Page 17

Riley

W ithout hesitation, I answered, “Absolutely. Go for it.”

Havoc hesitated for a second or two before explaining. “I thought that’s what you would say, but I didn’t want to assume that just because it was okay for me to look through your phone that you would be okay with a virtual stranger doing the same thing.”

His respectful attitude only endeared him to me more. “No, I don’t mind Hacker looking at my phone. He’s been really helpful so far. If anyone can find out if there’s a tracking app on my phone, he can.”

“I trust that you wouldn’t have suggested it if you didn’t think it was necessary. I trust you and your club brothers because you’ve been nothing but kind and supportive during this whole ordeal. Besides, now is not the time to nitpick about phone privacy issues.”

Mace came smoothly to his feet and sat down at the desk pushed against the far wall. He turned on the club’s laptop, and we watched it boot up.

Havoc gestured to it and explained, “Hacker set up the laptop a long time ago along with a security system we turn on at night. We all take turns using it, so we don’t have to lug our own laptops back and forth. It’s important to lighten the load when you’re riding a motorcycle.”

I tried to stay calm, but making small talk was getting harder by the minute. “I never thought much about how bikers have to travel light until I started riding on the back of your bike.”

I sat back on the sofa, letting it envelop me. I even grabbed a pillow and wrapped my arms around it. I didn’t feel unsafe with the two bikers, but I was worried about Slater circling back around at some point, maybe with some of his cop buddies.

Havoc walked over to stand behind Mace. He’d called Hacker and had his phone held in front of him with the speaker feature turned on so we could all hear the conversation. Havoc’s facial expression was tight and grim as he waited for his club brother to answer his call. He was taking the situation seriously, and that made me feel safe.

Hacker answered immediately, his voice deep and steady. “Good evening, Havoc. What do you need?”

“We need remote assistance, right now if possible.”

“What’s going on? Talk to me, brother.”

“We just got a visit from Slater. We went at it pretty hard. I called Storm, and he’s sending out reinforcements and wants us to move to our secondary location.”

“It must be serious if he’s sending you to the bunker. Tell me what you need from me.”

“Riley’s phone has been eating energy,” Havoc explained. “That, coupled with the fact that Slater found us out in the middle of nowhere, makes us think he might have put some kind of tracking app on her phone. We eliminated every other option.”

“That sounds about right. Dirty cops play dirty games, thinkin’ they’re above the law.”

“Yeah, dude thinks he’s a fuckin’ god. Mace said you could access her phone remotely through a laptop.”

Hacker immediately said, “Mace is one hundred percent right about that”

Havoc responded, “We’ve got that encrypted laptop you installed at the cabin up and running.”

“Good. My encryption program will make sure no one can trace anything back to the club.”

I heard keystrokes on Hacker’s end. We all waited for him to tell us what to do. Even though we’d joked around there for a few minutes to bring the tension down, it was back full force with the addition of Hacker to the mix. I remembered Havoc telling me Hacker used to work in military intelligence. It was obvious that he was in his element when it came to electronic surveillance.

His voice crackled over the speaker again. “I’m gonna send you a link. I need you to click on it to start syncing our computers. I’ll be able to see everything going on. Whoever this turns out to be, I’ll be able to track them down. They won’t realize they’ve been caught until it’s too late.”

A cold satisfaction bloomed in my chest. “You get me a name, an IP, or even a scent trail—I’ll handle the rest.”

“I know you will,” Hacker said. “Sending the link now.”

The call ended. Seconds later, Mace’s laptop chimed.

“Got the link,” Mace announced.

“Open the link, and once the computers sync, plug the phone in.” Hacker sounded almost excited about doing his part to resolve the situation. Gratitude surged in my chest for these three men. Just then Nine propped a paw up on either side of my body and laid his chin in my lap. I couldn’t help but smile and give him an affectionate pat on the head.

Mace murmured, “I clicked the link and it’s synced. I’m plugging her phone in now.”

I watched him connect my phone to the laptop. Then he lifted both hands up as my phone appeared in the file directory.

“I’m gonna call that success,” Mace said with a gigantic smile.

“Umm,” Hacker grunted. “That’s the first step. Give me a few minutes to rummage around in the downloaded apps section. If I don’t see anything, I’ve got a program that will suss it out.”

