cancer battle. Torch had morphed into a man on a mission, living and breathing the club, while my confused ass was left behind at base camp. All he did was work on those old bikes, sometimes until three or four in the morning, but he’d had them moved to the shop instead of doing it in our garage. I would have assumed he was just trying to stay busy to keep his mind off shit, but it wasn’t just him, I’d seen a lot of the guys in and out of the shop at all hours. I knew because I’d swung by a few times to make sure my husband was still alive.
I was the one who’d suggested he step up to the plate for Buddha, but spending twenty hours a day running himself ragged just to fix up some bikes wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. It didn’t really make a lot of sense, one had nothing to do with the other in my mind. And as if Torch wasn’t busy enough, he’d even done a few repo runs. Or so he claimed.
My brain kept trying to assure me there was a perfectly reasonable and simple explanation, but my gut said the MC was making moves or up against something serious. I was relatively new to club life, but I certainly wasn’t a stranger to how things worked in the streets. I suspected the endless workload had to do with money, but it was definitely about more than just paying some bills. I wasn’t fucking deaf or dumb, Torch may have thought he was fooling me but his demeanor certainly wasn’t. The fact that he’d bitten my head off at least twice now when I offered my services was enough to tell me he was hiding something.
What could I do though? Our deal was that he’d give me a heads up about threats, and there didn’t appear to be any considering he was doing quite the opposite of hovering. He was also sticking to our agreement of staying out of each other’s business, not once had he brought up my hacking job after I let him know I’d taken it.
So, despite my irritation at being left in the dark, I did my best to give him space. I fell back into the old habit of working until my eyes bled, mostly from the home office because hanging around the clubhouse and worrying about Torch wasn’t conducive to productivity. If he didn’t want to share, I wasn’t going to force him, but I wasn’t going to just sit there and bite my nails either.
Even with the added freedom and spare time, Silas’ job had taken a lot longer than intended. Considering the kind of organization we were dealing with and who its backers were, I wanted to be thorough. There was a strong possibility the culprit would end up at the bottom of an ocean and I wasn’t about to finger the wrong person.
But, I finally had answers for his client and was on my way to meet Silas at a truck stop outside of town. Just in the nick of time too. After several more emails containing copies of sensitive documents, the CEO of FTX had finally received a demand for two million dollars and his time was up at midnight.
I almost felt bad for taking fifty grand from him for what had turned out to be a time-consuming but relatively simple project. There were no high-tech hijinks being plotted against FTX, I’d scoured every single line of code and looked for any possible holes, malware, or encryption flaws. The so-called attack on their servers had turned out to be nothing but a ruse, designed to specifically penetrate only an outer layer of protection and throw the IT people off track.
In reality, the information their “hacker” had threatened to release was stolen the old-school way, by copying and pasting it to a flash drive and sneaking it out of the building. Just as Silas’ client suspected, it was an inside job by one of his own software engineers, a man named Jesse Wright. It didn’t take a genius to realize that both whistleblowers and blackmailers usually took their time, so why the FTX people only checked data back a month and hadn’t expanded their research to at least the prior three was beyond me. It would have saved them a lot of money and aggravation.
The files had been taken nine weeks before the fake attack, which explained why