Broker of Lies by Steven James

Author:Steven James [James, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Christian / Suspense, FICTION / Thrillers / Domestic
ISBN: 9781496473332
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2023-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 36

OAK RIDGE TECH CORRIDOR CONFERENCE CENTER

The inviting scent of sizzling bacon intermingling with the smell of fresh coffee permeated the air as Senator Cliff Richardson worked his way through his breakfast at the hotel’s posh ground-floor restaurant.

He was taking a final bite of his eggs Benedict when the text came through conveying the tragic news about Senator Bill Presnell’s fatal heart attack at dinnertime last night.

Immediately, Cliff felt a surge of grief and sympathy for Presnell’s family, for their loss, but he also felt a debilitating wave of guilt, because he didn’t believe for one minute that the heart attack had been natural. He suspected—no, he knew—Joshua had been behind it.

Things weren’t supposed to go like this.

People weren’t supposed to die. That was why he was doing all of this in the first place—to protect innocent lives, not to have some psychopath take them.

And in that moment, it struck him that Joshua was indeed a psychopath. Not the out-of-control-chortling-madman type, but the cold and heartless man-without-a-conscience kind.

Finding him six months ago hadn’t been as much of a challenge as Cliff would’ve guessed. Hiring him using an untraceable cryptocurrency hadn’t been prohibitively difficult either.

Now, as he stared at his plate and picked halfheartedly at his hash browns, all of that got Cliff thinking.

His experience in the tech world in Silicon Valley spanned nearly three decades. He’d watched the meteoric rise and fall of dozens of startups. It’d given him more than just knowledge of the business; it’d given him perspective.

With his background in programming, he knew ways to search beyond the search engines, both on the surface web and the deep web, so he had extensive experience finding information that was difficult for the uninitiated to obtain.

In fact, if things had turned out differently for him, rather than founding TalynTek, he might very well have taken another path that would’ve led him to become a white hat hacker instead of a senator. But then, when his brother, Keith, was killed in combat, everything had changed.

Late last year, when he began tooling around the dark web, he told himself that he was simply curious. And that might have been the case, at first. But in light of what he’d learned regarding the vulnerabilities of the United States’ nuclear infrastructure, he had formed a plan.

Or hatched one, as they say.

But no, that’s how they phrased it when the villain of a story came up with his scheme. Semantics. Like when you referred to one country’s government officials as an “administration” and another country’s—one you didn’t like—as a “regime.”

No, his plan hadn’t been “hatched.” He wasn’t a villain by any stretch of the imagination. He was the person responsible for stopping the true villains from attacking the infrastructure of the country he loved, the one that’d provided him with the opportunity to grow a business, to become rich beyond his wildest dreams, and now to serve his constituents as a senator. In putting them first, he’d had to put his own interests second.

With that, his thoughts circled back to Joshua.

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