“The first car blew right by me, and I was the easier target. It went for you; that’s how I know.” Frustrated, Liam ran his hands through his hair, resting them on the back of his neck as he looked up, and let out a deep sigh. “What are you hiding?”
“I’m not hiding any…”
Liam dropped his head, leveling his gaze with hers, willing her to be honest with him through his pointed stare. “Someone is hacking car computers, using their GPS to guide them like a friggin’ remote control toy, Felicity. They’re like heat seeking missiles, locked on you.” He gripped her shoulders and leaned in. “Someone just tried to kill you. Kill you! Do you hear me? What the hell is going on?”
She didn’t answer. Felicity stood there, doe eyed, and speechless while fear consumed her. He could tell she wanted to tell him, was desperate for help, she was overwhelmed. The roaring silence pulled his attention from her and to the street behind them. Liam stepped back and turned to the crashed car, leaning over it until he could see the quiet street beyond – it was motionless, but dotted with parked cars on each side.
“Shit. They’re waiting for us,” he said, “Someone is watching us. The minute we run, we’ll have a car on our ass.”
Felicity placed her hands-on Liam’s chest as she stepped forward, “How are we going to get out of here then? What do we do?”
Taken aback by her obvious fear, Liam couldn’t help but comfort her. He stroked her arms instinctively without a second thought. It wasn’t like Felicity to be so alarmed, lose her calm, but she had. The level of fear that she exuded was a clear sign of just how bad the situation was, how much danger she was in. The desire to protect her grew like a roaring flame, something he didn’t entirely understand but had no time to reconcile at the moment.
“You’re safe, Felicity. With me, you’re always safe,” he assured her. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Okay?” As quickly as the soft side of Liam came, it went. He’d figure out why she made him so weak in the knees later. Now, he had to get them out of there.
Liam looked around, taking in their surroundings with a different set of eyes. The only cameras he could spot were city security cams that were attached to the traffic signals and the streetlights that were up.
“We need to shut down the cameras,” he said. “Whoever is watching…” Liam paused and looked to Felicity, offering her yet another chance to tell him who was behind this. When she didn’t respond, he continued. “I don’t even know if those cameras are online. I have to assume they are since the cars have all been within these last few blocks.”
“Makes sense, but how do you do that from here?” she asked.
“I don’t, I do it from Watermark.”
Liam pulled out his phone and called Luke. Twins, Liam was the brains, and Luke was the braun of the duo. Quickly giving him a rundown about what he and Felicity were facing, and that they were trapped, Liam told his brother what he needed him to do – get on the computer in the lair and hack.
“You want me to what?” Luke chided, “I don’t have a get out of jail for free hacker pass, bro. I can’t even set the clock on my microwave, man.”
“You’re not going in blind. I will walk you through every step. It’s really easy,” Liam replied.
“Right, easy. I can get to the rooftop and shoot them down. We really have better odds with that, bro.”
“Luke, we need to shut the cameras down. The City of Portland needs to go black for a minute. I really need your help on this.”
Luke took the helm at Liam’s wall of screens in the lair while Wylie and Dace sat back and watched. Liam’s instructions fired through the speakerphone, one step at a time, to which he received grunts and choice words in response from each of his brothers on the other end as they tried to follow along.
“Got it!” Luke hollered through the phone, proud of his accomplishment.
“No. No you didn’t,” Liam said in frustration as he watched the street lights flicker on and off a handful of times. “We can try it again.”
“Why are we doing this? I can just come and pick you up in my car,” Dace offered as the most obvious solution.
“The cars’ computers are hacked, and I’m not sure how quickly whoever this is can get in. The last thing we need is someone gaining control of your car with you in it – not safe,” Liam fired back.
“I meant in Ruby. She doesn’t have a computer.” Dace grinned, referring to his ruby red Ford Mustang Fastback. “She’s a ’69 - good year,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.
A loud hum surrounded them, growing into a distinct buzzing sound before it finally came into view – a drone. It hovered in front of Liam and Felicity, the movement on the camera audible as it zoomed in and out.
“Liam? What’s going on, bro?” Luke questioned. “What’s that sound?”
Standing right in front of the drone, Liam unholstered his weapon and aimed it at the drone, and said, “Fuck you, asshole.” Then he fired, shooting it to the ground.
His brothers all shouted over the speakerphone at the sound of his weapon,
“We’re fine,” Liam said, turning to Felicity. “I just shot down the camera. It’s a weaponized drone.”
“Shit!” came through the phone from one of his brothers. It didn’t matter who it was at that point. This game they were playing just took on a whole new level of what the fuck danger.
“What have you done, Felicity? Who the hell is behind this?” Liam yelled. “This…this is serious shit. An armed drone?”
Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, Felicity couldn’t look Liam in the eye. She was so damn scared that Liam felt sorry for her, despite nearly getting his head blown off trying to save her ass.
“You realize if there is one of these, there could be several, and we won’t even know they’re there unless they want us to know they are?” If asking nicely and asking harshly wasn’t enough to get the truth out of her, Liam would scare it out of her. “They can follow us, shoot at us…kill one of us.”
