Chapter 35 Catfish
CATFISH
It takes two hours for Wren to stop being sick, and get them through a warm shower, and get the pair of us, plus the evidence, over to church.
The chat messages got worse. Much worse.
Obsession worse. Sadistic worse. Unhinged worse.
Some of the things Chase told the chatbot he was going to do to Wren turned my stomach too.
Many of them were poetically described, especially the one where he planned to put a chainsaw between Wren’s legs to slice them in half while they were still alive.
And he repeatedly deadnamed Wren, as if knowing what it was, and being able to call Wren it, meant there was something special between the two of them.
I’ve never called a meeting. Never had the need. Was happy to go along with everyone else’s agenda.
But now, I’m going to ask the club to take a vote.
I want to kill a federal agent. Something that would lead to the death penalty if I was caught.
When Wren and I enter the room, everyone is already there.
Grudge tips his head to my side of the table. “Brought in a chair for Wren.”
Wren’s hand is cold and damp in mine. I know they can’t be feeling good about what we’ve uncovered. And I’m worried about them. They’ve been quiet since the shower, and I worry that debilitating anxiety we’ve worked so hard to get rid of is back.
Because this is no longer about a random string of events. It’s deeply personal.
“You called this meeting,” Wraith says. “Why don’t you tell us what you’ve got?”
I place my hand on Wren’s back. “You want me to do this, or do you have it?”
I can only imagine the layers of complicated feelings Wren is grappling with right now, and I wish I could carry the weight for them.
Wren blows out a breath. “I got it. Federal Agent Dorian Chase has been stalking me for years.”
“Jesus,” Atom says. “What did you find?”
Wren opens their laptop and turns it so my brothers can see some of the evidence.
“I guess I came into his orbit somehow about three years ago. You could say Chase is a frustrated white hat hacker. Someone who can do a version of what I do, but for purely legal means. But his work with the FBI takes him to the dark web, and I guess he found me there. He’s good.
Very good. To have found my real identity, given all my safeguards, suggests he has a real talent. ”
Grudge temples his fingers. “You think this was an attempt to bring you in so he could charge you?”
“It might have started that way,” I say. “Who knows. But it’s gone way beyond that.”
Wren pushes their laptop to Grudge. “There are hundreds of sessions like this. He’s trained an AI model to talk like me.
He’s fed any transcripts from old logs and defunct forums and scraps of code commits that bear my syntax quirks.
My jokes. Even my spelling errors, like how I always mix up the e and i in weird.
He’s effectively grafted my voice to a chatbot so he can pretend he’s talking to me. It…”
Wren’s voice fades, so I step in. “He’s been getting off on sexually torturing a version of Wren he built in code and chatbots for three years.”
Grudge grabs the laptop and reads it. His face morphs through disgust, then anger before he shoves the laptop towards Wraith. “The guy can’t decide if he loves you or wants to rape you. Sick fuck.”
I remember what that part says.
Dorian: You asked for that.
Wren: You said you’d never hurt me.
Dorian: You hurt me when you don’t love me
Wren: This conversation makes me uncomfortable
Dorian: Your body is mine. I like it better when you resist. When you make me prove who that cunt belongs to. I like it when you make me rape you.
Wren just looks down at their hands, rubbing them together, over and over.
“He’s not going to stop. The whole setup.
He hired me and then incriminated me to make me need him.
But none of it is official, because the last thing he really wants is for me to be in prison where he can’t get to me.
That’s a long game. He’s toying with me.
But because he’s unhinged, he hasn’t really thought through all the ways this could go wrong for him.
There’s a journal, if you just go one tab to the left. ”
Wraith does as Wren instructs, and Atom leans over his shoulder.
“Subject, Wren, has demonstrated unparalleled talent in network penetrations and cryptographic reconstruction,” Atom reads.
“Their moral ambiguity makes Wren uniquely positioned to be a leveraged asset. I’m going to need controlled proximity to ensure compliance.
Direct supervision is necessary. Preferably personal, and on-going.
