Page 76 of Viper

“Their hideouts,” King blurts out, anticipatory excitement filling his voice as he leans forward and bracing his forearms on the table.

Cryos nods. “That’s what I’m thinking.” He clicks a few buttons and the image changes slightly to now reveal a couple of different places. A few of them outside our territory, and two within. Some more buttons and some map images come up. “These are the ones that I could triangulate. The two in our territory are the garage that Izzy worked at, and the second is a small pawn shop downtown that is out of the way.”

“And most people probably walk right by it and don’t realize what it is,” I say.

“Exactly. The others I haven’t decoded yet because they’re taking far too long to figure out, but I’m running through a system now to see if it can sort any possible ideas.”

“We should have Crypt take a look at this,” Shadow suggests. “He used to do this kind of thing in Special Forces, or at least he did way back when I knew him. He’s fucking good at it too.”

“Would he be faster than your system?” Bullet asks Cryos.

Cryos shrugs. “Honestly, it wouldn’t hurt to have him look at it. The system will spit out all kinds of results by the time it’s finished and then I’m going to eliminate as many possibilities as possible that don’t fit. With the way things are going, it’ll take a lot of time, so if Crypt can help, I’ll gladly take it.”

Bullet nods and looks back at Shadow. “If he can help us figure it out, then we need to use him. We don’t have a lot of time to waste. Where is he now?”

“He’s watching over Eden and Archer,” I tell him.

Bullet nods. “When he gets back, we’ll get him started as long as he isn’t too exhausted. He’s been running around doing all kinds of shit lately and I don’t think any of the Prospects have really gotten a full night’s sleep.”

“Once this shit is done, we need to find a few more Prospects,” Sniper agrees. Bullet nods and then gestures for Cryos to continue.

Cryos clicks a few more buttons and then brings up some more documents. “These are different, and my contact believes they are locations, but the code is different so they don’t believe it’s for the same thing. Not to mention that it’s much shorter, so far fewer places.”

“Could it be routes they take?” Medic wonders. “To make sure they don’t get caught?”

“I think it’s too short for that,” Cryos responds. “And, I did try to decipher some of it through my system, and only part of it showed up that makes sense. I think we’re looking at directions to where Vlad is hiding out.” He shows us the words take lane to house. “I can’t figure out why else this would be there.”

“But why would he have that on his phone?” Stone wonders.

“Maybe he was leaving this in case he did die and the Yakuza wanted to take Vlad out?” Torque suggests.

“Or he had it on there from the beginning before they came to town so he could direct Vlad to it and just never erased it,” Sniper suggests. “I don’t think it matters why it’s there, but we need to figure it out. Do you think Crypt can figure it out too?”

Shadow nods. “I’m sure he could.”

“Then we’ll give this to him too,” Bullet decrees. “At this rate, it’ll be the only thing he works on. Brothers, we might need to start pulling double duty for those that can spare the time until we can get this figured out or get more Prospects in.” There’s murmurs of agreement to this. “Alright, Cryos, keep going.”

“For the most part, that’s all we could get off Misha’s phone for now, other than a few different random texts, but they’re to the Yakuza bastards to tell them he’s got things set up for them. Everything else was wiped and unrecoverable.” Cryos gives a grim look around the table. “The other thing my contact found is the information on this one was linked to another device, and when someone tried to tamper with that device, everything shared between the two was completely deleted and then corrupted so it’s unrecoverable without months of time spent trying to detangle it to be usable. But at the same time, there is a very good chance it won’t work even if we did recover it. So, we only have this information for now.”

“You think he had another phone back wherever Vlad is hiding and they got ahold of it?” Bowie asks.

“Yep,” Cryos confirms. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense. So it could be there was more important information for us to find, but it’s gone and I don’t suggest trying to get it back.”

“Sounds like a waste of time to me,” Timber agrees. There’s another round of nods and voiced agreement.

“So, that brings us to the other part about Dagger,” Cryos announces. He pulls up a whole new set of images, and then clicks on the first to show us a string of texts. “My contact was able to dig into Dagger, and he came up with a bunch of shit. Dagger was dirty from the moment he joined the club, if not before. Most of the shit he told us before he died was true. His mother talked about the club being responsible for Bull’s death and that he would have to avenge him. It also confirms that the journal he gave us with the information on Dmitri and his operation was completely fake with enough truth in it to keep us busy.”

“Motherfucker,” Shadow hisses. “We looked into that and did find evidence of those locations being used, so how the hell did he fake that?”

“He used locations that Bull once used and Dmitri did use in the beginning,” Cryos explains. “But as soon as we turned up the heat, he must have told Dmitri and given him other locations to use.”

“Bull always was a clever bastard when it came to this shit,” Bullet says in annoyance. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were two journals, not one, and the second one had all the back-up locations in case shit went south. Hell, he did that shit for years and that’s why none of us could really tell where he was keeping the drugs and guns unless you were part of his inner circle. We all knew they existed, but when everything was done, we thought we found them all.”

“So, if there’s a possible second journal or whatever full of these back-up locations, where is it?” I wonder.

“That’s the million dollar question,” Sniper huffs. “Something tells me it’s not here, though. We’ve looked everywhere, and I doubt there’s many places he could have hid it where we would still have access to it.”

“We tore apart his room, so we know it’s not in there,” King agrees.

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