Dark Control (DARC Ops Book 4) Page 4

  She nodded. “I think.”

  “I don’t, uh . . . Well, look, this wasn’t even my idea in the first place, hiring y’all.”

  “Sentry Systems?”

  “Some of the boys at AIDA got right spooked, thinkin’ their communications might get listened on. Like, intercepted. Or . . . hacked? Is that it?”

  She nodded.

  “Now I don’t know for a fact if there is . . . if there even is something to worry about. But, well . . .”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Well, you know Atlanta.”

  “Yeah, yeah . . .”

  “You know things ain’t always . . .” He chuckled. “It’s not always above board when it comes to these folks. Now, there are things on there, on their . . . system . . . server . . . that, believe or not, that even I can’t access. But someone like you could.”

  Laurel listened hard, feeling more sober with each word.

  “Now, don’t get me wrong, Kiddo,” he said. “I think you’re a wonderful . . . young lady.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “A wonderful . . . professional, you know, at what you do there at Sentry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “This ain’t all about me.”

  More nodding. “Yeah, yeah . . .”

  “I’m just fixin’ to kill two birds with one stone.” Abe shrugged. “So that’s that.” He reached for his glass, his hand hovering in place when he realized it was empty. “And if there’s anything there, then I need to know about it, and to have it cleared up before I retire. The last thing I want is some . . . some goddamned . . . Excuse me.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t want to have anything to worry about. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m retiring next month. And I want it with peace of mind.” He looked at the glass again. “So, I’m taking a risk.”

  Great . . .

  He was taking a risk. With her.

  5

  Matthias

  It was a new destination: Atlanta. And a new bike: an all-black Harley Davidson Night Rod Special. It lived up to its billing as a pretty sweet ride. It was a nice distraction for a while, getting used to the low-profile design, figuring out the handling, enjoying the change from sport to chopper—and all the looks from his passersby. But after a few hours it felt like any other bike, any other long haul. And then, finally, the sad truth of it, that it was just another job for DARC Ops.

  Matthias found him sitting alone at the bar. Ernesto. Ernie. He wore a baseball cap and was hunkered down with his elbows on the leather edge of the bar when Matthias slapped a hand on his shoulder. The contact made Ernie jump. After a big smile and a hug, Ernie’s first question was about the bike.

  “You drove that all the way to Atlanta?”

  “Yeah, I was supposed to go further to Louisiana.”

  Ernie smiled. “Sorry about that.”

  “No, you’re not.” Matthias sat on the stool next to his and said, “You and Jackson, doing everything you can to ruin a guy’s vacation.”

  “Well, if you play your cards right here, it should be a vacation.”

  “By doing what?”

  “By not getting too involved in things.”

  Matthias stared at his friend. “So I stopped here specially, just to not get involved in things? I could have done that from New Orleans.”

  After ordering a pint of beer for Matthias, Ernesto said, “We needed a warm body, and Jackson thought it would help.”

  “Help?”

  “Like, help you get reintroduced. You know? To the lifestyle.”

  “I appreciate that, but I don’t need you guys playing doctor.” Matthias wrapped his fingers around the cold pint glass. “I’ve already got one of those.”

  “You also know about vehicle tracking from your work with Tansy. You’re an expert at that now.”

  “Tansy’s still better. Why didn’t you just get him?”

  Matthias’ pint of beer had already left a cold, sweating puddle when he picked it up off the bar top. Ernie raised his and clinked glasses. “Cheers.”

  “Yeah, cheers?” Matthias held the glass. “But what about Tansy? For real. He’s the expert in this area. I thought that’s, you know, the point.”

  Ernesto had taken a long sip from his beer and then said, “The point, my friend, is that you’re here.”

  There he certainly was, miles off track from his bike tour. In the sweltering, humid night air of Atlanta. And in some historic landmark of a bar. At least he had his old friend with him.

  “Well,” he said, “It’s good to see you, Ernie.”

