Ghost Warrior III - Sins of the Father - Chapter 15

 

Chapter 15

Tucker woke the way he had for most of his adult life.

One eye opened first, a slit barely wider than a knife’s edge, sweeping the room before his body even considered moving. The dim light leaking in around the edges of the heavy curtains painted the motel room in shades of gray and half-shadow. His gaze tracked the familiar map he’d made the night before: door and locks first—deadbolt, housekeeping lock, chain—all still latched. Window next, curtains undisturbed, no change in the way the fabric hung, no new gaps. The small table he’d placed in front of the glass sat where he’d left it. The duffel bag was still slumped beside the nightstand where he’d dropped it, zippers facing the wall.

Only after he’d confirmed the picture did he let the other eye open.

He took a slow breath, listening. The room’s AC unit rattled quietly under the window, pushing out air that felt more like lukewarm breath than cooling. From somewhere down the walkway outside, he heard the hollow thunk of a door closing. A truck engine turned over in the lot, idled, then faded as it pulled away. A distant freight train grumbled along the tracks beyond the building, metal clicking and clacking in a steady rhythm.

Nothing out of pattern. No sharp, unfamiliar sound. No wrong rhythm.

He exhaled, rolled to his side, then pushed himself up to sitting, the mattress complaining under his weight. Vertebrae popped along his spine as he rotated his shoulders. He rolled his neck slowly, left to right, until he felt a satisfying crack near the base of his skull.

Time to move.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood barefoot on the stiff carpet. The air had a slight morning chill to it, if only by contrast to his own body heat. He dragged one hand across his face, rubbing away the last of the sleep, then stepped into the open space between the bed and the door.

He started slow—a few deep breaths, feet planted shoulder-width apart, letting his weight sink evenly through the floor. His hands came up, fingers loose, wrists relaxed. He shifted into the first movements of a tai chi form—smooth, controlled arcs and turns, joints articulating through full range without ever jerking. Arms swept, hands cut, his weight gliding from one leg to the other as if every inch of the threadbare carpet were familiar ground.

He flowed from tai chi into isometrics, tensing and holding joints and muscles in angles only he knew, using his own body as resistance. He dropped into a low squat and held it, quads and glutes burning, then drove back up, spine straight. He moved into a series of kata—short, precise martial sequences drawn from too many disciplines to name. A front snap kick. A pivot into a side strike. Elbows cutting through imaginary targets. He combined them into a ten-minute blur of controlled violence, never once allowing his breathing to spike beyond what he could bring back under control in seconds.

By the time he finished, a fine sheen of sweat coated his skin. His pulse thudded comfortably in his chest—awake, but not ragged. Ready, but not wired.

He bent forward at the waist, palms to the floor, stretching his hamstrings, letting his spine lengthen. Then he twisted gently from side to side, arms hanging loose, feeling vertebrae align and pop.

He walked to the little built-in coffee station beneath the mounted TV. The hotel’s brewing setup looked like a relic: a plastic four-cup drip unit with a stained pot and a basket of off-brand coffee packets and powdered creamer. He tore open two packets of grounds, dumped them into the filter, filled the carafe with tap water, and poured. The machine wheezed to life, a faint burbling sound marking the start of its struggle.

While it worked, he grabbed a change of clothes from the duffel—fresh T-shirt, jeans, socks, and a light jacket—and carried them into the bathroom.

The overhead light was harsh and unforgiving, revealing every crack in the tile, every water stain on the ceiling. The mirror over the sink bore the scratches of too many cheap cleaning agents and at least one fist.

Tucker twisted the shower knob all the way to hot and stepped back as the pipes clanged awake, sputtering before finally producing a stream of water that quickly clouded the plastic curtain with steam.

He stripped down and stepped into the shower.

The first blast scalded his skin, but he didn’t flinch. Heat soaked into his shoulders, down his back, easing knots he hadn’t realized were there. He braced one hand against the tiled wall and bowed his head, letting the hot water drum against his neck.

