Brain
eXcessica publishing
Brain
© July 2015 by Candace Blevins
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First Edition July 2015
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Brain
Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Club, Book 2
by Candace Blevins
Cage: Car, truck, SUV, etc. A vehicle that isn’t a motorcycle.
Church: A meeting. Club business is discussed, items are often voted on.
Colors: Same as Cut.
Cut: A member’s vest or jacket with all of their club patches. It’s earned, and is a huge deal.
LEO: Law Enforcement Officer, sometimes Law Enforcement Organization
MC: Motorcycle Club
Prospect: Prospective member. They often get the first patch, but they aren’t a full-fledged member until they’ve proven themselves and been voted in. While a prospect, they have to do just about anything a member tells them.
Ice
Some people talk about going off the grid like it's sexy, fun. But sometimes, the reality sucks.
I made my choices at twenty-one, and I’ve made it to twenty-five against all odds. I've successfully evaded law enforcement from the top dozen or so countries in the world, not to mention having members of the Russian Mafia after me, but now I've come up against another hacker, and for the first time in over four years, I'm not sure of my ability to elude him.
The asshole drives a Harley. He's tall and thin, all sculptured wiry muscles with a cocky assed attitude. If he wasn't my arch enemy, apparently out to kill or capture me at all costs, I might actually be interested. Genius hackers don’t usually come with muscles, speed, strength, leather clothes, and motorcycles.
However, he was most certainly after me — pissed at me for breaking through his firewalls and selling his MC’s secrets, and he's been on my tail for more than a week.
I used a fake identity he doesn’t know about to rent a high dollar hotel room. While I'd like to think the penthouse’s fancy security was good enough to keep him out, if he figured out where I was, I knew it’d barely slow him down. He drives a Harley and wears biker clothes, but I doubt he’d have trouble infiltrating even this place.
I hadn't slept in days, though, so I was going to have to crash and trust he wouldn’t figure out my location.
I chose this hotel, in part, because the penthouse suite has a balcony with access to the rooftop pool, giving me three exits — stairs, private elevator, and through the pool area to the public elevators and stairwell.
Of course, this meant he also had three ways to get to me, all of which required a key card, but he wouldn’t have any problems making what he needed to get past the electronics.
I was beginning to talk myself out of how safe this place was, but I was exhausted.
I hacked into the hotel security and rigged it to ring the hotel phone if anyone used a key card to access the penthouse. I hung bells on all the doors — it might be low tech but it would wake me if anyone entered.
And I crashed, fully clothed with my knife, pepper spray, and taser in my pocket, and my backpack ready to go in case I had to make a hasty exit.
I don't know how long I slept when the phone rang, and as I rolled out of bed and grabbed my backpack, the bell on the terrace door jangled.
He silenced it in a microsecond, though. He's inhumanly fast, but I already knew that.
I’d left the window open, and I pulled my knife from my pocket and slung it open as I neared it, prepared to slash the screen so I could make it onto the terrace, and then hopefully get up to the pool and onto an elevator before he could get to me.
My ability to run fast has saved my ass more times than I can count, but this dude can run faster, and he terrifies me, which is why I chose to run instead of going for my pepper spray.
I lifted my hand, and a millisecond before I swiped down to cut the screen, he grabbed my arm and wrenched the knife from my hand.
The next thing I knew, I was on the bed, face down as he strapped my wrists and ankles with zip-ties. Panic threatened, but I’ve managed to get out of close scrapes before — I just needed to keep my head on straight and figure out how to get away from him. I breathed through my fear and reminded myself I needed to keep my wits about me if I was going to get away from him.
My eye had been tender from wearing my contact so long, and I’d taken it off before going to sleep.
When he rolled me over, I kept my eyes closed.
“You’re Ice?” he asked, but I kept my mouth and eyes shut.
“I already know you wear colored contacts,” he said, his voice soft, deadly, “so you may as well open them. Before we’re finished, I’m going to know everything about you, so open your eyes and let’s get started.”
My left eye is two-thirds brilliant blue, the other third an orangish-yellow, and my right eye is brown. Most of the time I wear a brown contact over my multi-colored eye, but other times I wear green or blue contacts designed to look natural. Sometimes, I’ve been known to wear cat-eye contacts, or unnatural colors like hot pink, purple, or fuchsia. Besides the Russians, no one who knows my hacker name has ever seen my eye without a masking contact, though.
