Chapter 3
Storm
Magnum showed me where the osprey nest is and then pointed out a heron sitting in plain sight that I’d totally missed.
We were deep in conversation about the wildlife around the lake when Bud returned with two men, one of them bigger than a house, aptly named Squatch if it was short for Sasquatch.
Mad Dog was closer to Bud’s size, meaning still larger than most men, but small compared to Squatch and Magnum.
Bud made introductions, everyone took a seat. I put the chair I was in back into the little kitchen area and chose a comfy armchair in the seating area.
It was clear Mad Dog was the leader and Squatch the muscle, but I had a feeling he was more than just muscle.
I still didn’t have a handle on where Magnum fell in the hierarchy, other than having a huge house in the middle of nowhere to hide me.
Bud told me to talk, and I decided to start with the backstory, since the present-day stuff wouldn’t make sense without it.
“I’ve been tracking missing people for years,” I told them.
“The ones nobody looks for when they go missing — homeless, kids aging out of foster care, or older teens still in the system who’ve either already run away and been brought back, or are on the record as threatening to.
Men and women, but it’s like there are different criteria.
The women tend to be either small and pretty or built like they could fight, with not much in between.
The men come in all sizes, though. Pattern’s been the same for years.
A cluster in one big city, then nothing for two months, then a cluster in another city.
They’ve repeated in the biggest cities — San Francisco, Manhattan, Chicago. But mostly, they don’t repeat.”
The three Birmingham men clearly became more interested when I mentioned homeless going missing. There was something there, but no one interrupted or asked questions, so I dove into the current investigation.
“Six months ago, I received a Securedrop message from a whistleblower about a fight ring. High-end. Invitation only. Crypto payments. I followed the crypto thread he gave me and discovered it’s a shitload of money — 100K to attend, and then more on what I figure are bets on the fights, with a 25K minimum, from what I can see, with some people betting way more.
Also, the fights happen every other month, on the second full weekend of every odd-numbered month. ”
It was like talking to three emotionless walls, listening without responding, so I took a breath and kept going.
“I saw it almost right away and didn’t want to put it together, because what are the odds, right?
But it lines up with the missing people I’ve been chasing.
I went back years and looked, and every month, the fight weekend happens and people go missing the following Tuesday night to Saturday night, and it even correlates to location, because if they’re taking people from California, it takes them an extra day or two to get there, while they land in New York pretty much right away. ”
Did they get the connection? Bud had, but I wasn’t sure about these men, so I spelled it out. “This means they’re going out and collecting new people after a fight, and that gives them two months to train them and get them ready for the next big fight weekend.”
I’d helped myself to a bottle of Coke earlier, and I took a swig before continuing.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself with location.
I started looking at airport activity during those weekends and found one in bumfuck Virginia that’s way nicer than it needs to be for the kind of activity it usually has.
It’s always super-busy on the second full weekend of every month.
There’s a nearby place with organized private hunts, so I figure there’s a hunt on even-numbered months, and the fight thing the other months. ”
“Or it could just be a hunt,” Magnum said.
I nodded. “Exactly, so I needed to know who owned it before I dug farther. It took me over a week of digging through corporations and LLCs to figure out who owns the property.” I sat back and gave the scariest part of the whole investigation.
“It’s owned by the current governor of Virginia’s husband.
He’s ex-CIA. Special Activities Center, and he worked in both the Special Operations Group and the Political Action Group within it. ”
“Fuck me,” Squatch said.
Okay, so at least one of them knew what that meant.
I met the huge man’s gaze and nodded. “Yeah, which meant I needed to tread carefully, but I needed to figure out whether the same people were coming on odd and even numbered months, but the logs weren’t…
I couldn’t get it online, so I thought I’d go to the airport and…
” I shrugged. “I’m good at getting people to talk, and I figured I could get them talking about planes, and then find out if one they especially like shows up very often, and how often.
I know it sounds like a crapshoot, but I’m really good at that kind of thing. ”
“I’m guessing it went to shit?” Squatch said.
“I never even got to the interesting questions. I was in my initial conversation, talking to a janitor about nothing even closely related, when he shut down and got suspish. I went to the snack bar — and what kind of small, single-runway airport without a control tower has a movie-theater type setup? I asked whether they get more traffic on weekends, or with business traffic during the week, and the girl looked scared of the damned question. I tried one more time, with a guy who was clearly a maintenance guy, coming in to get a drink. I flashed some extra cleavage and flirted with him several minutes to get him to chill. Looked like he was on a break, maybe, and he was sweet and talkative…” I sighed.
“Until I asked what his favorite plane to work on is, and he shut down like I’d asked him to spill state secrets.
His eyes got big, and he hightailed it out of there like I was preaching poison or something. ”
“You’re awful calm,” Magnum said.
I frowned at him, trying to figure out what he was saying. Why wouldn’t I be calm? “They didn’t follow me here. I’m safe for the moment, Grandma happens to be in Alaska right now, and panicking doesn’t help anything. Thinking it through and being smart is what keeps you alive, not freaking out.”
