"Go ahead."
Nolan stood. He picked up a marker from the table. Uncapped it. And instead of going to the whiteboard, he pulled a sheet of paper from the stack beside the printer and wrote in large, clear letters:
THEY MAY HAVE HACKED OUR PHONES AND LAPTOPS. THEY MAY BE LISTENING RIGHT NOW.
The room went still.
He held it up. Turned slowly so every man at the table could read it. Blade leaned forward. Ghost stopped bouncing his knee. Tank's expression didn't change, but his hand curled into a fist on the table.
Nolan wrote again, below the first line:
DO NOT REACT VISIBLY. SOME OF YOU LEAVE NOW. PATROL, NORMAL ACTIVITY. TALK NATURALLY. NO SUSPICION. THE REST: LEAVE YOUR PHONES AND LAPTOPS IN THIS ROOM. WE CONTINUE IN THE STORAGE ROOM.
He set the paper on the table.
For five seconds, nobody moved. Then Hawk nodded at Blade and Ghost. "Blade, take two prospects on a perimeter sweep. Ghost, relieve the tower guards. Normal rotation."
Blade stood. His face was granite, but he moved casually, the posture of a man following routine orders, not a man who'd just learned his communications were compromised. Ghost followed, his energy contained into what looked like restless boredom rather than alarm.
The door closed behind them.
Hawk reached into his cut. Slowly, deliberately, he drew out his phone. Held it up so everyone could see. Then he set it on the table, face-down, and slid it to the center.
The gesture was clear. Seven phones followed, one by one, placed beside Hawk's in a silent pile. Nolan collected them and set them beside his laptop, which he'd already placed face-up at the end. Then he looked at Hawk.
Hawk pushed back from the table. Walked to the door without a word. Opened it, stepped into the hallway, and looked back over his shoulder—a single nod, a jerk of his chin toward the back of the building.
Silence down the hallway. Past the common room where men were cleaning up broken glass and talking about retaliation in voices loud enough to carry through walls and microphones. Hawk led them around the corner, past the bathroom, to the storage room door. Opened it. Held it. Into the room with its whiteboard and its colored markers and its lack of electronic devices.
Nolan closed the door.
The change in him was immediate. The careful blankness dropped, replaced by an intensity that sharpened his entire body—his shoulders squared, his eyes bright behind the glasses, his voice carrying an authority I'd never heard from him before.
"The timing of the attack is wrong," he claimed. He didn't sit. He stood at the whiteboard, marker in hand, already drawing. "We finalized the assault plan yesterday. Today they hit us. The only way they know to warn us now is if they know we're about to move."
"Could be coincidence," Tyler’s statement came out slowly, testing the hypothesis.
"I don't believe in coincidence where federal assets are involved." Nolan drew a timeline on the board—red marker, hishand steady now. "Holt has access to FBI surveillance tools. Stingray devices that intercept cellular traffic. Remote access software that can be deployed through carrier-level exploits. He doesn't need physical access to our devices. He needs a phone number and a corrupt technician."
"Every text," Sean whispered, the humor gone. "Every call. Every search."
"Every photo we took of the whiteboard and sent between phones." Nolan tapped the board. "Every tactical discussion we had over cellular. The assault plan, the team assignments, the timing. They have all of it."
The room absorbed this. I watched the faces. Sean's jaw was tight. Tank's fist hadn't uncurled. Axel's expression had shifted from unreadable to cold—the cold of a man who'd just realized he'd been outmaneuvered and was already calculating how to return the favor. Tyler's eyes were narrow, his FBI training visible in the way he was running the same analysis Nolan had already completed.
Hawk leaned against the wall. His arms were crossed. The fury from the lot was still there, but transformed—channeled into focus, the way a forge channels heat.
"What Hawk said in church," Nolan continued, "was exactly what they needed to hear. Multi-point assault, day after tomorrow. Overwhelming force, snipers, the works—riding straight into their prepared defenses." He looked at Hawk. "That buys us something valuable."
"It buys us their complacency," Hawk concluded. His voice had changed. The raw anger from church was gone, replaced by the calculated authority of a man who'd been running a club for twenty years and understood that the most dangerous weapon in the room wasn't a gun. "They think we're doing exactly what they provoked us to do."
I felt the pieces click. The conversation with Hawk before church. The public performance. The fury that had been real but directed—not at the Wolves, but at the room, shaping the narrative for whatever ears were listening.
Hawk hadn't lost his temper. He'd used it.
"So we feed them what they want to hear," Sean’s fingers were drumming on his thigh. The energy was back, but different—focused, sharp, the restlessness of a mind that had found a problem it could solve. "Let them think the attack worked. Let them think we're coming in hot."
"Exactly." Nolan uncapped a blue marker. "We run a disinformation campaign through the tapped devices. Scripted text messages between specific members, timed to look natural. Here's what they'll see."