Panic overwhelmed Felicity, tears streaking her face and sobs escaping her, despite her attempt to keep it together.
“I can’t protect you if I don’t know what I am protecting you from,” he said.
“Bro – Mustang?” Dace interrupted from the other end of the call.
“I don’t see any other way out,” Liam said, eyes still fixed on Felicity. “If you guys can’t shut down the city cameras, you definitely can’t get into these drones.” Tossing Felicity a guilt inducing sharp look, he finished with, “We’re sitting ducks out here.”
“We’re headed down to the garage. ETA 3 minutes,” Dace responded.
“Your car may not come out clean, Dace. I count five cars lining the street that weren’t there before,” Liam admitted.
“I’m not afraid of a little Prius and it’s double-A battery, man.” Dace chuckled.
Dace planted an idea, and Liam knew how they would get out unscathed. Batteries. While he quickly pulled a plan together, he heard the elevator ding in the background. They had reached the garage at Watermark.
“Dace? Bring the Jeep; lose the top.” Liam swiped from screen to screen on his phone and began to tap the screen in rapid motion, hunting for schematics for each make and model of car sitting on the street. “I’m sending you guys some files; study them on your way.”
“Uh, on the way? We’ll barely have our seatbelts buckled before we get to you, and you want us to study?” Wylie interrupted.
“Bring Luke. He’s shooting,” Liam said with a smile.
CHAPTER 8
They all made it back to Watermark, uninjured, all in one piece. Liam’s strategy worked as planned. It was a short chase. Once the first car tailed them, Luke shot out the battery, immobilizing the vehicle. It didn’t matter if anyone had control of the vehicle’s computer at that point. No battery – no chase.
Once they reached the end of the construction zone and were headed right into the Waterfront area where Watermark resided, the cars just s
topped. It was odd. What did it mean? Whoever was behind the activity had been ruthless leading up to that point, so why stop there? Pedestrian traffic? Afraid of getting caught? No, it didn’t stop him or her the day before.
Maybe they could no longer see past that point, unable to hop easily from one circuit of cameras to the next. Or, they were just toying with Felicity and the O’Reillys and got bored. None of this made sense, and without Felicity’s help, it probably wouldn’t.
When they parked safely behind the security gate of the underground parking at Watermark, each took a deep cleansing breath as they just sat in the Jeep, collecting their thoughts, trying to rationalize it all. Felicity was the first out and charged to the elevator, anger replacing the fear she carried only moments before.
“I’ll call Carter,” Dace said, referring to Carter Landry. “He has a couple good contacts to cover up any mess and keep the media quiet.”
Wylie jumped over the side of the Jeep after Dace. “Yeah, this will require more than what our guys over at local PD can handle. We need to hide it until we know what it is.”
Luke draped his weapon over one shoulder and hoisted the drone Liam shot down out of the Jeep. “I’ll take this into the shack and disarm it so you can play with it upstairs in the lair. Maybe there’s some kind of clue or something.” The shack was a safe room for artillery and explosives. If anything detonated in there, everyone was safely protected by the layers of concrete and rebar.
Liam didn’t hear a word his brother said. His attention was on Felicity as he came up behind her, latching onto her arm and spinning her on her heels.
“Jesus, Liam. What!?” she said, full of angst.
“What? Are you serious?” Disbelief overwhelmed him to the point of a high pitched awkward laugh. “What the hell is going on? What aren’t you telling us?” As she stepped backward, he stepped forward until he had her back pinned against the wall. “We can’t protect you if you don’t tell us who to protect you from. What don’t you get about that?”
“I don’t want protection! Don’t you get it?” she fired back “This is my mess, and I’m not dragging you into this. None of you get hurt that way.”
“Newsflash, Felicity, in the past two days, my daughter and my brothers were involved. How is that not letting anyone get hurt? Whoever this is, they know. They know we mean something to you. They’ll keep coming, harder and harder, until they get what they want. I don’t think they care about a body count after today’s bullshit.” She shook at his choice of words, body count. He was finally getting through to her. This was bigger than anything she could handle. She was a hacker, not some sort of secret-ops expert. “Tell me, Felicity! Now!”
“Wells! Okay? It’s Wells!” she yelled, grabbing the attention of the brothers who were holding the elevator. “It’s…it’s got to be Wells.”
Liam pushed himself off the wall where he had been propped, caging her in between his arms. His stare empty, expression blank.
Silence.
“How do you know it’s Wells?” Liam asked.
Felicity looked around the conference table in the lair, taking in the blank expressions around the room. The O’Reillys had always been good to her, and she had been loyal. They were questioning her loyalty right now though – she felt it.
“I-I just do,” she said, her voice wavering. “It has to be. He knew things. He knew everything.”
“What’s everything, City? What does he know?” Luke was skeptical. How did a dead man come calling all these years later?
Felicity made eye contact with each brother, afraid that she was putting them in jeopardy by telling them anything more than she had. “The money. He thinks I have all of it – said I owe him millions and he’s back to collect.”
