Chapter 34 Wren
WREN
The laptop whirrs to life, and I hope it’s ready and willing to give up its secrets. Because I feel a rush of adrenaline flow through me, the likes of which I’ve never known. Having something to work on, being able to contribute to the solution of my own problem makes every sense I have soar.
Lines of code and command prompts flicker across the screen, ready to be translated and interpreted into the actions they represent.
My fingers hover over the keyboard as I try to decide my next move. Maybe my brain is a little slower coming online because I’d rather be upstairs in bed with River, than down here, buried in River’s hoodie, at the kitchen counter, waiting for the coffee pot to fill.
I don’t know what, if any, equipment Mika was left with when I look at the haul of units on the kitchen counter.
It might take me a while to make my way through all this.
The first thing I should do is scrape everything off the hard drive, then run it through a filter to look for anything that involves my name.
Or Dorian Chase’s.
Or the Iron Outlaws.
Or Vex and Calista.
“Shit, this is going to take a while,” I mutter.
I decide to prioritize. A first search will look for me and Dorian Chase. A second search can look for everything else.
But to answer my own question, it doesn’t look as though Mika was left with any equipment.
Because if any of my stuff had been taken, the very first thing I would have done would be to log in on another device and close down every external point of access.
Cloud storage. Multi-device apps I had running. Passwords would have been changed.
But Mika’s digital presence went dark nearly six hours ago. There’s no backup signals. No location pings. Nothing.
It’s as if he’s been erased away.
Unless…
River told me the FBI showed up.
I wonder if Mika has been taken, or worse, killed.
Maybe Chase has erased Mika as a liability. He could have done it, too, quietly and efficiently. He could have done it in such a way that sounded like self-defense.
Mika would be no more than an administrative problem.
Poor bastard.
But I’m speculating. Until River wakes, I won’t know all the details of last night. So, I start at the beginning. I spoof Mika’s last known IP address and mask it so it looks like it’s coming from a residential node in Sacramento.
It takes a little longer to get through Mika’s encrypted partitions, but once I’m into his drive, I run my custom parser.
The coffee pot bubbles as it finishes brewing, and I get up to grab a cup.
Memories of the day I dropped the cup flood me, but instead of feeling shame and embarrassment, I reassure myself that the terrified and anxious human I was then is now safe.
And that I don’t need to carry those emotions with me anymore.
I’m safe because I’m protected. But I’m also safe because I’m seen. I’m safe because I have people who care about me. And I’m safe because that fear of how my evolution might affect the person I love has dissipated.
I’m safe because I trust River to love every version of me.
“Because I’m River’s, and he’s mine,” I say, before wincing at my own words.
Any cheesier and it’d be a song lyric.
I smile regardless as I sit back at my laptop.
All I need is a pattern. A doorway. An email chain. A file folder.
Anything that will tell me more about how Mika and Chase and the cartel are interconnected. I take a large gulp of coffee and get started.
I go through the obvious places. Emails, which reveal that Mika was fastidious with his setup, and anal when it came to emptying his email box every day.
But in the temp directory, timestamped three days before the raid of Mika’s electronics, there are three messages. All from Griseus6.
So, you dropped the Cam, huh?
My pulse races, like I’ve chugged too many coffees back-to-back. I recognize the variant of the name. The person who instructed me to hack the cartel in the first place.
No…it can’t be.
Can it?
Griseus6: Use this drop again. It’s secure.
Griseus6: This will be the last time.
Griseus6: Unless you want a life sentence, you will.
The last messages carry an embedded tracking pixel. It’s subtle. The work of someone who knows what they are doing. It takes me a while to crack it, but when I do, the callback log points to an internal subdomain within the FBI.
I stare at the screen, certain I must be misunderstanding what I’m reading.
secure-dchase.fbi-internal.gov
dchase
Dorian Chase.
He’s the one who asked me to hack the cartel?
My brain misfires as questions flood through it. Why? For what gain? Was I being set up? Was it entrapment? How can I ever get out of it if he knows and has evidence of what I did? What if this is some weird U.S. government strategy to target cartels?
What if—
“Wren,” I say out loud to stop myself. “You’ve got this.”
It takes about an hour to figure out what I can do. I’m going to have to hack into Dorian Chase’s files, personal and FBI. And I’m going to have to make Mika’s machines do the talking for me.
