Dark Web (DARC Ops Book 2) (6 page)

“Act normal? We’re parked way out here like a bunch of freaks.”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about that now. So just chill.”

But it was clear that she couldn’t “just chill.” That little piece of advice seemed like a foreign language to the increasingly flustered Megan. She was moving around frantically, trying to straighten up her clothes, looking around to make sure nothing incriminating was left lying out. Then she started rummaging through her purse. “We’re fucked. And I’m probably still technically drunk, and I’m sitting behind the fucking wheel.”

“Just chuck the keys out the window.”

“What?”

“Do it,” said Carly, remembering an old trick she’d once heard from an old alcoholic neighbor. It was a precaution. Due diligence. If the keys were out of reach somewhere, then it would be tougher to prove in court that the driver was—or was about to be—operating the vehicle. “Take the keys out of the ignition and throw them outside. Trust me.”

Taylor reached for the ignition, but instead of pulling out a set of keys, her hand pawed several times at the empty spot where the keys should have been. Then she checked her pockets, and underneath her on the seat, and in the seat crevice. “I can’t fucking find them!” she cried, staring helplessly at Carly as if waiting for another instruction.

“Well, then don’t worry about it,” Carly said, watching as the police car, a highway patrol vehicle, rolled to a stop behind their van. She kept watching, almost mesmerized by the filmic quality of the scene, the way the police car looked in the early morning light, the way it sat perfectly still like an animal preparing its attack. There was a certain peaceful artificiality about the whole thing, until Carly was suddenly blinded by the harsh glare of a searchlight.

“Okay,” Megan said to herself quietly. “You’re right. I’m not gonna worry about it. Everything’s cool.”

“Everything’s totally cool,” said Carly, trying to hide her own increasing doubtfulness that everything was indeed cool.

“Yeah,” said Megan. “We’re fine, right?”

It might have been Megan’s first real run-in with the police. Carly, on the other hand, while not having direct police experience, was quite used to evading the authorities in a more general sense. Regardless, it taught her that dealing with law enforcement, in any form, took a certain confidence and self-assuredness. Over the years she’d built up quite the tolerance for the usual scare tactics. Of course, having an uncle who was a lawyer might have also helped. Through her career as a hacker, he’d helped Carly cover enough bases to stay out of the court system. That’s what it was all about—covering bases. And she covered hers last night by hiding the honey oil. Of course, a drug-sniffing dog might pose a problem. . . . 

But why worry about that?

She couldn’t let herself worry about that.

It was just some highway-patrol cop making a routine stop. He probably saw the van and figured they were stuck and needed help. The salt flats could sometimes get wet and muddy and extremely uncooperative to car tires. It was no big deal, really. He probably dealt with this kind of thing all the time. Stupid tourists.

Through the side mirror, and through the glare, Carly finally saw the door of the police car swing open. And out stepped the slender leg of a female cop.

For some reason that made Carly feel a little less sure about things, as if fooling someone of her own gender would require a little extra guile. The female cop would be a master communicator and mind reader. Wasn’t that how gender worked?

On second thought, maybe she was still a little drunk.

Megan started to open her door, until she heard the officer yelling at her to shut it.

Not a very good start.

“Stay in your vehicle,” the officer called in a strong, authoritative drawl.

Carly watched the officer’s cautious approach, her inspection of the rear license plate, her resting a hand at her holster as she disappeared behind the van and out of Carly’s sight.

Carly looked at her friend one last time. “Hey, Megan. . . . Try not to say or do too much, okay?”

“Okay,” Megan quivered.

The officer approached Megan’s open window, greeting them with a quick lesson in police-civilian relations. Mainly, the dangers of preemptively opening car doors during traffic stops. “It kinda scares the shit out of us,” the officer said with a weak smile. “And you don’t want us to be scared. Okay?”

Sure. Considering that a scared cop often turns into a gun-wielding cop, it sounded like good advice.

The woman sighed, resting one hand on the bottom of the open window frame. She was short but well-built. Her blonde hair was tucked up into one of those big brown campaign hats, making her look slightly ridiculous. It was an amusing juxtaposition, the hat in contrast to the deadly serious expression on her face. “So, how are we all doing this morning?” she asked with forced politeness.

“We’re good,” said Megan, sounding not very good. “We’re fine. Thanks. How are you?”

“I see you’re having some car trouble?” said the officer.

“No, ma’am. Is there a problem?”

“Well, I noticed you’ve been parked out here for a few hours. Did you guys get lost or something?”

“We got tired, so we pulled off the road.”

