Torched: Afterburn (Iron Serpents Motorcycle Club Book 2) (14 page)

“I know. But how the fuck did these assholes find out about it then? Buddha swears Cora’s the only one who knew.”

“Yeah, but Buddha didn’t tell him where the coins were coming from. Biff called the seller after church, the guy said Buddha was his first call, he didn’t offer the coins to anybody else.”

“Did you check our bikes for trackers like I asked?”

Gauge nodded. “Yeah, they’re all clean. Pres went to the hospital for blood work, so I swung by there too.”

“They could’ve followed us out, it’s not like we were going that fast.”

“One of us would’ve noticed a tail,” Gauge pointed out. “I don’t think it was him, man. Cora’s not an idiot, he’d know we’d look at him first and he’s got maybe fifteen guys. Would he risk starting a war with an MC of over five hundred members between all the chapters? Robbing a president who needed the money to treat fucking cancer would end with a bloodbath for him, we’d wipe out his entire organization.”

“I get what you’re saying, brother, but it doesn’t add up. I asked Biff to try and get into the cameras on I-25, maybe he’ll spot the van somewhere and track it.”

“I doubt Biff’s got the skills, he only got a few weeks of hacking training with Liv before all that shit went down last year.”

“Yeah, well, you assholes won’t let me ask her to help out,” Torch huffed.

Gauge tensed his jaw and stared at him. “Tell you what, let’s do what we can to get the money together and see if Biff comes up with anything. We’ve got fourteen days, if we figure we’re fucked after ten, call another vote and I’ll back you up. We should have at least half the money by then, so it’s not like she’d be covering the whole thing. I can live with that. You know you’ve got Zed on your side too, and with Buddha’s proxy, it’ll be a majority.”

He shook his head. “Buddha wouldn’t—”

“Buddha’s out of commission, maybe for good. You need to fucking step up and do what you need to do, brother.”

“I’m heading back to the shop,” Mace called out.

“Alright, man, we’re coming,” Gauge replied. He turned back to Torch and poked him in the chest. “Figure your shit out and own it. There’s a reason you’ve been VP all these years.”

: 11 :

| LIVIA |

Over the course of the next week, it became abundantly clear there was more going on within the Serpents than Buddha’s cancer battle. Torch had morphed into a man on a mission, living and breathing the club, while my confused ass was left behind at base camp. All he did was work on those old bikes, sometimes until three or four in the morning, but he’d had them moved to the shop instead of doing it in our garage. I would have assumed he was just trying to stay busy to keep his mind off shit, but it wasn’t just him, I’d seen a lot of the guys in and out of the shop at all hours. I knew because I’d swung by a few times to make sure my husband was still alive.

I was the one who’d suggested he step up to the plate for Buddha, but spending twenty hours a day running himself ragged just to fix up some bikes wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. It didn’t really make a lot of sense, one had nothing to do with the other in my mind. And as if Torch wasn’t busy enough, he’d even done a few repo runs. Or so he claimed.

My brain kept trying to assure me there was a perfectly reasonable and simple explanation, but my gut said the MC was making moves or up against something serious. I was relatively new to club life, but I certainly wasn’t a stranger to how things worked in the streets. I suspected the endless workload had to do with money, but it was definitely about more than just paying some bills. I wasn’t fucking deaf or dumb, Torch may have thought he was fooling me but his demeanor certainly wasn’t. The fact that he’d bitten my head off at least twice now when I offered my services was enough to tell me he was hiding something.

What could I do though? Our deal was that he’d give me a heads up about threats, and there didn’t appear to be any considering he was doing quite the opposite of hovering. He was also sticking to our agreement of staying out of each other’s business, not once had he brought up my hacking job after I let him know I’d taken it.

So, despite my irritation at being left in the dark, I did my best to give him space. I fell back into the old habit of working until my eyes bled, mostly from the home office because hanging around the clubhouse and worrying about Torch wasn’t conducive to productivity. If he didn’t want to share, I wasn’t going to force him, but I wasn’t going to just sit there and bite my nails either.

Even with the added freedom and spare time, Silas’ job had taken a lot longer than intended. Considering the kind of organization we were dealing with and who its backers were, I wanted to be thorough. There was a strong possibility the culprit would end up at the bottom of an ocean and I wasn’t about to finger the wrong person.

But, I finally had answers for his client and was on my way to meet Silas at a truck stop outside of town. Just in the nick of time too. After several more emails containing copies of sensitive documents, the CEO of FTX had finally received a demand for two million dollars and his time was up at midnight.

I almost felt bad for taking fifty grand from him for what had turned out to be a time-consuming but relatively simple project. There were no high-tech hijinks being plotted against FTX, I’d scoured every single line of code and looked for any possible holes, malware, or encryption flaws. The so-called attack on their servers had turned out to be nothing but a ruse, designed to specifically penetrate only an outer layer of protection and throw the IT people off track.

In reality, the information their “hacker” had threatened to release was stolen the old-school way, by copying and pasting it to a flash drive and sneaking it out of the building. Just as Silas’ client suspected, it was an inside job by one of his own software engineers, a man named Jesse Wright. It didn’t take a genius to realize that both whistleblowers and blackmailers usually took their time, so why the FTX people only checked data back a month and hadn’t expanded their research to at least the prior three was beyond me. It would have saved them a lot of money and aggravation.

The files had been taken nine weeks before the fake attack, which explained why Wright passed the sweep of his computer and eluded detection. I’d been able to find the exact day he’d done it simply by checking the USB history logs on his computer, every machine kept a record whenever one was inserted or removed. After that, it was simply a matter of using video surveillance to piece his movements together. Lo and behold, I’d busted our little rat on a hidden camera in one of the labs, he used a heat pen to remove the USB chip from his flash drive and then inserted it into a fake key fob. Keys were hand-checked and passed around the outside of the body scanner, explaining why security hadn’t caught him. Beyond that obstacle, all he would have had to do was solder the chip back to an identical circuit board in a different USB stick and plug it in.

