] I’m a friend, Breece. I’m someone who’s watched you for a long time.

] And I can get you to the man who lied to you all these years.

] The man who used you. Who betrayed you and so many others.

] But only if we do it my way.

Breece stared at the screen. Then his fingers moved.

>> I have conditions of my own.

Barnes stepped back inside. In the short term, denial was key. The election would be over in less than forty-eight hours. Large swaths of the country had already voted electronically. At this point, there were good odds that nothing could stop a Stockton victory.

I made that happen, Barnes told himself. Me. With the assassination attempt in DC.

All he had to do was deny everything. Keep any facts from being confirmed. There would be no evidence. He was wired deep into the system. DHS had learned long ago that in a surveillance state it was vital to reserve the ability to turn a blind eye to certain people at certain times. Standardization of code across Federal, State, and Local levels had made it possible. When DHS gave out billions in Homeland Security grants, they could dictate the terms, could use that money to get the data they wanted, spread the software they wanted far and wide.

And they had.

He was one of the few who could make the system turn a blind eye, one of the few remaining who even knew it was possible. And so there was no record of his trip to DC. No traffic camera had preserved any memory of his car that night. No cell tower recalled having contact with his phone on that trip. No gate or elevator or door at ERD remembered his face or his badge for that crucial hour.

The PLF wasn’t linkable to him. The servers that stored its files never saw his true location or identity when he connected – he always routed through an anonymizing cloud, one of the ones he knew NSA had not effectively compromised. All the rest – Holtzman’s briefcase, the small stockpile of little green pills, the other physical tools – were in a secure storage that had no record he’d ever visited it, and no trace of his prints or DNA.

It would all be fine. Hold the line. Deny everything. He’d get great lawyers. They’d find flaws in the recording, demonstrate how it could have been faked, maybe put together their own fake recording, showing Elvis killing the man, or Gandhi. That was it.

He tapped notes to himself on his phone, set an alarm for 6am, then forced himself to sleep.

He woke before the alarm. 3.33am. Make a wish, some part of him whispered. His mother’s voice. His father would’ve beaten him bloody for having a weak thought like that. The storm sounded fainter outside, dying down by the hour as Zoe spent herself inland.