“What road? The
interstate?”

“Mhmm.” Megan nodded.

“Yeah, I guess you
did
pull off the road.” The officer cocked her head around, having a look back to the distant interstate. The sound of a truck’s air brakes rattled across the flats. “I see you pulled
well
off the road.”

“Is that a problem?” Megan asked.

She peered back into the driver’s-side window. “It might be.”

There was a sudden loud crackle of police radio chatter. The officer took a step back from the car and tucked her chin against a radio receiver clipped to her lapel. She muttered a few things in code before returning to the window and asking for license and registration, which prompted Megan to continue her scrambling search for her ID. Carly, in the meantime, offered the officer a folded piece of paper. “It’s a letter of agreement from the owner,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Megan, still searching through the messy center console. “My cousin. We’re renting his van. You can call him and ask him.”

“We have insurance and everything,” said Carly.

“Who’s that?” asked the officer.

“Huh?” Megan wasn’t looking.

“Whose leg is that?”

Megan, finally with her ID in hand, leaned over to hand it to the officer. “You want me to wake her up?”

“Can you? Is she alive?” She inspected the ID with a flashlight, checking both sides. And then she looked at the letter.

“Excuse me, Officer?” said Carly. “Is it illegal to park here? We didn’t know.”

“Overnight camping is not permitted on the Bonneville Salt Flats,” she said while inspecting the letter. “There are designated camping areas on the surrounding public lands. This is not one of them.”

“Oh,” said Megan with a pained expression. “Sorry?”

The officer looked back into the van while folding up the letter. “You can’t just go parking anywhere you want.”

“Of course not,” Carly replied.

“And is that your pile of garbage right up there?” The officer was pointing to the charred remains of last night’s bonfire.

“No.” Megan’s reply came a little too quick.

“Really? Is that why you’ve got a bunch of it leaning up against your van?”

“Huh?” said Megan.

“We’re taking that out with us,” Carly said. “We can leave right now, actually. And, uh, we certainly won’t park here in the future.”

“Yeah,” said Megan. “And we totally apologize.”

“That’s fine, but I still need you to wait here. Okay?”

The request made Carly turn her head a little too far, and a little too quickly. The pain shot through her like electricity.

“Actually, you can step out of the vehicle. All of you.”

H
e’d been
on the road all morning, speeding across the desert floor on an empty little highway that meandered between two cacti-lined mountain ridges. A perfect start to the day, renting and subsequently abusing a sporty red Mustang, its throaty roar sounding as he gunned it further and further away from the glamorous artificiality of Vegas. Away from the people of the hacking convention. Away from people in general.

He was glad to be heading north on increasingly quiet highways, passing through increasingly barren towns that were spaced farther and farther apart. These new surroundings, the real Nevada, the desert, brought him an odd sense of relief. It came back like a nagging injury, surprising yet familiar. Comfortable, even, like an old pair of shoes.

Back in the Middle East, he’d spend a few minutes out of each day making a solemn personal promise that he’d never again, for the rest of his life, find himself in a desert.

But there he was, behind his car at the edge of the road for a bathroom break, staring across miles of shimmering sand under a huge blue sky. He was about two hundred miles north of Vegas, standing amongst a patch of yucca and Joshua trees that went sprawling up a mountainside. There he was, under that killer sun again, where he came to the sad realization that the heat of Nevada—aside from Las Vegas—felt more like home than his current one of Washington D.C.

It was a real kick in the ass.

Back behind the wheel, he began to sweat. Two minutes in the sun was all it took for him to remember the July he’d spent in Basra. By 9 a.m., he had no other choice but to roll up the windows and crank on the air conditioning—which brought back memories of Las Vegas. His car had now become the oasis in the desert, a traveling bubble of inexplicable air-conditioned comfort. The droning coolness made him sleepy and his eyelids felt the added weight of last night’s sleep deprivation, of Tansy feeling the wrath of Vegas being Vegas. His friends, being who
they
were, somehow convinced Tansy that the DEFCON after-party would be worth his while, and then another after-the-after-party at some other place down the strip, plus a mini poker tournament, and then. . . .

What else was there? He was sure there was more to it. He had the wristbands and hand stamps to prove it in the morning, evidence of a properly debauched night in Vegas. Wasn’t that what it was all about?

Maybe it would’ve been if Tansy was still twenty-one. And if he hadn’t the morbid privilege of seeing the naked fragility of life. He’d seen it up close in the battlefield, the fickleness of it all, where everything hinged on the most minute equations: the inches of bullet wounds, iota of seconds. And where he and his men would ultimately find themselves pushed up against the ragged edge of existence itself.