They’ve also never seen me as a girl.
I wasn’t going to get out of my current predicament in the next few minutes, though, so I opened my eyes and looked at my captor, defiant.
“Heterochromia?” he asked, and I was so impressed he knew the medical term, I nodded before I remembered not to.
“Do you have any of the associated syndromes?”
Okay, now he’s really impressed me, but I was also ready to stop talking about my fucking eyes, so I snapped, “What, you’re a medical doctor who hacks on the side, moonlighting as a bad-ass biker? How many people are living in your fucking head,
asshole
?”
He lifted his eyebrows, and one side of his mouth turned up. I was amusing him, and the realization pissed me off. I glared, and he smiled as he pointed out, “You didn’t answer the question, chicklet.”
“You sure I’m a girl?”
His face broke into a full smile and he asked, “You want me to check?”
No, I most certainly didn’t want him to check, so I changed the conversation. “What do you want from me, Wulff?”
He’d been leaned over me, invading my space and intimidating me, but now he sat up, ran his hand through his hair, and said, “We’ll get to that later. How are your wrists and ankles? Too tight? Or are you okay?”
What the hell? He wanted to make sure I was okay? Well, no way was I going to tell him they didn’t hurt and I was fine. “Yeah, my wrists are going numb, if you wouldn’t mind undoing them.”
He looked at me a second, grinned, and said, “Total lie. You’re fine.”
Was he one of those body-language experts who could tell if people were lying? If so, I needed to work on not giving him any tells because my getting out of this depended in large part on my ability to bullshit him. Usually, I’m way smarter than most people I come into contact with, but this guy… not so much.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” he said, no longer smiling. “I’m gonna tell you what I’ve pieced together, and you’re going to fill in the blanks for me.”
I glared at him, and he said, “At twenty-one, you took on a job to hack into a Russian server farm. You didn’t ask a lot of questions back then, but you did enough research to know you were hacking a fairly benign website, so the danger should’ve been low. What you didn’t know, was the website was a front for the Russian Mafia, with a hidden portal for their people to log into.”
My heart sped as a hefty dose of adrenalin dumped into my bloodstream, but I didn’t say yes or no, didn’t give him any indication of whether he was right or not, but he smiled as if I’d confirmed it, and he continued. “The Russians found the guy who paid you, tortured him, and he gave you up. He only knew a few things about you, however — he told them you were a boy, and on the small side, your hacker name was Ice, and he met you in a small diner on the outskirts of Cincinnati.”
No way could he have found any of this out if he wasn’t hired by the Russians, and terror filled my veins as I struggled to breathe enough to keep from passing out. “If you’re going to kill me,” I said, trying not to let him see my fear, “just get it over with.”
He sighed and ran his hands through his hair again, obviously distressed. Maybe he didn’t want to kill a girl? If so, I could use his reticence to help me stay alive. I wondered, though, how he was so sure I was a girl. He’d seen me dressed as a boy more than as a woman, and all my disguises were damned good.
“Let’s sit you up, see if I can make you more comfortable.” He put his hands around my ribcage, pulled me up, leaned me against the headboard, and checked my arms, wrists, and hands.
“What do you want from me?” I asked again.
“I told you, I want answers.”
“What?” I quipped, “You’re going to write my biography? Don’t you want to know about my early childhood? My parents? Siblings?”
“Sure. You talk, I’ll listen.”
I shut up and glared at him, and he grinned and kept going with what he’d discovered. “Since the university in Louisville participated in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, and is within easy driving distance of Cincinnati, I looked for someone matching your body type who competed. Now that I know you’re a girl, it’s a no-brainer, Lauren.”
My stomach turned over on itself, and if I’d eaten recently, I’d have thrown up. I took a deep breath, trying to control the fight or flight response because I could do neither at the moment. I bent my legs, brought my thighs to my chest, and put my forehead on my knees.
“Hey, I know you prefer Destiny now, or, I assume you do, since it’s on the ID you seem to use the most.” God, his voice sounded as if he was trying to soothe me, and fuck if I was going to fall for the Stockholm Syndrome bullshit. He was my enemy, no matter how nice he wanted to pretend to be. He hadn’t hurt me yet, and I needed to get away before he did.
