Page 8 of Magnum, Volume 1

“You can lock my phone if you want. I don’t have a death wish, so I won’t be pulling it from the bags anytime soon. Doesn’t matter if it’s under another layer.”

He nodded. “We’ll discuss other house rules later, when it’s just us. You’ll have your own room and bathroom. We’ll have to figure out whether your activity on my smart TVs might point to you. Not a problem if you’re watching something popular, but if you’ve been watching something offbeat, you’ll have to wait to finish.”

I nodded. “Right. I’m going to be investigating in all my free time, so I’m not sure I’ll be watching much TV.”

He shook his head. “You’ll be investigating when we can do it together.”

I shook my head right back. “I’ll have my data on my laptop, which won’t be connected to the ‘net. I’ll be working even when we aren’t online.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Okay. We’ll need to shut your wi-fi card down so it isn’t even looking for a network. Bluetooth, too.”

“Goes without saying,” I told him. “I have some cash on me, but not enough to pay my room and board beyond a week or two. We’ll have to figure something out so I can pay you after the fact.”

“No payment,” Mad Dog said. “You’re a guest of the club. Help us find Mason, even if it doesn’t end well, and we’ll be in your debt.” He stood. “And now I need to go talk to Gears.” He looked around the room and back to me. “Squatch is our Sergeant-at-Arms, which means he’s responsible for the club’s security. He, Magnum, and Skippy will be responsible for coming up with protocols and rules.”

“Skippy is your geek?”

Bud was about to shake his head in the negative when Magnum said, “Yes. Hacker extraordinaire, which means he knows how to keep shit safe from hackers. Gears is our graphics guy, which I don’t think will help with this, so we can probably keep him out of most of it, but…” He sighed and looked at Squatch. “He can’t come out there more often than he has in the past. We don’t know who these guys are watching, and Gears has been loud about wanting the police to look for his brother.”

“Agreed,” Squatch said.

“You’re good with staying?” Bud asked me. “If you aren’t, you need to speak up. This chapter has skin in the game, and they’re the most likely to put time into helping you. The most I can offer you is a safehouse an hour outside of Atlanta that isn’t associated with the club, but no guards or geeks.”

“I’m good,” I told him. “And I can’t thank you enough for the introduction and help.”

- - - ❖ - - -

Magnum

My background is in computer security and not as a personal bodyguard, but I still knew one of the top priorities was making my charge feel safe and comfortable.

Once everyone had left but Squatch, I told Storm, “I’m gonna throw some steaks on the grill. You have a preference between beef and venison?”

“Beef, but I’m okay with either. I can work on the side dishes, assuming you have a well-stocked fridge and pantry.”

I smiled. “I do. I was thinking I’d fry up some squash, and maybe dice some potatoes and stick them in the air fryer with some spices.”

She nodded. “I’ll get started cutting the potatoes and squash. I can toss the potatoes with rosemary, salt, and olive oil, get them started in the air fryer, and then fry the squash.”

Hmm. It seemed maybe she really did know a little about cooking.

“I eat a lot,” I told her. “Figure three times more than you assume.” I looked at Squatch. “And the big guy eats twice as much as me. I’ll salt the steaks and help dice the potatoes.”

“I’m going to think this through and make notes while ya’ll do that,” Squatch said. “It occurs to me, in order to fulfill blondie’s defensive wish, it might work for us to rent a cabin far from other people and not close to us, at least a three or four-hour drive away. Steal a car from the airport so they don’t know who we are by the plates, and then not be as careful as we’ve been about proxies when we go online to research them, so they find us.”

I nodded, because I’d been thinking along the same lines, though I hadn’t intended to share it with Storm just yet, if at all.

“That can work, but they’re going to know exactly how many people we have in the house and hidden in the woods. We can’t hide people nearby to even the playing field, and if they see a dozen or more of us, they’re gonna regroup and bring more people in.” Storm shrugged. “Or just use one of their rumored heart-attack machines, or killer sounds, to take us all out from a distance.”

Squatch grunted and furrowed his brow. I could practically hear the gears grinding in his head, trying to figure out how to counter a threat with tech we couldn’t begin to counter. Not only that, while our animal forms might help us with some of it, it was possible any sonar weapons would be even worse with our enhanced hearing.

“Right,” Storm said. “If we do an oopsie with a proxy, their automated sigint grid will flag it within minutes. They’ll deploy a radar satellite or a high-altitude drone to get a thermal fix on the structure, and if they count more than two or three heartbeats inside, or see armed sentries in the treeline, they might send in a team capable of handling however many people we have, but they may also choose to paint the roof with a localized microwave emitter or an aerosolized neurotoxin and wait for the twitching to stop.”

She cut the squash fast and methodical, focused on it rather than us, which let my eyes drift to the tiny little white halter top still straining against her rack.

“So we don’t give them a physical target to scan,” she continued. “We weaponize their data-dependency. Best I can tell, they rely on automated target recognition software — algorithms that scan satellite feeds for specific signatures. We fashion the leak late at night, so by the time they get around to looking, they see one person in a bed — but it’ll actually be a body-sized dummy. It’ll take some finagling to get it in the neighborhood of ninety-eight degrees and keep it there, but someone’s probably figured it out. And, while the proxy is malfunctioning to leak data, we upload a file to a dark-web node. Something that looks like a backup of my investigative notes, and we make it difficult but not impossible to follow the trail back to the cabin.”

The brilliance of it hit me like a gut punch. Tits and brains with that ass really should be illegal.