Suspect they’ll respond better to protection narratives than threats. ” Atom looks to Wren. “What is this?”
Wren shrugs. “He has folder after folder of ideas of how to set the two of us up. That one is about how to onboard me as an FBI asset. There’s one where he engineers meetings in an attempt to find out where I am geographically, then requests a transfer to the nearest station.
Then, there was the one setting me up so I would need him.
The hacking of the cartel was to set him up financially so I would want to be with him, and he could afford to impress me. ”
The laptop makes its way around the table to Smoke.
“Wren doesn’t know it yet, but they need me,” he reads.
“They keep running, thinking distance will save them. But the world eats people like them alive. I’ll be there when it happens.
I’ll be the only safe thing left. Then, they’ll understand.
With the funds transferred, we can disappear.
I’ll fake my death. Wren can create new identities for us both.
The Bureau will call it an op gone wrong. For me, it will be freedom.”
All the texts misgender Wren, so I’m glad my brothers didn’t when they read the excerpts out loud.
“What kind of freak is he?” Taco asks. “The guy’s not mentally stable. It’s obsessive. But also, so fucking inconsistent. It’s like, does he love Wren, hate them, or just want to own them?”
“In a weird way,” Wren says, “I think he thinks I’m his salvation. Or his reward for the years of sacrifice.”
“I need a vote to make Wren mine,” I say. “And then, I want a vote to kill the man who’d threaten them, because all of this says he’s not going to stop coming for them.”
Grudge looks to Wren. “We don’t normally ask, but in this case, I’m making an exception. You came here without any choice. But do you want to stay? Do you want to be here, with Catfish?”
Wren looks at me, and for a moment, I feel the warmth coming back into their features. “I do.”
It’s probably wrong that I flash forward to the two of us saying wedding vows. There’s no fancy outfits or a church. Just a quiet spot by the river. My brothers. Lots of denim and too much whiskey.
“And I promise I haven’t forgotten about the balance of the missing money,” Wren continues. “In case you were worried about that.”
“Easy vote for me,” Jackal says.
“Same,” Shade says, raising his hand, but winking at Wren.
The rest of the hands go up around the room.
Each of them acknowledging that Wren is mine to protect and love.
When Wraith declares the motion carried, I kiss Wren softly.
“You’re mine now,” I murmur against their lips.
They smile for the first time since they found Chase’s files. “And you’re mine.”
I look over to Atom. “Think about how much you want for the ranch house, ‘cos we want to buy it.”
“I like the idea of being neighbors. Sure we can work something out with a long lease on the land that keeps it in my family.”
The room falls quiet, because everyone knows what the second part of my ask means.
“We can’t just kill a federal agent,” Grudge says, finally.
His words hit the tiny kernel of fear in my gut. Not about killing Chase. I’d do that in a heartbeat. But that we might get caught, and I’d have to spend what’s left of my life without Wren. Not that my life would be too long. It would be an automatic death penalty.
“I think we can,” Wren says.
Grudge looks at them. “No offense, Wren, but you have no idea what kind of decision this would be for the club.”
Wren takes a deep breath. “I know, but we have an idea.”
“Which is?” Jackal asks.
“We set him up,” Wren says.
Grudge leans forward. “You’re going to need to give me more than that.”
Wren looks at me, and I take over. “All this would be enough to bring down a federal agent. But what if we leaked it all and then set it up to look like he killed himself in the shame of it?”
“How would it work?” Wraith asks.
“I don’t know what happened to Mika,” I say.
“But if he really is dead, why haven’t we heard about it on the news?
How did Chase get away with it if there were other agents there?
It smells of a cover-up. Wren has access to all this.
” I gesture to the laptop being passed around the table.
“So, we bundle it up and drop it to media channels and onto the dark web and let it spread so they can’t brush it under the rug.
They won’t be able to hide it. But, in parallel, we lure Chase to a remote spot and set it up.
I don’t know, hang him from something. Or use his government weapon to make it look like he shot himself in the head. ”
“I’ll selectively wipe out his history from the inside, removing all mentions of my deadname.
