Crash & Burn

by Abigail Roux

  “Relax, Garrett, it’s just us,” Owen said from the darkness of the living room.

  Zane’s shoulders slumped in relief. He hadn’t been up for a battle royale tonight. And Ty would have killed him if he’d wrecked the furniture. “Why are you sitting in the dark? I could have shot you.”

  Digger chuckled. “You could have tried.”

  “You made a show of kicking us out of your office; we didn’t want anyone seeing us with a key to your house,” Owen explained.

  Zane clicked on a lamp in the corner. “You have a key to the house?”

  “Of course. Ty gave us all one when he bought the place.”

  Zane ran a hand through his hair, smiling wryly. “I basically married all of you, didn’t I?”

  Digger chuckled evilly and Owen rolled his eyes.

  Zane sat on the end of the couch, struck by how odd this should have felt. Him and Digger and Owen, two men he’d never actually been alone with for any extended amount of time, not without Ty around. Or at least not without Nick around, if you counted that one time Ty had needed rescuing.

  “What did you find out? Anything?” Zane asked.

  “No one pinged verbally,” Owen told him, sounding a little embarrassed about it. “I didn’t get to everyone in your office, but I started with the team you used to work with and moved out from there.”

  Zane held his breath. “They’re all clean?”

  Owen winced. “I’m not going to say yes. The redhead gave Digger her number, so I’d fire her immediately for poor judgment.”

  “Hey!” Digger grunted.

  “Clancy would eat you alive,” Zane told Digger with a smirk. “Well, I ran the ID number of the agent who flagged the cartel’s accounts.”

  “Was it Burns?” Digger asked.

  Zane shook his head, sighing. “It was Ty.”

  Both men were quiet and thoughtful, frowns deepening. “What does that mean?” Owen finally asked.

  “Either Ty did it himself, thinking it was part of a legit op, or someone—maybe Burns, but definitely someone in power—used his ID to do it.”

  “Or Ty’s dirty,” Digger offered.

  Owen glared at him. “That might have been funny before O’Flaherty started killing people, dude.”

  “Sorry,” Digger grumbled.

  Zane rubbed at the tension between his eyes. “Either way, Nick was right. Someone in the Bureau hid something in those accounts, and there’s no legal reason for that to happen.”

  Owen and Digger remained silent.

  “Have we heard from Ty?” Zane asked. “The others?”

  “Yeah, Irish checked in this afternoon,” Owen answered. “He said they’d gotten in and out of the home with no problem and they were heading to Ty and Kelly, that Ty had called them for help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “He didn’t say, but he didn’t sound concerned about it. We haven’t heard anything since. He uploaded the contents of an SD card to us as a backup in case something went wrong. He said we should get it to you ASAP.”

  “Why, what’s on it?”

  “Photos. D and I looked over it, but it’s just photos.” Owen stood and headed for a laptop on the dining table as he spoke.

  Zane followed, watching over Owen’s shoulder as he brought up the contents of the SD card Nick had uploaded to a cloud. There were other files on there, most of them labeled with trips Sidewinder had taken over the years by location or event.

  “This where you guys share pictures and stuff?” Zane asked.

  “Yeah, it’s easier than relying on Digger or Doc to actually remember to send us copies,” Owen said under his breath.

  “I heard that!” Digger called from the living room.

  Owen smirked and pulled up the right file. Zane leaned closer, scowling as an array of photos popped up. Nothing seemed abnormal about them. Burns and his wife on vacation in the Caribbean. Landmarks and scenery. A cocker spaniel with its tongue out. There were some older photos, as well, of Burns and Earl Grady as far back as Vietnam. Wedding photos. A very young Burns holding a baby Zane could only assume was Ty. He recognized the fireplace in the background as the one at the Grady home.

  “What do you think?” Owen asked after letting Zane look over them for a few minutes.

  Zane shook his head. “Why did Nick think this was important?”

  “He said they found it in a safe in the floor that Burns’s widow didn’t even know was there. It was hidden inside a book.”