His mind began to move in parallel—the way it always did when the physical tasks were automatic.

Checklist.

Internet café first. Nothing corporate. Nothing polished. Something run-down, with old equipment and older clientele. The kind of place where people still paid cash for computer time and nobody asked for ID as long as you weren’t actively bleeding on the floor.

Set up ProtonMail account—clean, fresh, disconnected from any previous alias or association. No identifying details. Burn-after-reading mentality applied to an inbox.

Call Keys from something secure and impermanent. Get the intel package he’d requested—ten years of cartel data from DEA, HPD, DPS, and anyone else stupid enough to leave their systems vulnerable—to the new Proton address. Make sure Keys scrubbed his own tracks afterward.

Acquire burner phones. Eight to ten of them. No contract. No consistent carrier. Different big-box stores or gas stations. Different zip codes if possible. Each phone used once. One call, one purpose, then destroyed. He’d done it before overseas. Doing it here felt… wrong. But necessary.

Find a gun. Something anonymous but reliable. No registration. No paperwork. No trace. Houston was full of guns; finding one wouldn’t be the problem. Finding one without stepping into a larger trap would be.

Review cartel intel. Identify patterns, locations, known players. See how La Hermandad de la Frontera had changed in the last decade. See who they were fighting. See where Nashoba’s name still burned in their memory. See who had the motive and reach to send a three-man team to the middle of Oklahoma for one old man.

Plan next steps.  Find the cracks.  Exploit them.

He stayed under the water until the heat began to falter, temperature dropping from scalding to tolerable to lukewarm and finally to cold. Goosebumps rose along his arms. He shut off the tap, grabbed the small, rough towel from the rack, and dried off quickly, movements efficient and economical.

He dressed, layering his clothes so nothing printed, nothing drew attention. Wallet in front pocket. Small folding knife clipped inside the waistband, concealed beneath his shirt. Key to the room tucked deep into his jeans pocket, where it wouldn’t jangle or fall.

When he stepped back into the main room, the smell of cheap coffee filled the space.

He poured a cup, black, the way he always took it, and knocked back half the mug in three long swallows. It tasted like burnt cardboard and bitterness, but the caffeine was real, and that was all that mattered.

He set the empty cup in the small trash can—no fingerprints on anything that didn’t already have half the city’s prints on it—and reached for the duffel to make sure everything was where it should be.

Nothing had moved.  Good.

He zipped it, slid it under the bed, and left only what he needed on him. No sense in walking two miles in Houston humidity with unnecessary weight.

He took one last look around the room—the rearranged bed, the locked window, the repositioned table—and cataloged the scene. If anyone entered while he was gone, he’d know it. Displacement was a language all its own.

He disengaged the chain, flipped the housekeeping lock, turned the deadbolt, and opened the door.

The morning hit him like a damp blanket. Houston’s humidity clung to his skin immediately, the sky above low and colorless. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed, then faded. Traffic noise hummed along Imperial Valley Drive like a constant undercurrent.

He shut the door behind him, engaging the locks from the outside with a twist of the key, then slipped the key back into his pocket. His eyes scanned the parking lot—same old sedans and trucks, no unfamiliar vans, no cleaned-up cars that didn’t match the environment. The old Mercury Sable from the night before was gone. A faded blue pickup had taken its place.

He stood on the walkway for a moment, feeling the air, listening.

Everything wrong about Greenspoint was also what made it right for him. Nobody here looked up unless you made them. Nobody here asked questions they didn’t want to know the answers to.

He moved along the walkway and cut around the corner of the building, following the path he’d scouted the night before. About half a block down, near the edge of the property, he spotted what he’d been told would be there: an old phone booth, standing like a rusted monument to the late 20th century.

It was missing its door, of course. The metal frame was stained with rust streaks. The Plexiglas panels were cloudy, tattooed with graffiti and faded stickers. The payphone itself had long since been gutted—cord cut, handset gone, coin slot welded shut.