I watched as the cursor danced around opening and closing files, then suddenly the screen went black and I started to see a stream of unfamiliar code flooding the laptop screen.

“Now it’s time for the proper work to begin,” Hacker stated crisply. “Phone ID registered. Give me a minute to scrape surface-level permissions.”

Havoc came to sit beside me on the sofa, earning him a growl from Nine. When he scratched the huge wolfdog behind the ear, all was forgiven.

He asked me, “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m hanging tough. Do you really think he managed to upload an app to my phone and that is how he found us?”

The big biker shrugged. “I’d like to say maybe yes and maybe no. But my gut is telling me yes, this is how he found us. From everything you’ve described, he’s a control freak. We know he’s a spoiled rich boy who watched his father wield too much power when he was growing up. This is just the kind of thing he would do if he wanted to stalk a woman.”

“I see what you mean by the quick battery draining issue. It’s happening in the background processes,” Hacker murmured. “Wait... I think I found it. You have an app on your phone called ‘Puzzle Game’.”

“Yeah, I haven’t played that in ages,” I told him.

“There is also a ‘Puzzle Game Two’ on your phone. Do you remember uploading that one as well?”

“No. I just thought I got it automatically because I had the first one. It was a freebie that came with the phone.”

“Well, it’s using microphone access in the background. That doesn’t match any public package ID I’ve seen.”

Confusion set in at this point. “I don’t understand what puzzle games have to do with anything.”

“It looks like someone uploaded an app and disguised it as a puzzle game. The icon is just a screengrab, not a real app interface. It’s not a damn puzzle game. It’s a Trojan horse.”

I froze. Even though we expected this, it was still scary to think of someone using my own phone to keep tabs on me. Whoever this was had been watching every move I made.

“Is it a tracking app or something else?” Havoc asked, his hands balling into tight fists.

“Oh, it’s much more than a fucking tracking app. This thing is logging GPS coordinates every ten minutes. It’s uploading to a relay server with rotating IPs. It’s also recording ambient audio during charging sessions and creating logs of every button press, every app opened, every text typed.”

A strangled cry escaped from the back of my throat. It felt almost like a sob but more indignant and animalistic. My hand involuntarily flew to my mouth.

“Is it listening to us now?” I couldn’t help but ask this question. Images rose in my mind of the sweet encounter Havoc and I had by the lake, the kiss. Was that what drew that monster to us? Suddenly, dozens of questions were running through my mind.

“How long has it been active?” Mace asked, drawing me away from my internal thoughts.

“Give me a minute and I’ll check,” Hacker mumbled distractedly. “It went live the night you were arrested at Neon Vibes.”

I gasped. “My God, that was weeks ago.”

Havoc reminded me, “Wasn’t that also the night you said you left your phone at the table for a minute?”

I nodded, too shocked to answer. I reeled back in my mind to that night at Neon Vibes. We were having such fun, my three girlfriends and me. I left my phone unattended. I thought my friends had stayed at the table the whole time. Clearly, they didn’t. I cringed a little inside, thinking of how I made it easy for that bastard to stalk me.

“Can you tell who installed the app?”

I looked at Havoc, impressed that he still had the presence of mind to ask logical questions.

“Whoever is doing this is using a rotating ISP program to protect themselves from getting caught,” Hacker replied. “But don’t worry. I’ll dig deeper and see if they’ve left evidence of any kind behind.”

“How long would it take to upload and install a program this sophisticated?” Again, Havoc was all over this situation, asking all the right questions.

Hacker told him, “It wouldn’t have taken very long. Maybe two or three minutes if they had experience with this sort of thing. My best guess is they uploaded the app, installed it, renamed it, changed the icon, and then put the phone right back where they found it.”

“How long will it take you to dig deep enough to find out who did this?” Mace just kept drilling down on the details.

“I’m scraping the routing log now.”

When I leaned closer to Havoc, his big arm slid around me like it was the most natural thing in the world. His hand tugged the blanket from the far side of the sofa, and he pulled it over me. That’s when I realized that I was shivering.

