Chapter Twenty-Seven
ANGEL SINCLAIR
After Jax left the café, I looked around. The elderly man who’d bought me my hot chocolate and croissant was sitting near the fire reading the newspaper. He must have felt me staring at him, because he looked up and smiled. I gave him a small wave. Other than him, I didn’t know anyone else in the café.
That was a good thing.
I opened my laptop, keeping my back against the wall so there was no one behind me to look over my shoulder. I wasn’t going to hack in a café full of people and slow Wi-Fi, but that wasn’t going to stop me from pulling up a list of employees at my father’s last known place of employment, King’s Security, for the period of time he’d worked there. I’d already hacked the list when I was still at home. During that hack, I’d discovered King’s Security was a cover for a NSA satellite office, which led me to believe my father might have worked for the NSA.
Methodically, I began to google the names on the list, starting with the security engineers, as I assumed he would have had the closest contact with them. I created a folder and began compiling dossiers on each person. Nothing seemed unusual about any of them until I came to an engineer named Joseph Lando. He’d died in a freak boating accident about two weeks before my father disappeared.
I typed in his name and pulled up an article with a photograph from a newspaper. The article was about his funeral, which had taken place at a local church and been attended by sixty-two people. The eulogy had been given by a man named Isaac Remington. Joseph Lando had been thirty-six years old. There was no other information about the accident, other than it had happened on the lake near his house. He was survived by his mother, Sally Lando, his brother, James Lando, and his wife, Maria. Apparently, Maria and Joseph had no children.
The photograph accompanying the article featured a group of men carrying a coffin. The caption underneath the photo only named the first two men in line, Misha Peterson and Isaac Remington, the man who had delivered the eulogy. I enlarged the photo, and my breath caught in my throat. The second man behind Isaac Remington was my father. I’d seen enough photographs of him to recognize his face. So, my dad had known Joseph Lando well enough to attend his funeral as a pallbearer.
I quickly cross-referenced the names Misha Peterson and Isaac Remington with my list of employees at King’s Security. Only Remington came up as having been an employee of King’s Security. He had been Joseph Lando’s and my father’s boss. I did one more search that took me nearly an hour, but I discovered Lando’s wife was still alive.
I didn’t know what she could possibly tell me after all this time, but I planned to give her a call next Saturday. I’d take any scrap of information about my father that I could get.
Wally and Frankie sat in the seat behind me on the bus and chatted all the way home about the movie. Mike sat next to me even though there were several empty seats.
“So, Angel, you up for gaming after dinner?” he asked.
“What game did you have in mind?”
“Quaver Legend. You know it?”
“Of course I know it. I’ve made it to level seven already.”
He whistled. “Level seven? I’m at level five.”
“Noteworthy,” I said. Quaver was hard, so to be at level five was decent. “Anyone else in?”
“So far, you, me, and Jax. Does Frankie play? Hoping to pull in at least Wally for one more.”
“Wally will play,” I confirmed. I would have interrupted him to ask for certain, but Frankie was in the middle of explaining an important part of the movie to him. “I think he’s a level six in Quaver. Frankie isn’t into gaming, but you can invite her anyway. Personally, I could use a little stress relief. It’s a great idea, Mike.”
It turned out that only Wally, Mike, Jax, and I wanted to play. Bo wanted to head to the gym, and none of the other girls were interested in playing. So the four of us headed to the gaming room to get started.
Jax was a so-so player, so it was really a battle between Wally, Mike, and me. Mike and I fought tooth and nail, but Wally edged both of us out to win, using some unconventional moves that left the rest of us in the dust.
“Dang, I’m impressed,” Mike said, setting down the controller. “Wally, dude, you can game. All of you have wicked skill. I didn’t expect that level of expertise.”
Jax tossed his controller on the coffee table. “I was clearly out of my league on this one.”
I stretched my arms over my head. Gaming with these guys had felt good. It was strange, but I’d become comfortable in their company. Their appreciation for my skill and smarts was real. I appreciated it, although I didn’t need it. Perhaps that was part of the UTOP strategy—creating grounds for accepting and respecting the strengths and weaknesses of others.
In fact, the more I got to know my fellow candidates at UTOP, the more I liked them—minus Kira, of course. For a loner like me, that was a huge and startling personal development.
I wasn’t sure what to think of it.