It was an education.

One of its lessons—and something that he’d have to reprogram his brain for—was that his life actually
was
a gift. He’d gone through an institutionalized adolescence knowing otherwise, that he wasn’t anything, certainly not anything special. It was the type of knowledge one might get from a dysfunctional upbringing following a traumatic divorce, which was then capped by a lengthy stint or two at youth-detention facilities. Through those facilities, and through whatever school he attended, the message had always been the same. And while it was quiet and sometimes maddeningly subtle, it was a message nonetheless. A pervasive one, even. One that whispered from all angles at once.

Boot camp reinforced the message of mind-numbing mediocrity, that he was a robotized piece of meat, that he was nobody. That was how they trained, and so Tansy excelled. He thrived. He didn’t know any better.

CAUTION

SLOW

A cluster of temporary road signs plucked him away from his thoughts. He’d been driving for so long and in such barren scenery, coming across anything other than an open road felt like a major event. In this case, it was a small line of cars—a Nevada traffic jam—backed up at a roadblock. Tansy coasted to a stop behind an old dusty pickup truck, threw the car in park, and waited for an approaching highway patrol officer. He noticed other signs while waiting, one digital display board reading, “NO UNLAWFUL ENTRY.”

It was an odd sentiment.

Was there a
lawful
entry? And would Tansy be allowed to do so?

As far as he understood, it was a public road. As far as he knew, it was illegal and unconstitutional to—

“What’s going on, Officer?” he asked, turning off his air conditioning at the same time he rolled the window down. The rush of heat was immediate and harsh.

“Road’s closed,” said the officer, a kid much younger than Tansy with a crew cut.

“Why?”

“Public safety. We’ve got an ongoing active shooter situation, and we can’t let civilian traffic into the theater.”

Times like these it paid off to be a marine. “Are you former military?” Tansy asked, hoping he could get some real talk with someone who looked and sounded like a soldier. The way he described it as a theater. . . .

“No, sir. Highway patrol.”

Never mind, then.

Tansy drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel, thinking. “Damn . . . I’m just trying to get up to Ely.”

“Well, you’ll have to turn around.” The officer stood next to the car, squinting in the sun while instructing Tansy to head back down to Crystal Springs, and to take a left on ninety-three, and then—

“So what’s going on up there?” Tansy interrupted. “Some kind of shootout?”

The officer pulled his sunglasses off his hat and slipped them on his bored, emotionless face. “An active shooter situation, sir.”

“You already said that.”

The officer wished Tansy a nice day before turning his back and walking off. He stopped at each car along the way to the barricade, saying something to the drivers. Tansy rolled up his window and watched as the officer gestured for the other drivers to turn around.

While the officer said he wasn’t former military, the barricade certainly looked the part. Along with several police cruisers were two large and imposing MRAP vehicles, tanks on wheels that could withstand mortars and land mines. Tansy knew them well. Maybe even too well, having ridden too many times down too many IED-filled highways in Iraq. He could even distinguish their model and manufacture date. The real mystery was why they were being used on American soil, against Americans.

Tansy made a quick U-turn, kicking up some dust along the road’s shoulder, before speeding away from the checkpoint. He looked back in his rearview mirror a moment later, still able to make out the distinctive militant shape of the black MRAPs. They were beyond overkill. And that was only for a checkpoint. What were they using on the real bad guys down the road?

* * *

A
gainst his mounting annoyance
, Tansy had backtracked to the junction at Crystal Springs. And as the officer kindly suggested, tried his luck with a highway that ran parallel with the previous, barricaded route. As luck would have it, the “active shooter situation” hadn’t spread across twenty miles of barren desert, and thus Tansy’s travels were so far unimpeded by additional roadblocks and MRAPs.

He eventually pulled off the highway for a gas station, a barely standing relic in a tiny, dust-swept town.

A ghost town, if it weren’t for all the news trucks.

They were camped out along the single block of Main Street, their various reporters wandering from van to van with coffees and cameras in tow. It was reminiscent of a classic Washington D.C. media circus. You couldn’t drive around the District without coming across at least one per day. But this was Parsnip, Nevada, not the nation’s capital.

He parked at the edge of town before getting out on foot to survey the scene, taking note of the various major national networks as he walked by each van. Through brief snippets of conversations, and from the competing noise of radio broadcasts, he was able to glean only one common narrative about the developing “active shooter” story—which was that no one knew what the hell was going on.