I can’t send a direct email. First, depending on if Mika is dead or alive, it might be weird receiving an email from a ghost. And that would set any careful Fed on edge.
The tracking pixel shows a callback domain and a short-lived handshake URL, an endpoint that proves Chase touched Mika’s messages from an internal machine.
With more care, I find stale sessions, cached tokens, passwords, and an SSH agent socket that has been used recently enough.
Taken all together, they give me a credible way to get to Chase without him knowing it’s Mika’s machines or even me.
“Hey.” The gruff voice, rich with smoke and gravel, comes from behind me.
I turn on my stool.
River stands shirtless in the doorway, his eyes still heavy with sleep. Jeans, unbuttoned, cling to his hips.
“You should have stayed asleep a little longer. You’ve only slept a few hours.”
He rubs a hand over his face as he walks towards me. “Was missing you.”
“Sweet talker.”
When he reaches me, he wraps his arms around me and kisses me with as much feeling as he did in bed, cocooning the two of us in the safety of his arms.
“Should we buy this house?” River says suddenly.
“What?”
He smiles. “You heard me. Should we buy this house? I think it would be perfect. It’s big enough and has plenty of land. It’s close to the stables and the clubhouse. We get the added bonus of club protection. And the view is pretty spectacular.”
I look where he’s looking. Out of the large kitchen window, across the paddock to the trees and beyond. “Is that a possibility?”
River shrugs. “I don’t know how much Atom would want for it.”
I let my imagination run wild. The two of us. Cozy fires. Lazy Sundays. Making soups. “I’d pay half, if I can afford it.”
“No need. I can afford it for the two of us.”
I should have expected he’d want to provide for me. “It’s not about the cost; it’s about feeling the same sense of ownership you do. That we’re in this together. Providing for each other.”
“When you put it like that, I find it hard to argue. Stop being so damn sensible.”
The peace and safety I’ve been looking for is right here, between the two of us.
“I’ll try to be less rational in the future.”
A wide smile breaks on his face, and my heart leaps at how damn attractive he is. “Let me talk to Atom. We might never have to move out.”
“But your family?”
He buries his head into the crook of my neck, and I stroke his back. “All that security system shit you ordered will arrive at the clubhouse soon. And there’s a prospect living at my place temporarily to keep an eye on Willa.”
“When you decide something, you really do move fast,” I say, looping my fingers through his.
“Not usually. But for you, I make an exception.” He brings my hand to his lips and kisses it. He places my hand back down on my lap, then moves to the coffee. “How far have you gotten?”
I recap my progress, then look back at the laptop.
“My plan is to send Chase a professional request. Something that is curiosity provoking, like a reference to a live case. Or something so inanely boring that he won’t think twice about accepting it.
Like a request from IT to have his laptop serviced or something. ”
I don’t bore him with all the other things I’m going to try.
“What will that give you?”
“Access to all Chase’s systems, because I’m reasonably confident that Chase and the person who paid me to hack the cartel are the same person.”
River places the coffee pot back on the hot plate with a clatter. “For real?”
I nod and explain the overlapping names.
Lines furrow his brow. “Motherfucker. So, he set you up to rob the cartel, then screwed you over, then pretended he could offer you safety if you went to him?”
“It looks like it. I just don’t know why?”
I take a moment to type a short message to Chase, telling him there’s a recall on his specific make and model of laptop and he needs to book a time to have it replaced.
I hope it’s generic enough that he won’t care.
If he clicks on the link, a mundane motion, it will plant a script that would leave access to his machine open to me.
When I hit send, my head spins, for a moment.
River walks back to me, coffee mug in hand, then places his free hand on my back. “Then do what you need to do. What’s this?” He picks up Raven’s copy of the romance book they were reading.
“Oh, it’s from book club.”
“Sorry if that was too much. We forgot to cancel after I suggested it.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t. They’re good people. I might have even enjoyed it.”
River flips through the book. “You know, Raven highlights all the sex in these books that she wants to try and leaves it lying around for Wraith to read it.”
My mouth opens. “She does not.”
He shows me a page with lilac highlighter and notes in pen. There’s the letter ‘W’ with a little heart next to it. “Maybe we should do the same.”