by Jack Hardin
“Fine by me,” he said and brought up the trolling motor.
Roscoe Green loves snook more than anyone I know. Being the owner of the most popular bar and grill on the island keeps him busy and doesn’t allow him as much time as he would like on the water. So Rich and I made an agreement with him to give him ours whenever we bring one up. The state of Florida has tight regulations on snook. Since it’s illegal to buy or sell them, the only way to eat snook meat is to catch one. Snook has to be cleaned just right, with care that all of the skin is removed before cooking. Get that wrong and the meat will come off the grill or out of the oven tasting like soap. That’s right. Soap. I haven’t eaten soap since third grade, after I called Cindy Holmes a very poor string of expletives, and my grandmother wasted no time jamming a bar of Irish Spring past my teeth. I don’t have a problem cleaning my own fish, but when it comes to snook, I prefer the adage, “I catch ‘em, you clean ‘em.”
By the time Rich and I finished dinner and a few beers at The Reef, it was full on dark. A quarter moon was slipping up the black curtain of night, and thousands of stars twinkled brightly. A live band was playing outside the bar as we pulled away, and for a little while, we could still hear the cover band singing Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In The Years” over the drone of the small engine.
Ten minutes later Rich pulled the skiff alongside a slip at the end of our marina. “I’m going to get this girl back to Glen,” he said as I stepped onto the dock.
Glen Bennett was a good friend of Rich. They were both active in the Upper Keys Rotary Club and had a standing appointment at the first hole of a local golf course two mornings a week. Neither Rich nor I owned a flat bottom boat, and Glen was always more than happy to offer his up if he had no immediate plans to use it himself.
“You want to hand me the rods?” I asked.
“Nah, I’ll clean them at Glen’s and set yours on your deck when I get back.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I had a good time out there.”
“Likewise, Ryan.” He pulled away from the dock and headed back into the channel, the white hull slowly disappearing into the darkness in front of a bright foamy wake.
I turned and made my way down the dock. The Cozy Crawfish Marina was small, just thirty slips, and other than Rich and Edith's catamaran at the other end, I was currently the only liveaboard here. I hummed along to “Reelin’ In The Years” as I casually made my way across the dock to my houseboat. I looked at the stars. This time of year the Big Dipper, in the early hours of the night, appeared just above the horizon.
My relaxing stroll home was suddenly interrupted by a jolt of adrenaline as I caught sight of the darkened outline of a man standing just in front of my boat. A splash of yellow light fell on one side of him from the sodium fixture mounted on a pole beside my boat. The man’s back was to the light, making it so his face remained hidden beneath the hoodie resting atop his head.
I stopped ten feet away. My Glock was on my hip, hidden beneath my untucked shirt. One sudden move on his part would be all I needed to bring it out.
I spoke in a crisp, commanding voice. “Can I help you?”
“Major Savage?”
I hadn’t been addressed by my rank since I left the Army five years ago.
“Do I know you?”
“Yes, sir—you do—did. It’s been a while.”
The man’s voice wavered. He sounded scared, maybe drunk.
“My name is Darren Reddick. I served in Afghanistan the same time as you. At Bagram. At the time I was Corporal Reddick. You might not remember me, but I helped you fix your laptop a couple of times.”
Mental dust drifted off the surface of old memories: a sandy-haired man in his early twenties, an IT specialist who struck me as way too smart for the position he was in. And he was one hell of a darts player. Hit the bullseye three out of four times.
“What can I help you with, Darren?” I still couldn’t see his face, and I wasn’t prepared to let my guard down.
“Well… I got out of the service last year. Been working at a startup.”
His voice was shaky.
“Earlier tonight I left work and went to my brother’s place. He sent me out for some dinner and when I got back, I heard a couple of guys upstairs. They—they ended up shooting him. He’s dead.”
I watched as the figure in front of me slumped down a few inches. I heard a mournful sniff come from inside the darkness of the hoodie.
“Darren, I’m sorry to hear about your brother. But why did you come here, to speak with me?”
“Because, sir, earlier tonight…” Darren’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry,” he choked out. “When those guys were leaving my brother’s house, I heard them say that they were coming for you.”
Chapter Three
It’s not every day that someone appears on your doorstep to inform you that you’re on someone’s hit list. “Darren, would you remove your hoodie and step farther into the light?”
He did as I asked. It had been six years since I had last seen him. His face was fuller now, and he sported a full but well-kept beard. His hair was longer, falling over his ears, and with the light on his face being dim and uneven, I doubted that I would have recognized him without an introduction.
“Are you armed?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’d like to have it, please.”
He hesitated.
“Darren, I’m going to invite you in so we can talk. But given the circumstances, I would feel more comfortable if I knew you weren’t armed. You’ll get it back when you leave.”
“Okay. It’s behind me.”
I asked him to turn around and then stepped up. He slowly lifted the back of his hoodie, exposing a slim canvas bag. I cautiously raised up the flap and reached inside. The cool metal of a handgun touched my fingertips. It rested against the rigid frame of a laptop. I slipped out the gun and took several steps back, still wary of my overall surroundings. The weapon was a sub-compact Walther PPS M2 with aftermarket sights.
