Brother's Keeper V: Wylie (the complete series BOX SET): NEW RELEASE + Series Box SET included!

by Stephanie St. Klaire

  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.

  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 stopped. 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 ca
lling 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.

  “What money?” Wylie asked. “Why does he think you have some of his money?”

  “He knows I helped bring down his team. He also knows I’m the one who sabotaged his accounts. He told me he watched the money drain from each of them and that only I could have taken it,” she admitted. “He can’t find it now. He’s scoured the backend of every financial institution he hit and the offshore holdings – nothing.”

  “That’s because I returned all of it and hid it from him within each institution. The money is all there. He just can’t see it.” Liam felt an inkling of guilt. Felicity was taking the fall for what he had done. “Good to know the walls I put up are still intact after all this time.”

  When all was said and done, Liam had returned the money that had been stolen, at least that which they had. Wells had already been living high on the hog and spent plenty. Once the money was back where it belonged, Liam worked with the IT departments of each victim and helped them build a better fail safe so it couldn’t happen again.

  “Yeah well, you did too good of a job because he thinks I have it and need to return it, or…” Felicity paused, nearly choking on her words.

  “Or what, City?” Though calm, there was a hint of something in Dace’s tone – anger, maybe fury. It was as if he already knew the answer.

  A small sob escaped Felicity. She pushed her chair away from the large table and took to her feet. With her back turned to the men in the room, she wiped away the tears she could no longer withhold. She straightened her shoulders and took a cleansing breath before she turned to face them. “Or he starts hurting the people I love.”

  “He’s not going to get
to any of us, City.” Sympathy wasn’t something Dace handed out, but her words had confirmed what they all had suspected. She had been trying to protect their family, hence the secrets and odd behavior. “We can…”

  “He has pictures of Reagan,” Felicity shouted. There wasn’t a single thing Dace or the others could say to her to make her feel better or even safe. “He even has pictures of her at school, running the track. He has pictures of all of you, even Colleen and Magnus.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Wylie was on his feet now, fists clenched and pacing.

  Luke tossed his hands in the air as if they were making this harder than it had to be, and he had a simple solution. “So, he’s here then. Easy, we just…”

  “No,” Liam said. “Just because he has pictures here doesn’t mean he’s here.” Liam dragged his hands through his hair, already running through scenarios on how to beat this guy at his own game in his head. “You’ve been doing this long enough to know that nothing is as it seems when it comes to tech. We can do anything we want, remotely. Even collect intel…pictures.”

  “Even the cars?” Luke questioned. “I mean, we’ve done some weird shit over the years, tapping into stuff…but never cars.”

  “Think about it. He had that drone on us today. We don’t know the range on that yet. The military sends drones across oceans to spy on other continents. He could be in Japan right now for all we know, anything is possible,” Liam began, trying to convey just how different this case was going to be for them, “He chased us with cars that probably didn’t belong to him and watched us through city cams like we’ve done many times. Technology allows him to be absolutely everywhere we are – inside, outside, you name it. Almost anything can be hacked remotely with Bluetooth.”

  “Everything has Bluetooth now,” Wylie added.

  Liam nodded, “Exactly, even the smaller stuff. Your home thermostat, refrigerators, an alarm clock.”