Taking advantage of the tools given to him, Lucas used that same tech to quickly snap pictures of each of the book’s forty-nine pages. When he was finished, he rifled through the pages on the desk until he found an incomplete contract. Grabbing the nearby quill and dipping it into the inkwell, he scribbled in a few bogus numbers and statistics. When he was finished, he took the purloined seal, dabbed it in some wax, and made his handiwork official. He repeated the process ten separate times, setting each page aside after taking note of the modified numbers, dates, and the minutes he listed on a separate sheet of paper.

“What are you doing?” Bonnie asked as she watched Lucas work.

“I’m making fake contracts,” Lucas replied. “Kegan’s signature is pretty easy to copy, and these will be indistinguishable from real ones. The noble’s wax seal is like this age’s version of a notary, so if the signature and the seal both are authentic-looking enough, no one will believe either is fake.”

“So, you’re going to put him out of business? I don’t get it,” Bonnie replied. She walked across the room and hovered over Lucas’s shoulder uncomfortably, studying Lucas’s every movement. “And why bother? Do you really think even with his seal he’d honor a contract he knows is fake?”

“You’re right,” Lucas agreed. “He wouldn’t honor these at all. Even with his seal, he’d probably be able to argue in court that he never received goods or services for the amounts claimed, and we’d never win. But that’s not the point. I’m not making contracts that have him buying things from us, I’m saying he sold things to us in these contracts and that he already received the money.”

“What? Why would you do that?” Bonnie pressed. “I don’t get it. What’s the point of saying he sold stuff to us?”

“He’s making them to legitimize a fake ledger,” Nick answered for him. “If you’re going to be a merc, you should know how this stuff works. You might be asked to do this for another client one day.”

“Yup, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I plan to make several dozen contracts that show Kegan got a ton of money from other sources. In the Imperium, if he received money, he should pay taxes on it. It’s no different than real life. Even if it’s not true that he received funds, all we have to do is prove that he didn’t pay dues on the money he earned to make his original books look like they were cooked and the fake book we’re going to make look real. So, if I take these fake contracts along with the fake accounting book that I’m going to make to Dray von Maidbanger, Kegan will be in hot water, and we’ll have freed that annoying Dwarf’s friend in the process,” Lucas explained.

“And then . . . Then we can kill Kegan and take this stuff to sell?” Bonnie asked.