Jackery fumed. How weak-willed and cowardly could a man be? The pussy of a bank president caved at the first sign of a threat—even after Jackery told him to hold tight while he prepared a counterattack. How had such a spineless creature risen to the office of bank president? He wouldn’t have lasted a day in the jungle of Silicon Valley.
Such were the raw materials Jackery had to work with. Just like the sheriff who’d let a loudmouth lawyer bully him into releasing the Walker girl before they could make an example of her. These men were big frogs in a very small pond. Nothing in their cozy existence had prepared them to fight. When he succeeded in making Dixon County his fiefdom, they’d have their place, but it would be far down the totem pole. He’d give them impressive-sounding titles and let them strut around, but they’d be nowhere near the levers of power.
He hated the feeling that the Barb cabal was running circles around him. One by one, the assholes were undercutting the pillars that made Jackery’s plan possible. This couldn’t continue. He needed to step up his game. He’d grown complacent and allowed his early successes to lull him.
That ended now.
He called Marcy.
“Hello, sir,” she said.
“What’s the news on the Barb front?”
“There are a bunch of fresh posts,” she said. “I’m summarizing them for you now.”
“Forget that and give me your gut.”
“Sir?”
“What stood out when you read the posts? Were there any patterns? Any impressions—even if you can’t necessarily back them up with hard data.”
“Now that you mention it, sir, the posts from today have a different feel from yesterday’s—even the ones supposedly from the same account. And…”
“Yes?”
“All of today’s posts feel like they were written by the same person.”
“Interesting,” said Jackery. “Now that I think of it, there was something about the posts from yesterday. As if they were trying too hard to sound different.”
“Like a single person creating multiple personas?”
“Exactly.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“To throw me off the scent. It’s a classic disinformation campaign. As Sun Tzu says, ‘All warfare is based on deception.’”
“How do you know things like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like stuff that isn’t about business.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Marcy. Business is war.”
“That’s profound,” said Marcy.
Jackery took the praise as his due. “Once we know,” he said, “or at least strongly suspect, that my enemy wants me to think he’s multiple people, the question becomes why? What is the deception designed to cover up? In other words, what’s he trying to hide? Discover that, and he’s ours.”
“I’m on it,” said Marcy.
“Good girl,” said Jackery. “Tell me the moment you find something.”
He ended the call, thinking yet again what a prize Marcy was. Whip-smart and loyal to a fault. Too bad she was as homely as a horse. But he wasn’t fucking her. He had other women for that. Which reminded him, he hadn’t said anything to Mae Lin about cutting her loose. He found himself wincing at the thought of never seeing her again. Especially now when he was under so much stress. He could really use her company.
The thought popped into his head that he could still make that happen. She didn’t know of his intention to end things with her. It was purely something he’d decided within his own mind. That meant he could just as easily un-decide it.
The risk was that he would come to enjoy her company too much. But using that rationale to break it off was like cutting out chocolate because it tasted too good. He enjoyed Mae Lin’s company. Why should he deny himself that pleasure out of some abstract fear of becoming dependent? She was a girl. Not a line of cocaine.
The more he thought about it, the stronger his desire became to see her for a little while longer—at least while he carried out the Dixon campaign. Yes, it would sting when he eventually cut her loose, but that would be true whether he broke it off today or months in the future. So why not enjoy himself for now?
He decided to allow a day or two to go by and then send for her. They could order in and eat in bed. By then he was pretty sure he’d have plenty of new stress to work off.
That decided, he returned to considering his next move. If Marcy’s intuition was correct—and her intuition was matched by what his own gut told him—that meant that rather than a group of enemies, he was facing a single one. Someone clever who understood the art of deception. He tried to think of a man who might want to hurt him, someone he’d crossed paths with who had an ax to grind. The list was long. You don’t reach the heights he had without making enemies. But who among those enemies had both the balls to take him on and the cleverness to execute the moves this Barb had? That was a much shorter list.
Out of the blue, his phone rang. He glanced at the screen. It was Marcy again. He was surprised because, like most of her generation, she considered calling without texting first to be the height of rudeness. She must have something important.
“What have you got?” he said, answering the call.
“Sorry to call like this, but I have a friend at one of the message boards hosting the Barb posts. I called and asked if they could look at the posts for me.”
“What did they find?”
“When they checked the logs, they found all of the posts came from the same IP address.”
“So it is one person doing everything.”
“That’s how it looks. But I wouldn’t have called you just for that.”
“You have more?”
“I asked my friend to look up the IP address, and he told me the location is somewhere in Dixon County.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Oh, no, sir,” she said, horrified. “I would never do that.”
“You’re telling me my enemy is on the ground in Dixon County right under the sheriff’s nose, and he has no idea they’re there.”
“Yes.”
“This was very definitely worth a phone call,” he said. “You’ve done well, Marcy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Keep digging and call me if you find anything else—no matter how small.”
He ended the call before she could fumble her goodbyes.
So, his enemy was in Dixon. That took real balls. He allowed himself a moment of admiration. Talk about deception. Not only was his enemy disguising his identity, he was also disguising his location. Why would he do that? The only reason was because his location made him vulnerable.
But I got you now, you crafty son of a bitch. You’re fighting on my territory.
Jackery’s next more was obvious: he needed to smoke the bastard out. That would require reinforcements. The sheriff wouldn’t be happy about that, but fuck him. It had been his job to secure the area, and he obviously wasn’t up to the challenge. So Jackery would take matters into his own hands.
He’d hoped to have the county properties in his name before bringing in outside troops, but it was time to readjust the plan. Dixon wasn’t a huge county, but it still held a large number of places for this Barb asshole to hide. Therefore, the problem called for a brute force solution.
And Jackery knew just the brutes.