“Fucking crotch rockets. Really?” Keg’s bitching came through the earpiece.
“How many times are you going to mention the damn bike? Get over it,” Moose answered and shook his head.
“As many times as the damn seat on this thing pinches my balls.” Chuckles could be heard from the others.
“What are you doing on that seat? I’m on the same kinda bike, and though I would rather be on my Harley Fatboy, it isn’t bothering me.” Pinch and Keg were on Suzuki Hayabusas positioned in either direction to be able to take over the follow if Moose and I needed them to.
“All that means is my dick is bigger, and these seats aren’t made for size.”
“Fuck you, Keg. Bigger mouth maybe.” Pinch and Keg had been going back and forth since we met up with them at the motel. The most we made of it, was Keg asked Pinch how his sister was doing and Pinch was having none of it. We had a bet going on how long Madison would let her brother keep her from associating with the club before she bucked against his rule about her attending any of the parties. It had been an ongoing fight between them since she’d come of age. Now that she’d been of age for several years, I wondered if the argument was out of habit.
“Fifteen minutes for the dismissal bell. Any update on our friends?” I asked.
“There still just sitting in the SUV. Tram’s linked into the GPS Keg slapped on the vehicle yesterday.” Crank and Tram were in one vehicle on one end of the block, and Moose and I was at the other end of the block. The two men in the SUV had been in their spot since we arrived, which had been an hour ago.
“Hey, that’s two of the four men we had to look for. Honest to God, I don’t know how they’ve stayed hidden so long. Which made me wonder if they didn’t need to hide now because time was about up on what they were up to.
Moose, Crank, Tram, and I arrived at BOS (Boston Logan International Airport) just after five thirty yesterday morning, on separate airlines, while Keg and Pinch departed at a different time, arriving a couple hours behind us. The vehicles were picked up, and the bikes were in the parking lot of the motel with the keys in the rooms along with everything we requested.
The email from Wild Bill, with additional intel obtained while we were in the air, greeted Tram when he signed on his computer. We studied it and made the necessary adjustments to our plans while we waited for Pinch and Keg to arrive.
We spent the day familiarizing ourselves with the area. At least as well as we could in one day. The day hadn’t been wasted because it gave us the opportunity to drive by the school when they let out so we could take note of the directions the buses headed and where would be good for us to set up. Our payoff for our effort was the two assholes that sat down the road. They’d been there yesterday.
Sleeper cells were the worst in my book. The individuals laid in wait for months, even years, setting up for that one shock and awe that could devastate the country. They watched, they timed, and then they struck. The individuals blend into the background and go unnoticed, never drawing attention to themselves, which makes them harder to find.
I’d figured out the difference between them and the random acts of terrorism. It boiled down to patience, which contributed to the effect of the attack. With random, it always happens quickly. They didn’t seem to make a plan. It was if they had a thought and days, a few weeks at the most, they just acted.
The only thing similar in the two was whatever was done resulted in some type of devastation, just different in the scale of it. The one common thing shared between them that I’d seen—the willingness to die for the results.
Our job was to find, identify, and force them out of hiding. Hopefully, before the act, the fuckers thought up was executed. Then we fade into the background while the sweeper team collects them up.
“We are down to two minutes. Everyone pay attention. Keg, Pinch, you still good?”
“Yeah, Hawk, I’m good. Sitting on the side of the road like I pulled off to talk on my phone, which I gotta add that some rude ass people live here because not one fucker has stopped to ask if I was broke down or needed help.” Moose groaned beside me, and I shook my head. There was no sense in us replying, Keg would bitch if they had stopped and called them nosey fuckers. When the brother was tired, he turned into a dick and bitched about everything.
“I’m good, Hawk. Haven’t moved from the parking lot of the shopping center. The one we drove by yesterday, that’s about a quarter-mile away from the school,” Pinch answered.
“We’re good too, and our friends have started their vehicle. Guess they want to be able to move without delay.” Crank checked in, and the sound of the bell could be heard, then kids started to pour out the doors of the school.
