Caught in the Dark

by Ann Jensen

  Tek paced, taking all the information in. “I’ll work on hacking the mercs and see who is paying their bills. We’ll know what they know by morning.”

  His President studied his face. The silence stretched and frustration bubbled in his stomach. He had better not try to stop him. Tek had all the respect in the world for his Brother and President but if the fucker tried to stop him, he didn’t want to think about what he would do. Finally, Hawk nodded.

  “All right. Anything you need.”

  Exhaustion and caffeine were battling inside his system. The clock on his computer said it was the middle of the night and the walls felt like they were closing in. His office was not designed for comfort. Set up more like a computer server room, shelves of computers and electronics lined the walls. The hours tracking the mercenaries from the moment they entered the country were well spent. He had their numbers and who exactly they were up against. What he hadn’t figured out was who was funding them or why they were focused on Cami.

  The door slammed open and Tek reached for a weapon. The files on his screen quickly forgotten. Jojo stood in the doorway, her neck corded, eyes wide, and fists clenched. Tek slid his hands back to the desk, not wanting to spook the obviously pissed off woman. It was hard to feel threatened when she was dressed in a costume-like cowgirl outfit, right down to a pair of sparkly cowboy boots that had to be a size eleven.

  “This is all your fault!” she screeched. “You and your fucking Dark Sons’ dirty business.” She grabbed a box of cables and hurled it at him.

  Tek dodged the flying object. His monitor wasn’t as lucky and crashed to the floor. “What the fuck!”

  Jojo reached for another box. To Tek’s surprise, Max appeared behind her and grabbed her wrist before she could launch another missile. The two wrestled for a minute. Jojo might have some impressive skills for a civilian, but she was no match for his Brother. It took less than a minute for the hissing, struggling drag queen to be pinned face down to the floor. Tek shook his head. What the hell had sent Cami’s best friend storming in here?

  “Get off me! I’m going to kill you all for dragging my girl into your mess.” Jojo tried to buck Max off, but the man settled his weight on her trapped arm and forced her back down.

  Tek stepped around the desk, trying to find his calm. Jojo was Cami’s friend. Helplessness was a frustrating emotion. How bad it must be for the woman to be left out of the search efforts completely. He would need to find some way for her to help. First, he would have to figure out what set her off and calm this situation down. He wanted to do that as quickly as possible so he could get back to trying to track the Mercenaries’ money.

  “Jojo, none of us realized what Rick was capable of. I get why you are mad at me, but that has nothing to do with my Brothers. Two of our Brothers are in the hospital. Injured while trying to protect her.” He kept his voice low and calm, hoping it would help.

  Jojo stilled, her wig tilted awkwardly. The ridiculous thing was about to fall off her head. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” Max’s voice was strained, and Tek wondered how much strength it was taking to hold his captive down.

  “Does the name Mitchell Thomas mean anything to you?”

  Max let go of Jojo as if burned. It took Tek a few seconds to place the name. Mitchell Thomas was the alias of an evil bastard known as the Recluse. Human trafficking and information brokering was his specialty. He had kidnapped and tortured Pixie. Renewed rage burned across his skin as he remembered the horrors that man perpetrated on the world. What the hell did he have to do with this?

  He was dead. The Dark Sons had raided his compounds almost eight months ago. According to his Brothers, his sister had beaten the man to death with a lamp. Looking at the tiny girl that was his sibling, it was hard to accept the brutal stories, but every man there swore they were true.

  Jojo got to her feet and fixed her hair. The anger in her eyes said she was only a moment away from attacking again. She looked between the two of them and their confusion must have been apparent.

  “At least you don’t deny knowing the name.”

  “Start from the beginning. How do you know that name?” Tek asked.

  She crossed her arms. “None of this made sense. Sure, you could make a pretty penny off of selling our customers’ data. Insider trading is why corporations are willing to pay us so much. Identity theft is profitable but would have been caught too quickly. So I asked myself, how did Rick the Dick get contacts that were willing to not only pay him but kill and kidnap for him?”

  Tek frowned. “The government contract we have...”

  “Won’t go live for months, and it’s not like we have access to those servers yet. His cover is obviously blown, but these guys are still working with him. So I used the data Cami obtained from Rick’s e-mail and traced the person he contacted back to their first contact ten months ago.”

  “What does this have to do with Thomas?” Max interrupted.

  Max had a personal stake in that take down. When it was over, his Brother volunteered to help all the women they had rescued. He was still trying to track down and save Thomas’ previous victims. Jojo had better be very careful with what she said next, or Tek might have to step between the two.

  “At first Rick was asked if he had access to Dark Sons’ servers. The idiot said yes. Over the next few months, he fed them every bit of data on our systems about this Club.” Jojo made a gesture around the room.

  Tek wasn’t exactly worried about what might have gone out. The data kept on the Vallier servers was only for the legitimate businesses. He would need to make sure they changed any passwords or account numbers, but most of that was standard practice every few months. Since Tek was aware any system was eventually hackable, they didn’t keep anything incriminating anywhere that could be tied back to the Club. Tek could see Max clenching his fists, probably imagining beating the information out of Jojo.

