Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

always well stocked,” the pilot continued, “so help yourself. I’ve never been told not to wander around . . . but if it were me, I’d stay put.”

“What about the internet?” Andie asked.

“There’s a desktop in the office at the end of the hall. That’s the only connection you’re allowed to use.”

“Is it secure?”

“I’m told it is.”

Andie and Cal exchanged a glance. Andie wondered if it was safer to try using the cellular device Zawadi had given them, but decided not to raise the issue. “Fair enough.”

“I’ll leave you to it then. I’m going to grab a beer and catch some shut-eye. We’ll leave when you’re ready. Just knock if you need me.”

After the pilot disappeared into his bedroom, Andie yawned and said to Cal, “We should get started. But I’m taking a hot shower before I do anything.”

“First on my leaderboard is caffeine. How about I scrounge around for some coffee and breakfast and meet you in thirty?”

She agreed with a weary nod. She didn’t trust this place, and didn’t plan to rest until they figured out where to go next. “Deal.”

In the kitchen, Cal found an unopened canister of Illy coffee and a French press. The fridge was stocked with the basics. He pulled out some eggs, cheese, and peppers for an omelet.

Cooking was his happy place. As he puttered around making breakfast, taking his time to dice the peppers just right, he tried to live in the moment, something he was normally good at. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the shitshow of the present, and the black hole of his future.

Cal considered himself an even-keeled guy. Lighthearted even. But ever since his article exposing the black-site facility belonging to PanSphere Communications had been discredited, and he was blackballed from respectable journalism, his life had felt like it was circling around a drain with no bottom.

And that was before the Ascendants tried to kidnap him in LA, and he went on the run with Andie.

He tried to stave off his depression with the aroma of ground coffee and the simple pleasure of farm-fresh eggs and grated cheese, but his thoughts kept spiraling. Before he fled LA, he was living month to month, eking out a living by scrounging for bottom-feeder articles, writing crap for pennies for whomever would pay. He never slacked in his research. His journalistic integrity would never allow that. But it didn’t take much work to rewrite an Associated Press report for some third-rate network or to repurpose some old articles for the conspiracy theory of the day.

Losing his job had cost him his convertible, his girlfriend, and his nosebleed Clippers tickets. His credit cards were maxed. No more little pleasures in life. A beer or two after work at the bar had turned into a six-pack at home, sometimes a twelve-pack. Leon’s dog food got cheaper and cheaper.

And by now, he would have missed the payment on his house for the third time that year. He was going to lose it, though he was upside down on the mortgage anyway. His 401(k)—what he hadn’t pulled out—had fewer zeros than an NBA score.

Worst of all was the knowledge that his career was ruined. Cal lived for being an investigative reporter. He loved everything about it: the coffee-fueled days and nights during a story, the beauty and economy and power of the written word, the clever disguises and the research trips and the fast-talking seat-of-his-pants interviews with a source. Most of all, though he would never admit to it on a first date, he loved pursuing justice and righting wrongs through the dogged pursuit of truth, imposing order on a chaotic world that had broken both his parents in different ways, and which he longed to make sense of.

Losing his livelihood did something terrible to a man, stripped him of dignity and self-confidence in a way that nothing else could. He had learned that from watching his dad implode when the airline went bankrupt. Cal had vowed never to follow in his footsteps—and now the same thing was happening to him.

But now, for the first time in years, he had a spark of hope. His mood began to lift as he realized he would choose that spark—terrifying and life-threatening as tracking the Ascendants had been so far—over a slow death in LA.

All he had to do was finish the story. He knew from breaking into Elias Holt’s house and seeing his own background file on a laptop that Aegis International and the Ascendants had targeted him because of his work on PanSphere. These were the bastards who had destroyed his life.

Now he just had to prove it.

As he cooked, he found a pen and a napkin and wrote down the principal facts and resolutions, preparing for the article or even the book that would clear the record and become the ticket back to his former life. He always started a story like this, outlining the essentials in his head, and often in the kitchen. Every reporter had a different method. He called his “Cal Sous Vide.” During a big story, he worked in a vacuum, ignoring everything else until the temperature was right, when he would send his fingers flying across the keyboard.

What he knew

• PanSphere Communications owned the black-site lab in Bolivia that Cal had uncovered.

• Elias Holt’s company, Aegis International, provided online security for the Ascendants.

• Aegis/the Ascendants had a huge file on Cal that started the day he published the exposé on PanSphere.

• The Ascendants almost certainly orchestrated the disappearance of Cal’s source, discredited his article, and wrecked his career.

• Although the Ascendants lived in the shadows, they wanted the Star Phone and the Enneagon bad enough to risk exposure.

Objectives

• Find proof to verify his story on PanSphere

• Go public with that proof, and with as much corroborating info on the Ascendants (and the LYS if needed) as he could find: names, dates, government and business connections, illegal activities, etc.

The best way forward

• Follow the money trail behind PanSphere, Aegis, and