Read Online Silhouette by Dave Swavely - Free Book Online

hit bottom, at least that I heard. As I went to turn him faceup, I saw the thick, bloody cross behind his right ear where one of the Xs had hit him. Based on the way he was struggling to move, I assumed the other one had hit him in the kidneys or lower spine. I turned him over, grabbed his lapels, and held his upper body over the edge of the crevasse.
    â€œThere are a lot of dead people down there,” I said to him. “I’m sure they’d love some company.” Korcz blinked his eyes at the blood that had seeped over to his face during his crawl. In my mind, I pictured this man walking up to D’s car, my little girl staring at him from the back window. “Did. You. Kill. Darien. Anthony?”
    â€œWhat?” he said, or something that resembled it, and blinked a few more times.
    I pulled out the killer boa and held it to his face, my hand shaking from the rush of emotion, until I heard Twitch’s voice say, “Is everything all right, sir?” And on the left side of my vision, because the editor had switched back to the falcon view, I saw myself from behind and above, the dark maw of the crack on the other side of me so big that it looked like it could swallow me whole, if I wasn’t careful.

 
    6
    We took Korcz to the cathedral and locked him up, but within an hour it was obvious that this man was not the murderer. No fewer than five reliable and independent sources, both real and virtual, confirmed that he had flown into the Bay Area that morning, rather than three days ago, as Harris had said. He had come to visit his parents (the old couple), who still lived here. He was on vacation from a security job with an East Coast firm similar to ours, but smaller, and they had granted him his perfectly legitimate weapons clearance. He also had no explosives on him, or in the belongings we searched.
    Why had he run, then? Seems that he had been guilty of some financial indiscretions years ago when he was an agent of BASS. Darien had handled the problem personally in a discreet and gracious manner, allowing him to leave without controversy, and even serving as a reference for him later on when he applied for his new job—which explained the periodic contact between the two men.
    When Korcz heard that same morning that Darien had been killed, and then was confronted by a BASS posse, he thought that the clemency toward him had expired. The man also apparently had a deep-rooted paranoia about BASS leadership, which for some reason only Darien had been able to assuage. I made a mental note to ask him about this at some point before he was released, but now I was calling Harris from a net room in the castle, near the aero garage.
    The tech beside me was busy with my special instructions when the tattooed freak appeared on the screen. I didn’t want to endure his gloating, but there was a method to my madness.
    â€œSir Michael Ares,” Harris barely managed to say in his talking-head voice, because he was laughing so hard. He clutched his stomach and rocked back and forth in his chair. “Leads an assault on an innocent man, almost killing his geriatric, heart-patient parents” (more laughing) “who immediately go to the press, when they wake up , describing the entire fiasco in vivid detail! This is Nirvana! The third heaven. Brainsmash, Headflip without the hangovers. A night with Marilyn—Monroe and Manson! I think it’s on the news right now.…” He started fumbling with some of the screens beside him.
    â€œI don’t want to see it,” I said. “You told me Korcz had been in town for three days, and that he had explosives on him.”
    â€œBeautiful, ain’t it?” he said, proud of himself. “After you asked me about those names, our Tricky Dickies ran a net scan, and found out he had flown in and bought three tickets for the Stick. I was hoping it would waste your time, at least, but I didn’t even dream (Dream Base Outer