Calista looks straight at him. “Bet if your old lady were here right now, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
I wonder if King realizes that, despite his care for Wren, the concept of old ladies leaves no room for someone like them in the role of a biker’s partner. There’s not much room for queerness at all.
King rolls his eyes. “Fuck my life. Listen. I’m aware that all of you know about the possible FBI threat.”
For a moment, it’s a bit like a comedy show on our end. I look at Grudge, giving him a,you kept it from usglare. Grudge looks surprised I know. And Wren looks from King to me, wondering how the fuck King knows we all know.
“We do,” I say calmly as Wren grips my knee tightly.
“I just got a call from a contact who works at the private airfield we flew from. An FBI agent, Dorian Chase, has been sniffing around, trying to find out details about our flight. Couldn’t remember the name of the guy you said had emailed you. Is that the one?”
“Yeah,” Wren says. “That’s him. I got another message from him this morning.”
“It seems officious and official,” I say. “Wren ran all kinds of tests on it.”
Grudge gives me side eye, like we’re going to be having a conversation about all this later. Which, fair. I wanna know why he didn’t tell us Wren was at risk from the FBI when he clearly knew.
“What was he asking?” Wren asks.
“He’s suspicious about the flight manifest and details,” King says. “He wanted to know who was on it. He showed an image of Wren, an older one from before you came out.”
Wren takes a deep breath beside me, and I find myself desperate to put my arm around them and reassure them the world is going to be okay. But given the conversation I was having with Grudge before the call, it’s best that I keep my hands to myself.
“Did they give him anything?” Wren asks.
King shakes his head. “My guy deals with refueling and shit. Happened to be inside to pick up some work orders. Overheard as much as he could. They wanted to see any security video. Heard them say that one of the key requisites of running a private airfield is client confidentiality. They told him that if his request was legitimate, he should come back with a warrant, because that would be the only way they’d surrender the intelligence.”
“Shit,” Wren whispers.
Vex raises a hand. “Cool your heels, Wren. I wasn’t going to leave you out in the wind. I went into their security files and deleted footage.”
“That won’t be enough. If anything, the day of my departure being missing is going to look suspicious.”
Calista chuckled. “Have I not trained you better than that? We went in and deleted periodic windows over the eleven days before your departure and for a few days after. An hour here, two hours there. That way, if he does get a warrant, it will look like the system has been glitching for two weeks, and it’s just bad luck your video is missing.”
I blow out a breath of relief. “Thank you,” I say.
“This guy is tenacious,” Vex says. “Doesn’t mean he won’t try to get footage from around the airport in the lead up to the flight departure time, which is publicly available. There are tons of warehouses with security cameras and street cameras. We dropped you at the airport in a convoy. If they picked us up on one of them, they might be able to get a line of sight on Wren, although, we told them to stay in the middle of the truck and stay down.”
“I just want it to be over,” Wren says. “I wonder if there’s any harm in talking to this guy. Like, if he’s just going to keep trying to find me, anyway. Make it happen sooner rather than later.”
Various forms of no echo over the video line and from Grudge.
“How?” I ask Wren. Because I’m starting to believe that if they think it’s possible, it is.
“I have three options,” they say. “I can set up a hardened, single-use signal relay. I’ll bounce the call across multiple country jurisdictions using virtualized nodes in countries with no mutual legal assistance treaties. The encryption can reset every thirty seconds. No traceable packet headers. No embedded metadata. No GPS leakage.”
Vex shakes his head. “But you’ll have no fallback if something goes wrong with the call.”
Calista leans forward. “But Wren could make it time locked. Have it automatically shut down if they try to trace it.”
“Well, option two is I go in under deep fake. Maybe spin up a fake visual shell. Let’s add flights out of Colorado, about twenty minutes after I arrived, that make it look like I flew off again. Tokyo or somewhere. I mask everything, including my voice, through digital modulation. He’ll think he’s talking to me but he’s talking to my shadow.”
Grudge shakes his head. “Call me old-fashioned. But if I couldn’t see you, if I couldn’t hear a real voice, I’d question whether it was you. I’d be looking for some kind of proof of life that I’m talking to a real person.”
Wren huffs out a frustrated sigh. “So, what do we do? Because the third option is to wait while he tries to track down leads to find me. While he possibly paints me as a villain. He’s already put me on the Most Wanted list.”
“Did you speak to Krillbyte?” Calista asks.
