“What the fuck was that?” Billy paced the length of the room moving from the window to the couch and back again as he gripped the phone.

He’d been physically ill the moment he saw the newscast showing two trains barreling toward one another on tracks they weren’t supposed to be on at the same time. He had recognized the scenario with the two trains as soon as he’d seen it. Thank God the person behind the setup had stopped the trains just short of a collision, but still, the passengers on them had to have been scared witless.

One man had suffered a heart attack and it was looking like he might not survive.

Billy’s initial thought had been that one of the people in the Brain Trust had acted on one of the scenarios, but he dismissed that possibility right away. When they set up the Brain Trust, they’d picked their marks carefully. Everyone in the rooms had been chosen for not only their intelligence and naïveté, but also because Damon’s profiling had shown they were highly unlikely to ever act on any of the information shared in the group.

That left one possible culprit behind setting those trains up to collide. And he was talking to him. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“Calm down, Billy.” Damon was using the patronizing tone that always got under Billy’s skin. “It was a necessary demonstration of the product. How can we expect anybody to put money out there without us proving what we have?”

“You could have killed those people. I didn’t sign on for anything like that. We can go to the companies and show them what we have, or a piece of it anyway. They would have paid to see what else we had found, and to find out who gave us the information if they’d just seen a small sample of what we have. Proving it is complete bullshit. You could have killed everyone on those trains.”

Silence on the other end of the line sent a chill through him, but it was the only answer he got.

“What the hell are you doing?” Billy’s question was quiet, too quiet. Mostly because he had a feeling the answer wasn’t something he really wanted to know. He asked the question again, louder, nonetheless. “What the hell are you doing?”

His partner’s answer was frighteningly nonchalant. “I found another way for us to make more money with this. We agreed this was going to be a one-time thing. In light of that, we need to get the most we can out of it.”

“What does that mean?” Every fiber of his being prickled with the uneasy knowledge that his partner’s true nature—a nature he had long suspected but had been studiously ignoring—was behind this move. “What do you mean you found another way for us to make more money?”

The voice on the other end of the phone remained bland. “Early on it made sense for us to go to the relevant companies and extort money from them in exchange for the information that we’ve garnered.” He paused. “There are . . . other parties that will pay more for the information.”

“Anyone who would pay more for this information is going to be dangerous. Very dangerous.” Billy began pacing again, running a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end.

“That’s of little concern. The bidding will all be done remotely. We won’t have any interaction with them, no engagement at all. Everything will be perfectly safe.”

“That’s not the point!” He’d now raised his voice to almost a yell. A hollow ache began in his stomach, and he was reminded how he’d foolishly once thought he’d been the one in control here. It had become evident long ago that he wasn’t the one in control here anymore. But that didn’t mean he needed to sit by and let this happen. He could stop this. Had to stop this.

He took a slow breath before speaking again. “You know perfectly well that’s not the point. What people would do with this kind of information is the issue. A lot of people will die, or worse. I’m not going to be part of that.”

There was only a slight pause on the other end of the phone, not enough to convince him Damon had given much thought at all to what he had said. “Well, it’s not up to you, is it? If you’re not happy with the situation, you walk away. But remember this, once you’re out, you’re out. No money, nothing to show for over a year and a half of work.”

They’d spent hours every day coddling those idiots in the chat rooms. For people with such high IQs, they could really be incredibly stupid. Not to mention, putting up with the arrogance of the eggheads looking down on anyone who didn’t measure up. And let’s face it, that had been their profiles. The geniuses had often caught on that the fake profiles Billy and Damon were behind in the group weren’t as intelligent as the others. But that arrogance had kept them in the dark about the manipulation going on.

That didn’t matter. Billy would scrap all that before he’d let this information out to the kinds of people who’d pay money for it. He opened his mouth to object, but didn’t have a chance to respond. The line went dead.

He stared at the phone for a minute, not all together believing what had just happened.

Fuck. He needed to find some way to fix this shit. Right now, they both had access to the information. He needed to figure out a way to close that up. To lock down access to the information until he could get this shit show back on the rails.