“What the fuck does your grandmother being in Alaska have to do with it?”
“I bought her a new car years ago, and I have her old one. It’s a ninety-nine, so no tracking shit on it. Still in her name, so I’d worry about her if she wasn’t off where it’ll be hard to get to her.”
“Let her tell the story,” Mad Dog said, and he made a motion that clearly meant I should get back on topic.
“I keep Faraday bags with me,” I said, looking at Mad Dog now, “and I pulled the map up to refresh my memory for how to get to the interstate, and then turned my phone off and put it into a bag before I left the parking lot. I went ninety miles south on the interstate, exited onto a state highway, and followed it until I came to an old mom-and-pop hotel I’ve stayed at before.
A little extra tip keeps you from having to show ID, and if you pay in cash… ”
I was getting off track. Squatch seemed the most engaged, so I looked at him.
“I sat in the parking lot before I went inside, pulled my burner phone from my trunk, plugged it in, turned it on, went through a series of proxies, and logged into my home security system. It’d been like, nearly three hours since I arrived at the airport, and a little over two hours since I left.
It didn’t make sense that anyone would be at my house that fast, but I wanted to check. ”
I took a deep breath. “There was a blip. Four seconds. Could be an anomaly, but I don’t believe in coincidences.
Pros do that when they don’t want to be seen and don’t want to shut it completely down.
I’m paranoid as fuck, so I sprinkle powder just inside the front and back doors before I leave through the garage. ”
It seemed Mad Dog would be making the decisions, so I looked at him.
“The back door had been opened since I left. Someone had researched me, figured out who I am despite being in a car not registered to me, and then gone through my house in Pennsylvania — a seven-hour drive away — within forty fucking minutes of me asking the first totally innocent questions.”
- - - ? - - -
Magnum
The proxies had been smart, but I had questions. Mad Dog wanted to hear her out, but that didn’t work for me.
“Multiple proxies? Same system, or did you chain them?”
“I stacked the first two layers and then chained two more.”
Okay, so she at least sounded like she knew what she was doing, but I’d hold off on believing she knew more than the terminology. “And you didn’t change cars?”
She shook her head. “Like I said, my car is a 1999 Lexus, bought brand new by my grandmother — maternal, so we have different last names. She lives in a fancy seniors-only place with heavy security, but I’m really happy she isn’t home right now.”
“They could still follow you on cams, and I figure this guy has access to them.”
She nodded. “Right, which is why I got off the main roads and onto curvy mountain ones — harder to follow on satellite, and there are fewer cams.”
“Why stop at all? Why not drive straight through to Atlanta? You could’ve loaded up on coffee.”
She shook her head. “I made the decision to keep researching after I found out who I’d be up against. My choice.
No way was I going to lead these guys to Nickie’s place, so I stopped and slept in my locked car.
Bought ice and filled a cooler with it, left the cooler open in the floorboard, and I slept without burning up.
Had my gun loaded and hot, plus five more mags, and slept with the holster tucked against me.
When no one showed up five hours later, I figured it was safe to drive to Nickie. ”
Clearly, big tits and long blonde hair didn’t mean ditzy airhead with this one. Why did that piss me off?
Before I could think too much about it, she told me, “My Sig is in Bud’s little trunk, since he said I’d need your okay before I brought it into your house, or even into your yard.”
If Bud had let her bring it, he felt confident in her ability to handle it. Making him take it home with him would be rude, but I wasn’t ready to have someone handling a firearm around possible enemy combatants until I knew her skills. Friendly fire can still hurt like fuck.
“We’ll do some target practice, and then we can talk about how it might be used in an emergency.” If she was a decent shot, and she understood how to keep from shooting me while she was aiming for the bad guys, she could keep it. Otherwise, it’d need to go in my safe.
She nodded and looked to Bud, who said, “I’ve told all of you she’s friends with my Nickie, and the two have had each other’s backs on multiple occasions.
She has a USB with a good bit of her information on both investigations, and she has everything in the cloud with an extra layer of encryption, but we all know how that goes.
I didn’t want her accessing anything from my place without Shadow overseeing things, and I didn’t want to pull him in on this if we were just going to bring her here. ”
“I can get her online safely,” I told him, and I left to get my most secure Linux tablet. If Gears’ brother had been taken by this group, then our chapter would absolutely get behind her to help take it down.
And if he hadn’t? I wasn’t so sure. The assholes needed to be stopped, but taking on that level of badass who was married to the governor? Nothing about this would be easy.
But I was in a unique position to help her, which was likely why Bud had brought her here to start with, instead of taking her to Mad Dog and having him send her here.
The tablet I grabbed never gives up where it’s logged in from. I use it when we travel, and for… other things. Also, the tablet would grab her login info, so I could sneak and get the data later, if we need it.
And yes, it’s fucked up, hesitating on whether to help while working to steal her information in case we want to go after these assholes on our own, but whatever. I don’t claim to always make sense. Usually, but not always.
Kinda like how I’m pissed that this bitch with the huge tits also has a good head on her shoulders and knows her shit. Don’t ask me to explain that one, either.