“Step aboard,” I said and then followed him off the dock. Unlocking the salon door, I stepped in, flipped on the light, and after locking the door behind us, escorted him across the galley and invited him to have a seat in the aft salon where couches were positioned in an L-shape.
Darren selected one and placed his laptop bag at his feet. I sat on the opposite couch, resting his weapon on the cushion beside me.
“I’m sorry for just showing up like this, sir,” he said. His eyes were blue but grayer than I remembered. The young man looked tired, exhausted, and scared.
“It’s Ryan,” I said. “You can drop the ‘sir.’ Why did you come here and not just call the police?”
Darren closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. “I should have.” His jaw clenched, and he balled his hands into fists. “I should have. Maybe they would have already caught whoever killed my brother.” His eyes flicked open again. “I panicked. Seeing Mike like that really messed me up. And… well, I guess I got scared for myself, too. I don’t want to get into any trouble.”
“Why would you be in trouble?” I asked.
He shook his head like he was angry at himself. “Last weekend… I spent some time helping Mike with some grey hat stuff. It wasn’t anything really bad—but it wasn’t entirely legal, either.”
My brows went up.
In the world of online hacking, there are basically three different types of hackers: white, grey, and black. White hat hackers are employed by large organizations and governments to perform penetration testing, probing in-place security systems and conducting vulnerability assessments. Think of a bank hiring someone to try to successfully rob them in order to test the strength of the financial institution's security. That’s a white hat hacker. It’s perfectly legal.
Black hats, on the other hand, generally have the same extensive knowledge and skills as the white hats do. But they find their way into computer networks and bypass security protocols without permission. Their primary mo
tivation is personal or financial gain, cyber espionage, protest, or perhaps a just simple addiction to the thrill of illicit cyber crime.
And then there are grey hat hackers. They’ll go looking for vulnerabilities in a system without the owner’s permission or knowledge. If issues are found, they will report them to the owner, sometimes requesting some kind of fee to fix the issue. If the owner does not respond or comply, the hacker may post the newly found exploit online for the world to see. These types of hackers are not inherently malicious with their intentions; they’re just looking to get something out of their discoveries for themselves. Usually, grey hat hackers will not exploit the found vulnerabilities. But this type of hacking is still considered illegal because the hacker did not receive permission from the owner prior to attempting to attack the system.
“What exactly did you help him do?” I asked Darren.
Darren seemed reluctant to continue, a hard grimace entering his face, his eyes tinted with a concoction of shame and fear. “Last Friday I was hanging out at my brother’s place. We were both cruising the dark web when Mike got all excited and said that he found something interesting. So I slid my chair over to his monitor.”
The dark web is a part of the internet that isn't indexed by search engines. It utilizes encryption and special privacy browsers to keep a user's identity hidden. Because of the anonymity it affords, the dark web has become a popular destination for whistleblowers, human rights journalists, outspoken government critics, and political dissidents.
And for the same reason, it is also a hotbed of criminal activity.
You can buy credit card numbers, drugs, guns, stolen subscription credentials, hacked accounts, and software that helps you break into other people’s computers. On the dark web, you can purchase login credentials to a $50,000 bank account for $500 or get $3,000 in counterfeit twenty-dollar bills for just $600. You can hire hackers to attack computers for you, buy usernames and passwords, or arrange for illicit and criminal sexual activities.
“As it turned out,” Darren continued, “Mike had broken into a Tier 1 server that belonged to a private security firm in Switzerland. He had basically cracked into a digital vault. If I’m honest, it was pretty thrilling. It didn’t take me long to fall prey to the hacker’s high and before I knew it, both of us had spent all night going deeper into their system. It was fun and games at first, kind of like breaking into Fort Knox and poking around. It’s just fun to be in there. But then...then Mike stumbled onto the mother load. This company has a service where they keep extremely sensitive files for their clients.”
“Like a safety deposit box?” I asked.
“Yeah. Exactly. Except it’s all digital. The client has a particular passcode and can only access the system via the company’s intranet. They have to be on site. So Mike copied all this stuff and moved it over to the servers in his home office. Then he emailed the information’s owner and set forth a proposition. If he paid us a hundred thousand dollars in Bitcoin, then we would delete the files and forget all about them. If he didn’t, we were going to put it all up on Reddit.”
“What kind of files were they?” I asked.
Darren paused and looked at me unsurely. “I wouldn’t have done something like that sober and in the daylight. I’m not that kind of person. I’ve got a great job with a great company and I want to do things right.”
“What kind of files were they?” I repeated.
“The guys who killed Mike, they stole his servers and the hard drives.” Darren sighed heavily. “But there were pictures of men with younger women on their arms. Probably their mistresses. Business paperwork connected to chemical dumping in Europe. Various kinds of contracts. There were a couple of audio files in some Russian dialect. From the few words that Mike could pick out, he said it sounded like they were talking about ousting a politician from office. And then there were more pictures of men with their ladies. Mike and I concluded that it was all stuff intended to cover someone’s ass. Stuff they could use for blackmail or to get control over someone.”