“Okay,” Hacker said, sounding excited. “I tracked down the IP address of the final destination server. It’s registered to a dummy corporation out of Nevada, but the actual signal bounced three times before it hit the server.”

“Where were the other two bounces?” Havoc asked.

“The first one was Cavar County courthouse, and the second one was a private server located in a fairly remote part of Carver County.”

I felt my heart thud hard against my ribs. “I remember you telling us that his father is the Carver County sheriff. Do you think their precinct is located in the courthouse?”

“I’ll check,” Hacker responded excitedly. “Yeah, the Sheriff’s office is housed in the basement along with the county jail. I think it’s some kind of backchannel between father and son. Their version of an encrypted system. I am picking up a lot of traffic between the three servers.”

“Wait,” Hacker muttered. “I’ve hacked one of the servers. A lot of the log files are corrupted.”

“What does corrupted mean?” Havoc asked, glancing anxiously at me.

Hacker elaborated, speaking quick and fast. “Someone tried to clean house. Deleted a bunch of files, call logs, and audio dumps. I’m not gonna lie, it was done badly, like whoever was in a rush. But here’s the thing. This wasn’t done by Slater or his old man. It would take an expert to set up a system like this. If I didn’t have advanced military skills in computer surveillance, I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at. I think these assholes have hired themselves a computer expert. And something made that expert fly into a full-blown panic. There are packets of information, where the headers were left intact, but the contents were deleted.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why not delete the whole fuckin’ file?” Havoc asked.

“Because whoever this was didn’t have much time. They created a program that targeted certain information. It was probably set up to wipe the contents of any file with certain keywords in it, thus the packets and file folders were left intact.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” I told them. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

“Maybe nothing,” Hacker admitted. “But there was something in those files and on those recordings, something they didn’t want anyone to see or hear. If we can find out what it was, we might be able to use it as leverage against Slater.”

“And use it to keep his father from interfering, like he’s done in the past when Slater got into trouble.”

My world tilted back into alignment as hope bloomed in my chest. These clever bikers were right. This could be my ticket to getting Slater to leave me alone. Or better yet, get him charged and put in jail. He can’t stalk me from jail, I told myself.

“What you’re saying is that you think he recorded something that could incriminate him?”

“It’s really common for dirty cops to put people in compromising situations and then use that against them. Nobody likes to get blackmailed, but it’s a surprisingly effective way to get people to do what you want.”

“Hold on for a minute. I found a file with audio that was partially deleted. I’m gonna see if I can restore the audio.”

We listened to him typing away for a bit and some cursing under his breath and more keystrokes before he finally spoke again. “The audio is too corrupted to be restored, but I might be able to reconstruct the metadata. This might take a minute.”

While he typed, Havoc got up and started a fire in the fireplace. This time of year, the days were okay, but the temperature tended to drop significantly at night. Outside, the wind whistled through the trees, and I could hear an owl hoot. Since Nine paid it no mind, neither did I. I just kept petting my four-legged hero, and he was soaking up all the well-deserved attention.

“Alright, I think I have something interesting,” Hacker stated at long last. “The file with the audio recording had an unusual file name. It’s what grabbed my attention in the first place. Most of the files containing recordings had digital file names, numerical sequences to be exact. They looked to me like they might be dates. Only one had a word name.”

“Don’t leave us in suspense, brother. What was the word name?” Havoc asked, his voice almost irritable.

“The word was ‘confession.’”

Shock roiled through my body because it sounded an awful lot like they had captured someone’s confession and then, for some reason, deleted it.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Mace said, speaking up for the first time since the beginning of the conversation.

“This is not a joking matter,” Hacker shot back sternly. “According to the metadata, the timestamp is the date of Riley’s assault. It was recorded at six fifty-seven in the morning, lasted for seven minutes, and was deleted three hours later.”

I stared down at Nine as a multitude of questions filled my mind. What was this confession that went on for seven minutes? Was it an actual video of him accosting me? Me begging him to leave me alone? Him tipping my shirt open? Or was it him talking to his lawyer, assuming I would report him?

“I just found something else,” Hacker blurted out, clearly shocked. “I was tinkering around, just to see if I could find anything else unusual. I ran that program I mentioned earlier, and it found another spyware app.”