I had a feeling FTX would be instituting a new policy of leaving keys with devices at the door.

I pulled up next to Silas’ car in the lot and saw him sitting at a nearby picnic table. He was wearing his usual designer duds and looked completely out of place. As I hopped off my bike and started walking towards him—sans helmet since Torch wasn’t paying enough attention to bitch about it—he spotted me and stood up. The sun was just starting to set and I planned on getting in a ride to stash the money and clear my head afterward.

He greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. “Lovely to see you, Styx. Thank you for the heads up, Mr. Wright is already being questioned.”

“Good.” I dropped my backpack on the table, fished out a memory stick, and handed it to him. “Everything your client needs is on there, he shouldn’t have a hard time making the guy spill.”

“You’re positive it’s him?” he asked. “We only have about six hours before the deadline.”

“It’s him,” I promised. “I found a copy of the attack code on his personal laptop and his arsenal of stolen documents hasn’t included anything saved on the servers past the day I caught him plugging in the USB.”

“I knew I could count on you,” he said, handing me my finder’s fee in a black plastic bag. “My client sends his gratitude, he was extremely relieved to find out it was simply a greedy employee who could be cornered, he feared a much worse threat.”

“Your client should probably do a little refresher training so he doesn’t have to waste money on a hacker next time, but I’m happy to take it off his hands. Pleasure as always, Silas.”

“Indeed.” He held out his hand for a shake. “I’ll be in touch, my dear.”

“I’m sure you will. Happy travels.”

I stuffed the cash inside my backpack and walked back over to my bike. As soon as his car pulled away, I hopped on and took off in the other direction.

Torch didn’t know where I hid my money and he’d never asked. Aside from the stash he’d found in my go-bag while I was locked up, he had no idea just how much I’d saved over the years. Some I kept in an offshore account, some in bitcoins, the rest in cash; and that cash was currently located at the club’s safe house about ten miles outside of town. It was the first place Torch and I had made mad, passionate, rain-soaked love after reuniting.

The cabin stood on about five acres of land and club members mostly just came out for shooting practice. Other than that and the occasional emergency, the house generally stood empty.

I made it there quickly and took the money inside. Off from the kitchen was a walk-in pantry, the perfect hiding spot in a house belonging to a bunch of dudes because nobody ever organized non-perishables or tossed food unless it stank. Kneeling down on the floor, I pulled out some expired cereal boxes and reached under the shelf to slide out my combination-secured steel box. I punched in the code and added the day’s haul, before putting everything back the way I’d found it.

After locking up and getting back on my bike, I glanced over at the grassy clearing that had been the site of one of the best days of my life. Torch and I had made scores of new and wonderful memories since then, but the safe house would always hold a special place in my heart. Maybe we could spend a weekend there once everything—whatever the hell it was—blew over.

: 12 :

| TORCH |

Balling up a polishing rag in his hand, Torch took a step back and looked over the 1955 Panhead shining pretty under shop lights. It was almost midnight, but after a week of grinding away, they were finally done with restoring and customizing his eight vintage Harleys. All of them were already spoken for and due to be delivered the next day. Between the bikes and extra repo runs, they’d be sitting on about a hundred grand. One week and another hundred to go.

Christ, he was already fucking exhausted.

He knew it wasn’t so much the workload or lack of sleep wearing him down, it was the inner turmoil of trying to keep up appearances outside the clubhouse. His old lady was perceptive, she could read his ass like a book; if they hadn’t already, the pieces would come together in her head. Every time he so much as
looked
at her, he worried he’d somehow betray the brotherhood and show his hand. And his brilliant fucking solution of avoiding her as much as possible had just made things a hundred times worse because she’d been way too accepting of it. Now he was just fucking paranoid that she knew about Cora and would put her ass in danger to pay him off herself.

Did she? Would she? Was he reading way too much into it? There was no way to tell without straight-up asking and he wasn’t about to fucking do that.

In desperate need of a drink, he tossed the rag and walked over to the clubhouse.

The air inside felt thin, but it wasn’t the Colorado elevation at work. Tense brothers were milling around, obviously trying to get their minds off Buddha’s health and the debt owed to Cora by drinking it all under the table. But there was no escaping the black cloud hanging overhead. Even Liv, the woman whose smile could light up the darkest cave and who hopefully knew nothing about their problems, looked a million fucking miles away as she played pool with an equally somber Biff.

Where the hell had she been all day? He usually got at least a text to ask if he was breathing, but he hadn’t heard from her at all since leaving the house before she woke up that morning. See?
Too
fucking accepting.

Goddamn it, the fucking paranoia wouldn’t quit.

He glanced around and saw Buddha standing in the doorway of his office. It looked like something was eating at him too. Considering this was the first time he’d been by the clubhouse all week, his appearance didn’t bode well.

Buddha motioned for him to come in and closed the door behind them. A half-empty bottle of whiskey and two glasses were already waiting for them on his desk.

Was he even supposed to be drinking on chemo?

Fucking great.

“Have a seat,” Buddha said, pouring them both a shot.

Torch eyed him, his stomach feeling like he’d swallowed twenty pounds of rocks. “What’s going on, man?”

Buddha exhaled and threw back his glass, then poured another. “Got a call from the oncologist today, the treatment’s not working.”

Twenty pounds turned into forty. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“You know exactly what it means. It’s time to face facts, son, I’m dying.”