I started going through the old financials last night.”
“None of this is digital?” Bryce asked, looking around at the piles of paper.
“No,” Mack said. “Everything’s done the old-fashioned way. You can’t hack a filing cabinet.”
“No, but you can steal one,” Sarah replied. “Who is it?”
“The financial board is a committee of twelve men, all of whom have detailed knowledge of our operations, at least from a financial standpoint. I checked to see if any of them had ties to Tuck Investments, and one did own a substantial share of the company.”
“Why wasn’t it caught?” Bryce asked. “We would have run a background check on everyone, including the agency.”
“The account was under a fake name, but I had Johnny check on the withdrawals to see if there were any slip-ups, and he found one, a substantial amount sent over to his personal account.”
Sarah edged closer to Mack, her knuckles cracking from the pressured squeeze on her hand. This was what she needed, her starting point, something to sink her teeth into. “Who is it, Mack?”
“Branston Clark.”
***
Sarah already had one foot out the door and a hand on her 1911s before Mack finished the sentence. She loaded up on some gear and headed to the helicopter pad on top of the building that housed their new digs. The CEO of the financial holdings group that inhabited the skyscraper was constantly coming and going, so the sight of a chopper wasn’t anything to bat an eyelash at.
During the whole flight to the location, Sarah kept her grip on the pistols. It felt like forever since she had held them and even longer since she had used them. They were oddly heavy, almost foreign, when she first picked them up, but she continued to hold them until the familiarity returned, which took all of about sixty seconds.
“All right,” Bryce said. “The chopper’s gonna drop you off two miles from Branston’s estate.”
“Estate?” Sarah asked. “Jesus, how much money does this guy have?”
“What do you think an estate is?”
“It’s the name of the place where the guy lives that I’m going to beat the shit out of.” Sarah ejected a magazine, checking the rounds, then slammed it back in.
“No,” Bryce said. “That is not what an estate is.”
The chopper touched down, and Sarah jumped out, keeping her head ducked low as the chopper quickly disappeared back into the sky.
“We’ll keep the bird in the air for you until it’s time for the extraction,” Bryce said.
“Shouldn’t take too long.” Sarah fell into a light jog as she made her way through the open fields of northern Illinois. In the distance, she could see other sprawling estates with large gates and enormous mansions. “How many people you think live in those things?”
“According to the heat signatures, there are ten people in the house to your left, twelve people in the house to your back, and eight in the house to your right.”
“And what about Clark?”
“He has twenty-five.”
“Any bets on how many of those are guards?”
“I really don’t feel like throwing my money away today.”
Much like the neighbors, Clark had his own stone-wall fences surrounding the fifteen-room, three-story brick mansion. The lawn was well kept, and a smaller building, which looked like the size your middle-class family of four would live in, was the garage. Sarah snuck a peek in one of the windows and found a cluster of Porsches, Ferraris, and Bentleys. “They even have my color.”
“I have movement on the other side of the garage,” Bryce said. “Two men, armed with assault rifles, loaded down with Kevlar, heading your way.”
“Time to start the show.” Sarah unsheathed her knife, gripping the hard rubber handle and drumming her fingers along the side. She crouched low at the corner of the garage, listening to the thump of the footsteps grow louder until she saw the tip of the first boot.
Sarah jumped up from her crouched position, ramming the tip
Learning to Kill: Stories