Flying Monkeys Read online

  Together, the three of them walked hand in hand back down the beach toward the safe house.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Mary Silo startled as she caught sight of herself in the mirror. The change was dramatic. In the sink lay the hair she’d buzzed off with the clippers she’d purchased at the drugstore. Using the longest attachment, she’d cut her hair off without hesitation.

  It took years off her, to be honest.

  She liked it.

  Gathering all the hair up, she flushed it down the toilet, not wanting housekeeping to see it in the garbage and have it stick in their minds. After rinsing out the sink, she read the instructions on the bottle of hair dye she’d purchased, a blue-black that she’d grabbed more on a lark than anything, and a total change from the pale reddish blonde Hannibal had insisted she be all these years.

  A color she’d detested with a passion.

  An hour later, she stepped out of the shower and ran a towel over her body and hair before wiping down the mirror.

  I should spike it.

  Wet, her hair stood up and rendered her totally unrecognizable.

  She would check out early the next morning, leave via the back entrance. Since she was paid up, there wouldn’t be any charges. She’d parked her car, an older but reliable Honda solar hybrid, a couple of blocks away. It was the car she’d purchased in Kansas City when she traded in the car she’d just bought in Denver.

  The woman who ran the car lot had fallen for her tearful story of an abused wife on the run from her husband. She’d used the name and information for one of her former nurses, which she’d pulled from Hannibal’s computer the night before she left.

  The woman never asked to see ID, too caught up in Mary’s story and genuine tears.

  While in Denver, Mary had made another large cash withdrawal, this time from her new account. She suspected Hannibal could probably hire someone to track her via the money withdrawals. She’d also used cash to purchase herself a sat-linked tablet she could use to more easily to stay in touch with her contact, and two new burner cell phones.

  But what she wanted to do was find herself a small little dingy apartment for rent, somewhere she could pay cash, and lay low while she finished what she needed to do. Her contact had furnished her with the information she’d need to get a new identity, in exchange for more of the evidence she had against Hannibal.

  They’d also passed along a little nugget she hadn’t considered, that Hannibal would be under suspicion of having made her disappear and would likely have to scale back some of his plans, unless or until police could prove she was alive and had left under her own power.

  She hadn’t thought about that. Yes, it meant Hannibal would probably be even more eager to find her and haul her back in, or at least prove she was alive.

  But it also meant he’d have to walk a fine line and keep his nose clean until that happened.

  She was good with that. Anything to be a pain in his ass was fine with her. Trusting her contact had taken a considerable leap of faith on her part, but she knew she had to start her new life somewhere.

  * * * *

  In an Atlanta coffee shop, Ali Xavier, known to his friends in the underground hacker community as Ax, nervously tapped his feet as his fingers flew over his keyboard. His blog hits had exploded in the past couple of hours as he posted the first snippets of the evidence forwarded to him by his contact. He’d already set up her new identity and as soon as he had a picture from her, he could get her ID printed and sent to her.

  He couldn’t believe it, but knew whatever that batcrap Reverend Silo had done to his wife over the years had caused her to snap. The things she’d revealed to him in e-mail had checked out. The initial audio tapes she’d provided were compelling, and when he compared the voice on them to video from one of Silo’s sermons and ran it through recognition software, it checked out.

  Then she’d forwarded him some video, with promises of much more audio and video to come, if he helped her stay hidden.

  Pulling his hands from his laptop, he nervously drummed his fingers in his lap under the table and out of sight as he read over the latest e-mail from her. He was about to become a very rich man. He was thirty-two and had struggled for years from boring job to boring job while honing his hacking skills and staying ahead of the law. Before now, he’d always fought the urge to do some sort of illegal hacking job, even though he’d had the skills for it.

  The risks were too great, the potential return too small.

  This…

  This was a golden goose egg. This was the kind of event he’d saved himself for, staying off the radar of law enforcement, always being a white-hat, never engaging in any activities that would put him at the top of the list of something like this. Just running his ranty antiestablishment blog about certain religious groups, including the Church of the Rising Sunset. He’d been careful not to single out just that church or that religion for fear of drawing too much attention to himself.

  If they thought he was picking on several religious organizations and denominations in general, he would only become dissonant noise to them.

  Which he had.

  Until now.

  An opportunity he’d waited for all his life.

  After working out some of his nervous, caffeine-fueled energy, he put his fingers to his laptop again and finished what he’d started, watermarking the video snippet he was about to blast out to the Internet.

