Free A Murder of Crows by David Rotenberg Page B

very possibly responsible for the death of a six-year-old girl.
    Garreth added a bit of sugar to his bourbon and swirled the dark liquid in the highball glass. Bourbon was a newish delight for him; adding sugar was something his southern neighbours had taught him. He had tried the mint sprigs they also added to their bourbon but disliked the way it covered the slow smokiness of the liquor. Besides, he couldn’t get over the feeling that if you added mint you should also add a tiny umbrella and probably a cookie.
    No.
    Alcohol was a grown-up’s pleasure and he wanted to keep it that way.
    He tilted the fine liquid into his mouth and savoured it on his tongue. As long as he was tasting it he wasn’t drinking just to get drunk—or so he told himself.
    Palmetto bugs slapped into the veranda’s screens. Beyond them,fireflies flicked into and out of existence. He metaphorically peered into his own darkness.
    Garreth swallowed his drink in one long gulp, passed by the TV that flickered light across his hardwood floors and headed into his basement, where he kept the files of his unsolved cases, knowing that the one on top had the underlined name of Decker Roberts on it.

21
A PLOTTING OF CRAZY EDDIES—T MINUS 16 DAYS
    EDDIE ROLLED A BOMBER THICKER THAN HIS THUMB AND INHALED deeply.
    The Trojan he’d embedded in the new lease he’d e-mailed to Ira Charendoff, Patchin Place Lawyer, was doing its nastiness and had sent him Charendoff’s e-mail contact list, which of course included the man’s daughter’s address.
    Eddie looked at the photograph of the Charendoff girl he’d downloaded from the Paris newspaper’s website, then at the photo of the dead boy almost encased in the ice of Stanstead’s little river. He turned over several possibilities in his mind, then he reminded himself that the sinner was the father, not the daughter, and how very wrong that Old Testament crap was about visiting the sins of the father on his children.
    He fired off a quick e-mail to the daughter and waited for the unsubscribe reply. It came in seconds with a request to remove her from his e-mail list—she did not wish to receive any more correspondence from Iowa Baptist Ministries for Justice and Peace in Moldova.
    Good, Eddie thought. Just wanted to make sure that was you.
    He looked at the photo of the dead Stanstead boy a second time, then replaced the photo of the daughter with one of her father—the sinner.
    He pulled out his checklist. (1) Get Decker safely away—done . He checked his GPS mapping program, and there he was. Good. (2) Find Marina in Portland—in process . (3) Attack Charendoff—to be executed.
    Eddie opened his STUXNET file and added the few new ideas he’d been able to piece together from his recent explorations into the covert world of cyberwarfare. Eddie, like almost every other computer maven in the world, was pretty sure that STUXNET was an Israeli viral attack on Iran’s nuclear industry.
    Unlike some he believed there were good viral attacks and bad viral attacks.
    On a whim he opened his WikiLeaks folder from his computer desktop and reread the news coverage closely. Mr. Assange had got himself in a passel of trouble. But that wasn’t really a concern of Eddie’s. He had no idea if Mr. Assange was a force for good or evil in the world. Jury was out on that as far as he was concerned, but the American government was clearly anxious to nail his snotty little ass to the wall—which led him back to the PROMPTOR anonymity system.
    He reduced the WikiLeaks file and opened his PROMPTOR file. There he quickly scanned the few scraps he’d been able to put together on the founder of PROMPTOR—and, once again, on the American government’s interest in silencing him. Two people “of interest” to the American government—the head of PROMPTOR and Mr. Assange.
    Eddie thought about that—“people of interest to the