Collapses the Youth Guard

“It’d be easy,” I said. “I’ve been looking into your organization, and a few words in the right ears and all your secrets would be open to the world.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

I leaned forward and patted her hand.

“I’m sure the Youth Guard is terribly dangerous dear, but there are enough skeletons in the closets of your superiors that the whole thing would fold like a house of cards with the right kinds of pressure. The funny thing is, that I know you’ll tell this to your superiors, and they’re going to start to clean house and trying to burn evidence. What they won’t know is this… are the things they’re about to do the things that are going to start the whole ball rolling? Are the cover ups going to be the inciting incident, or have I already spoken the right words in the right ears and they’ll know what to look for?”

Her hand tightened under mine.

***

“Two months six days,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s how long it would take to dismantle the Youth Guard if I were to keep my involvement a secret. Letting them know reduces that to five weeks.”

“Didn’t you just let them know?” Battery asked uncertainly.

“They’ll implode on their own now,” I said coldly. “The people who understand what I can do are going to start panicking. They’ll start covering their tracks and setting up their coworkers to be fall guys. Those people will see the way the wind is blowing, and they’ll start creating their own files to use as leverage in plea deals. The whole thing was unstable to start with, a house of cards. I just nudged one of the cards on the bottom and when it collapses it will be spectacular.”

“Are you telling us that you really did just destroyed the Youth Guard?”

Actually, I’d set up some of the necessary preconditions a couple of weeks ago when I’d been frustrated with my progress on my work and had been irrationally blaming the Youth Guard for some of the crap that had been happening to me. In my defense, I’d been mainlining energy drinks while I had been on the web trying to figure things out, and I’d been really unhappy with some of the patterns I’d been seeing. Forty hours without sleep had led to me sending out e-mails that I didn’t really remember including a couple to the offices of a Senator who would have been happy to have a government agency take over for the Youth Guard.

***

Guard