“What in the hell else could he want that the first app doesn’t provide? They’re already monitoring every single thing I do on my phone with the one disguised as a puzzle game.” When both Havoc and Mace turned to stare at me in shock, I was embarrassed that I let my temper get the better of me. I’m supposed to be better than this. And I used to think I was. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to myself and everyone else that this situation is making me unhinged.

“Sorry about yelling. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that the stress is getting to me.”

Havoc stated soothingly, “It’s fine. We all feel the same way. We just need to hold it together long enough to get to the bottom of this.”

“Alright, please continue, Hacker.”

“This one wasn’t transmitting to the same relay.” The tone of his voice implied we’d know what that meant. Looking from Havoc to Mace, I could tell we were all equally bewildered.

Finally, Havoc asked, “You need to explain this shit to us like we’re a ten-year-old. We don’t understand the significance of different relays.”

“A different relay means this app is using a whole different system, one that’s not related at all to the puzzle spyware. It was a second tracker. It could be some kind of failsafe, you know, a backup in case the first system fails.”

I grew more agitated instead of less agitated. “That makes zero sense. I can’t believe there is someone in the world who wants to track my movements, much less that tracking me is so critically important to this creep that he’s installed a backup tracker operating on an entirely different system.” I snapped my mouth shut because I was ranting at the nice guys who have dedicated their time and effort to see to my safety.

Havoc lifted me into his lap and held me close. “Alright, we’re ready to hear the rest, Hacker.”

Hacker picked right back up where he left off. “Like I was saying, it’s a different server, which means there is a different destination. And here’s where it gets really interesting: the server they’re using is located at the Griffinsford PD.”

I gasped. “You think the two police departments are in cahoots? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It could be that they’re all dirty and working together. This app was disguised too, but as a system tool called ‘Voice Assistant Update.’ It looked so legit that I missed it the first time around. My bot doesn’t miss anything though.”

Havoc rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We can’t ignore that someone at the Griffinsford PD has realized what a liability Slater is and decided to go after him. They must know that the only way to totally put him out of commission is to take down his old man as well.”

Mace threw in his two cents’ worth. “That seems highly unlikely. We already know there are deeply rooted problems with Griffinsford PD’s chain of command. I can’t imagine them deciding to be hometown heroes all the sudden.”

Looking from one to another of them, I wasn’t sure what to think. They continued to debate that last point until Hacker decided to wrap it with a recap of what we’d learned so far.

“Looks like we have two separate trackers going at the same time. The one linked to Slater is highly intrusive and tracks a lot of information. The one originating from the Griffinsford PD servers is basically a listening program. It activates when the phone is in use.”

“Hold on a moment,” I said, suddenly realizing something.

“What?” Havoc muttered.

I mouthed the words to him and pointed to the laptop, “If someone is listening in, then they know what we’re doing.”

“What’s she saying?” Hacker asked.

“She’s worried someone’s listening,” Havoc said.

“Not at the moment,” Hacker replied. “I switched it to airplane mode remotely before I started going through the code. If someone’s listening now, they’ll probably think you’re in a dead zone.”

I felt myself relax at that bit of news.

Havoc’s voice became steely and determined. “What we need is a plan.”

Hacker shot back, “No, what you need is to meet with Storm and the other club officers so you can come up with a plan together. Considering this puts you right between an organized crime family operating under the cover of law and our own local police department, this isn’t something you can do on your own.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that. I’ve recently learned that I need to cool my jets and engage in doing the proper front-end work if I want to keep my shit from going sideways,” Havoc told him.

“When we meet with Storm and the others, I’ll recommend that we track Slater’s end first. I don’t know exactly who is managing his servers, but if we can get to him and force him to talk, we might find out who was confessing to what. Once we get that information, it might be helpful, and it might not be germane to our situation. But one thing is for certain: squeezing intel out of their IT professional will give us the inside information we’re looking for to nail Slater and his old man down.”

Havoc’s arms relaxed around me, and the tightness in his shoulders clicked down a notch. “I totally agree with everything you said. Going straight to the source is the right answer.” Havoc glanced down at me before adding, “If we work together, we’ll find a way to put Slater where he won’t be able to target any more innocent women.”

