Savage Truth

by Jack Hardin

  Savage Truth

  Jack Hardin

  First Published in the United States by The Salty Mangrove Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Jack Hardin. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part III

  Epilogue

  Foreword

  Collaboration can be as rewarding as it is challenging. Rewarding, because successful teamwork is always a win. Challenging because, when it comes to co-writing a book, a mind meld must occur, with both authors eventually seeing the same thing.

  Soon after I (Jason) originally concepted this series late last year, Jack and I discussed collaborating on future installments. We have now penned five books together, and I have decided to hand the reins over to him. I’m stepping aside to work on a new series of military thrillers, with plans to have that series out sometime later this year. I’ve learned a lot from working with Jack, and I promise you that everything you love about this series came from his overly-creative mind.

  Jack here...both the Ryan Savage and Ellie O’Conner series are dear to my heart. I just passed the two year anniversary of publishing stories. And what an incredible two years it has been. Because of you, dear reader, because you read and share my stories, I am able to do this full time at home.

  I count myself among the few who can honestly say that I love what I do. The more time an author spends with his characters, the more he sees them as family. Pondering plots and character arcs, writing the story itself, and then performing the menial task of editing, takes me well over 150 hours per story. Once you’re a few books in...you can see how much time you’ve spent with a character in their world. They become a family of sorts.

  My older sister actually named her German Shepherd after Ellie. And speaking of Ellie, you might find a surprise in the pages to follow...

  We hope you enjoy Savage Truth as much as we enjoyed writing it!

  Jack Hardin

  Jason Briggs

  Prologue

  The small cargo aircraft shuddered as it pushed through the air and continued its ascent. Outside, the cloudless afternoon sky was a rich and unsullied blue, and bright sunshine streamed through oval windows, shadows stretching like dark taffy across the plane’s interior as it slowly veered to the west.

  I sat on the carpeted floor with my feet in front of me, my knees up, my hands zip-tied behind my back. My nose was broken, and blood caked my upper lip and chin.

  Not exactly how I had foreseen the day shaking out when I woke up this morning.

  In the cockpit, a man unbuckled, rose out of his seat, and pushed through the narrow cockpit door. He smiled down at me with his customary smile and yelled over the sound of the engines and wind rushing by outside. “How’s it going back here?”

  “I think I overpaid,” I yelled back. “Is this how you treat all your first class passengers?”

  “The pilot is concerned that we’re a little over our max recommended cargo weight.”

  I looked down the short cargo hold. At the back were three cardboard boxes lying beside each other. They were each the same size—nearly three feet square. That was it. Other than me, there was nothing else back here.

  I felt a cold sweat spread across my chest.

  The aircraft leveled off and the drone of the engines quieted as the pilot bled off some speed.

  “He’s informed me that relieving the aircraft of some unneeded weight is probably wisest if we’re going to follow the safety guidelines,” he said. Joel Fagan adjusted the eyepatch resting over his left eye and stepped in front of me. He leaned down, hooked his hands under my arms, and hauled me to my feet. “Stay there.”

  Fagan moved to the cargo door.

  “You’re joking, right?” But I knew he wasn’t. “You kill me and they’ll descend on you like locusts.”

  “I’m moving on, my friend. New opportunities await. New opportunities in new countries that will require new aliases. Let them send every damned Fed and Marine after me. They won’t find me.” Keeping a watchful eye on me, he grasped onto a metal handgrip with one hand, then reached out with his other, unlatched the door, and threw it open.

  Wind rushed furiously into the empty fuselage, screaming across through the empty space like a disrupted spirit, whipping our hair and clothes, and nearly splitting my eardrums.

  Fagan stumbled behind me and tried shoving me toward the doorway. I planted my feet and lowered my center of gravity as I did what little I could to withstand him. Fagan slapped a hand between my shoulder blades, grabbed my bound wrists, and lifted them in a single swift motion.

  Pain radiated through my shoulders, and I bent over in an involuntary effort to relieve it. Fagan shoved me forward, frog-marching me up to the threshold. I looked down on the dark blue carpet of the earth below, nothing but shimmering blue water as far as the eye could see.

  Adrenaline flooded my system as I stood, literally, at death’s door.

  So this is how it all ends.

  Fagan leaned in and set his mouth near my ear so I could hear him. “It’s been fun, Savage. But as I recently told my girlfriend, sometimes the fun has to end! Enjoy the ride!”

  I felt his hands leave my shoulders, and just as I fell forward into the void, his boot punched into my backside and sent me hurtling outward.

