“It seems extreme,” Giraffe said.
“That’s my take too,” Polar Bear said. “We promised to break the glass only in the direst of emergencies. All of us have to agree. It can’t be four out of five.”
“I know,” Chris said.
This had been Boomerang’s top-level security from the start. None of them knew the others. That was a huge part of it. If one was caught, they couldn’t sell out the others, even if they wanted to, no matter how much pressure was put on them to turn. There was no way to track each other down.
Unless they “broke the glass.”
All of their names were in a secure file with every protection known to man implemented. Each member of Boomerang had created their own unique twenty-seven-digit security code. If all five put in their codes within ten seconds of the others, the five animals could see the name of the sixth member of Boomerang. That was the only way. All five had to put in their individual codes at the same time—and even then, they would only get the identity of the sixth member.
“Let’s go through this step-by-step for a second,” Chris said. “We have a past target, Henry McAndrews, who has been murdered.”
“He wasn’t a past target,” Polar Bear said. “He was a potential target. In the end, we chose not to proceed.”
“I stand corrected. A potential target. His case was presented to us by Panther, who is currently not replying to our messages. There are several possibilities, including several possibilities which can be boiled down to this: It’s a coincidence. We deal with a lot of people who are acting rashly. The fact that one is murdered is no guarantee it has a connection to us.”
“That was the argument we half-heartedly made,” Kitten said, “before we remembered that Henry McAndrews was brought to us by our one missing member.”
“Correct. I think for the purposes of this discussion, let’s put the coincidence possibility to the side. Let’s say that Henry McAndrews’s murder is directly connected to us. More to the point, let’s say the murder is directly connected to Panther’s disappearance.”
“Whoa, that’s a little strong,” Polar Bear said. “Disappearance? We don’t know that. Has it even been twenty-four hours? Look, we are all very engaged in the tech world. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. I don’t know about you, but when I need a break—and that happens—I go cold turkey. I go on a boat out on the water where I don’t have any mobile service or internet. There is a chance, a decent chance, that Panther has done the same.”
“Without telling us?” Kitten countered. “And by coincidence, they choose to do so at this very moment?”
“So you think what, Kitten? That Panther murdered a police chief because he bothered some pretty-boy reality winner?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
Chris stepped in. “I think what Kitten is saying—or at least, what I’m saying—is that we need to find out what happened here.”
“By outing Panther?”
“By getting Panther’s name, yes. This way, we can check on them and make sure they’re okay.”
“I agree,” Kitten said.
“I’m against it,” Polar Bear said. “For a lot of reasons.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“First, sorry, it’s still too early. If it were me, if I were Panther in this scenario, I would not want you to out me. So I’m hard-pressed to do it to Panther.”
“What else?”
“If you’re right, Lion, if this is directly connected to Panther, then I can only see two possibilities. One, Panther was so incensed by our decision not to punish this McAndrews that he took matters into his own hands. I know, I know, I’m supposed to say ‘they.’ For all I know, Panther is a woman. But I find it awkward so let me just speak this way, okay? So that’s one possibility, right? That Panther lost his mind and killed McAndrews and now he’s ghosting us.”
“Okay.”
“Except that’s pretty damn unlikely. Sure, Panther pushed for us to okay a low-level hurricane on McAndrews, but he didn’t seem super upset about it. If he had, if Panther really pleaded for us to punish McAndrews, I think we would have relented. But he didn’t. So why would he go and kill him?”
“Fair point,” Chris conceded.
“Then let me take it another step. If Panther did decide to kill McAndrews and ghost us, well, he knows that we might break the glass. We would get his real name. We would be able to track him down. So ghosting us makes no sense.”