  Matthias’ attention was pulled away from his friend when two tall blondes walked by in high heels and tight jeans. He smiled at them, out of habit—a bad habit. And one of them smiled back.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Ernesto. “Enjoy yourself.”

  “So that’s why I’m here, then? To sit around and enjoy myself?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe with company.” Ernesto motioned to the women, twins maybe, who were strutting away into the darkened bar. “You know them or something?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  Matthias grinned at his old pal. “Is there at least some work for me to do? Or could I just stay in bars, hitting on women every night? Not that I would particularly mind that . . .”

  Ernesto gave a wincing smile. “Well, you’ll be keeping up appearances, at least. There’s a cybersecurity company here that needs your services. It’s called Sentry Systems. You’ll be headed there tomorrow for a meeting with the CEO.”

  “Yeah, that does sound pretty boring.” Matthias couldn’t see the blondes anymore. “This company . . . they’re doing the tracking?”

  “Yeah, for the FBI.”

  “How do you feel about that? As an FBI agent, I mean. Do you feel safer, knowing they’ll know your every move?” Matthias smiled at him.

  “I’m not sure if safer is the word . . . I definitely feel more scrutinized in what I do.”

  “Maybe that’s the real reason.”

  “They say it’s for our safety, whatever that means.”

  “So, they’re currently tracking your car? They know you’re here?”

  “Yes,” said Ernesto. “My work car was just recently equipped with the latest release of the technology. All the other older models have been too easily hacked, so I guess we’ll see how they did with this one.”

  “What do you make of the cybersecurity company?

  Ernesto shrugged.

  “I mean, do you trust them?”

  Matthias moved his chair over, making room for the recent arrival to the bar—a curvy young woman in a tight denim skirt. Long ringlets of hair swooped across her back when she sat down. She appeared to be alone. That was a little hard to believe.

  “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust them,” Ernesto said, looking around the bar, and then at the young lady before speaking a little quieter under the music. “But all it really takes is just one person. One mole.”

  “One person to leak company secrets out to hackers?”

  “Or criminals,” said Ernesto. “Or terrorists. Which we have reason to believe may have already happened.”

  Matthias listened as the woman ordered a mint julep, trying as best he could to not stop his eyes at the sight of her breasts, but instead concentrate on Ernesto’s story. It was important, damn it.

  “Our main priority right now is with the Southern Dragons. A biker gang. We’ve been watching a lot of their operations. But it seems like the closer we get to them, the more heat gets reflected back on us. Someone doesn’t want us messing around with the Dragons.”

  “What kind of heat are we talking about?”

  “They had a meeting that we were tipped off about. We showed up to run some surveillance, and it turned out to be an ambush.”

  “They trapped you guys?”

  “Someone did. They knew we were coming.” Ernesto grabbed his glass, but then just
seemed to stare off into space. “Had us pinned down for twenty minutes until we neutralized them.”

  “And so you think they’re tracking your vehicles?”

  Ernesto shrugged.

  “Does it sound conceivable that a gang of bikers could hack through FBI security?”

  “Not really.”

  “So what the hell are we talking about, then?”

  “They’re getting help somewhere,” Ernesto said. “We thought we came across an encoded message, from someone at Sentry.”

  “Who?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Matthias watched the girl smile at the bartender when her drink arrived.

  “So,” Ernesto said. “There’s at least some reason for you to be there at Sentry Systems. Though it’s a super small percentage that the leak actually came from there.”

  “If it had, what do you think would be the motivation for helping a biker gang sabotage the FBI?”

  “They’re either bought and paid for, or affiliated in some way with the gang. Or whatever party the gang is working with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The corruption could go up pretty high.” Ernesto took another look around before hunching in close to Matthias. “There’s a lot of corruption in certain circles in Georgia right now. Dirty politics. Dead bodies. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was ultimately something done by a politician hoping to keep his nose clean.”

