Inheritance (From the Desk of Col. Garrett Ross)

A swirl of newspaper clippings, advertisements, and business cards are all tacked there. Galen's done some compiling. One of the business cards is tipped sideways, and the face on the card is staring downward at an advertisement for a genealogical background checking service. They'll place you all the way back to the royalty of the principality of Parma then find your connection to Adam or Eve if you like it that way, and you have the money to pay up. The news stories catch my attention, since one's an obituary. Loving Father Passes, reads the headline. The other one is Ex-Colonel killed in Bombing Raid on Tehran. He could have just as easily have written 'I believe I know what happened to your father, Gideon.' -Me 

A password-encoded, coded message from Galen, possibly my only friend in the business I still trust. Since he's not an idiot, and since this little piece of crap shack in the back alleys of the Matrix isn't registered to my real name, I'm grateful.  

*** 

I answer the phone. 

"Hey." 

"Hey." 

Galen cuts all the bull and goes straight for the kill. "You know how you were saying...that, you know, at the last company Christmas party, those people pulled that practical joke on you and you never found out who it was?" 

I give a wry grin. "Course," I tell him, "They set up the bucket of water to fall on my head." 

"You've put out your antennas, and I did the same thing. I've been keeping an ear open for people talking about it in the break room." 

There's no break room for spies or agents or whatever you would call people like us. Galen and I have had this code worked up since we were around thirteen years old. The break room he's talking about is the International Communications Matrix, the ICM. There was no bucket of water either. Anyway, I've been searching just as long and just as hard, but nothing came up on my radar. 

"There was a journalist in to do a piece on the company..." 

I nodded. I'd followed up on the case of James Drummand. This was a Pulitzer wannabe who'd done something and had connections. Found out about Clements. He went after a team calling themselves Firefly, and the media thought it was one assassin. Nothing ever came of it though, and I thought it was unrelated. 

"You mean the unlawful practices piece." 

Galen nods. "It was just after the journalist came...must have spooked people enough that they put something in the microwave and burnt the hell out of it. Stunk up the break room like hell. You remember Anthony Gibbons?" 

A fire. Anthony Gibbons meant A.G. If I knew my Clements-related runs, he was talking about the murder of Arcturus Gray, and the subsequent burning of his house. Burnt up the break room. That means a pulse in the Matrix. I saw it happen, when prices for jobs went up by three hundred percent for twenty-four hours. I didn't think much of it, and I guess I should have.  

"Not really, not well. He's in another department." 

"He was a department head. Anyway he's long gone. Fired." Fired equals dead. "But one of the guys that screwed up the microwave, and nearly burnt down the office, I got paired up with him on an account." 

There it is. This is what I want. 

"No shit," I say. "What'd you find out?" 

*** 

Jamie Hanson was the name that appeared, and Galen's methods of getting to it are always serpentine at the least. I probably would have found the guy who knew the name, followed him home, bombed his house and knocked him out with a concussion grenade when he jumped out of the second story window. Then I'd have tied him up in a bay area warehouse and tortured him until I got the answers. God knows how much time, wheedling and manipulation Galen put himself through before the name came out. Good news is he bypasses the entire epic novel when he flies in and gets to my apartment.