  I tumbled out of the plane with nothing on my back but my favorite polo shirt. It flapped mercilessly on my back as gravity pulled me greedily to the earth. Within seconds, I had reached terminal velocity and was plummeting at 120 miles per hour toward the dark mass of the Caribbean Sea three miles below.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  One Week Earlier

  Darren Reddick’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

  Colored letters and numbers crawled rapidly across the black background on his computer screen as he entered his fourth hour of non-stop coding.

  He hadn’t even stopped to use the restroom or take a sip from the bottle of Mountain Dew perched on the other side of his mouse.

  His mind was racing faster than his fingers; the idea had come to him as he lay in bed earlier that morning. He had woken up and as he was staring at the white monotony that was his ceiling, the concept had entered his mind and splayed out in brilliant cohesion as if it had been there all along.

  After racing to work, he had spent the first part of the day running the idea by his boss and working up a mind map before putting in the work of building out the function.

  For the last two years he had given his all to EchoRaid, a start-up tech company focused on providing innovative phone apps to the medical sector. The company was small—less than thirty people—but they were churning out cutting edge technology. Everyone was hopeful that soon en
ough they would present enough value to the sector to get bought out by some Silicon Valley monolith. Then they could all move on to something else. But as multi-millionaires, and no longer driving beat-up cars, surviving off Ramen, and asking their investors to hang in there for one more quarter.

  A familiar voice came from behind him. “You going home? Everybody left over an hour ago. It’s Friday. Get out of here and go party with your friends.” It was John Wilson, EchoRaid’s owner and founder.

  Darren glanced at the timestamp on his monitor: 18:23.

  As took a deep breath and was finally aware of the Mountain Dew. “Okay. I guess this can wait until tomorrow.” He reached out and took a swig of the drink.

  “Don’t give me that,” Kevin quipped. “We both know you’ll be back at it before the clock strikes midnight.”

  Darren huffed over a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I will.”

  “It's a great idea, Darren. Run with it. It’s efforts like this that will help our chances of getting bought out. And that will increase your cut when we do.”

  Don’t I know it.

  “But really, get out of here. Let your creative battery charge for a few hours.”

  “Okay.” Darren slapped his laptop shut and disconnected the cable to the additional monitor. “Are you leaving?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I promised Margie dinner in Miami Beach tonight. I won’t be too far behind you.”

  Darren slipped his laptop into his backpack, stepped away from his desk, and pushed in the chair. A small mirror was mounted in the brick wall in front of him. A Bud Light logo was stamped on the bottom corner. Darren took a quick at himself. His black hair was greasy and matted. He hadn’t shaved in days and dark circles had taken up permanent residence underneath his tired green eyes. Suddenly, a full night of sleep seemed extremely appealing.

  John smirked at him in the mirror. “And maybe take a shower too.”

  “Probably not a bad idea,” Darren said. “See you Monday.”

  “Call me if you need help with anything. We’re close, Darren. Really close.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Darren made his way across the open floor and exited out the front door. Other than John’s Acura, his fifteen-year-old Saturn was the only car in the gravel parking lot. The vehicle’s front door squeaked obnoxiously on ungreased hinges as he pulled it open. He got in, tossed his backpack onto the passenger seat, and started the engine.

  Ten minutes later he was pulling into a sandy driveway in west Fort Lauderdale. The neighborhood had once been a cozy place, but now the oversized lots were mostly neglected, overrun with uncut grass and untrimmed trees. Houses that had once been the pride of young and hopeful families just starting out in life, now, decades later, had fallen into disrepair; deteriorated siding, missing shingles, and rusted chain-link fences faltering testaments to those who had missed out on the American dream.

  Darren pulled in behind a blue Dodge Ram and got out. Waning sunlight filtered through the boughs of a mangrove standing tall above the truck. Darren kicked a fallen and half-rotten mango into the grass as he made his way to the front steps. The front door was unlocked. He stepped in and immediately set the back of his hand to his mouth and held his breath.

  The place reeked.

  He waded through warm smells of sour milk, old garbage, and an overrun litter box as he made his way back toward the kitchen. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes, the counters littered with empty bags of potato chips and equally empty boxes of microwavable dinners.

  Darren moved to the back door, unlocked it, and threw it open to let in some fresh air. A gray Persian cat with knotted fur meowed softly and walked swiftly through the high grass in the backyard. It approached him and rubbed itself against his leg.

  “Hey, Skittles. I guess it smells a lot better out here, doesn’t it?”

  Another meow.

  “I’ll leave the door open and will have a talk with your owner. This is no way to live.”

