Sullivan Saga 2: Sullivan's Wrath by Michael K. Rose Page A

and, after drinks had been brought in, dismissed his servant. He reached out to the table and flipped a switch on a box the size of a pack of cards. “A signal scrambler,” he said. “I use one wherever I go. Can never be too careful.”
    Sullivan glanced around the room. “You’ve really arrived, my friend.”
    Brain grinned. “All because of the two of you. You helped me bring down Zednik’s operation.”
    Allen nodded. “And you know what it cost me, Eugene.”
    Brain sighed. “Yes. I really am sorry about that, Frank.”
    Allen waved his hand. “It’s in the past. And it wasn’t your fault, it’s just one of those things. But we do need something from you now.”
    “Name it.”
    Allen turned to Sullivan. Sullivan cleared his throat. “Eugene, we need two hundred thousand credits.”
    Brain’s cheek twitched. “That’s a lot of money.”
    “It is. But you know that Kate Alexander’s father has died. She now controls the company. We can easily repay you, but Frank and I need money now. We can’t wait for Kate to send it.”
    Brain smiled. “You two are up to your old tricks again, eh?”
    Sullivan laughed. “Something like that.”
    “What do you need to buy with the money?”
    Sullivan shifted position in his chair. “It’s better if you don’t know that, Eugene. We don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position if something should happen to us.”
    Brain looked off toward the far end of the room and nodded. “I understand. And I trust you both, completely. You’ll have the money.”
    Brain took out his tablet and began typing on it. After a few minutes, he put it away and smiled. “There. I’m having the credits transferred to a prepaid. One of my men will bring it as soon as it’s ready.”
    “Thank you,” said Sullivan. “You have no idea how important this is.”
    Allen leaned forward. “So the last we knew, you were off to find Orion Zednik’s body to bring it back to Abilene.”
    Brain laughed. “Now that’s a story. My men and I went out to that house in the woods you told us about. You’d mentioned that there was a man tied up in a van inside and Zednik was dead in the kitchen.”
    Sullivan nodded.
    “We got there, and the garage door was wide open, no van. We went inside and, sure enough, no Zednik. Well, it seems Zednik had credits squirreled away in banks on other planets. It wasn’t that much compared to what he had on Abilene, but combined with the ransom he would have gotten for Kate, it would have been enough to begin rebuilding.
    “Zednik was just waiting for the authorization to transfer the money, but you killed him before it came through. When we eventually tracked down Zednik’s man, we found out he had scooped out Zednik’s eyeball and let Zednik’s tablet scan the eye to confirm the transfer. The transfer was for half a million. All that was left on the card when we got it was a few thousand. It appeared he’d wasted much of it on drugs and whores by the time we got to him. But we couldn’t kill him. We had to take him alive because he knew where Zednik’s body was, and I needed that body to prove to everyone here on Abilene that he was really dead.”
    Brain laughed. “The things that man made us do to him to find out where the body was… it wasn’t pretty. We couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just tell us. We probably would have let him go if he had. We supposed at the time it was out of some sort of loyalty to his former boss.
    “Well, we had to take off a few fingers and an ear before he finally broke. We went to get the body, and as we dug it up, we figured out why he hadn’t wanted to tell us. He’d buried several prepaid cards with the body, each loaded with ten thousand credits. He hadn’t blown as much of it as we’d thought. He’d buried it, like a pirate with his treasure.”
    Brain smiled. “It was smart, really. The way he was throwing money around, someone would have tried to rob him eventually.”
    “What happened to