Wells was a well-known criminal – a hacker – a dead hacker. He was one of the best, a white hat, meaning he hacked for good. Felicity worked for him, contributing to a team of the most highly skilled in their trade. They would hack big systems without warning, testing their security to see if it could be breached. When they got in, they would take whatever financial assets were available. Sometimes those assets were confidential business details worth millions; sometimes it was the actual millions.
It was and is a legitimate business – test security, find flaws, present solutions, make money doing it. Large corporate conglomerates use such as service as do financial institutions and even government agencies. Anyone with money, assets, or even secrets worth a lot of money are always at risk for theft and extortion. These services help protect vulnerable targets.
Wells and his team were being paid to break in and steal with permission because it was always a faux robbery. They never really took anything – just showed how easy it could happen, then put whatever they took back where they found it. They’d reveal the path in and how to close all of the virtual holes so the client could strengthen their cyber security.
Wells had hackers everywhere. No two were in the same city or even state. Not unusual, working from a home office was common in this field. It made the job appealing.
Felicity was cleaning up, and Wells was singing her praises. She could hack into anything, so her client list continued to grow. Almost too fast, and that sent up a red flag for her.
She started looking further into Wells and backing into all of his accounts set up for the faux robberies. The only problem was they weren’t faux robberies like Felicity had been led to believe. They didn’t have clients – they had targets.
The deeper she looked into things, the longer the list of punishable crimes became. She had worked hard, only to become a felon – a convictable felon. There was no hiding what she had done, if she was caught before she could cover her tracks. Wells made her an unknowing black hacker, and a wanted woman, just as soon as the authorities figured out who she was other than a ghost hacker.
She asked one question too many, so Wells invested in a little collateral to keep her working and keep her quiet. He held her mother and young sister as an insurance policy so she would continue to steal for him. They were all that she had, and he exploited that.
Felicity was smart though; he underestimated her. She realized the danger and kept the ruse going. She tackled her client list, but rather than steal from them, she would tighten up their system and close any backdoor that left them vulnerable so Wells couldn’t get to them. She was better than Wells. Every few hits, she’d funnel money to an offshore account to satisfy Wells.
What he didn’t know was that each deposit, to each account, she was leaving herself a safety net – a Trojan horse. When she finally found where Wells was held up, and had the evidence she needed to obtain blanket immunity, she would take him down. That Trojan horse would save her ass and drain every account she could find belonging to him and put it somewhere he would never find it.
Wells already had a bounty on his head, and Ronan and Ryker O’Reilly were zeroing in on him with the help of Brother’s Keeper Security. They were silently shutting down the ring, using bot’s and agents to fool Wells into thinking he still had a team in place. When Liam caught on to Felicity’s trail, however, he was stumped.
They raided her small Seattle loft and confirmed what Liam had suspected. She wasn’t stealing for Wells. She was stealing from Wells, and all of those safety nets she put in place saved her ass. She was one of the good guys. Liam thought it odd that fear never seemed to define her. It was like she was relieved they were there and had been expecting them.
She immediately went to work, showing them everything she had on Wells, and shared what she still needed to take him down. When they shared that they had enough to bust him, she stopped them. She didn’t know where he was, and he had something that belonged to her.
Liam worked alongside her, posing as her at times even while they narrowed down where he was. It was easier than one would think to hide. Despite having a traceable IP address, that IP was bouncing from location to location, using a private server. Using a Brute force algorithm, Liam was able
to extract passwords that allowed him to do one of the simplest remedial hacks. He tapped into Wells’ cellphone camera to see where he was.
They couldn’t locate him with an IP or GPS, but his cellphone camera showed them his surroundings. Liam and Felicity used a simple program they coded together to put in all that they could see, and they let the program narrow down where he was – an old abandoned warehouse outside San Francisco.
It didn’t take long before Wells noticed inconsistencies in Felicity’s language and became suspicious. He recognized her work. It was like a fingerprint. When he backtracked and checked some of the targets she had hit, he watched her, using Seattle’s closed-circuit surveillance cameras scattered around her busy neighborhood, and he noticed the unusual presence of bulky men, dark clothing, unmarked vehicles, and weapons.
It didn’t take long for him to realize who they were. He was a hacker; he could find out who anyone was. And he did. He also knew when they were coming for him because he was able to use facial recognition and nearby surveillance feeds to figure out just when Ronan and Ryker arrived to apprehend him. That, combined with Felicity’s Trojan horse, draining all of the offshore accounts simultaneously to places unknown, had him backed into a corner. He blew up the warehouse before they could execute a hostage rescue.
Remains were difficult to identify, but determined to be Wells, Felicity’s family, and a few other wanted fugitives. Felicity was devastated. She was also alone now.
As the rest of the crime ring was brought down and brought to justice, one case never saw a courtroom. Felicity was free. Evidence that she was working against the crime ring granted her immunity as long as she testified against those who knew full well what they were doing for Wells. Brother’s Keeper Security hired her as their first employee outside of family, and she’d proven to be an asset ever since.
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