Hitman vs Hitman - L.A. Witt Page 0,41

kind of computer they were talking about.

“It’s not the sort of thing I can just run off with,” he explained, letting his head loll against the car window but keeping his eyes on Ricardo. “It’s a little too hardwired into the house, for starters.”

“Why is that?”

“I needed the extra processing power.”

Ricardo shook his head. “You’re flapping your lips, but you’re not actually telling me anything. I know that’s how you roll, generally speaking, but considering that I’m going to be trying to help you get to this supercomputer of yours, you should make my job easier by being clear.”

August smiled. “But I like being opaque.”

“And I like staying alive, so spell it out for me or we’re turning around.”

August huffed, definitely ignoring the little frisson of pleasure that went down his spine when Ricardo’s balance started tipping toward “determined and/or murderous.” “I live in a smart house,” he said at last. “Everything, every last light and appliance, is wired into everything else, and is accessible and controllable only by me. I have some of the best biometric sensors in the world ensuring that the parts of my property I really don’t want people to access can’t be accessed, not without destroying them. The stuff you saw? The explosions, the secret passages, the back doors—those are the obvious part of my defenses, the things I trigger when I don’t have time to do anything else. But when I have the time to take my time?” Oh, like last year, when that fucking French dickhead had come after him, charming his way into August’s arms before trying to slit his throat in bed. That was the last time August had slept with a guy so blatantly pretty—you couldn’t trust a man like that. Himself included.

Killing the would-be killer had been a simple necessity after a power play like that. The satisfying part was wiring him to a chair first and letting him watch while August hacked all of his bank accounts, destroyed his house and yacht, and bought out his family’s business, all in the span of twelve glorious hours. It took special equipment to pull that off so fast, and to do it without being trackable. That was what the home computer was for.

And getting rid of the body was what the second water tank was for. There wasn’t a drop of water in that thing, and after a few days there wasn’t a drop of recognizable human being in it either.

Ricardo made an impatient gesture, and August forced his mind back on track. “When I can take my time, I’ve got the means to do a lot more subtle work. I have access to facial recognition systems that provide a match of 99.6 percent certainty, and they do it fast. Then they securely store the information so that I can look at it when I have more leisure, and I can do all sorts of interesting things then. Like remote-access biometrically locked cell phones, for starters. You would not believe the kind of shit some people keep on their phone—like Flappy Bird! Who still has the Flappy Bird app? The actual creator of that app made his mint and then pulled the damn thing, it was so awful, but—”

“August. Focus.”

He hmphed. “Rude. What I’m saying is, my home is equipped to run as a giant computer, in a way. All my smart devices provide processing power that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get, unless I wanted to shell out ten billion dollars for my own quantum computer, which…” He shrugged. “I’m rich, but not that rich.”

“So what you’re saying is you’ve got a special computer that can only be accessed inside your house that will use facial recognition software to identify Heidi’s bad guy really, really fast.” Ricardo raised an eyebrow. “Is that it?”

“I suppose…in a nutshell.”

“Hmm.” He focused on the road for a moment, then said, “Why not send the picture to your sister?”

August froze. “No,” he managed after a second. “Not an option.”

“Why not? She must have even more resources than you, and we wouldn’t have to skirt a bunch of cops and God knows who else to get it done.”

“No.”

Ricardo looked at him calmly. “Why not?”

“Because she’s off-fucking-limits, that’s why not.” He couldn’t keep the venom out of his voice, didn’t even want to. “It’s bad enough you even know about her. Don’t you dare think you can bring her into this with a few vague references to making life easy for us. I would walk