  “Then he’s going to some pretty extraordinary lengths to do it, taking on the FBI.”

  “Well, he might be involved in some extraordinarily criminal activities. The severity of the crime usually equals to the severity of the coverup. Like I said, lots of dead bodies around here lately. We’ve found members of the city council floating in the Chattahoochee River.”

  Jackson had never told him about the bodies. Apparently that little tidbit was lumped in with the rest of the stuff he’d waited to hear from Ernesto. He might have reconsidered his visit to Atlanta if he’d known about ambushes and dead bodies.

  “Yeah,” Ernesto said. “It’s that bad.”

  Bad seemed like an understatement. They had fucking politicians floating around in the rivers.

  Matthias took a drink. A large one. “Tell me more about this biker gang.”

  “They’re just your average biker gang. They run guns and drugs and prostitutes. And somehow along the way they may have befriended a few shady politicians. Imagine that.”

  “So you think they’re the muscle behind all the corruption? The gang carries out the hits and does all the dirty work.”

  “That’s what they do best. They’re the street-level guys doing the messy stuff for people who ride around in limos all day.”

  Matthias had kept an eye on the girl next to him the whole time. An eye to her and an ear to Ernesto. He’d heard everything his old pal had to say, all the important details of the mission, yet he couldn’t untangle himself from the beautiful distraction sitting next to him. She had been recently joined by an unhappy-looking guy, some scrawny tweaker with shifty eyes, and through his conversation with Ernesto, Matthias could hear some of their bitter back and forths. Something about furniture, and money. An unhappy couple disputing their finances, perhaps.

  No, they couldn’t have been a couple. That didn’t fit.

  Still, Matthias knew he should stay out of it. And he’d planned to, at least until the point when the guy laid a hand on her. Her wrist. The tweaker grabbed it hard and she struggled out of his grasp.

  “Come on, bitch.” He grabbed her again. “Let’s go!”

  Now, even Ernesto was finally paying attention to her, their conversation quickly dissipating amidst the drama next door.

  “I don’t care how I get the money,” the kid said. “But I’ll get it.”

  “Hey,” barked Matthias, “Is there a problem here?”

  “Yeah,” said the kid. “And it’s got nothin’ to do with you.”

  “It does when you got your hands on her like that.”

  “Stay the fuck out of it.” He reached for her again.

  “I’m not gonna sit here and watch you do that.”

  “Matthias,” said Ernesto. “Chill out. Let’s get the bouncer.”

  “No,” the kid said. “Let’s go outside, all of us. Me and you.”

  “How about just you go outside,” said Matthias. “With a broken fucking neck.”

  The kid was arguing with the woman again, grabbing her arm and yanking her off the stool. “You’re coming out, right now.”

  Matthias was already standing, an automatic lurch out of his stool and now coming down on the guy, his hands at his shoulders, pushing back and away from the girl. He was a scrawny little kid with a bad mouth. He moved easily, and scared even more easily. Maybe he felt courageous enough to raise his hand to that girl, but to Matthias he was shying away. “Chill out, man,” he cried. “What the fuck?”

  Some huge lug of a guy wearing all black, a bouncer maybe, had stepped in between them. The kid was still whining, “What the fuck? What the fuck, man?” And now that there was a huge body between them, he finally said, “Wanna go?”

  He invited Matthias outside several times more while Matthias just shook his head and returned to the bar, and to his beer. He didn’t care about the kid. He didn’t need to prove anything to him, or to make some horrible lasting impression with his fists. He just couldn’t sit there and watch him grab her like that. He did what any self-respecting man would do in that situation. And now it was over with. And he hadn’t felt the slightest twinge of panic.

  “He was grabbing her,” Ernesto said to the bar staff. “Get him out.”

  “Jason,” the girl cried, “just get the fuck out of here.”