  Darren went back inside, passed up the refrigerator and the narrow pantry door before taking the carpeted stairs two-by-two until he got to the landing, where the stairs turned and led up to a garage apartment.

  At the far end of the room, plastic folding tables were covered with computer monitors of every size. Five high-power desktop towers sat on the floor beneath them. In the right corner stood a server rack half-filled with servers, patch panels, routers, and switches, orange and green lights flickering on their display panels. A frenetic network of cables and electric cords led from the computers to the server rack.

  Sitting in front of the tables was a man in a white T-shirt and an Atlanta Braves hat turned backward. He had a wireless headset over his ears, and his fingers were cruising rapidly across the keyboard.

  Darren stepped up behind him and could hear music pouring from the headphones as he tapped him on the shoulder. His older brother flinched and cursed as he turned around, slipping the headphones off his ears as he caught his breath.

  “God! How many times do I have to tell you not to scare me like that?”

  “How many times are you going to react like a scared schoolgirl when I do?”

  His brother turned off the music, leaned back in his chair, and kicked his bare feet up on the desk. Empty cans of RockStar and Monster energy drinks jittered on the tables along with a stack of empty food trays taken from the TV dinner boxes downstairs.

  The energy coming from all the machines made the room an extra ten degrees warmer than it was downstairs. It was hot and stuffy and filled with a muted hum from over a dozen fans in the back of the machines.

  “Geez, Mike. It’s like an oven in here,” Darren said.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. The window A/C unit blew last night. I need to get another one.”

  “You’d better do it fast before you burn something out.”

  “Yeah. It’ll be fine. I’ll run out and get one in the morning.”

  Darren plopped into a cracked leather couch on the side wall. He sank into it and thought that he could fall asleep right now and not wake up until the morning.

  “What do you say, little brother?” Mike asked. “You guys make it rich over there yet?”

  “John is flying to California next week to meet with another company who's interested. How about you?” Darren jutted his chin toward the setup on the tables. “What small country are you hacking into now?”

  Mike’s smile was sinister. “Can’t tell you that.” His eyes lit up. “But I think I found my retirement plan. If I can play my cards right, then I might be on the threshold of some big-time money, same as you.”

  “Then what will you do?” Darren asked. “Hire a maid, right? Please tell me you’ll hire a maid.”

  Mike chuckled. “You know what? If this works out, I’ll hire a damn maid. Just to shut you up.”

  “When was the last time you took out the garbage? Seriously, I can’t believe you can live like this.”

  Mike shrugged. “When you’re working on the hack of your life, everything else is just background noise.”

  “It might be background noise to you, but it’s a nasal assault to the rest of us. And Skittles, man. That’s no way to treat a cat.”

  One of the computers beeped, and Mike returned his attention to a monitor. He quickly typed out something and smiled to himself. “Come on, baby. Come to Papa.”

  “Take a break,” Darren said. “Let’s get outta here and go see a movie or something. I’m worn out. I need to chill for a few hours.”

  Mike shook his head without turning back around. “No mas. I’m onto something big here.”

  “It’s not that thing… that thing from last weekend, is it?”

  Mike whirled back around with a newfound determination that Darren had never seen before. “You’re damn right, it is. Brother, you and I are on the brink here. This is the payday I’ve been looking for. You too, for that matter.”

  Darren looked away.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Mike aske
d.

  “I’m just not sure that I’m comfortable with all this. I’ve got a good job and a promising career ahead of me. I don’t want to mess it all up.”

  Mike snickered. “I’m not going to mess anything up, little brother.” He nodded to the server rack. “No one’s going to find us.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Last I checked I taught you everything you know, little brother. You wouldn't be where you are without me. So lay off the mother routine, will you?”

  It was true. Mike had almost eight years on him and had introduced Darren to the world of coding and computers almost a decade ago. Mike had transferred his love for computers to his little brother by means of a hand-me-down laptop for Darren’s fourteenth birthday. And now, all these years later, Darren was keenly aware that he had gotten the job with EchoRaid in large part because of the skills Mike had transferred to him.

  Mike leaned forward and slipped his wallet from his back pocket. He opened it, tugged out a plastic card, and handed it to Darren. “Run out and get us some beers, will you? I’m going to have to pull another all-nighter. And that being the case, I’d rather do it with a buzz.”

  Darren took the card. “You want anything to eat?” he asked. “I’m starved.”

  “Yeah. Run by Giovanni’s and grab us a pie. I don’t care what, but make sure it has pepperoni and olives.”

  “You and your olives. Nasty.”