  “Jojo get to the point.”

  “They got angry when he said he had given them everything. So he asked exactly what they wanted. He didn’t get an answer via e-mail, but Rick keeps notes on his phone. His task reminder actually said ‘Find the files the Dark Sons stole from Mitchell Thomas’. The notes gave a date to start looking from. The due date for the task was two weeks from now. I’m guessing that is why he got caught. He was trying to sell as much information to his other clients as possible because he needed to flee.”

  “How did we miss that?” Tek stood back behind his desk to his terminal. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Jojo, but he needed to see the information himself.

  “Unlike you, I spent the last few hours reading every single email in the file. His buyer switched accounts several times but always referred to Rick as Mister Nelson. Not M R but M I S T E R.”

  Guilt sunk like a lead weight in Tek’s stomach. If this was true, it really was Dark Sons business that dragged Cami into this mess. Did her kidnappers even know who she was? If they only thought she was a mildly talented programmer, would they even keep her alive?

  “If I hadn’t gotten her the internship, she would still be safe. That girl is worth a thousand of y’all. Because I stuck my nose in. She has been abused and dragged into the muck of your dirty dealings. When we get her back, you and your Brothers stay far away from her.”

  Jojo’s words were like knives sticking into Tek with every syllable. Cami was a bright light in his life. What had he given her? He had done nothing but dim her brilliance time and again. She may have forgiven him for what he’d done before, but could she handle knowing that the entire thing was his fault? The majority of the information they’d gotten from Mitchell Thomas when they had raided the compounds had been sold to the US government. They still had copies, but none stored online. Even Max worked off an isolated system when he was tracking the girls.

  Even if they saved her this time, would she be safe the next time someone wanted to get information on the Dark Sons? How did any of the men with Old Lad
ies deal with the fact that their women were constant targets for the enemies they collected over the years? Even his own sister was at risk. Could he live knowing the woman he loved was in constant danger? Pain lanced through his chest as he admitted to himself that he did love Cami and that no, he wouldn’t be able to function knowing she was in constant danger.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Max growled. “Mitchell Thomas was human garbage who preyed on women. I’m sorry your friend got dragged into this, but stopping him was the best thing we ever did.”

  Max was right, and taking the man down had been righteous, but they could have done a better job of covering their tracks. The government was like a leaky sieve and because they hadn’t hidden where the information came from or the fact they had been the ones to do it somehow this mysterious buyer found out. That sloppy work had then put Cami directly in the line of fire.

  His phone buzzed on the desk in front of him right before both Jojo’s and Max’s started pinging. The phones started cycling through alert sounds in an awful cacophony of noise. Tek picked up his phone and unlocked the screen. Displayed on the screen was a picture of Cami, a bruise yellowing her temple with the words ‘SEND HELP’ written across the bottom. Text and e-mail notifications scrolled across the top of his screen.

  Max and Jojo both flipped their phones to show they had the same picture. The sounds of footsteps echoed down the hall before the doorway to his office was filled with confused Brothers all with the same messages spamming their phones. His beautiful, brilliant hacker had found a way to contact every phone connected to their network and was making sure she was heard.

  GPS coordinates followed in the next burst of messages. Hope filled his body with renewed energy. He looked up, ready to start organizing the rescue, and caught Jojo’s gaze. Cami’s friend was just as excited as the rest of them, but her words from just minutes ago dimmed his elation.

  This was no life for the curious kitten he had come to love so quickly. They would rescue his woman, and then he would have to let her go.

  Chapter 32

  A real man doesn’t need to make excuses. He can face his mistakes and take the consequences head on.

  It took all of Cami’s willpower not to smile when she hit send on what she was going to lovingly call her Dark Virus. She still had trouble believing they’d retrieved her backup laptop out of her storage unit. She had thought it would take over a day to create the programs she needed on a new system. It was a pipe dream when she’d told them she already had a system set up if they were willing to get it out of her storage unit. They seemed relieved to have an easy solution that didn’t require shopping. Her whole kit was delivered to her and the only thing removed was her utility knife. That meant she had a mobile hotspot and enough tech gear to fill a geek’s wet dreams.

  She petted the edge of her completely custom laptop and prayed everything she’d done was the right move. If she hadn’t feared being put into ‘protective custody’ she might have contacted the police rather than the Dark Sons. Faith in other people was a scarce commodity in her life, and she hoped the Brothers wouldn’t let her down. She calmed her nerves by creating hundreds of contingencies in case anything went wrong.

  A light snore came from across the room. Most people looked innocent when asleep, but Rick looked ridiculous with a slack jaw and drool running down his chin. He was supposed to be watching over her, but other than a few disinterested peeks in the first hour, she’d been left alone. There was no way this man was a hacker. From what she saw on his laptop, he was more a corporate espionage guy. Not hacking, but sharing information he had legitimate access to. Hell, he was still using his Vallier Technologies laptop to log in.

