Epilogue

I went to work for Jason Black a couple of days after we detonated the bomb. When he offered the job, I didn't even hesitate. I mean, let's face it -- even though he cleared off my criminal record, I wasn't swimming in job prospects. My employer had turned out to be the company I was fighting, and Mike was in the wind anyway. Never saw him again. And, like I said earlier, I'd pretty much exhausted all of the big, scary guy jobs... except for the one Jason Black gave me, I guess.

We tried to go after Umbra for the whole "let's blow up Los Angeles" thing, but we really had nothing. We had no evidence except for the bomb, which we destroyed (and remember, its radiological signature couldn't have been traced back to Umbra anyway). We had Laura's testimony, but she was just one person. Her word against thousands of Umbra employees... yeah, couldn't make that stick. There was my story and Quentin's story, too, but neither of us made stellar witnesses, and our testimony was all stuff that Laura told us, anyway.

So, we had nothing. We tried to put some undercover people inside Umbra for the next couple of years, but it never really worked. The DoD, at Jason Black's recommendation, cut all of their defense funding... until three years later, when 9/11 happened. Then everything was either forgiven or forgotten, because Umbra got an assload of money to ramp up our war machine for the Afghan and Iraq wars.

I worked for Jason Black for, Jesus, 35 more years. So you know what's coming. The nuclear bomb set off in Los Angeles -- Aon Center, sixth floor -- in 2018. Both Black and I smelled a rat, and the investigation landed in our office... and we couldn't do shit with it. Umbra had learned from its mistakes, learned to cover its tracks too well. The most we could get anyone to believe was that North Korean extremists somehow obtained and copied Umbra's plan from 1998, but we couldn't prove it. I mean, we couldn't even prove it was their plan back then. There were rumors, bad reputations, but Umbra kept on getting tons of money throughout the entire China War.

It may seem like we lost. I mean, it seems that way to me, most of the time. But here's the thing -- I'm not dead yet. Neither is Laura. Just saw her before I went to work this morning. And as long as we're still kicking around, we'll find a way to prove it, even as Umbra is looking heroic here in the fourth year of the war. We'll expose what they did.

You know. Eventually.