Page 92 of Bombshell

“I don’t have to explain myself to you. Not anymore.” I take a step towards her and she flinches, but this time there’s no Malcolm there to step in and save her. It’s been a long time since he cared enough to concern himself. “It’s time to fight your own battle—face-to-face—this time.”

“I always fight my own battles,” she seethes.

“No, you don’t. Did you know I felt sorry for you once? I thought you were in over your head with my family, but now I know you’re just like my brother and my father—even my mother. There’s always an excuse for their behavior. There’s always an angle to be manipulated. But you can’t change basic facts. I’m her mother. You aren’t.”

“You don’t stand a chance against us.” Her hands ball into fists as her face goes pale. “Nothing’s changed. We still have all the lawyers, all the money, the police report, the witnesses.”

I shake my head and despite everything, I can’t help but laugh. I look over to the studio window. Class has begun, and in the center of the students, Ellie is turned the wrong direction, dancing to a completely different beat than everyone else. She’s mine. My little girl. Our little girl. I fought and lost before. I won’t lose her again.

“Everything’s changed,” I tell her, “especially me.”

20

Sterling

“Cyrus is supposed to arrive fifteen minutes from now. Is that enough time?” I’m alone in Adair’s suite at the Eaton, talking to Luca and Jack over an encrypted communication hub running out of Jack’s G-Wagen. We’ve run this setup before, dozens of times on damn near every continent, but never with our own skin in the game.

It adds spice, to say the least.

It also means we can pull it together in a pinch, and we’re running out of time. The most difficult element was getting Adair to agree to follow my instructions without an explanation in advance. I just promised her I wouldn’t order her around again after this. I wouldn’t risk it.

Luca is meeting with the hotel manager, Mr. Randolph, who’s been trying to get a private meeting with him for a couple of weeks. Randolph’s name has been on my list since before we returned to Nashville—ever since he embarrassed me at Thanksgiving five years ago, in fact. Today, the entire Eaton dynasty gets what it deserves, right down to the asshole manager.

“We knew we’d be threading the eye of the needle with this. You getting cold feet, Ford?” Jack has the easy job—he always does.

“You’re just mad you still have to stay in the car,” Luca chuckles.

We have an impressive array of tech at our disposal, earpieces and mics so small no one will see them by accident, wireless cameras, and a fiber-optic splicer that costs more than a modest house. Someone has to manage all of it, and who better than Jack, since he made most of it? I hadn’t been surprised when he’d led us into a hidden room in the back of the Barrelhouse and a stash of equipment. Jack might want to be out, but old habits die hard. I’m not certain he’ll ever relax into the life he claims to want entirely.

Normally I take point, Luca covers me discreetly, and Jack provides operational support from nearby, usually somewhere unglamorous like a utility closet or a shitty van. But today Luca and I are both working at the same time, which gives us almost no ability to improvise and absolutely no room for mistakes.

We all know the score: once I start my discussion with Cyrus, there’s no going back. He’ll figure out what I know and how I know it. He’ll move to protect his data trove, which we know now is in a safe next to Randolph’s office downstairs.

It was surprisingly easy to discover where Cyrus keeps the data cache from his family’s vast holdings. The Eaton is wired into a standard cable company fiber optic network, and it only sends and receives encrypted data. Contrary to movies and television, encryption is nearly impossible to break. It’s one of the reasons the U.S. government spends so much time pressuring tech companies to put hidden backdoors in its products. But finding where someone’s keeping that shit isn’t difficult at all.

All Jack had to do was splice into the network hub for the block the Eaton hotel sits on to confirm our theory that the company’s flagship hotel is more than just that—it’s where they’re storing their dirty laundry. Massive amounts of data are being routed there from IP addresses all over the world.

If I wasn’t so close to this, I might be impressed. The complexity of the operation is worthy of a foreign intelligence agency. The potential for blackmail is staggering.

What happens when Eaton Hotels wants to open at a prime piece of real estate next to Red Square? Well, it definitely helps to have dirt on a number of government officials. It also explains the Eatons knack for cutting through red tape. How else could they manage to own hotels in the heart of Moscow?

“It’s a quarter to one,” Luca says through the headset. “Are we go?”

“Go,” Jack says.

“We're go,” I agree, checking my watch. Cyrus is meeting me in fifteen minutes, but he might arrive early. If he follows his usual daily routine—stopping in the main office as soon as he enters the building—everything will be fine.

Powerful people have a tendency to be paranoid bordering on superstitious. Accessing sensitive information comes with its own routine. The simple fact they’ve never been compromised before tells them their routine is working, so they almost never change it. That’s the flaw in his system. It tells us more than he could ever imagine. Like the fact that the name he’s made for himself in the stock market is probably built on the information he gathers from the illegal surveillance. Why else would he keep an office at the hotel when he’s hardly involved in its management at this point?

First, he goes to his office as soon as he sets foot on property. Then he reemerges ten minutes later, sometimes stopping to talk to the manager, Mr. Randolph. The amount of data being sent is too vast to decrypt for the ten minutes he’s on site—it would take hours or even days—which means the computer in his safe must be storing the data in its decrypted form.

Get in the safe, and the data cache is ours. Sutton will be safe, and so will my family.

Through my comms, I hear a knock on the door. Luca’s appointment has arrived.

“Ah, Mr. De Angelo, right on time,” says Randolph.

They exchange pleasantries, and then I hear a door close.