“Nah, I’m going with they are posted to make sure whoever the kid is, doesn’t leave once they are here.” I glanced at Moose, then back to the kids either walking away or getting on the buses.
“Why?” I asked.
“They would have grabbed them already. I think they suspect him or her, but don’t have enough proof. Or getting rid of them would bring too much focus, which tells me someone the kid knows is involved. We know we were to find four men and a woman. Two of the men sit in that vehicle, so the kid doesn’t know them because they aren’t worried about being seen. Narrows us down to two men and the woman.” What Moose said made a helluva lot of sense.
The kids started to thin out. Buses pulled away, and several groups walked off together. The kids I watched were the ones who stayed to themselves.
“Kids are dwindling down. Are the two still there, Crank?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’re still in the same spot. But they’re looking up and down the street as if maybe they missed them.” I had to agree with Crank because the thought had crossed my mind too.
The doors opened, and a group of kids piled out, with computer bags thrown over their shoulders. Normal looking kids with nothing about them that stood out. As they talked a car pulled up and the group turned, then one of the boys walked toward it. The tinted windows made it hard to get visual, but I could make out that it was a woman with long hair.
“Crank, Tram, can you see the driver in that car?” I asked and filled the others on the kid and the woman.
“No, but our boys here are on the move in your direction,” Tram said, and I could even hear his fingers tapping the keys on his computer. Moose turned his attention to the road while I watched the kid.
The boy opened the car and bent down to look inside but didn’t get in. He talked with the driver as the car carrying the two men passed by. If I hadn’t been watching so closely, I probably would have missed the slight turn of the driver’s head toward the car and then over shoulder glance on the woman’s part.
As Moose and I watched the interaction of the woman and kid, Crank and Tram drove past, following the vehicle with the two men in it. The boy stood and shook his head to whatever the driver said, and he closed the car door. He stayed watching the car pull away, then I saw the sneer before he turned and walked toward the group who were heading down the sidewalk away from the school.
“Keg, the woman is headed in your direction. She’s driving a late model black Camry with tinted windows. Pinch, ride toward Keg, and you two follow her. Moose and I will tail the kid. Keep your eyes open. Don’t know if this woman and kid mean shit but if she does, that still leaves two men out there we haven’t tagged yet.”
Everyone acknowledged, and I pulled the SUV out onto the street to tail the kid. We were either going to be lucky or waste some time. Damn, I’d take luck.
We sat in the back of the restaurant we had planned as a meeting place. The angle of the table gave us an open view of the entrance along with privacy to talk. The briefing of what each found was held off until the waitress sat our orders down on the table and walked off.
“Keg and I tailed the woman to a carrier business downtown and circled a few times. Nothing unusual about the place. A few bike carriers pulled out, even of few trucks pulled around back of the place, which I assume were coming in for the day from deliveries.” Pinch picked up his silverware, then continued,” The woman is young, maybe late twenties, early thirties. Not old enough to have a kid that is seventeen or eighteen, though. She was foreign, and yes, she looked to be from the Middle East.” I knew Pinch was finished when he started to eat.
“Our boys went back to the apartment from yesterday. We parked down the street and watched for a bit to see if they came back out. The tall, thin one came out after about ten minutes and headed up the street on foot. We tailed him to a convenience store. When some time passed, and he didn’t come out, I got out and went in. It’s where he works because he was behind the counter. We already know both the men are from the Middle East.” I cocked a brow at Tram, and he smiled. “Yeah, yeah a lot of people are from the Middle East but in our world and I’m talking club. When have you come across three with various positions but near each other?”
“True but other than that, we have nothing else that ties them together. The kid went with the others to a coffee shop in that shopping center you were at Pinch. He sat at a table with the others, and they ordered drinks and opened their computers. They sat and worked for an hour, then we followed him to a medium income neighborhood. Nice house, well taken care of, but it was an older home,” Moose said and took a drink of the beer he ordered with dinner.
