Chapter 6
Storm
Magnum needed to back the fuck off, but there was no way for me to tell him to.
We were working, dammit. And okay, maybe he wasn’t out of line.
People sometimes touch when one person has control of the keyboard and mouse, and the other person is just as engaged.
My body’s reactions were my problem, not his.
Also, telling him to back off would just let him know he was affecting me, and he was way too cocky already.
I switched back to the monitor we’d been on before Magnum had sent us off on this quite lucrative tangent, and picked up the thread showing them my early research.
Barely three minutes in, he pointed to a trail I’d already followed and I nodded. “Yes, used to send money to a charity fund that worked hard to get the governor elected.”
I showed him where that thread went, and Skippy stepped forward. “Wait. Go back. What’s the eight-hundred-dollar transfer for? We haven’t seen anything less than a few hundred K, so far.”
“No idea,” I told him. “I spent three days running it down, but it bought a gaming gift card not associated with an account.”
“Scoot,” Skippy said, and I moved so he could sit at the desk.
His fingers flew, and seven minutes later, we had a name, and the person’s gaming activity, along with a lot of flying into and out of airports, and I made Skippy copy them into a text file and save it on my cloud.
He saved the long list of first-person shooter games as well, but I wasn’t sure that gave us much of anything.
Forty minutes and three databases later, we knew the gaming signup name was an alias for a man who’d crapped out of SEAL school and then been recruited into a CIA SAC team.
“So, what, he was too much of a psychopath to make it in DEVGRU, which made him perfect for SAC?” I mused.
“Bingo,” Skippy said, and he started an image search, looking for the guy’s face.
Alarms blared, the browser closed, and Magnum grabbed his phone, keyed in his code, and hit a button already on the screen. “Cuts the power to the router,” he explained. “Faster than running downstairs and unplugging it.”
“Interesting that searching for his face triggered an algorithm, isn’t it?” I noted.
“My guess is that this dude is dead, and they put that purchase in to try to trap anyone following the thread,” Magnum said.
“Fuck, I hate it when the bad guys are smart,” I noted.
Skippy had the USB out and the laptop was shut down, and he handed the USB to Magnum. “They didn’t get close. Put this in your safe. Need to wait at least six hours before we search less serious threads, and fourteen hours before we dig into anything specific.”
I put my hands on my hips, realized I did, and relaxed them at my sides. “If they didn’t get close, we should be able to go back to my cloud and look through what I did. Thirty minutes away from it, maybe, but six hours seems excessive.”
“We’re tunneling and hiding,” Skippy said.
“If they’re as smart as I think they may be, they’ll look for someone popping right back online who’s acting squirrely.
Under normal circumstances, we don’t look like we are, and I’ll swap out the final two hops the next time we go online, but still… six hours to be safe.”
“We can head out in the boat,” Magnum said. “Supposed to storm this evening, so we should take advantage of the good weather while we can.”
Thirty minutes should be fine, but I could see I wasn’t going to win this one. Skippy was the supposed expert, but I had a feeling Magnum was, too — and I was clearly in the minority for wanting to get right back to work.
“Fine,” I said, “but if we’re going out into the blazing, hotter-than-hell Alabama heat, I’m putting a bathing suit on.”
Magnum went completely still for a half second and then shook his head. “On second thought, I know you said you have more on your cloud than the USB, but can we stay offline and look through logs there?”
I smiled. “Yes, but…” I frowned. “Can’t follow them. We’d just be able to note places to go back and follow later.”
“No,” Skippy said. “Ya’ll go out and play.
Take a break. I can build another way to get on.
I’ll make it look like we’re coming from a realty firm in Virginia, and we can search land records.
” He met Magnum’s gaze. “I brought encrypted radios. Take one with you, and I’ll let you know when I have it set up.
Probably take at least an hour, maybe double, depending on how many routes I decide we need between us and the info. My duffel’s in the kitchen.”
“I’m going to need a favor — a coded message for my dad, so my parents know I’m somewhere safe.
The idea is to call and offer an extended warranty on his Ranger boat.
He has a Lund, so it’s the wrong boat. It’s a Ranger if I’m safe, another brand if I’m not.