  All his tracks were covered. The URL was registered overseas under a fake name, and he had redundant mirror accounts so he could swap the DNS over and be back up again in minutes in case Silo got one of his sites shut down. His bank account was through a MacCoin exchange and untraceable.

  Anyone who wanted to show the full video would have to pay for the rights. And the web traffic would generate him click-bait income as well.

  Maybe he could finally move out of that shit-hole apartment he shared with his two older brothers.

  Some hackers wanted the prestige, public knowledge of what they’d done. Not him. He didn’t want it traced back to him for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that he wasn’t sure what Silo’s organization was capable of.

  All he wanted was the payout. Monetarily, and the personal satisfaction that he’d finally brought Silo down. Technically, what he was doing wasn’t illegal. Well, with the videos, at least. One of the parties involved in the videos had willingly given it to him. The other party was the one who’d videotaped it in the first place, so they couldn’t claim they didn’t know about it.

  Especially when on one of the videos Silo had taunted his wife about videotaping their sessions.

  He hadn’t even hacked into the church’s systems to get the info. He hadn’t hacked into Silo’s private computer.

  Okay, so he was helping Mary Silo stay hidden and getting her a fake identity. Technically, he supposed, that was illegal, because he was hampering a law enforcement investigation, but he saw it more as helping someone out than breaking the law.

  Besides, the fucker deserved it.

  Especially since he knew for a fact that Silo was behind deaths of his parents when he was a young kid. Their mother had been a reporter for one of the DC news sites. She’d been putting together a story about several elected leaders who’d made some interestingly unusual stance changes at the same time. Changes that had come about not long after personal visits from the Reverend himself.

  No one had ever caught the hit-and-run driver who’d run them off the road. They didn’t have life insurance policies, and the car insurance had barely paid out anything.

  Ali and his two brothers ended up living in Atlanta with an aunt who’d gone to her grave from a heart attack just a few years earlier and still swearing her sister and brother-in-law had been murdered by the Church of the Rising Sunset.

  Ali’s brothers never listened, never believed. Neither did anyone else.

  But Ali did.

  Because he remembered how on that night, when he was six
, he’d awakened to a noise in the living room. His older brothers, twelve and fifteen, had been sound asleep.

  Their parents had gone out that night to some sort of a government meeting their mom had to cover. They were going to eat dinner after and come home. They’d left the two younger boys in the care of their eldest brother.

  The man Ali had seen rooting around in his mom’s desk had told him he was a friend of their mom’s and had been sent to get something from her desk. Then he’d told Ali to turn around, go to bed, and not wake up his brothers or his parents would be very mad at him.

  Then he remembered the sound of his brothers talking to the police in the predawn hours.

  How no one believed him when he told them about the man. Even when they couldn’t locate their mom’s work laptop, or any of her notes or backup drives that she’d kept in her desk in the living room.

  Everyone told him it was a bad dream.

  Except his aunt. She was the only one who’d believed him, and had told him not to tell anyone else that until he was an adult.

  Now, he’d tell everyone what a piece of shit Silo was.

  He couldn’t tie it back to his mom and dad for fear of revealing who he was. For fear of attracting Silo’s attention.

  Even now, he was piggybacked through some woman’s computer in the coffeehouse. Her password had been ridiculously easy to break. Okay, technically that was illegal, but she should have used a better password. If anyone did manage to make it through the layers of separation he’d meticulously laid down, they would point the blame on her, not him.

  Not that he was worried.

  Once he finished what he needed to do, he shut down and shoved his laptop into his messenger bag. He glanced at the woman who was still sitting in the corner, in a booth, earbuds in and foot tapping in time with whatever she was listening to on her phone. He couldn’t really tell what she looked like because of her surgical mask. He recognized her more because of her computer login ID alonegirl.

  He’d seen her in there quite a few times before, usually around the same time of day, and had piggybacked through her connection multiple times.

  Clueless.

  If anyone did track stuff back to her, he was confident she’d be cleared. She was definitely not a hacker in any way, shape, or form. One look at her computer would absolve her, and they’d know someone else had piggybacked through her.

  By that time, he would be long gone, no trace, using some other way to get through.

  He didn’t care. This was a one-time event in his life. The world was going to shit. He wanted to cash out and clear out, if necessary. Or he could hang around, pretend to be as shocked and outraged as the rest of the public, and silently snicker as he watched events unfold.

  This is for you, Mom and Dad.

