrigg, after all. There is just one problem. Mohinari isn’t the kind of guy you threaten. He’s the kind you kill. Or else.
“If he pleads to domestic battery, he’ll lose custody of his daughter,” Rex argues. “He’ll never go for that.”
“He doesn’t have a choice. It’s that, or he goes to prison for all of his other more grievous crimes.”
“You got guts, Trevos. I’ll give you that. Give me a second.”
Rex stalks by me with a scowl and plunks the remote for the torture spider in my hand. “Roman, if he so much as twitches, give him a zap, yeah?”
“You got it,” I say with a matching scowl. Roman is my cover name. I take a step toward Omar and he croaks at me, “Water. Please.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I stride over to an old, dusty wooden table and pluck one of the designated rewards off the counter. Water. Food. Stimsticks. Omar’s holoband. These are a few of the incentives we have to get him to cooperate. I’m breaking the rules by giving him a reward for bad behavior, but in my book, he’s earned it.
“Here you go.” His hands are bound with shockcuffs, so I hold the bottle to his lips. He gulps water, spilling at least half of it from split and swollen lips.
“Thank you,” Omar whispers.
I step back with a nod.
He regards me steadily. His eyes are clearer and less heavily laden now. “You don’t approve of this,” he whispers. It’s not a question. “You can stop him.”
“Which him?” I counter quietly. “Rex or Rajesh?” It’s an honest question. If I stop Rex, I can’t stop Rajesh, and Rex is just one small cog in a much bigger machine. I could stop this torture session, sure, at the expense of my actual mission, but the next goon that Rajesh sends to deal with Omar might skip straight to his wife or his daughter. “You need to give them what they want,” I say. “This is going to end badly.”
“I’m holding all the cards,” Omar argues. “They can’t touch me.”
“Maybe. For now. But what happens when they find a way to circumvent your little setup?”
Omar shrugs as much as he can without triggering a shock from the cuffs around his wrists. “The same thing that will happen to me if I give them all of the evidence now. Rajesh will kill me and my family. Our only hope for safety is to hold onto it as long as we can.”
“Then why push your luck?” I ask. “You’re trying to get him to plead guilty to a lesser charge and lose his daughter in a custody battle. Rex is right; he won’t do that.” I know, because I was hired by Mohinari’s wife to kill him, and she’s paying me handsomely to get it done. She knows her husband well enough by now to realize that she can’t simply threaten him and call it a day. Men like Rajesh never lose, and even if they do, they make sure you lose far more than them.
If Rajesh gives in to Omar’s demands now, it will be because he’s stalling for time while he finds a way around Omar’s digital dead-man’s switch.
Rex comes striding back over to us, smirking, the plasma lancer from the holster on his hip now in his hand. My gut gives a sickening twist at the sight of that. I can imagine how the conversation with Rajesh went, and for it to end with a weapon drawn means Omar miscalculated. Badly.
My prediction of how this was going to end is about to come true.
“It looks like you’re out of time, scriggface. Boss says it’s time to wrap this up.”
“What?” Omar looks genuinely shocked. “Does he realize what I’m going to do to him?”
“You won’t do anything. It turns out, we managed to solve the problem without you.”
Omar’s face is a horrified blank. He doesn’t know what to make of that. “How?”
“We cracked your password.”
“How...? It’s twenty-seven characters and requires a biometric scan to confirm.”
“A stream logger installed by one of your buddies at the precinct. After you told me how you planned to distribute the logs, we found the e-mails you scheduled and deleted them all.”
“But you still don’t know where the logs are,” Omar insists. “I could send them later.”
“You won’t be around later.”
“My wife—”
“Wouldn’t be that stupid after she finds out what happened to you. Not with your daughter’s life in the balance.” Rex makes a show of checking the charge on his lancer. “Any last words you want me to give to them when I pop by to give my condolences?”