” I shrugged. “We talk weekly, but I’m not going to be online. No posts, no videos. They’ll worry.”
It’s a Boston Whaler if I’m not safe, but for some reason, I didn’t want to share that.
“Not a problem,” Skippy said. “I’ll use VOIP to do it once the two of you are back.”
I thanked him, and Magnum and I left him alone in the office.
The bathing suit I’d packed for this trip was chosen for its ability to make men stupid.
If I’d known I’d be living with a sexier-than-fuck biker, I’d have chosen one that didn’t show as much of my ass, didn’t go so low in front, and covered more than my nipples.
This one showed actual underboob, so I slid a white crop top on over it.
The suit was turquoise and white, so it worked.
Wasn’t there some kind of creed about bodyguards not fucking their protectees, or something? That seemed right. He needed to stay focused on keeping me alive, right?
But damn, it almost felt like maybe we could focus better if we just got the fucking out of the way. I’m usually able to focus on the job and ignore sexual tension, but him hovering right over me at the desk had taken every ounce of my willpower to stay focused on the data.
Having Skippy there had helped. I couldn’t imagine how we’d manage without Skippy in the room.
I put my Chacos on and made my way to the kitchen, where Magnum was adding ice and water to stainless-steel drink bottles.
“Sunscreen is on the table,” he noted. “Use it.”
“I’ve already put some on. I’m picky about…” I noted his brand was a mineral kind, and one of the better ones. “Well, I was going to give you my lecture on chemical versus mineral blockers, but it seems you’ve already heard the speech. You chose well.”
“Don’t like chemicals in general,” he said.
That struck me as odd. “Nickie says Bud doesn’t either. She has to be careful with fragrances around him, and they don’t buy prepacked foods. Just stuff straight from a farm, mostly. They even have a source to buy organic, grass-fed beef.”
He tilted his head. “Bud and I are a lot alike, it seems. I actually prefer to hunt my own meat, and you’ll find plenty of venison and turkey in my freezer. I have grass-fed beef too, though.”
He said his boat was nothing fancy, but it looked pretty nice to me. He showed me the life vests and asked, “How strong of a swimmer are you?”
“I can tread water forever. Not the fastest swimmer on the planet, but unless I get knocked out, I should be fine.”
He nodded, started the boat, released the ropes, and eased us away from the dock.
“You have a point about us not being able to research each other,” he said. “If I could research you, I’d start by watching some of your channel. What would I find if I did?”
I looked at him, deciding how I’d get the most information from him, and decided he needed to answer questions first. “Tell me where you went to school, and for what, then I’ll do the same.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, but said, “Georgia Tech. Partial scholarship. Graduated with a computer science degree, threads in cybersecurity and system architecture. You?”
Yeah, he’d absolutely been sandbagging his intelligence. Georgia Tech is damned hard to get into, and even harder to graduate from. I’d known he was leaning too hard on the boneheaded biker thing though, so this wasn’t a total recalibration.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know what I do for a living, but I don’t know what you did before you…
” Before he’d gone to prison, because a felon likely couldn’t get a cybersecurity job, which explained why he was probably doing illegal shit for the bikers now.
“Where were you working when you beat the shit out of the abusive asshole?”
He shook his head, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but he said, “One of the big financial institutions, head of network security. Not something felons can do.”
Fuck. I’d nailed that one, and it made the woman’s lies even worse.
A deal was a deal though, so I told him, “Syracuse University, Newhouse School of Public Communications.” I shrugged.
“I was accepted into the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, but Arizona is too fucking hot.” I sighed.
“I’m pretty sure Alabama is even hotter, and it’s possible I’ll just melt, and save the bad guys the trouble of killing me. ”
“I’ll toss you in the water to cool you off if I see you melting. What made you want to be a journalist? And was it always investigative journalism?”
“My dad was a cop when I was little and made detective when I was in middle school. My mom produces a local news show, so I was in and out of the news station, the studios. They say some kids try to merge what their parents are, and I guess I’m one of those people — the investigation angle from my dad, the news part of it from my mom.
What about you? What led you to cybersecurity? ”