Chapter Nine
“SHUT IT DOWN,” says Ryder, low and severe.
Jake types fast, his fingers a blur over the keys. “Trying. Whoever’s pinging it’s already got a foothold and it’s not letting me sever the live connection.”
“Then pull the damn plug,” Ryder snaps.
Jake yanks out the wire taped to the tablet’s case—the one running to the antenna taped to the window for internet reception. The screen glitches, then freezes. He holds down the power button until it dies completely.
For a second, there’s a collective breath of relief.
“Silas ran surveillance on the whole club,” Wyatt says, shaking his head.
“But Silas is dead,” Damian counters.
“Someone else could be taking over for him,” Ryder suggests.
Jake stands and rifles through a plastic bag pushed against the wall, pulling out a small drive and a bundle of cables.
“Before I boot it back up, I’ll isolate it in an air-gapped system so there’s no network access.
I’ll sandbox the drive and run it offline.
If I’m lucky, I can trace the route through the cached packets. Might take a few hours.”
He plugs the tablet into his laptop, the screen blooming back to life, and starts typing.
“Or,” he murmurs, leaning in, “maybe not…it left a breadcrumb. Whoever tried to connect didn’t mask the return hop completely.
I’ve got an IP fragment and partial coordinates.
” He zooms in, squinting at the scrolling data.
“Shit. It’s coming out of Virginia. Prefix block starts with one-five-three.
That’s federal infrastructure. Private contractor range. ”
Ryder frowns. “Federal?”
“Yeah. Every IP address is assigned to a registered block. I used to audit some of them when I was still working defense-side. You see a one-five-three starting with that subnet, it’s either a three-letter agency or someone doing their dirty work for them.”
“But that doesn’t add up,” Ryder says, dragging both hands through his hair. “We knew there were government ties, but you’re talking about federal infrastructure. That’s different.”
“Yup,” Jake says. “High-level. Maybe somebody up the chain wanted their dirty data stored somewhere deniable.”
“I don’t understand,” I admit. “How does a dead guy’s tablet connect to the government?”
There’s a beat of silence. The men exchange a look.
“This is the job, Max,” Wyatt says finally. “This is what we’ve been chasing for two years.”
The government?
At first I don’t see what that has to do with the O.D. Why anything federal would be linked to a piece of O.D. equipment. But then a sinister image comes to mind—gray hair, slow smile, silver ring tapping against a glass.
Senator Jack Hargrove.
“Our job was never just about the bikers,” Ryder explains.
“A private outfit, Keystone Tactical, hired us through a DOJ cutout. Basically a middleman so the government can outsource work without anyone being able to trace it back. The brief was cartel cash being washed through shell companies and fake charities, all of it feeding into the same pipeline. The warning was that somewhere along the pipeline, there were political fingerprints. Not who, not how high up, just that it touched government. We knew the O.D. was one of the major laundering hubs and that’s why Wyatt embedded.
But what we still don’t know is who they’re washing the money for. ”
Damian folds his arms, leaning back in his chair. “We figured it was some mid-tier bureaucrat or campaign treasurer. Some asshole with a slush fund.”
Jake lifts his chin toward the dead tablet.
“And instead we’ve got a federal-contractor subnet pinging a shitty diagnostic unit from a biker clubhouse.
That’s…not normal. Whoever mirrored this data built themselves a vault inside government infrastructure.
” He looks at Wyatt. “You said Silas was running surveillance?”
Wyatt nods. “Everywhere. Hallways, offices, back rooms. Hidden cams, audio bugs. Billy showed me the setup once. Locked control room, monitors, routers, drives stacked floor to ceiling. He said nothing was short-term or recycled. That Silas kept everything. Not just the stuff he uploaded—he kept offline copies too. Months of footage archived on labeled external drives.”
“Hmm.” Jake’s brow furrows. “So he wasn’t just hoarding dirt. He might have been routing it to someone. But why?”
“Blackmail’s the obvious play,” suggests Ryder. “Insurance. If the club screws their contact, he’s got proof of every illegal thing they’ve ever done.”
“But the volume would be enormous,” Damian points out.
Wyatt hesitates, then snaps his fingers softly. “But the drives weren’t labeled by date. They were labeled by content. Stuff like ‘count nights,’ ‘deliveries,’ ‘prospects.’ Even ‘personal.’ Silas wasn’t just recording surveillance. He was sorting it and indexing it.”
Damian lets out a low whistle. “Jesus. That’s obsession-level shit.”
“More than obsession,” Jake says, eyes narrowing. “It means he wasn’t just dumping raw footage to some drop point. He was curating it. Probably flagging what mattered so whoever was pulling the strings could find what they needed fast.”
Ryder leans forward. “So who the fuck was he doing that for?”
“There was a contact,” Wyatt chips in. “The top of the ladder. They called him Mr. White. Billy said he was their insurance policy. Big meetings, black car, cash drops…” He glances at me. “And you—you knew him as the senator.”
Four pairs of eyes turn to me.
“That’s what Billy called him,” I say quietly.
“Only to me. Everyone else knew him as Mr. White, a kind of ghost benefactor. They never saw him. Billy would go to him, or sometimes the senator would come to the clubhouse but stay outside in his car. A few nights ago, Billy made me bring him drugs and cash at a hotel. I was supposed to be—” I stop, swallow hard.
“A gift. But I got away. The next morning, everyone at the clubhouse was glued to the news. They said a senator had been found unconscious at the Astoria Grand. Drugs everywhere, a ledger with the O.D. named in it, stacks of cash. His name was Senator Jack Hargrove.”
No one speaks. Jake lets out a low whistle. “Well, fuck.”
Ryder runs a hand over his beard. Damian stares at me. But Wyatt blinks, then leans forward a little.
“A few nights ago?”
“Yeah.”
His brows knit. “You mean the night I was out on that run?”
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh, and manage a sad smile.
He sits back, scrubbing a hand over his mouth. “Jesus, Max.”
He closes his eyes for a second. When his hand drops from his face, his demeanor is sharper.
“Club prez took her to all of his meetings,” he says to the other men, then he looks to me for confirmation. I nod.
“I was like a prop, I guess,” I say with a shrug. “He would dress me up and then later he’d want me to tell him how great he did in the meeting. How powerful he seemed. How the other guy seemed impressed. That kind of thing.”
Wyatt adds, “They talked business in front of her. He never censored anything.”
“I don’t think he thought I understood it,” I say.
“And some of it I didn’t, not at first. They used these weird coded phrases, like ‘new land paperwork’ when they meant a cash drop, ‘the boys in uniform’ when they meant cartel security, ‘the church fund’ when they meant the laundering front.
But after a while you start to hear the pattern. ”
The room stills around me.
Damian lets out a low breath, eyes narrowing with a kind of wary respect. “Well congratulations,” he says quietly. “You just became the most dangerous person in this room.”