Tansy tried asking a local, the elderly gentleman sitting in a chair behind the counter at the gas station. Because elderly gentlemen in small towns always knew what the hell was going on.

“Heck if
I
know,” was his whistly-voiced response. He was probably just happy to sell so much gas and shitty coffee.

Outside, on “main street,” Tansy tried his luck with a guy who looked newsy enough yet still adequately schlubby, a goateed tech guy with a large set of headphones around his neck and a cigarette in his mouth. “I dunno,” he mumbled through his cigarette. “Something about an active shoo—”

“Okay, thanks,” Tansy interrupted, desperately unwilling to hear the buzz phrase of the day repeated for the hundredth time. “Do you guys have a police scanner in your van?”

The guy seemed a little suspicious. “Who are you with?” he asked.

“No one. Just myself.”

“So why do you care about a police scanner?”

“I’m just looking for the news, like you.” Tansy offered the guy a candy bar. Fresh from the gas station, it still felt cool in his hand. “So what are they saying on there?”

He was looking at the candy bar. “Uh, no, that’s okay . . . I don’t want that.”

Tansy shrugged and opened the wrapper. “It wasn’t a bribe; I was just being nice.” He took a satisfying bite of chocolate. “So, what’s the word on the scanner?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“They hide all the important stuff on a private channel or something.”

“Oh, come on,” Tansy said, his mouth still full of chocolate.

“What?”

“You guys don’t monitor that stuff?”

“How? It’s blocked.”

Tansy laughed. “What if we unblocked it?”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Listen, uh,”—he wrapped up the half-eaten snack and slid it into a cargo pocket on his shorts—“are you on a break or something?”

The guy took a puff from his cigarette.

“Okay. So on your break, let’s say you wanted to play around on your scanner. Alright? If you wanted to do that, could you then bring it over here and it wouldn’t be a big deal?”

“Who are you again?”

“Seriously, I’m just a guy. I’m just curious.”

“And why would I do this?”

“Because you might get a good scoop. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

“Not for me. I just film what they tell me to film.” He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “But I’ll tell you what. There’s a bomb-ass taqueria place just down the road a few miles.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tansy was shocked at his sudden turn, and pleased. But he didn’t have time to make yet another detour.

“Don Pedro’s,” he said. “Come back here with a chorizo breakfast burrito and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Hmm . . . I don’t think I’ll have time for that. What about something at the gas station? More smokes? Porn mag?”

He frowned.

“Okay. Should I just grab another candy bar?”

A few minutes later, Tansy and his new friend were sitting at a picnic table in front of a long-vacant diner. Amongst the empty junk-food wrappers on the table sat a police scanner hooked up to a laptop.

“I guess you
do
know what you’re doing,” said the guy. “This looks pretty legit. How’d you learn all this stuff?”

“I dropped out of school,” Tansy said as he fiddled with the controls via his laptop, setting up a decryption generator that could crack into the right frequency. “How else would I find the time?”

“So, this is illegal, right?”

“Yeah,” said Tansy. “And you’re an accessory, so keep it on the hush.” He turned up the volume knob on the scanner until they could hear someone speaking. It sounded perfectly clear, a man’s voice describing a reconnaissance report. Something about three gunmen, with sniper rifles, on a rock ledge, on the north end of delta sector.

“Who is that?” asked the guy, his eyes widened. “The cops?”

“FBI. It’s their encrypted channel.”

They spent the next twenty minutes transfixed by the radio, listening intently to each transmission, after which they’d quietly go over what they’d just heard. It was mainly Tansy translating the military-ese for the news guy, summarizing the situation as a standoff between armed civilians and FBI tactical units. The gunmen, who were more often referred to as “suspects,” were on someone’s ranch, which was more often referred to as a “compound.” They were currently in hour thirteen of the standoff, with both sides holding firm. The compound’s occupiers refused to leave, or even lay down their arms, or allow the FBI access. And of course the FBI wasn’t going anywhere.

Most of the chatter was about the positioning of assets and snipers, the coordinating of times and plans. Occasionally they would talk of negotiations, relaying the comments and requests of the compound occupiers to and from central command. Still, the information was scant and heavily coded.

Although no one in the transmissions came out and said it, Tansy had a good idea who the FBI agents were after. It was the same group he’d been after himself: Nevada’s Sagebrush Militia. At one point they had been after Tansy, contacting him last week about a hacking job, offering a pretty penny for him to access a heavily fortified server. Something had seemed off, and so he’d brought the offer to the attention of DARC Ops. He and the team had only needed to look at it for just a few minutes before they decided they weren’t touching that deal with a fucking ten-foot pole.