“The token’s legit,” Jake continues. “Which means the rest of the system was built around it.”
“Okay,” says Ryder. A prompt.
“Meaning if the drives from the clubhouse are encrypted the same way, the cleanup team can’t just plug them in and erase files.” He taps the table once with his knuckles, vibrating with contained satisfaction.
“And what’s in our case?” Ryder asks.
“I haven’t opened everything. I did a skim. Labels. Dates. Basic metadata. Enough to understand what kind of mind built it.”
Damian snorts. “A rat mind.”
Jake’s eyes flash. “A paranoid one,” he agrees. “But organized. The way it’s labeled…it looks like he separated what he considereduseful.”
“So itisa curated selection?” Wyatt asks.
Jake nods. “It’s trending that way.”
Wyatt’s gaze slides to me, quick and loaded, then back to Jake. “When Max and I were in the clubhouse today,” he says, “the TV was on. Hargrove was giving a statement outside the courthouse. There was a man standing behind him in a suit, like an aide or something. One of the bikers pointed him out and said he’s the one who went through the clubhouse with hired guns and took the drives.”
“Someone Hargrove would put on TV?” Ryder asks. “That’s bold.”
“There’s more,” says Wyatt. “Max recognized him.”
I nod. “He approached me at Dewy’s once when I was there with Jake and Damian. Knew my name. I think he took the picture for the bounty post. And the night they took me…it was him with Silas.”
No one says anything for a beat.
“We need his name,” Ryder finally says. “And see if he shows up anywhere in the archive. Jake, tomorrow you and Max work together to go through those drives. She’s got the names and intel. And I want the name of that fucking aide.”
“Great,” says Jake, smiling. He turns to me. “We’ll start tomorrow. You can sit with me and we’ll go through it together. Build timelines, cross-reference, get this fucking airtight.”
Jake finally takes a bite of his chicken. He chews, swallows, then looks at me again, bright-eyed.
We start early the next morning. Jake carries a chair up from the basement so I can sit beside him at his bedroom desk, which is a whole command center—triple monitors, a custom-built tower, a big stack of external drives, cables tied up with zip ties, and a little labeled dock of adapters. A mechanical keyboard in front of the screens, and a neat row of sticky notes along the bottom of one monitor with password hints, abbreviations, and dates.
Wyatt brings up coffee, like we’re about to embark on some deeply taxing work that only we can do and he wants to support us.
Before we even touch the first drive, Jake pulls up a replay of the courthouse clip. He pauses it when the aide steps into frame behind Hargrove.
“Smile for the internet,” Jake says, and takes a screenshot, cropping it tight. He opens another window and does a quick reverse image search.
A second later, he points to the screen. “Oh, he’s sloppy in the normal world,” he says. “Here.”
The same face, tagged in a charity-event photo beside Hargrove. A caption with a name: Adrian Mercer.
Jake drops the screenshot into a new folder labeledAdrian_Mercer.
Then we get started.
Jake creates folders with dates, locations, and names. He copies the categories that Silas wrote on the drive labels.
The first drive contains grainy footage from the hangar. Not one continuous stream, but clipped segments pulled from different cameras and stitched together. Silas has cut it like a reel, with angle changes mid-moment and timestamp jumps.
Jake scrubs through while I sit tight beside him, pointing when I recognize someone. He pauses, grabs a still frame, and drops it into aFacesfolder with a timestamp.
After a bit, Jake toggles to the screenshot of Mercer, and then back to the hangar reel.
“I’m going to try something,” he says.
