Page 9 of Room Ten: Praise Times Three

3

SOREN

Ican’t get a good lock on the signal the call came from, but I’ve triangulated it to a fifty-mile radius that is two-hundred miles from here, so we’re going to head that way and get as close as possible until they call back. I’m packing up my bag when Case runs in with a small Netgear hub in his hand.

“Epi’s ex-IT person designed her thisscrambler. Want to check it out?”

“Absolutely.” I tuck it into my laptop bag.

“Are you leaving?”

“Yeah. We are going back to the garage. I think I have a lock on her southwest of here near Peoria. I’ll look at this while the guys are packing up the gear.”

“Are you going with them for extraction?”

The question grates on me, even if it is valid. Although we all have the same training, we don’t all excel in the same things. I, for instance, am skilled in all things tech. The other guys could do much of what I do, especially with the tools I’ve created, but it’s not as easy for them as it is for me. Meanwhile, hand-to-hand combat isn’t my strong suit. Don’t get me wrong. I can kill a man with my hands, but while it wouldn’t take Reese five seconds, for me there might actually be a scuffle first. With this group of men, it’s embarrassing to know I’m the weakest amongst them.

“Yeah, the signal is too erratic to not be constantly monitored.”

He hands me a cell phone. “Can you make this seem like it’s working, but route all the traffic internally to us?”

I laugh and take the phone from him. “Is she giving you hell?”

“You have no idea.”

“Yeah, but you guys like that. Chicks with a ton of attitude get you hard.” I glance up at him.

Rolling his eyes, he grumbles, “You have no idea.”

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” I pop out the SIM card and slide it into a small handheld decoder I modified years ago. Then I open up an app on my phone, something I also designed that routes any SIM card I program to an internal messaging service on all of our phones. This entire setup takes me ninety seconds.

“Yeah, they are beautiful.” He sighs and takes back the phone. “Thanks. You guys be careful.”

I nod, hoisting my bag back up on my shoulder. “You’ll hear from us when we have something.”

“Same.” Case fist bumps me and is out the door.

I’m the last to leave the library, and I can feel a half-dozen FBI eyes trained on me, eyeballing my bag of tricks. I doubt they’ll find the trace duplicator I put on their equipment, but if they do, I already have the MAC address to their equipment and will backdoor it if need be. Yes, that would be a felony, and yes, I could face jail time if caught. But I don’t worry about things like that. Not with Victor at my back.

I give the boss a head nod and exit the property, climbing into the backseat with Caiden and Reese already situated.

“All good?” Caiden asks, as he puts the SUV into gear.

“Yep.” I pull the little “scrambler” device out of my bag to inspect it. The factory seal has been broken, but that’s not a big surprise. I often take commercial items and retrofit them to serve my purposes. It’s called garage engineering.

“What’s that?” Reese asks.

“I guess Epiphany has an ex-IT guru. They designed this device to help Epi broadcast while hiding her location. While you guys pack up our gear, I’m going to do a bit of reverse engineering.”

“IT guru? Could that be why—”

“That’s what I’m thinking. It certain explains the erratic signal and why I can’t get a lock on it,” I say, interrupting his thought process.

We pull into the garage under Townsend Agency, located in downtown Chicago. I have no idea how Victor afforded this little gem of a building smack dab in the middle of one of the busiest and most congested cities in the country, but he did, and it is nice. If the neighboring office buildings had a clue as to the amount of ammunition and tactical equipment housed in this building, they would be nervous.

Very nervous.

We have plenty of explosives, too, although I can’t remember the last time we got to play with any of it.

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