Her Secret Service (Jane Roe 1) by Jason Letts (sites to read books for free TXT) 📗

“I hope you’re right. We’ll be getting everyone together for a staff-wide meeting and then we’ll coordinate with the reporting pool afterward to get everyone on the same page. If we don’t get out in front of this, it’s going to look bad. That means we need to have articles going live today, and heaven help anyone who submits something after the deadline this time,” he said, glaring at Oliver.

“Right. We’ve all got our deadlines,” Oliver said, wishing he’d been able to say something ten times as snide for one final sendoff, but raising suspicions by dunking on the editor to his face wasn’t going to help Oliver keep his freedom.

Ducking out of the office, Oliver swung by his desk one last time to grab a half-empty bag of pretzels and a hard drive that went along with his laptop. Once he had everything the FBI would be taking anyway packed in his case, he was out the door and back in his Kia Forte.

The car came to a halt at a red light, giving Oliver a precious chance to think about what he needed to do next. He was used to covering his tracks, being impossible to follow, but the FBI had tools that went beyond what amateur internet sleuths and competing journalists had access to.

He started to put together a plan in his mind that involved taking public transportation down to the southern border and finding a way across into Mexico. He had a faint interest in the Yucatan Peninsula, and the jungles there struck him as the perfect getaway. No one would ever find him once he had a new name and started learning some Spanish, which he figured he could master in a couple of weeks.

The trip home couldn’t go fast enough, and he’d barely gotten out of the car near his building when his phone started to ring. Worried it was the FBI, Oliver glanced at the screen to see that it was his editor. The meeting was starting and he was irate, but Oliver couldn’t care less. His mind was already on the implications of carrying around a phone that could be used to track his location.

He had to get rid of all of this stuff and fast. The door to his apartment opened with an annoying creak, one he really wouldn’t ever have to listen to again this time. Crossing the room, Oliver pulled open the window against the far wall that looked over a narrow alley. While living here, he’d perfected tossing apple cores and other garbage into the dumpster of the building next door. Shutting off his phone, he chucked it across the gap and straight into the dumpster. His bag flew next and landed with an audible thump.

Heading into his bedroom, Oliver grabbed the bottom of the rusty steel frame and yanked it away from the wall. That exposed a hole in the wall about the size of a baseball. Leaning beside it, Oliver reached in almost to the elbow and withdrew a bulky sock tied up with rubber bands. He peeled the bands away one after another until he was able to unroll the sock and shake out the contents, a wad of cash with nearly a thousand dollars in it and little white Percocet pills in a plastic bag that could be sold for some additional money.

He was breathing heavily at this point as he tried to envision what running for it would look like. Riding a bus most of the way across the country brought the fear of it being boarded by the authorities at some point, leaving him nowhere to run. On the other hand, even if he changed the plates on his car he had no clue how far he’d be able to get until they found him.

Crossing the actual border into Mexico seemed like the easiest part, simply because there had to be a regular smuggling operation he could partake of. Sighing, he tried to come to grips with how much of his trip would have to come together on the fly, and his penchant for planning and covering his tracks might not hold up against the lack of time.

But it would all be better once he reached his destination, a small town to call his own where he would use his ingenuity to build a thriving business and impress the local women, who would be vying for his attention. All he had to do was move himself there.

Once he’d exited the bedroom with a pack containing some extra clothes, the last thing he had to do was unplug his home laptop and send that one sailing out the window as well. Brushing his finger against the trackpad to wake it up, he was about to turn it off when out of habit he noticed that a message had come through to the email account he’d created for tips.

Unable to resist seeing what it was, especially when it had a tantalizing subject line that read “This is what you’ve been waiting for,” Oliver clicked to open the message from one of his most trusted informants, an old retiree and keyboard warrior steeped in the net’s most eccentric theories.

He glanced over the message with the expectation that it would be something irrelevant and he’d be shutting the machine down, but instead he found himself drawn to the attachments that consisted of three pictures. Oliver was usually sent screenshots of offensive social media posts, but the pictures were something else and required a little more scrutiny. The attachment thumbnails showed that it had to do with some papers on a desk that were photographed surreptitiously, but it wasn’t clear what they were about.

The document in one of the photos was too blurry, one was at a bad angle making it too tough to read at first look, and the last had someone’s arm partially obscuring the shot, but at least on that one there was a legible header