  “What book?”

  Owen shrugged.

  Zane hummed and clicked through a few more photos. Looking at picture after picture of Burns smiling for the camera, at moments of his life he’d caught for posterity, so important to him that he’d scanned them and kept digital copies in a safe, Zane felt a pang of mourning.

  He’d been upset when Burns had been murdered, of course he had. He was human, after all. And he’d seen the way the loss had torn at Ty and his family. He’d suffered from sympathy and remorse. He’d never mourned the man, though. He’d never thought of Burns as anything but his boss who hadn’t trusted him. He’d never thought of him as a husband, brother, or uncle. He’d never thought about the lifetime he’d left behind him.

  “You okay?” Owen asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just . . . this is a side of him I never saw.”

  Owen laid a hesitant hand on his shoulder.

  “This is the side of him Ty knew, though.”

  Digger spoke up behind them. “Six ain’t ever going to get over Irish killing him. Is he?”

  Owen and Zane exchanged uneasy glances. Zane looked back at the photos on the computer screen and Owen turned toward the kitchen, shaking his head.

  Zane heard the others coming before they ever got close to the front door. They were bickering, berating each other for whatever had gone wrong. Zane couldn’t hear the words, but he recognized Ty’s “annoyed on a mission gone wrong” tone even through the door.

  “I mean, how fucking hard is it?” Ty shouted when the door opened.

  “You know me, Ty! I’m not a good liar!” Kelly slammed the door shut behind him. “I told you not to make me talk, I told you I couldn’t do it, but no, go tell the girl you’re in IT, Doc, people never ask questions when you’re in IT.”

  “They don’t!”

  “Well obviously they do! How the fuck am I supposed to know how many megahertz is in the fucking Bureau processors, huh? That’s not common knowledge!”

  “I’ll megahertz you,” Ty grumbled.

  Kelly dropped his coat and waggled his fingers at Ty. “Let’s go then!”

  “Hey!” Digger shouted. He stood with his hands outstretched, his eyebrows raised. “What happened?”

  Ty and Kelly glared at each other for a moment longer before calming and separating. Kelly stomped to the kitchen, while Ty moved to the couch and sat next to Zane. He ran his hands through his hair. “We couldn’t get the files. We didn’t have enough time, and there were just too many to go through. We didn’t know where to start.”

  “Where are the others?” Owen asked.

  Ty raised his head, eyes scanning the room. “They’re not back?”

  No one answered. Kelly slammed the refrigerator door and cursed.

  “We used Liam as a distraction to get into the building,” Ty told them. “Nick was driving, I’m sure they got away. Probably had to dump the car, they’ll be here soon.”

  No one argued the assertion. Zane observed the members of Sidewinder, wondering how they could fight like they did but still have so much faith in each other’s abilities.

  Actually, that pretty much summed up him and Ty.

  “We need you to look at some pictures,” Owen told Ty after a stretch of tense silence. “Nick uploaded an SD card for us, but we can’t find anything that pings on it.”

  “It’s all personal photos,” Zane said. “We were thinking you might be able to catch whatever Burns thought was so important about them.”

  Ty nodde
d and got up to follow Zane to the dining table. He sat and began flipping through the pictures, going slowly, staring at each photograph for a long time. Zane wanted to comfort him, do something to ease the pain in his eyes, but no amount of coddling or cooing would ease the grief.

  It took Ty nearly half an hour to page through every photograph, and then he sat back and sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “No idea why he’d take such pains to hide and keep those safe?” Owen asked.

  Ty shook his head. Then his lips curved in a smile. “You know, when they said it was inside a book, I half expected some sort of code that needed cracking. Dick loved replacement ciphers.”

  The fond smile on Ty’s face brought one to Zane’s. Then something struck him, and he stood so fast he almost toppled his chair over. Ty flinched. “He coded the photos!”

  “Do what, now?” Ty asked.

  “Digital steganography,” Zane blurted. He shooed Ty out of his seat and plopped himself down in front of the computer.

