Page 57 of Oath
“Got it,” Alphabet said and pulled my attention back to the screen. “Come on, show us how fucking cocky you bastards are…”
“There,” O’Rourke said, leaning forward like he could make their tracking happen faster by force of will. “You’re going to lose them.”
“Excuse you, I don’t lose my targets,” Alphabet stated, his fingers all but flying over the keys before he switched one hand to a track ball and the other on the keyboard. The images snapped as he began to rotate his view.
“You already have, they wentsouth,” O’Rourke argued. “You’re tracking me.”
“Hmm.” Alphabet’s noncommittal sound just seemed to aggravate the other man. “Is that what I’m doing?”
Before he could respond, however, another vehicle popped on the screen and Alphabet paused the view, snapped a screenshot, then ran a facial rec in the corner.
It matched by 88% the man who had been following earlier. A little grainy, but good enough.
“Son of a bitch,” O’Rourke swore.
“Don’t talk about my mother that way.” The half-distant comment carried no heat or really any of Alphabet’s attention.Instead, he’d switched from following O’Rourke to the car—not the man he identified in the car—thecar.
“Holy shit…” The low exhaled curse from O’Rourke had me almost leaning forward.
“Not so fucking clever now, are they?” The deep sense of satisfaction apparent in voice said everything it needed to convince me we had a lead.
Exhaling slowly, I relied on sniper breathing to keep my reactions under control. No rushing. No ordering. No directing. No pretending we could force a speedier answer by hovering. Alphabet knew exactly what he was doing. He was our resident expert for a reason.
The minutes trickled past as the screen reflected Alphabet’s manipulations of the system. He tracked the car out of Queens, through Manhattan, then onto Jersey via the tunnel. From there, he picked up the vehicle on the other side—new license plate.
An hour later—based on the timestamp—they traded the car for an SUV and got on the turnpike. They continued almost relentlessly south for the next several leaps. Not once did Alphabet try to rush ahead, he verified and when his next snap didn’t reveal the car, he backtracked.
“Fuck,” O’Rourke half-whispered the word, his hands flexing against his thighs. Impatience swarmed over the man, but like me, he kept his comments to a minimum. It took almost two brutally painstaking hours, and two hot coffees—I made O’Rourke accompany me while Alphabet worked—before Alphabet fist pumped in the air.
“Got them.”
All I needed to hear to surge forward. “Show me.”
“At the risk of minimizing your admiration of my genius,” Alphabet said. “I’ll skip the details on just how many systems I had to hack to do this, but I tracked two of our identified goonsto a location just outside of Alexandria, Virginia. According to land titles, it’s owned by a private corporation that is in turn a subsidiary of a subsidiary ad infinitum. Beneath the shell game is Patriot Exports, a division of a cover company once used by the alphabet agencies to move large cargo around the world.”
“Government ties,” I muttered. “Check.”
“I think co-opted ties, because the location itself is not a warehouse or a corporate building. In fact, it’s not much of anything other than a house, a barn, and some fields with cows grazing.” He shifted our view to a satellite overview.
“But?” I prompted.
“But,” Alphabet said with a grin as he rolled his head from side to side and cracked his neck from side to side. “What it does have is an underground bunker, complete with low level accessand…” He wiggled his fingers like a magician preparing to do a show and hit a key on his keyboard. “CCTV.”
I wasn’t the only one gaping at the screen. Even O’Rourke looked stunned.
“Why the fuck would someone running all those secrets have a network accessible surveillance system that can be hacked into?” His expression sobered abruptly. “Wait?—”
“To bait someone like me into a trap,” Alphabet answered, smug smile firmly in place. “Too bad for them that I always ghost my intrusions so I can send their bots off on wild goose chases.”
“In about fifteen minutes, we’re going to know everything they do, specifically, the operatives working on it, who they are in bed with, is it actually a government operation or is it government adjacent…”
He rose slowly, stretching as he went. His back cracked lightly, then his shoulders before he began to move. The limp was there for one step, but then he exerted force of will and erased it from his posture. Goblin rose, stretching as he went and moved to join Alphabet on his slow pace around the room.
“Don’t touch it,” he said without glancing back and O’Rourke pushed out of his own chair.
“I wasn’t planning on it.” The edge of defensiveness in his voice betrayed him, however, and Alphabet just shot him a look. For his part, O’Rourke didn’t deny but he did throw his hands in the air before pacing away. Neither left the room fully and I shifted my stance to keep an eye on both of themandthe computer.
The map to the location was still up on the screen so I took a beat to study it. I didn’t know the place, but that didn’t mean anything. We had a number of bolt holes across the country and overseas.