  When she’d asked him for the IP address of the Dark Sons’ network, he had given her the address for the Vallier Technologies server. Thank God she already had the information she needed to get into the Compound’s servers. Altering a program she already had, she was able to send out a broadcast to every phone connected to the Wi-Fi and broadcast her distress call. The GPS on her laptop said she was on a small farmhouse east of Denver and South of both the Vallier Technologies’ Compound and Dark Sons’ Compound. The one time they had let her out of the room to go to the bathroom she had seen several mercenaries in the front of the house, but in here it felt like it was just the two of them.

  When the idiot had first fallen asleep, she had rushed to get the package together with all the information she had, fearing he might notice she wasn’t banging her head against Vallier Technologies security like he was. That done, she had taken time to connect to his laptop and mirror it to her own since he had literally no security on the thing. From what she could tell, he had spent the last few days logging onto the Vallier network using system administrator IDs and doing brute force searches of every directory he could find.

  The search terms he used consisted of names and places that meant little to her, but she saved them for future reference. The door to the room swung open, and she hit the key that brought up a screen of code that was a piece of an encryption breaking program openly available to anyone who knew where to find it on the internet. Rick jerked upright and tried to pretend like he’d been hard at work rather than napping. The guard snorted and dropped a tray of food onto the table before leaving.

  Cami got up, grateful her captors had uncuffed her after she pretended to be willing to cooperate.

  “You should keep working,” Rick grumbled.

  “Like you were?” She was tired of his attitude. The man was as much a prisoner as she was, yet he pretended to have some sort of authority over her.

  Rick rubbed his eyes, then took a deep breath. “If we don’t find what they want, they are going to kill us.”

  “No, they are going to k-kill you. I don’t know what they p-plan to do with me.”

  “Look, I’m sorry they dragged you into this.”

  Cami might almost believe his remorse. It might have been believable if she didn’t know his request to get rid of her had started the whole mess. “I’m s-sure.”

  “If you hadn’t poked your nose into things, I would be sipping a drink on a beach somewhere right now.”

  Cami glared at the man who even now was trying to blame her for his problems. “So it’s my fault you can’t deliver what you p-promised?”

  “I don’t even know what I’m looking for!” Rick practically shouted. “If the thing they wanted existed, I would have found it by now.”

  “You really think you are that good?” Cami couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  “Yeah, I am. I’ve been pulling the wool over the mighty Joseph Vallier’s eyes for over a year and no one would have noticed if I hadn’t needed enough money to get out of the country. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. No one was supposed to get hurt, but then they offered me enough money to live the life I was supposed to have. How could I say no?”

  He was a narcissistic child. Making over a hundred grand a year wasn’t enough to satisfy his ego. It didn’t matter the businesses he hurt by selling information as long as he got what he thought he deserved. One of the many things her father had done right in raising her was to make sure she understood the world didn’t owe her anything. Too many people walked around every day believing that simply by existing they should get the best in life.

  “No. It’s a s-simple w-word. What you were doing w-was w-wrong.” Cami wished she could find her anger, but he was so pathetic she couldn’t dredge it up.

  “Listen to you. You can’t even talk right and you’re lecturing me? Good and bad are concepts for the stupid, so I shouldn’t be surprised you cling to them like a child to the concept of Santa Claus.”

  “Fuck you.” There was her anger. How dare this asshole think she was naïve? She had survived hell. Seen the effects of evil on the innocent. The world might be made up of shades of gray, and the laws set up to protect the guilty more than the innocent, but she knew what was right and what was wrong. No entitled pri
ck was going to convince her otherwise.

  “You’ll see, I’ll get out of here. I’m just waiting for my chance.”

  “Chance for what? What are you going to d-do? Wait till I find what they need and take the c-credit like you did at work?”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know you are a spineless w-weasel who p-probably used D-daddy’s money for college and his connections to get a job. Other than deciding to become a c-criminal, have you ever made your own decisions? Stood on your own two feet?” Cami looked the pathetic man up and down. “You aren’t a man, you’re a s-spoiled child.”

  She sat back in her chair, not wanting to continue the pointless conversation. Anger and frustration bubbled in her stomach like the worst Mexican food. She focused back on her computer. Her heart skipped as she saw the brown square at the bottom of her screen. Someone was logged into the livestream she had set up. Was it Tek? She hoped with all of her soul it was.

  The packets of information she’d broadcast gave them the information they needed to connect. They would get video and audio from her computer but not be able to talk to her. The risk of being found out if someone sent her a message at a bad time was too high. Her body shook with nerves as she continued to work on hacking the mercenaries’ phones and connected emails for almost an hour. She checked the time. The Dark Sons’ Compound was only about twenty minutes away. She knew they would have to plan and scout, but not knowing when they were going to rescue her was another kind of torture.

  She let out a squeak when the door opened again. Rick gave her a dirty look. The urge to flip him off was a serious temptation, but she didn’t want to risk pissing off their guard. One of their guards came in and bent over to pick up the now empty food tray, and her stomach dropped when she saw her nemesis stand with his laptop raised over his head. Shock held her still as he brought it down on the burly guard’s head. Luck must have been on his side because the guard dropped to his knees, giving him the opportunity to hit him again.