06 - Vengeful Read Online Free Page B

room floor. It had a five-point base, supposedly making it harder to overturn in the name of idiot-proofing. Clearly, the designers had never met idiots of the sort I had to deal with.
    I carried him by his lapels through the air as he struggled instinctively against my mother-bird grip on him. “What are you doing?” he managed to cry out by the time I was halfway back to his cubicle.
    “I need you to work,” I said, drifting down and dropping him into his own chair.
    He hit gracelessly, spinning it halfway around thanks to his flailing limbs, nearly overturning this one as well. You had one job, J.J. “Have you thought about just asking—like a normal person would?!”
    “Do I strike you as a normal person?” I let gravity reassert its dominion over me and thumped to the ground feet-first, landing like a badass.
    “I hope you’re not going to hit me at all,” he said, fiddling with his glasses.
    I looked him straight in the eye. “Let’s skip the threats. The explosion.”
    “Yeah,” he said, looking sort of like he was returning to business mode, though giving me a wary look. “Figured you’d be in about that. Let me tell you, that going off outside the window was actually a little more gentle than what you just did. Just for future reference.”
    “Information,” I said.
    “Manners,” he replied, and I got right up in his face, causing him to squirm. “I can see you’re … uh … strained at the moment, and not of the ‘re’ variety, so why don’t I just …” He tapped on his keyboard while turning to give me a close-up view of his cheek. I just kept right there, like I was going to Hannibal Lecter him and take a bite if he pissed me off. “Here we go.”
    I pulled back enough to get the stink of cat out of my nostrils and so I could see his monitor. “What the hell is this?”
    “These are email accounts tied to IP addresses of your much-vaunted ‘Brain’ villain,” J.J. said, apparently deciding to wisely forgo any additional unamusing witticisms in favor of extending his life expectancy. “I caught them last episode, while we were dealing with Anselmo and Bryant Cunningham. They’ve been waging a PR war against you, tipping off reporters to all sorts of stuff that’s … well—”
    “They’ve been messing with my public image,” I said, adding that fuel to the fire that was burning not-so-deep inside of me. “She’s been upping the speed on the treadmill as I try to outrun these media shitstorms.”
    “Bad analogy,” he said, shaking his head, “there’s not a treadmill out there that you couldn’t outrun ’til it smoked—” He caught the look on my face and stopped. “Yes. Right. So … these are the Brain’s emails … and this is what went out early this morning, while I was sleeping.”
    He punched a key and brought up a wall of text, six emails in a chain with replies and everything. I blinked as I scanned, and my blood grew colder and colder. “Who the hell is the recipient?”
    J.J. smacked his lips together. “Local assassin, near as I can tell. He doesn’t have a file with Homeland Security or the FBI, which means—”
    “He’s good,” I said, feeling that chill settle over my bones as I kept reading. “How do I find him?”
    “His name’s Michael Shafer, and he communicates over a VPN that’s technically untraceable—” J.J. froze mid-sentence, looking at me like I was going to smack him. “You know what? I don’t want to waste your time with the technicals—”
    “Good call.”
    “Anyway, I already found him.” He tapped the keyboard a few times and an address popped up along with a Google map. “Sending to your phone.”
    I heard a chirrup and pulled out my phone to find the map already there. I stared at it for only a second, the thought I had not really a thought, just a generalized urge to head straight for my enemy. “Okay,” I said and waited for him to say something—a wiseass comment, a word of caution, anything. He didn’t,