“Okay, not much, but more than we had yesterday. When we get back to the motel, Tram, start working on the business and the house address.”
“I will get on it when we get back,” Tram said, and the conversation stopped while we demolished the steak dinners.
Back at the rooms, Tram opened his laptop and got down to business, shutting the rest of us out while he did his thing. The others sat around and talked, and I took the break to check in with the Prez.
“How’s it going for you boys, Hawk?”
“Hey, Prez. Might already have a break.” I informed Wild Bill of everything that happened since we arrived.
“So, you got the woman and two of the men? Anything on the other two?”
“Negative on the other two. Tram is searching right now for more info. Not sure on the woman yet. Should know something soon. I’d feel better if I knew where those other two were.”
“Only been two days, Hawk. You’ll locate them. It’s different being away when there’s someone home waiting for you at home, isn’t it?”
“She’s under my skin, that’s for sure. Roach been by to see her?” Wild Bill went quiet and then I heard him sigh.
“No. I went by Roach’s place today because he hasn’t even come by the club. He was home, yelled through the door he was fine. Told me he needed some time to himself. He’ll figure it out, Hawk, and then I imagine he will reach out to Charlie.”
“He goddamn better. Roach isn’t the only one hurting, Prez. Charlie is too. He needs to pull his head out of his ass before I get back and shove in further.” Prez’s chuckle caught me off guard. “What the hell, Prez?”
“Calm down, Hawk. First Moose, now you. I may not survive the rest of you pairing off. And Keg scares me the worst.”
“Well, he is your son, Prez.”
“There is that. But, Christ, you and Moose have chosen some pretty impressive women. Keg, though—I will be surprised if she’ll be able to add two and two. His track record hasn’t been that great.”
“He might surprise you?”
“One can only hope.”
The motel door opened and I looked over my shoulder, and Moose motioned with his head.
“Gotta go, Prez. I’ll check in later.”
“Do that. Stay safe.”
I hung up and walked back into the motel room. The guys stood behind Tram while he pointed to different things on his computer screen.
“What is that?” I asked as I walked up beside Moose and looked at the screen.
“This is the computer system for the carrier business the woman went to today.” Tram looked over his shoulder at me.
“Okay, what are we looking at? And do I want to know how you got into their system?”
“Through the back door. They didn’t have a lock on it.” Tram chuckled at his own computer joke. “Let me go to the beginning, and I will show you.”
Data moved across the screen that to me was totally unreadable. To Tram, though it was second nature, he focused on the screen, and his fingers moved over the keypad. I looked around at the others, and they were watching too. Tram could have made a killing as a hacker. Anytime we’ve needed him, he has gotten the information. We’d not come across any program he couldn’t crack. It was astounding to watch.
“Like I said, I got in through the backdoor. Nice, expensive system and cheap ass security. I will never understand that. Anyway, once I was in, I was able to make a route to each computer on the system: shipping, admin, payroll. Got to say some of the employees there don’t make dick. Sad, ‘cause the company is raking in the green.
“Here,” Tram pointed at the screen that came up, “this is a log of everything they picked up and delivered.”
Tram went over a couple more shipping logs, then briefly showed the payroll and company bills. Next came the list of clients that used carrier company. The list was long.
“They do pick up and deliveries for just about every type of company: law offices, pharmaceutical companies to hospitals, doctors’ offices, clinics, a few labs. Now here is the shipping clerk’s computer.” Tram brought up a screen with data notations that I had no clue what they were.
“What the hell is that?” Moose asked what I was thinking.
“This is where everything starts to get interesting. What you are looking at is a program that was put on the computer to monitor keystrokes. And it wasn’t put on by the company to watch what its employee was doing, it was loaded by another outside computer that used the same backdoor I did to get into the system.”
“Holy shit, how did you find that?” Keg asked and leaned in to get a better look.