  Jason had been turned around by a bouncer and was shoved out of the bar. His leaving ended all the tension and shouting. But in the aftermath was this frail-looking woman still at the bar, one hand shakily clutching her drink, the other combing through her hair. It reminded Matthias that other people had nerves, too, and sometimes those nerves don’t always cooperate. He thought of his own hands, looking down at them and expecting to see that same shaky mess. But they were steady. He was steady.

  “Fuckin’ asshole,” he heard Ernesto say. But Matthias was still looking at the woman, trying to think of what to say. Maybe she didn’t want to hear anything. She looked embarrassed.

  “Thanks,” she said. It was a surprise to Matthias. And it came out just before she gulped down the last of her drink, the ice rattling against the glass.

  “No problem,” Matthias said, turning to the bartender and motioning to her glass. “Another one of those drinks with the leaves in it.”

  She made no reaction. Her eyes were fixed on the bar top.

  “Are you okay?” Matthias asked her.

  She stared for a moment, and then said, “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks.” And when her drink came, she clutched her hand around it, a little less shaky now. “Thanks,” she said to the bartender.

  The bartender pointed a bottle opener at Matthias. “You can thank him.”

  She turned, laying those watery brown eyes on him. “I appreciate what you did and everything . . .” She trailed off and Matthias followed, waiting for the inevitable but. “But I’m just here to drink, okay?”

  “So am I,” he said, raising his glass to her before taking a sip. She wandered down the bar and sat again.

  “Well,” said Ernesto. “That was interesting. Way to jump in and be a hero.”

  Matthias shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal. Just some punk.”

  “Careful with that,” said Ernesto.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t want to draw too much attention your way.”

  “I thought you told me to relax and have a good time.”

  “Yeah, just try to do it without ending up in jail. Drunk and disorderly won’t help us.”

  “I’m not drunk,” said Matthias.

  “What about disorderly? You seemed pretty
close to it.”

  “With that guy? Nah . . .”

  Matthias took another look at the girl. She had pulled out her phone, the soft blue glow reflecting against the delicate features of her face. He heard Ernesto say something about getting back on topic. But it was hard to take his eyes off her.

  At the far end of the bar came a voice over the PA system, a host introducing the band. And then came the first notes of a swing number.

  Over the noise of the band, Ernesto said, “You alright?”

  “Yeah,” said Matthias. “Everything’s great. I’m on vacation.”

  Ernesto smiled. “Careful, Amigo.”

  6

  Laurel

  She spent the rest of the night hiding in a bathroom stall, making calls to whomever she thought would be awake and nearby. It wasn’t a big enough deal to pull someone out of bed for. And she wasn’t about to call every single name on her list just because she was stranded at a bar with a lurking ex-boyfriend. She could handle him, if she had to. She just didn’t want to. She’d done enough of that in the few years that they were a couple. Handling, humoring, persevering, denying. What a joke.

  Laurel gave up after six unanswered calls and a flurry of texts, emerging from the stall and walking straight to the mirror, checking her face. Her makeup. Mascara still intact. Good. He’d made enough of that run in their days. Now that they had split up, she resolved herself to end that. Especially the finality of today’s last visit to their house. If she could go her entire life without ever crying about Jason . . .

  Alright. She straightened up her clothes, her hair—combing it out of her face—and then walked out, back into the music-filled bar. A swing band had taken the stage since Jason’s ungracious exit. A big brassy ensemble playing Glen Miller tunes. Count Basie. The Duke. By the time she left the bathroom, they were onto a few slower numbers. A ballad with a sad, crooning female vocalist. A song about a dead lover. It matched her mood perfectly.

  She scanned the crowd for any sign of Jason, and when she couldn’t find any, she set out straight for the bar. She wasn’t drunk enough to deal with Jason’s latest dose of drama, accusations that she was trying to manipulate some agreement with the landlord about the deposit money. She also wasn’t drunk enough to handle the horrific thoughts of him waiting outside the bar for her.