He stood and paced, his hand going through his hair every few seconds. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Okay, brutal honesty. I need to know who hired you to hack into our servers, and if I have to hurt you to get it out of you, I will, but I hope to god you don’t make me.” He shook his head. “Been a long time since I’ve come up against someone who could give me a run for my money, and it hasn’t happened since I became an adult. You have my respect and admiration, and I have a few things I can offer in exchange for the information I need from you, but… if you don’t take them? I can make you talk.”
I had no doubt he could and
would
follow through on the threat, but I could also sense enough humanity in him to see he truly hoped he didn’t have to. I sighed, shrugged, and asked, “And if I don’t know enough about the people who paid me?”
He shook his head. “You learned from your mistake with the Russians. You don’t do shit anymore unless you know the score.”
True, but I wasn’t going to agree with him. “What do you have to offer?”
“A way to stop being on the run. You may not be able to keep the name Destiny, but I can fix it so you can have a normal life, if you want it.”
“How?” If an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
“Someone close to your age with the same hair color and similar body type has a terminal disease and will die in the next couple of months. For a price, she’ll agree to be in a supposed snow skiing accident while working on her bucket list, and her face will slam into the fictional tree. While in a podunk hospital in the middle of nowhere, a doctor will pronounce her miraculously cured. However, her face will be messed up and will require cosmetic surgery. I know a plastic surgeon who’ll alter your face so you’ll no longer hit as the old you on the facial recognition software, and get you close enough to her look to be plausible, since she’ll have needed surgery to fix the damage. The girl will die, we’ll take care of having her cremated without the paperwork, and you’ll take over her identity.”
“What’s her name?”
He shook his head. “No, you get no further information about her. I can help you find a new life, or I can hurt you. Those are my bargaining chips. I’d offer money, but you’re loaded and I have no intention of offering enough to sway you.”
“How do you know how much money I do or don’t have?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know how much you have, but your rates start at ten grand and go up from there. Plus, you’re good enough to transfer money from bank to bank, whether it’s yours or not, if you want. Also, you don’t seem to be hurting for funds as you move around. You alternate between skeazy hotels when you’re dressed like shit, and nice hotels when you aren’t. If you need a wig or a change of clothes, you stop and buy them, and you give worn clothes to the homeless instead of washing them and wearing them again.”
I weighed my options, deciding whether to give him anything at all. The things I’d deduced might mean I didn’t walk out of here alive, but… if used properly, could possibly be levied as a bargaining chip.
“You haven’t worn your colors while you’ve been after me,” I told him, “but you built the firewalls for the RTMC chapters in Atlanta and Chattanooga. They aren’t built to Wulff’s signature specs, but close enough I’m sure it’s you. I looked through the data I downloaded, and there’s a member in Chattanooga called Brain. Just a guess, but I’d say that’s you.”
He looked at me a few seconds, pulled a phone from his pocket, called someone, and said, “Yeah, use the key card I gave you, in the third elevator from the left. It’ll bring you to the penthouse. Low-key, and no names. Keep your mouth shut when you get up here, no matter what she says.”
My stomach sank when I realized there were two of them. I have a small saw hidden in my ring, and could’ve used it to cut through the zip-ties if they’d given me ten minutes alone. With two people, though, the odds of that happening had just dropped to practically zero. One person would need to leave for food, eventually, but two…
shit
.
“I know your motorcycle isn’t here,” he said, eyeing me as if he were analyzing my state of mind. “Is there anything you need to take with you, besides the backpack?”
I looked at him without answering, as I realized the ramifications. They were going to take me somewhere else, which meant I needed to escape
now
, while I still had a snowball’s chance.
“Answer me, doll. If you need anything besides the backpack, I need to know before my associate arrives.”
I saw the pen injector, realized he was about to knock me out, and kicked up with my feet in a last ditch effort.
The asshole easily caught my feet, as if I were a small child, and smiled. “I like your spunk.”
I tried to move out of the way as he aimed the injector at my arm, but then yelped as the needle went in. “Damn you!” I practically shouted.
He put the lid back on the pen, put it in his pocket, and looked sad as he said, “I know, and I’m sorry. It could take up to five minutes to completely knock you out. I’ll ask again, do you need anything besides the backpack?”