But my guess is, if an FBI agent goes that far off the rails, they aren’t going to want a huge inquiry into it.
They’re going to make it go away quietly as soon as they get a first glance at how fucked up Chase is,” Wren says.
Atom leans back in his chair. “I don’t have a problem with that as a plan. But is there anything in those files that suggests he knew you were connected to the Outlaws? Or that you were brought here?”
“You’re gonna need to give me a bit more time to be certain,” Wren says.
“But so far, I haven’t come across anything.
I have seen reference to Calista. She was mentioned because Mika found the fake personnel file we put in Valentine Security, so we’d get an alert if anyone was looking for me.
It makes sense that it wouldn’t take too much effort to find out who Vex is. ”
I stand suddenly because the adrenaline is pumping, and I’m scared they are going to say no. “So what if they do know about us? Knowing who we are and being able to blame us for the death of an agent are two different things.”
Wren places their hand in mine and squeezes it tightly, encouraging me back to my seat. “He’s right to be cautious. This is my mess. I don’t even like the fact you’re being dragged into it.”
That makes me sit, but I turn to face Wren. “We’re in this shit together. Always. But it’ll be a lot easier to deal with this if we have my brothers’ backing.”
Wren leans towards Grudge. “I can see everyone he contacts regularly. Friends. Family. I could plant a few messages of apology. How he feels like he let everyone down. I can even create a fictional narrative that he’s being blackmailed or being pursued by the cartel to get the funds back and he’s terrified.
How someone approached him in person to threaten him.
I can do to him what he did to me. I can take all his messages, learn his tone, write in a way that reflects his history with the sender.
Only two or three of them. I can make him a man despondent with his life choices, filled with remorse, and terrified for his future.
If they think it’s death by suicide, they won’t look too hard.
Especially when all this hits the news.”
Grudge rolls his neck from left to right, and I hear it crack. “Fuck me. What’s that Navy SEAL saying, the only easy day was yesterday?”
“I feel like we have a little time to set this up,” I say.
“Not much,” Smoke says. “You forget, Chase probably knows we took all Mika’s shit. For all you know, Mika gave up descriptions of who came to his house and took it before that bullet. In fact, perhaps the bullet wasn’t even for him. Mika could still be alive. It could have been a warning shot.”
That stops me in my tracks. We hadn’t considered that. “Shit. I made a dangerous assumption.”
Wraith pulls a face that suggests he’s not sure.
“What could Mika tell him? Five big guys in leather jackets. We all wore balaclavas. He couldn’t see shit.
We didn’t wear our colors. And we were hours away from home.
Sure, Mika knew we were asking about Chase and Wren.
But we could be fucking anybody across a whole country asking. ”
“Did anyone see you leave?” Jackal asks.
Atom shakes his head. “We were clear on the way out. Went over into a neighbor’s yard. We were under cover of darkness down a back alley. Even if a neighbor saw us, there’s still nothing identifying about us.”
“The truck?” Shade asks.
“We took the plates off,” Wraith says. “Rolled out in the dark.”
“Okay,” Grudge says. “Wren, you got until the end of the day to get through those devices, learn everything you can. I want this package bundled up and ready to go at the push of a button. It’s leverage. I want you to be able to act with one click if he rocks up at our gates today.”
“I can do that,” Wren says.
He turns to Jackal and Shade. “You two, when Wren’s done, collect all Mika’s shit, take it to our garage, after hours, and crush those fuckers. Melt shit, burn off labels. I want no identifiable trace of any of that equipment left by midnight.”
“Done, Prez,” Jackal says.
“Smoke. I want you and Taco to work on a location. We need options where we can kill this fucker. One here. One in Utah. We might need to go find him to make this happen. You figure out where. Atom, Catfish, Wraith, and I will figure out the how.”
There are various murmurs of agreement before Grudge turns to me. “Ask Babyface to coordinate some security around your sister and mom’s place overnight. Just as a precaution.”
For the first time since Wren showed me all those messages, I feel warm.
“Thank you, brothers.”