“What’s our next move?” she said, wanting to change the subject.
He took a bite of satay and chewed, his expression contemplative, then swallowed. “Hard to say without more intel. You heard anything more from SPD?”
She shook her head. “The chief is giving me a lot of room for once, meaning she’s not pressuring my lieutenant, either. I don’t want to risk any of that by getting in touch. If anything changes, I’ll hear from them.”
Carl nodded. “Sleeping dogs, I get it. Well, no matter what, it seems to me we need to either get ahold of those videos, or confirm they’re destroyed. Or at least confirm they’re inaccessible by anyone, which amounts to the same thing. I don’t think any of this is emotional for the people we’re up against. They’re just trying to acquire something that’s important to them, whether because it’s valuable or because it’s a threat. If they get it, we don’t matter anymore. If they realize they can’t get it, same thing. Of course, if we get the videos, and they know we have them, or they think we do, anyway, they’re not going to leave us alone. We’ll have to make them.”
That all made sense to her. Of course, the question was how.
“What about Schrader?” she said.
“What about him?”
“You think he’s alive?”
He looked away for a moment. “I have a hunch he is, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because he knows the only thing keeping him alive is those videos. If he gives up his credentials, they’ll kill him for sure.”
“But if they’re torturing him, at some point he’ll break.”
“True. But even then, they wouldn’t kill him right away. Because if it turned out the information he gave them was false—and by the way, information you torture out of someone is typically unreliable—they’d be shit out of luck. It’s like if you tortured the combination to a safe out of someone. You’d be wise to open the safe before killing the person. Sorry to be so gruesome, but it’s true.”
“Plus there’s the dead-man switch.”
“Right. If you want those videos to use as blackmail, they’re not much good once they’ve been released into the wild. Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
“What am I thinking?”
“Well, if Schrader dies, one way or the other, and there is a dead-man switch like he told Diaz, the switch gets triggered, the videos get released, and we’re all off the hook. I mean, if I knew for sure there were a dead-man switch, I’d happily shoot the sumbitch myself. And I figure, all the men in those videos would have their reputations destroyed, which seems only fair. On top of which, every one of those videos is a crime and evidence of a crime, right? So with the videos out, Diaz could prosecute a whole lot of people.”
Livia didn’t answer. He was right—some of it was what she had been thinking. But he wasn’t seeing the whole picture.
“But here’s the thing,” he went on. “We don’t know about the dead-man switch. If it’s a bluff and we kill Schrader, then we have no way to take control of those videos. Someone else could get ahold of them. Or they could be lost forever. Either way, the men who appear in them would go unpunished. And we’d need a way of persuading the people who are after the videos now, like Rispel, that we don’t have them. It could be tricky.”
All true. But he still wasn’t seeing it. She didn’t blame him. This was her world, not his.
“There’s something you’re missing,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“The girls. If those videos are made public on the Internet, it’s forever. That kind of thing is a nightmare for the victims. For the rest of their lives, every time they see a strange man looking at them—in a supermarket, in a restaurant, at work—they wonder if it’s someone who has watched them being raped and degraded online. So yeah, I’d like to kill Schrader. And I’d do it, too. But not if there’s a dead-man switch. Not even to take the pressure off us. And I don’t want you or Larison doing it, either.”