Page 54 of Lone Wolf

He rolled himself back to a seat and then found his balance on his hands once more. He started another set of vertical push-ups.

It was hard not to grunt.

By half past eight, Joey was sitting all the way up on the sheet-metal desk with her legs bent before her, chin resting on her knees, tapping a gnawed stick of red licorice against her bottom lip. They were reviewing her findings, and she was dead serious.

Or at least as close to dead serious as Joey could manage.

“So here’s where we’re at so far,” she said. “The dead vet Tanner? He’s a dead end. Fell out of life about five years back, homeless, pops up applying for various VA services here and there. But I doubt I’ll be able to connect him to the Wolf and if I can’t, no one can. I’m still digging on the weapons front—the Manurhin MR73 Gendarmerie in particular. But as you know, folks buying weapons aren’t exactly eager to ensure they can be tracked by databases.”

“And Solventry?”

“Solventry’s our Everest. It’s like a big-ass umbrella for so many entities that it’s not an umbrella anymore, it’s like its own complex. Like the Solventry-industrial complex. Get it?”

“Yes.”

“E-commerce obviously and no shit, but we’re also talking big data, consumer electronics, food delivery, apparel, online pharma, ride share, wearable tech, mortgage sales, robotics, credit monitoring, online payment, game streaming, dating apps, social content aggregators, predictive software, genome kits, health apps, fitness trackers, synthetic media, cloud computing, therapeutics—the full Bezos. Oh, they also own, like, a few hundred daily newspapers—local, national, foreign. And they just spun up a film and TV studio which sounds like a big expense but it’s really just a rounding error slash loss leader to open up markets like India, China, and Slovakia for delivering toasters and selling digital storage and all their other services. So, you ask yourself, what do all these ventures have in common?”

“Personal data,” Evan said.

“Yup. Data is the endgame.”

Evan had been sitting long enough that his aches and bruises were starting to announce themselves more vehemently. He held up a finger. “Hold please.”

He walked out of the Vault and through the penthouse to the kitchen. Moving past the living wall, he entered the small freezer room with its glass walls and centered bar. The chill hit fast and hard, settling soothingly into his lungs. A panorama to the south offered a generous view of Century City’s sleek high-rises, each a hive for accountants and lawyers thriving on exorbitant hourlies, doctors tending to the rich and fortunate, and Hollywood agents exacting their tenth of a pound of flesh.

Spaced precisely three inches apart, the bottles represented the finest and rarest vodkas in the world. His gaze settled on one in particular. Ensconced in a black leather case, it came with a small wooden hammer with a brush in place of a claw.

Beluga Gold Line was distilled at the freezing edge of Siberia, three hundred kilometers from the nearest sign of man. Manufactured with hyaline artisanal water for pure-as-the-driven-snow clarity and with coached malt enzymes for a robust profile, it was filtrated with quartz sand and then instilled into a bottle of crystal-pure French glass. Wax poured over mesh wire muzzled the cork: thus the hammer and brush. Each bottle sported an individual identification number.

Along with a rocks glass and two spherical ice cubes formed of distilled natural spring water, he brought the black leather case back to the Vault and sat at the L-shaped desk. Leaving one ice cube in the rocks glass, he set the other atop Vera III’s clutch of serrated leaves to water her.

She held it aloft appreciatively.

Then Evan freed the bottle. It was a thing of beauty unto itself, a metal label and a three-dimensional beluga-fish logo adhered to the glass by hand.

“Data is the endgame for what?” he asked, resuming the conversation.

Joey shrugged. “Allman probably doesn’t even know that.”

Slowly, meticulously, he began working on the sealed Italian cork. Gentle taps of the hammer chipped away at the hardened wax, freeing peels and dust. “He’s Solventry’s CEO?”

“Founder, visionary, and CEO. Dude’s worth uh kuh-billion dollars. He could, like, buy Argentina.”

“Why Argentina?”

“’Cuz who wants Venezuela right now?”

“I wasn’t aware those were the only two options.”

“Plus: steak.”

Bits of wax scattered across the sheet-metal desktop and Evan took care to trap them with a napkin. Joey watched him, one eyebrow hoisted in annoyance.

“What did you find out about him?” he asked. “Personally.”

“Dude is secretive. There’s so little out there about him it’s crazy. He’s not boring tunnels beneath cities. He’s not building dick-shaped rockets to go to outer space. He’s not dating Belgian nutrition and lifestyle influencers a third his age.”

“Belgian?”