“There is always a footprint left behind, but they can be erased if the hacker knows how to backtrack their movements. Whoever did this is good. They still have a lot to learn but, truthfully, most people wouldn’t notice the footprint because face it, the average person who works on a computer for their job, they don’t know enough to be able to search. Computers have programs that work in the background at all times. How do you think the majority of identities are stolen? They aren’t following people through stores to steal their purses or wallets, not when they can sit at a computer, hack in, and wait for whoever to do their online banking or shop online and use their credit card.”
“I’m never doing personal shit on my computer again,” Crank said and shook his head in disgust. “So is whoever placed that program stealing personal shit off the clerk’s computer?”
“No, they are watching what the clerk is typing, whether email, invoices. Pretty much everything. Whoever it is would know if the clerk paid a bill, or whatever, just as if they sat at the computer and watched.
“And here is the woman from the school.” Tram hit a button, and a driver’s license pic came up. “I know no one got a good look, but this is her because I ran the car tag, which came back to Jerry Rivers. Jerry Rivers married Kadija Suri eighteen months ago. She has been the shipping clerk for a year, moving from the receptionist to replace the lady who retired from that position.” The screen changed, and the kid’s picture showed.
“This is JJ. The nickname is short for Jerry Junior.”
“Excellent fucking work, Tram. Now to figure out what they are up to and how they are connected to each. Patel’s going to need to brought up-to-date. After the last two men are caught, boys, we can head home.” I patted Tram on the shoulder.
“I can get on board with that,” Moose said, and the others agreed.
“I’m going to stay logged into the computer at the carrier place. Also, see if I can tap into that keystroke program. If I can, we would be able to watch Kadija work.”
“Tomorrow morning then, let’s hit this shit early and see what we can find out.”
I walked out of Tram’s room with the others after we set our agenda for the next day. On the way to my room, I stopped at the vending machines, then with a Coke in hand, I unlocked my door and entered the quiet room.
Replaying everything from the day in my mind, I felt I was missing something, but what, I couldn’t pinpoint. I stripped and laid down on the bed. If I was going to get any sleep I was going to have to clear my head. I knew exactly what to do to obtain that. After I had grabbed my cell on the nightstand, I scrolled my contacts until I found the one I wanted and pushed the button.
“Kaden?”
“Hey, Red.” My voice hinted with a little of the tiredness my body felt.
“Is something wrong, Kaden?”
“Nah, just tired. I wanted to check on you, though.”
“Oh. I’m fine. Still haven’t heard from Roach, but nothing I can do about that other than wait. The next move is his. He either takes it, or he doesn’t. I know you can’t tell me what you are doing but is it going okay?” When she talked of Roach, I could hear the hurt in her voice even though she tried to cover it up, which made me want to fly back just to smack some sense into the man.
“It’s going well. Hope to have it wrapped up in the next couple days. Things are falling into place.”
“Well, that’s good.
“If you need anything, Red, call Wild Bill. Okay?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I asked you to. I didn’t call to argue with you.” Charlie would catch on. Did I think she would go along with everything without input? Not in this lifetime. I was in unchartered waters for the first time in my life. Most men might be apprehensive, and take it slow. But I wasn’t most men. No, I was going to jump in with both feet.
“Fine.”
Charlie’s immediate agreement was proof enough that she was preoccupied with the Roach situation.
“Good, now tell me what else you’ve been doing.” She needed to take a break from the stuff she was dealing with just like I needed to get away from mine.
Charlie talked, and I listened and laughed at times. She told me about her dinner with Katie. Even sharing the part about Mac, Haven’s new Prospect. The woman was going to be a handful but in the best of ways. I was happy when she said that Travis and the other brothers had checked on her. As I listened to her, she reverberated what I had already concluded—badass (at least in how she tried to portray herself)—and a huge heart (the part she tried to hide).
We said goodbye an hour later, and I sat my cell on the nightstand, relaxing back on the bed. Talking with Charlie had been just what I needed to clear my head and unwind enough for sleep to take me.