  “Can you figure that shit out?” Owen asked. “Doesn’t it usually take a pretty advanced computer program to decode?”

  “What the fuck is digital stego . . . saurus?” Ty asked.

  “Steganography,” Zane corrected. “It’s the process of hiding information in electronic communications. Sort of a modern day invisible ink.”

  “Would Burns have been able to do that without leaving an electronic trail?” Ty asked.

  “There are advanced ways of doing it that require equipment, which would have left a trail if he’d used them. But there are low-tech ways, too. A photo-manipulating program and some patience is all it would take.”

  “How so?” Kelly asked.

  “The most common way, the easiest way, is to change the hue of the pixels according to a preset alphabetic code.” Zane pulled up one of the photos as he spoke, zooming in on it until it was magnified by two thousand. It was no longer an image, just blocks of blurry color. He scanned along the photo, and couldn’t help but grin triumphantly when he hit on a pattern of squares that were drastically different from the colors around them. “It’s invisible to the naked eye, especially when the photo is printed out, but the more you enlarge the digital file, the more obvious it becomes. We just need to identify the pixels and figure out what they correspond to.”

  “Jesus. This is going to take forever,” Owen said.

  “It would,” Zane said with a nod. “Luckily, I know a guy.”

  Ty felt stupid leading the boys into the Baltimore field office under the cover of darkness. This was the second federal building he’d trespassed on today; he was pushing his luck more than even he liked.

  Owen, Digger, and Kelly followed him to the service entrance, keeping to the shadows and using the odd corners of the loading docks to shield them from prying video eyes. None of them said a word as they waited for Zane to meet them and let them into the building.

  They took the service stairs to the fourth floor to avoid the telltale beep of the elevators.

  The cybercrimes unit was dark and quiet, lit by emergency lights and the glow of several machines that had been left on. Ty waited in the stairwell as Zane moved out and checked that it was clear. If Zane was caught here at night, the only thing he could be accused of was being a workaholic. The rest of them, not so much. And if they were confronted by anyone from the cartel? Ty was confident the five of them could take care of it.

  They moved out, the other boys fanning out behind Ty in a natural protective formation, falling back on all their years of training. They stayed low, confident in Zane to lead them through the floor without incident.

  The room Zane took them into was lined with machines that gave off a soothing whir. It was cold in the room, too, cold enough that Ty didn’t even bother taking his scarf off.

  “We just need to load the photos into this one,” Zane told them as he sat in front of a screen. “It’ll take the program a few hours to run, but we should have what we need and be out of here before people start coming in.”

  Ty stood at Zane’s side as he brought up the photos on the SD card and began loading them into the program that would identify and decode the pixels. Ty loved watching him in his element like this almost as much as he loved to watch Zane brawl.

  “So we just . . . chill until it finishes?” Digger asked.

  Zane nodded as he typed. “Break room down the hall has yogurt and crossword puzzles.”

  Digger muttered under his breath.

  Ty turned to look over the others. Owen was standing by the door, keeping watch through the blinds on the window. Digger was touching things he probably shouldn’t be touching. And Kelly was crouched against the wall, his phone in hand and a scowl lit by the device’s glow.

  “Still nothing from Nick,” Kelly said when he saw Ty watching him. “We should have heard from them by now.”

  Ty nodded in agreement, but he had no words of comfort. He hadn’t even thought twice about offering Liam up as bait, though he’d been a little surprised when Nick had agreed to help Liam. Maybe there was something to Kelly’s theory about a sort of Stockholm syndrome going on. Nick wasn’t easily susceptible to mind games, but two weeks alone with Liam and a gun would break anyone.

  There was nothing to be done about their predicament right now, though, not until they heard something from one of the missing men.

  “Isn’t there something more worthwhile we could be doing than watching this computer do shit?” Kelly asked irritably. “Like looking for Nick?”

