AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Okay, but why send Felix a death threat?” Cal asked.
Jack looked confused. “Death threat? I didn’t send anyone a death threat.”
Felix shook his head. “That’s right. He didn’t. The threat was all Cooper. The timing was a coincidence, but I don’t think your boss hearing something big was going down and Cooper making his move was at all. I have a feeling we’ll have more pieces of the puzzle once we see what’s in that file.”
Julius tapped the screen on his phone. “It’s at ninety-seven percent. We’ll have those details soon enough.”
“In the meantime, I’d better check in with Agent Stone and McMahon.” Felix felt his pockets for his phone, then smiled. “Shit, I forgot I don’t have a phone.”
I pulled mine out and passed it over. “Here. Use mine. I’ve got McMahon on speed dial.”
Julius cringed. “No one says that anymore. I swear you are the oldest thirty-eight-year-old I know.”
I gave him a single-finger salute in return.
Felix found McMahon’s contact and hit the button to connect the call. He put the call on speaker just in case McMahon had information that would help us and set the phone in the middle of the table. Felix kept the details around how he’d found out Agent Lance Cooper was the FBI’s mole vague, and when McMahon asked where the agent was now, he responded that he had no idea.
Technically, he really didn’t know where the agent had ended up. Jack and Cal had gone back to the warehouse after the fire was put out and took care of anything that might have been able to be used as evidence. It was a little scary how good they were at that kind of cleanup.
McMahon promised to update Agent Stone and see what he could do about getting Felix’s phone returned to him, then he hung up.
“That could have been worse.” Cal leaned back in his chair, rocking it up on the two back legs.
Jack and Julius nodded.
Felix smirked. “I’m not an idiot. Ironically, it was Agent Cooper who had coached me to keep my answers honest but vague when I was being interrogated after Jordan and I were arrested. I thought it was a strange thing to say at the time, but I’d taken the advice. Bet he never thought I’d use it against him.”
A shudder rolled through my body as an image of Felix tied to that chair on the warehouse floor surfaced in my memory. I was trying to keep all of that locked down, but it was proving harder than I thought it would be.
Felix found my thigh under the table and gave it another reassuring squeeze.
Julius’s phone beeped, and he glanced at the screen. “The file decryption is complete.”
Felix was out of his chair and halfway through the kitchen before Julius had finished speaking, and the rest of us stood too.
Jack motioned to the takeout containers covering the table. “Do we need to put this away?”
Cal shook his head. “We’ll do it later.”
By the time I got to Julius’s basement lair, he and Felix were already set up in the chairs in front of the wall of computer monitors. Julius had a screen with a progress bar showing one hundred percent up on the largest monitor.
“Ready?” he asked Felix, who nodded, prompting Julius to hit a button that flooded his screens with information. Files, folders, and documents cascaded over the screens so fast it was impossible to keep up.
“What is all this?” Cal asked.
“Hold on.” Felix reached over Julius, and with a few confident keystrokes, the files resolved into an organized hierarchy. “There, that’s better.”
“This is still an insane amount of data to wade through. Where do we even start?” Julius moved the cursor of his mouse, and the list of folders and documents went on and on.
“Look for anything that has the word list in it,” Jack suggested.
Julius nodded. “Good call.” He ran a keyword search that narrowed the options down to ten. The folders were dated going back to the late nineteenth century. He clicked on the first one, and a profile of Lucien Crowe appeared on the screen.
Crowe was a nineteenth-century artist, philosopher, and scientist. While Charles Darwin was writing his theory of evolution, his contemporary Crowe had made the claim thatman was only a steppingstone along the way to the complete evolution of humanity and survival of the fittest. Lucien Crowe believed that shifters were the true final evolution of man and that ultimately all humans would evolve into beings who could take the form of both man and animal. Up to and even during that time, shifters were largely persecuted by society and religion, and if someone was known to be a shifter, they were often cast to the edges of humanity. Crowe’s work was largely criticized because people didn’t want to understand anything that was different. His work, including his most famous piece of art,The Evolution of Man, was incredibly controversial, and he and Darwin were known to get in public debates that often turned uncivilized.
The Evolution of Manwas also thought to be the most stolen piece of art in recent history. It wasn’t currently on display anywhere, and most people in the art community believed that was because nobody knew where it was. Every once in a while, it would pop up only to go missing again. The longest it had stayed anywhere was on display in the Musée d’Orsay from 1976 to 1979. It was taken down for dating and restoration after someone claimed it was a fake, and it disappeared from the restoration rooms. The last I’d heard that anyone had seen it was in the mid-2000s.
Cal looked as confused as I felt. “Everybody who has ever taken a history class knows who Lucien Crowe is.”