“What was the name of the client you hacked?”
“I… I can’t remember any specifics. I took an Uber from Fort Lauderdale and spent the entire drive here trying to remember details. Mike would have known. The client was from somewhere in Europe. If we can find who killed my brother and get the servers and hard drives back, then we might be able to find out who did it.” He shook his head. “There’s no other explanation for why someone would want to kill him. Mike didn’t keep anything from me.”
“Darren, I’m no technocrat. But doesn’t the dark web put a hacker’s identity behind layers of protection? How would these guys have found out that Mike’s hack originated from his house?”
“The best thing I can think of was that his VPN credentials expired. He may not have logged off properly or left a trail of digital crumbs. Whatever it was, his IP address wasn’t masked like he thought.”
I scratched at my chin while I thought of how to handle this. “How did you know where I live?” As a Federal officer who spends his time hunting down the scourge of the earth, I’ve made conscious attempts to keep my private life tucked away.
He shrugged meekly. “I’m good with computers. But I couldn’t find your phone number or I would have just called.”
“These men who killed your brother, could you give a description of them?”
“I’m not sure I could identify them in a lineup. I didn’t get a good look at their faces. One was white, the other black. The black guy was bald and the white guy had his hair dyed blond and tattoos all up his right arm.”
“And they said what exactly, about me?”
“One of them said they should go back and get some shuteye because ‘we gotta go pop that dude in Key Largo in the morning.’ Then he asked the other guy to remind him what your name was again, and he said, ‘Ryan. Ryan Savage. He’s a Fed.’ Then they both laughed and the white guy joked about the chance to take out a Fed.”
My mind raced as I thought back through all the cases I’d had in my two years of working for Homeland Security. The two men Darren described sounded like half of the deadbeats I’d ever arrested. The men intending to come after me could be anyone or connected to any number of guys I put behind bars.
The desire for revenge never dies.
It could be anybody.
“I need to get you to a police station so you can make a report on your brother,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Darren, I can’t promise that they won’t arrest you once they find out about what you and Mike were doing on the web.”
“I know. I can face the consequences. I want to.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
I gave fifteen years to the Army, so I could not abide by, ‘Once a Marine, always a Marine.’ But my personal conviction is that you don’t ever leave behind the courage, discipline, and honor instilled in you during your military service. Those virtues are to be taken with you, to remain a guiding principle for the rest of your life. I was happy to hear Darren was willing to accept responsibility for any wrongdoing.
If those men who killed his brother were planning on coming here tomorrow to put a bullet in my head, then I planned on being ready for them.
They weren’t going to know what hit them.
I stood up. “I’m going to pack an overnight bag,” I said. “We should get off my boat. When these guys come for me, I’d rather not be around for it.”
Darren followed my lead, grabbing the strap of his computer bag and standing up. “I’ll meet you out on the dock.” He stepped through the galley and slid back the glass door as I headed back to my stateroom. I grabbed an empty backpack from the closet and stuffed in a fresh T-shirt, shorts, socks, and a pair of underwear.
Once we arrived at the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, I would request that a deputy keep an eye on the marina overnight to make sure no one suspicious came around. I planned on getting up before dawn and coordinating a stakeout with the
sheriff to make sure we were prepared to grab anyone suspicious.
With any luck, we could grab these guys without a shot fired, and Darren and I could have all our questions answered before the sun set tomorrow.
I grabbed my toothbrush and a few other items from the head and zipped up the bag. I stepped out of the stateroom into the salon just as I heard a distinct zip in the air outside. It was followed by a muffled thud and then a grunt, just before I watched Darren’s body crumple onto my forward deck.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was standing in the center of the salon, silhouetted by the galley lights, and I just managed to dive for cover on the edge of the salon as a barrage of gunfire shattered the glass in the door and pierced the boat’s exterior bulkhead. Shards of wood and fiberglass popped into the air as the boat was chewed up by a relentless stream of semi-automatic gunfire.
Sliding my arm from the backpack strap, I drew my .45 from its concealed holster. As the shooters paused to reload, I scrambled to the aft entrance and out onto the deck just as the gunfire started up again and a bullet scraped past my ear. Staying low, I shot forward and dove into the water, swimming downward into the inky water and away from my boat.
The water muffled the sounds of the gunfire, coming from two weapons; a suppressed pistol—the one that took down Darren—and an unsuppressed assault rifle. Two shooters. Apparently, the men who had killed Darren’s brother decided to advance their schedule and not wait until morning.
My blood started to boil as I pushed through the water and swam a few slips over. These idiots had not only murdered two men tonight, but they were now destroying my home.
My home.
Surfacing on the starboard side of a Bowrider, I grabbed the gunwale, heaved myself up, and peered across the deck. The light above my boat revealed a single figure on the dock, staring cautiously at my boat. A sub-combat assault rifle was situated in his hands. It looked like a Heckler & Koch MP5, its unique thin, curved magazine jutting away from the weapon. The MP5 fired a 9x19mm cartridge; I could only imagine what my boat looked like now that he had just painted it with sixty rounds.
