Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

Ellie’s eyes were wide. “Let me guess, we don’t know who?”

“No.”

I said, “And the Wi-Fi spoofer, what did that do?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at his laptop screen, blinking blankly. “It was operational for what, a minute, thirty seconds? Maybe even two or three minutes. I guess it could have done a lot, could have sucked out all kinds of information from me and my mom’s stuff.”

I said, “And sent them to that same someone, right?”

Hank looked very scared. “Right.”

Helen came into Hank’s room then. She said, “Honey, the internet is out. Do you need to reboot it or something?” Hank looked at me, I looked at Ellie, Ellie looked at Helen. Ellie looked back at me. Helen said, “What’s going on?”

I said nothing.

We stood next to Ellie’s pickup truck.

She was nervous. “What the hell was that, Keeler?”

I shrugged. “I guess it was a trap.”

“What do you mean by a trap?”

“The laptop was left in George Abrams’ apartment in case someone came snooping around. Then, they would know who was looking. Open the laptop and get it to turn on, thing takes a picture of you and they suck down your location and whatever other information it can get.”

Ellie said, “Jesus. Who are they?”

“Same people who did Valerie Zarembina and her friends out at Beaver Falls Lodge,” I said coolly.

Ellie looked into the gravel of the driveway. She said, “We can’t know that, Keeler. It’s conjecture.”

I locked my eyes on to hers. “No. It’s not conjecture. There aren’t two things going on here, Ellie, there’s one. We just haven’t connected the dots yet.”

She pursed her lips and scratched her ear. Like a tell. Then she looked at me and gestured to the trailer. “I don’t think we can leave them here alone. What do you think?”

I said, “Do you have anywhere you can put them?”

“How much time do you think we have?”

“None. We need to go, right now.”

“Let’s take them to my place.”

I shook my head. “Bad idea, Ellie. Somewhere else.”

“Shit, Keeler. I can’t put them in my office either. Maybe the police station and I’ll ask Smithson what he thinks.”

I agreed.

Twenty-Six

But Helen didn’t agree. She didn’t want to leave. Not just yet, she wasn’t done with her work.

Ellie tried to explain it to her, that there was danger, without the details. But Helen wasn’t listening. The situation alarmed her, but so did her work. And Helen was an optimist who believed in the healing power of crystals. Plus, her online reputation was at stake. As a Mechanical Turk she received reviews from her clients, for each task. Apparently that was important.

Hank got the Wi-Fi working, and Helen wanted to finish up her computer tasks. She was stubborn, and Ellie relented. I agreed to stay with Helen and Hank while Ellie ran into town to confer with Smithson. Ellie was hoping that the Port Morris police would come on board and offer protection to Helen and Hank, at least for a couple of days. Her going back to town was my idea. After what had happened with the laptop, I didn’t figure that phones were safe. Not that I had thought they were safe before. Ellie would come back in a few hours and we could drop those two off somewhere before heading over to Guilfoyle’s boat as planned.

Helen closed herself in her study, worried and eager to get to work. Hank came into the kitchen where I was drinking a glass of water. He was sullen and withdrawn. I figured he blamed me for what had happened, which I thought was unreasonable. Sometimes the chain of causality is tough to call, too far gone to assign responsibility to any individual person or thing. At that point it’s in the ‘shit happens’ category.

Hank wanted to make a sandwich. He put two slices of bread in the toaster, then went to the small bathroom off the living room. I walked over to look at the tribal artifacts hanging above the sofa. Two carvings, like a short totem pole sliced vertically in half. Each half hung next to the other. The carvings were distorted faces, one on top of the other. Like a stack of cartoon ghosts, or gods. I smelled burnt toast. Smoke curled out of the kitchen into the living room. Hank came out of the bathroom and went into the kitchen. He called out to me. “Can you open the window?”

I opened the window. It swung in on noiseless hinges. The rainforest was quiet, not much wind. The temperature was chilly but comfortable. Crisp. I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes.

An hour later, my eyes clicked open all by themselves. They were catching up with my ears, which had been awake longer, communicating with the back of my mind. The ears had caught on to something far away, and tracked it as it came in, even as I slept. The ears were hearing a buzzing sound like a mosquito, but getting louder than that. From where I lay on the sofa I was looking out the open window into the white nothingness of an autumnal Alaskan sky. The thing appeared as a speck at first. Just a tiny black dot, barely moving in one corner of the window, like a far away gnat.

But the gnat was getting bigger. Not really big, but bigger than it had been, and bigger than a gnat, definitely. And I realized that it was not a gnat or a mosquito, it was a drone.

When it was still far away, I could see from its profile that the drone was a consumer model, the kind that can be purchased in stores or online. Not the cheapest model, but a high-end drone. Exactly what the enemy in Syria had been using when I was there. In Syria the ISIS drones had often been strapped with a load of explosives, like remote-controlled flying IEDs. Or sometimes they had just dropped grenades