  “Where would you start, man?” Ty sympathized with Kelly’s desire to find the man. Hell, Ty wanted to hear from him too, and the more time that passed the more worried he got. But there was nowhere to start, and they had to trust in Nick and Liam to get out of a scrap on their own right now. “And if we run into trouble with this, we’ll need you.”

  Kelly huffed, but he didn’t argue.

  “Movement on the elevator,” Owen whispered, and he knelt below the level of the window in the door.

  Ty and Zane shared a look as Ty reached for his gun, but Zane stopped him with a hand on his wrist, and stood. “I’ll see if I can head them off. Y’all stay here. Keep quiet.”

  Ty nodded and slid his gun back into place.

  Zane took his jacket off and draped it over the chair, then pushed the sleeves of his Henley to his elbows. He searched around the desk area, then grabbed a pen and slid it behind his ear. He held his hands out to Ty. “Do I look sleep-deprived and grumpy?”

  Ty mussed his hair for him. “You always look sleep-deprived and grumpy.”

  Zane smacked him on the back of the head as he moved by him and slipped past Owen into the hall.

  He closed the door tight behind him, but after a second Owen turned the handle and popped the door back open so they could hear. They crowded around, straining their ears to listen.

  “Michelle?” Zane called.

  “Garrett!” Michelle Clancy replied. “What the hell are you doing here? You scared the shit out of me.”

  Zane chuckled. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “I was downstairs getting some work in, saw the elevator move. Came up to check it out.”

  Ty scowled and met Owen’s eyes. Was it possible someone had taken this elevator up even as they’d been climbing the stairs on the other end of the building? Or was Clancy lying?

  “The elevator?” Zane repeated, his tone more guarded.

  “Get out there, Six,” Kelly whispered. He patted Ty’s leg as he listened from a spot on the ground. “Go go, give him backup.”

  Ty was already trying to get out of his coat and scarf and boots. He tossed his shirt aside as well, leaving himself in nothing but his jeans, socks, and a T-shirt with a picture of a piñata that said, “I’d hit that.” He took off his holster and dropped it, sliding his gun into the back of his jeans and making sure his shirt covered it.

  “Keep at that computer,” Ty whispered. “If shit gets bad, you make sure you’re gone befor
e it ends, got it?”

  They all nodded and moved aside so he could slip out of the room.

  Clancy was standing by the elevators, and Zane was facing her with his back to Ty. They were eyeing each other with growing suspicion, neither of them speaking.

  “Hey, Red,” Ty said. Zane jumped when he spoke but he didn’t turn around.

  Clancy seemed to relax a little when Ty appeared, and then a slow smile spread across her face as she saw the condition of Ty’s clothing. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt . . . whatever you were doing.” She turned half away and shielded her view with her hand.

  Zane almost looked over his shoulder, his body twitching.

  “Michelle, we came up the stairs,” Ty said quietly. “You sure that elevator moved?”

  Clancy’s entire demeanor changed almost instantly. Her shoulders tensed and her hand hovered near the gun at her hip. Ty was stunned for the briefest of moments by the thought that Clancy might be about to draw on them.

  Then she took a step to the side and put her back to the wall beside the elevator. “It was about ten minutes ago,” she said, voice pitched lower. “Started at the ground floor and stopped here. Didn’t move again.”

  Zane turned to meet Ty’s eyes then, nodding. “Someone tailed us,” he said, drawing his weapon.

  Ty knocked on the door behind him, and the other three men poured out of the room. Owen and Digger fanned out onto the floor, sliding through cubicles and disappearing into the darkness. Kelly stayed behind, guarding the door to the computers.

  Clancy watched slack-jawed. “Oh Christ. I’m going to get shot in the ass, aren’t I?”

  “Probably,” Ty whispered. He moved to Zane’s left, gun in hand.

  “You two aren’t here getting your rocks off on the equipment, huh?”

  Ty shook his head.

  “Thank God.”

  “You haven’t seen anyone else here tonight?”

  “No, just you assholes,” Clancy grunted.

  Zane scurried to the bank of windows at the front of the building and looked out. “Whoever they are, they parked out front.”