  He stepped out into the humid Atlanta afternoon.

  * * * *

  Donna Epperson watched videos on her laptop. It had finally picked up again. For a while there, it was acting slow, like it was having trouble buffering the videos or something. Sometimes that happened. One of her friends told her it was likely due to how many people had been sharing the public sat-link connection in the coffee shop.

  She still had fifteen minutes to kill before heading back to her job. Most days, she worked a split shift at the bank. It was a pain in the ass to her schedule, but she made a little extra money per hour by doing it. She opened, worked until noon, took a three-hour break, and then worked until 9:00 p.m. And she had Fridays off.

  She could live with that. It was a better job than most people had.

  The only pain was she didn’t have a car, and if she tried to get home via public transit that time of day, she’d literally have ten minutes to turn around and get back to the bank.

  Thus the coffee shop two blocks from the bank had become her little home away from home. She saw a lot of the same people filter through on a regular basis, but had little contact with them.

  She preferred it that way. She didn’t even like having a lot of contact with her roommates, whom she’d been friends with since college.

  Growing up in a house shared by three generations and several branches of the same family meant she was tired of close quarters and forced interaction. Only having one roommate in college had been blissful.

  Now she had a room of her own in the two-bedroom apartment they’d shared for the past six years. She paid half of the rent instead of a third. That’d been the deal she’d made with her roommates to avoid having a fourth person in the apartment and sharing a room with them. It was worth it to her for the privacy. Yes, it meant nearly two hours on busses every day, but that was more time she could blip out for a while and ignore people.

  She had her fill of people at work.

  The rest of her time was just that—hers.

  She clicked through another news site. There was a kerfluffle about some televangelist in New Mexico whose wife had disappeared, and now there was a sex tape or something.

  Booorrring.

  She clicked into their human interest section. She didn’t want to hear news about Kite. She didn’t want to hear about people dying in that horrible accident in Barstow, or people killing each other in Los Angeles.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t care. She was overloaded. Too much stimulation. Since last July, she’d made a conscious decision not to watch or read bad news. Sure, she’d take precautions, she wasn’t an idiot.

  But she refused to immerse herself in everything bad going on in the world.

  Give her videos of cute dogs and cats, or good news, or even recipes, or travel videos of places she’d never be able to afford to go.

  Anything except bad news.

  One of her coworkers liked to tease her about that, tried to ambush her with the latest headlines as they started their mornings counting their tills.

  Donna ignored her. Or tried to, as best she could.

  Hey, she’d managed a scholarship to college, even if the only job she could get after graduation with a business degree was at a bank. She had a job. That was a lot more than many people could say.

  She had a little bit of savings built up. Again, more than a lot of people could say. Including her parents, who still shared a house with six other relatives.

  Her bills were paid every month, she could afford to go to the coffee shop every afternoon to relax, and she didn’t have a lot of worries many people did.

  In her mind, that made her damned lucky.

  It also meant she’d earned the right not to bombard herself with bad news, if she chose not to hear it.

  She saw a link about “drunk monkeys” and clicked it, then clicked away when she realized it was actually a story about people, not video of adorably intoxicated primates.

  Nope, you can’t force me to read news.

  She sipped at her latte and clicked on another link that led her a video of a bunch of dogs on water skis in Florida.

  That’s more like it.

  * * * *

  Bubba sipped his coffee as he read through the latest feeds crossing his notice. Someone sure as hell had a hard-on for Reverend Hannibal Silo in a bad way.

  Someone besides them.

  His first guess would be the wife, but based on what he’d seen come out about her “disappearance,” he wouldn’t think she had the skills or means to do what she’d done alone.

  She must have help.

  He smiled and reached for his coffee mug again. He’d like to find out who that someone was, get to know them, and possibly work out a deal to team up with them.

  They might need someone watching their six once the Reverend got his teeth into them. It didn’t smell like an intelligence operation, though. It smelled more like solo black-hat hacker stuff.

  I think life just got a little more interesting.

  THE END

  WWW.TYMBERDALTON.COM

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tymber Dalton lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”)
and too many pets. Active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC winner is also the bestselling author of over sixty books, including The Reluctant Dom, The Denim Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Suncoast Society series, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, the Coffeeshop Coven series, the Good Will Ghost Hunting series, the Drunk Monkeys series, and many more.

  She loves to hear from readers! Please feel free to drop by her website and sign up for updates to keep abreast of the latest news, views, snarkage, and releases.

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