Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 147789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 739(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 493(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 739(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 493(@300wpm)
“So if we were gonna close this file for good, where would you start?” Kreed asked after a moment of silence. The biggest concern Kreed had about the case right now was who could be trusted. With the discovery that Special Agent Langley had been on the inside—and that he hadn’t acted alone—there were most likely other dirty agents, either in the FBI or other government agencies. Aaron was technically the only one he really trusted right now and that said a lot. Aaron had single-handedly broken the case wide open when he’d identified Peter Langley’s attorney being at Kreed’s brother’s funeral when no one else had—or maybe they had, and never shared.
If he and Aaron were on the same page going into the meeting today, they could bust out of DC by tomorrow. And if they weren’t under someone’s thumb, and he and the kid worked closely together, it might not be much of a stretch to close this case by week’s end. Because with Kreed’s gut and his willingness to allow Stuart to do whatever it took—both inside and outside the law—to find this information, he figured they could wrap this case up tight.
Aaron stayed silent for so long that Kreed figured the guy had caught on to his ploy to entice Aaron to close this investigation quickly rather than encouraging the man’s desire to leave the case behind. The kid surprised him when he finally answered. “It’s hate related. It’s not rocket science that hate masks itself in religion all the time. Religion means a church is involved. Before I left, I narrowed it down to three satellite churches. All had members involved in the rally. ”
“So you’re thinking like I’m thinking—there’s a religious organization behind this whole deal, probably starting back before even the Colt Michaels accident?” Kreed laid his burger on the plate, pushed the food aside, and took a deep breath. Being on the same mental page gave him the validation he needed to continue with his plans.
“Pretty much,” Aaron said, before taking another bite of pasta.
“Have you looked into any of them closely?” Kreed asked, and Aaron went silent, eating the rest of his plate without making eye contact.
“If we’re gonna be partners and get this solved so you can get out of here, you need to come clean with me, Aaron,” Kreed said quietly. He leaned in a little and whispered the next words. “I want this done. Mitch and Cody aren’t safe until we figure this out. You can trust me. I swear.”
“We aren’t partners yet, and the less you know about my processes, the better,” Aaron quipped and Kreed leaned back a little disappointed.
“Well, that’s fucking cryptic for a government employee who wants the hell out of here,” Kreed snorted. He needed to remember Stuart wasn’t someone to push. Aaron needed a gentle hand to help guide him where Kreed wanted him to go. “So if you were looking at the churches, when will you know something?”
Aaron wiped his mouth and gave an exaggerated eye roll.
“I’ve narrowed it down, but won’t know for certain until I can get a secure connection,” Aaron replied, before finishing off his pasta dish. Kreed nodded in agreement. That was all he’d needed to know. Kreed lifted his hand for the check. All of a sudden, getting Aaron to the office was the only thing Kreed was interested in.
“I ordered dessert,” Aaron said defiantly when he realized Kreed’s intent to leave.
Kreed shoved from the booth, heading toward the back where he saw the waitress go. He quickly asked her to bag Aaron’s dessert and handed her his credit card for the meal. There would be little more than a skeleton crew at FBI headquarters, and they could work reasonably undetected. Maybe he could access Mitch’s old office and stick Aaron in there, see if he could gather any more valuable information before they all met this afternoon.
Chapter 4
Dammit! Aaron knew better than to think he could worm his way out of this mandatory onsite request. To make it worse, he had no one to blame but himself. Society’s shady-ass behavior always intrigued him to the point of trying to figure out motives and the potential next moves they planned to make. Add that to his innate do-gooder attitude and he always went after the bad guy when any sort of injustice made its presence known.
Good versus evil and all that superhero shit made him feel better at the end of the day if he had to break a few rules to expose the bad guy. His online buddies called him the modern-day Robin Hood, hacking information and releasing it to the disenfranchised. Knowledge was power, and the power should be with the people, not corporate overlords. Typically, that was a source of pride, but right now, riding in this car, he had the major heebie-jeebies—times about a million—at the prospect of walking into the front doors of FBI headquarters. This shit just got way too real and wasn’t funny at all.
Aaron looked down at his palms. They were sweaty from his overactive nerves, and he quickly ran them down the front of his jeans before tucking his hands under his thighs. Up until Mitch’s case that somehow inadvertently got dumped on his shoulders, Aaron had been able to do his Robin Hood thing from behind his computer screen in the safety of his own home. Now¸ as they pulled into the parking lot with the massive Federal Bureau of Investigation stamped on the entrance, a fear Aaron hadn’t known, became his number one focus.
While working adventures with his merry band of brothers, Aaron might be branded the king of manipulating and exploiting limitations in the proxy servers of large organizations—more specifically, the largest corporations in the world, who tended to regularly exploit the little guy. And there might have been a time, or perhaps a few dozen times, where he may have orchestrated a complete flood on their system by simply issuing a calculated DDoS—Distributed Denial of Service—attack. And since Aaron’s particular talents included systematically evading any reverse proxy servers in their way, allowing the unsuspecting flood to penetrate, some legal eagles might consider that a planned global cyber-attack. Aaron dubbed it more a wakeup call to the senior administration when they’d gotten a little too big for their britches.