Free Point and Shoot by Duane Swierczynski Page B

had finally come to fruition.
    Now, apparently, it had blown up in their faces. There wasn’t much Abrams could do about it except follow it through to its logical conclusion.
    Originally there had been three ruling partners of their organization: Gedney, Doyle, and Abrams herself. Charlie Hardie had done the unthinkable and killed Gedney, though even Abrams had to admit that the man had it coming. You don’t put someone as volatile as Charlie Hardie inside a secret prison and expect him to languish there forever. Wood chipper, people.
Wood chipper
. Abrams assumed her partners thought she was joking about the wood chipper, but they didn’t realize it had been a fetish of hers since that infamous Coen brothers movie. You don’t know bliss until you’ve walked barefoot through the freshly pulped remains of another human being. Especially if you’ve had a conversation with them not five minutes before.
    Gedney’s way: hadn’t worked.
    Doyle’s way: failing miserably. The Cabal was hurting and was forced to hide underground while their enemies picked away at their various fronts and operations around the globe.
    Which left Abrams’s way.
    “I’ll take care of it,” she said to Doyle on the phone now. Poor Doyle, even a year later, was still going through rigorous rehabilitation sessions at a private facility on the East Coast.
    “This isn’t my fault,” he said. “The craft was impenetrable. All systems in place. Hardie had no way of knowing how to knock the craft out of its orbit, and there was no way anyone could have transmitted that information to him. It’s a locked room mystery. An inside job!”
    “I told you, I’ll take care of it. I want your people reporting directly to me from here on out. No exceptions.”
    “You sound angry.”
    “I’m not angry. I’m annoyed,” Abrams said.
    “Because of what was inside the craft.”
    “Because of what had
still
better be inside that craft.”
    It was time to initiate her contingency plans: recovery teams on opposite sides of the country.
And
complete sedation for her old friend Doyle. Better he sleep through this next part. This was no longer a holy trinity. Abrams was God, and the world was about to feel her wrath.
    Life had been pretty quiet for Factboy.
    Which really sucked, because a quiet life meant
no money
.
    For a while there, in the glory days, the frenzied big money days, he couldn’t open offshore accounts fast enough. He and the wife didn’t get along, but that didn’t matter because the checking account was always fat, the credit limits on all of the cards were sky-high, and there were vacations galore. (Even if Factboy spent a lot of time in the bathroom.)
    Factboy was an information broker for the organization that used to call themselves the Accident People. He was known as sharp, quick, and reliable. Not the best, to be sure. The top-tier guys were at another level entirely, and formed a tight little clique that called itself—and how freakin’ pompous was this—the Architects. Factboy would never be an Architect. Nor would he want to be. He had enough to keep his family happy, and that was fine.
    Until three years ago, when the work started drying up.
    And the Architects snapped up all of the high-paying gigs, leaving everybody else with scraps.
    Factboy especially.
    Try explaining to your wife why your computer consulting job—one that had previously afforded them European vacations and the latest minivans and the fattest, tallest Christmas trees on the lot—suddenly paid a whole lot less, and they had to settle for the occasional trip to the beach, and hey, yeah, maybe we should just keep the Odyssey this year, it’s been good to us, right, and wow, look at this artificial Christmas tree—a genuine blue spruce!
    Ms. Factboy started to get suspicious, and Factboy started to get real worried.
    It wasn’t as if he could level with her. Tell her what he’d
really
been up to all of these years. Not only would that be a