Free Unleashed by Sigmund Brouwer Page A

in electronic surveillance equipment.
    “Thinking of threatening me?” he said, smirking.
    His non-answer was as good as an answer. Bentley’s prediction had been correct. It would have been stupid to march in and make threats that could get me in trouble later. Which meant, of course, that Bentley and I had needed to come up with a way to hurt Schmedley without any chance of repercussions for us.
    I glanced at my throwaway phone. I had an email in the out-box, and I hit Send .
    “So if a person had been tortured by having curling irons taped to his hands,” I said, “he’d have a tough time getting justice without proof of who had done it to him.”
    I was watching Schmedley’s face carefully. I was glad when he gave me a smile. To me, that said far more than all the evidence Bentley had found by hacking the guy’s computer. The trouble with the evidence on Schmedley’s computer was that it wouldn’t hold up in court, because it had been illegally obtained.
    “Very tough time,” Schmedley answered.
    His computer dinged. Incoming email. From me.
    Bentley and I had been undecided. Would he glance at the screen, or would he be polite and ignore it? I’d guessed he wouldn’t be polite. Not to a kid like me.
    He glanced at the screen to check his message. The subject heading was all in caps: PROOF OF CURLING IRON TORTURE .
    We’d been prepared in case he didn’t look. I’d have told him I’d just sent him an email and asked him to look at it. That would sound innocent on whatever recording equipment he had in the office.
    The important thing was the satisfaction of him knowing that Bentley and I were paying him back.
    He looked at the screen and looked at me.
    I shrugged. That would look innocent on a video recording of this conversation.
    He would have been inhuman not to be curious enough to open the email.
    As the attachments downloaded and began to open on Schmedley’s monitor, I hit Send on a text in my phone that had been waiting to go to Bentley. The text had one word: ENJOY .
    Bentley had a monitor at his end to mirror what was on Schmedley’s monitor. Getting into Schmedley’s hard drive a day earlier had been a breeze for Bentley. He’d set up an email account that was almost identical to Winchester’s. Since Schmedley had already been in email contact with Winchester, he wouldn’t get suspicious receiving an email supposedly from Winchester. Nor would Schmedley have any reason to distrust the attachment.
    The email had this for a subject heading: To Confirm. This is Jace .
    The attachment had looked like a photo of me but had also been an executable file that slid into Schmedley’s computer system. Malware. From there, Bentley had taken full control of Schmedley’s hard drive. That’s where we’d found plenty of proof that it had been Schmedley who’d put the curling irons on me.
    Right now on Schmedley’s monitor, the first photo in the PowerPoint slide show I had just emailed him popped into view. I’d been in a hurry, so there were no fancy transitions between photos, and the photos weren’t perfect, but I was confident the slide show would make my point.
    The first photo in the slide show was a piece of paper hanging from a fishing line, against the background of the cubicle door in the toilet in the gym where Schmedley had duct-taped me in place. All the rest would look the same, but with a different message.
    THERE IS NO ONE AROUND TO HEAR YOU SCREAM
    Schmedley glanced over his shoulder at me.
    “Looks familiar,” I said. “How about to you?”
    I was being careful not to say anything that could incriminate me if it was played to a jury in a courtroom.
    “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Schmedley said. He must have been just as aware of the danger of having this conversation recorded.
    “Keep reading,” I said.
    BECAUSE THE PAIN WILL BE FAR WORSE THAN CURLING IRONS
    “Looks like an amateur attempt,” Schmedley said. “Are you wearing a recording device?”
    I