Mace stood up and patted his leg, causing Nine to jump up and run to his side. “This situation is bigger and more complicated than I ever imagined when I saw you duking it out with Slater.”

Hacker’s voice rose. “You didn’t mention having a fistfight with Slater.”

“Don’t worry, I kicked his ass.”

Mace chimed in, “The dude sounds like he had it coming, to be honest.”

Hacker’s voice turned aggravated. “I’m not debating whether or not he deserved it. He clearly did, and I probably would have done the same if he’d come after my old lady. The thing is, he’s a fucking cop. They’re all going to be looking to take their pound of flesh outta you for daring to touch one of their own. You do know that, right?”

“Yeah, Storm mentioned that. It’s why he wanted us to hightail it out to the bunker after talking to you.”

“Good plan. Wait for us to come to you. Don’t take a chance showing your face in Griffinsford right now.”

“Roger that. Unless you have something else, we best get going. I don’t know how long it’s gonna take Slater to lick his wounds and come back with his buddies in blue to have another whack at me.”

Mace asked, “What about the phone? Do you want to throw it in the river?”

“Fuck no,” Hacker responded tersely. “I want you to take the battery out and put both the phone and the battery into the floor safe.”

Havoc and Mace looked at each other, a little bewildered.

Mace asked, “You mean the one at the clubhouse? I was thinking me and Nine would patrol the outside of the bunker until reinforcements arrived.”

“That’s a yes on the patrolling and a no on bringing the phone to the clubhouse. Just put it in the floor safe at the cabin.”

Havoc looked confused, “What floor safe?”

Hacker quickly explained, “Knowledge about the floor safe is on a need-to-know basis. You need to know right now, so I’m telling you about it.”

“Right,” Havoc mumbled, sounding none too happy about being left in the dark.

We sprung up and did as we were told. I grabbed the blanket and the toss cushions as the two men laid the sofa on its back and tugged up the area rug. We could barely see that the carpet had a big square hole cut out of it.

Havoc pulled up the piece of carpeting and we saw a big hunk of metal that looked nothing like a floor safe.

“What the fuck is this monstrosity?” he asked Hacker.

“It’s a safe that doubles as a Faraday cage. A unit of my own design that was fabricated on site. I’ve programmed every brother’s fingerprint into the biometric lock.”

Havoc reached down and pressed two fingers against the scanning plate, and we heard something click. He turned the awkward metal handle and pulled the lid up. All three of us gazed down into what appeared to my eye like something you would find on a military base. There were armor chest plates, metal ammo boxes, and lots of equipment I didn’t recognize.

Hacker asked, tense, “Are you in?”

“Yeah,” Havoc replied. “We’re in, but I’m not sure what the fuck I’m looking at here. I’m seeing a lot of things that don’t make sense.”

“It contains personal bug-out items for the club officers as well as basic equipment our club would need to survive a worst-case scenario situation and start over in the event that something happened to our clubhouse again and our accounts were frozen.”

“I know the cabin’s registered in the name of one of the old ladies’ mothers, so I suppose this is a logical place to stow this kind of gear,” Havoc muttered.

“Exactly. Remove the battery from her phone and place it in the ammo box marked for communications equipment.”

Havoc ran his fingers down the line of ammo cases and then tugged one free. It wasn’t locked, so he just popped the metal clasp. “Found it.”

Hacker instructed, “Put Riley’s cell phone and battery in the box and pull out one of the burner phones. That will have to do her for right now, I can clone her SIM card but I want to make sure it’s clean first.”

Havoc handed me a burner phone. It was actually a little kit with a charging cord and prepaid card so I could activate the phone. I watched him dump my phone into the ammo box, shut the case, and drop it back into place. They quickly closed the lid, replaced the square of carpet, and pulled the area rug back into place. I stepped back while they righted the sofa and replaced the toss cushions and blanket. No one could tell by looking what lay just beneath their feet. I knew without being told that this information was not to be shared with a living soul.

“All done,” Havoc intoned.

“Good,” the deep voice on the other end of the line said. “Now get your asses moving. Me and the other club officers will come out first thing in the morning. Storm has already sent prospects to guard the outside of the cabin and shelter. They should be arriving anytime.”

“Yeah, okay. We’re heading out now.”