What he needed wasn’t the phone.

It was the directory bolted to the shelf beneath it.

Most newer booths didn’t bother. But whoever owned this patch of broken concrete hadn’t invested in updates since about 1998. The directory book was there, held in place by a metal rod through its spine. The cover was grimy, pages yellowed and curled at the edges.

Tucker flipped it open, ignoring the faint smell of mold rising from the paper. He turned past the white pages—names that meant nothing to him—until he reached the yellow section. Listings for repair shops, dry cleaners, pawn shops, diners, and the kind of low-rent services that thrived in neighborhoods like this.

He ran a fingertip down the column under INTERNET / COMPUTERS.

There.

NET TIME – INTERNET CAFE & PHONE SERVICES

Address: a small strip mall two miles away. The name sounded right—generic, forgettable. The location sounded better—close enough to walk without drawing attention, far enough from the airport not to be clogged with tourists.

He studied the address, fixing it in his mind, then gripped the edge of the page near the book’s spine and tore.

The paper resisted at first—old, stiff—but he pulled smoothly, neatly, ripping out the section with the listing and folding it once, then twice, until it fit easily into his pocket.

He stepped away from the phone booth, eyes scanning the street again. A Metro bus rumbled past at the far end of the block. A pair of teenagers in oversized shirts walked by on the opposite sidewalk, sharing a pair of earbuds. No one looked at him twice.

Tucker turned in the direction of the strip mall and started walking.

Tucker kept a steady pace along the cracked sidewalk, hands in his jacket pockets, head down just enough to look like any other man trying to stay invisible in a part of Houston where invisibility was a kind of currency. Two blocks before the strip mall he’d marked on the map, a faded sign caught his eye—Fleming’s Electronics & Repair, letters sun-bleached and peeling, the windows cluttered with outdated routers, tangled phone cords, and dusty stereo equipment that hadn’t been top-shelf since the Clinton administration. Perfect.

He stepped inside and a bell over the door gave a half-hearted jingle. The shop smelled of solder, old plastic, and cardboard—an aroma he’d learned to trust over the years. A rail-thin man in his sixties sat behind the counter, reading a newspaper like it was still the primary source of all truth. He barely glanced up.

Tucker moved along the aisle, scanning the shelves without appearing to. In a corner display, half-hidden behind prepaid long-distance cards and clearance-bin chargers, he saw exactly what he needed: a scattered mix of prepaid burner phones—different brands, mismatched colors, outdated models. Nothing uniform. Nothing trackable in bulk.

He chose three at random. A flip phone with scuffed packaging. A candy-bar style TracFone. A no-name off-brand unit with instructions printed in three languages. He brought them to the counter, set a twenty and a ten on the scratched glass without saying a word. The old man rang him up without small talk, without curiosity, without eye contact.

Perfect.

Tucker pocketed the phones and stepped back out into the street, the bell jangling weakly behind him as he continued toward the strip mall.

Tucker moved with the casual rhythm of a man out for no particular purpose, but his eyes stayed active—mirrors, reflections, the rhythm of footsteps behind him, the cadence of passing cars. Nothing pinged his instincts. No repeating silhouettes. No vehicles circling the block. Satisfied, he slid one hand into his jacket and quietly opened the first burner phone package, letting the plastic fall away inside his pocket. A block later, he did the same with the second and third, slipping each bare phone into a different pocket—left jacket, right jacket, back jeans—separated, silent, ready.

Up ahead, a dented municipal trash can stood near a bus stop. He paused only long enough to drop the folded packaging inside, burying it beneath fast-food wrappers and a discarded newspaper. When he stepped away, he looked ahead again and saw it: NET TIME – INTERNET CAFE & PHONE SERVICES, its blue sign flickering in the morning haze. He adjusted his pace, scanning the windows, the lot, the crosswalks—then made for the entrance without breaking stride.

The internet café smelled like burnt coffee and old plastic, the kind of place where no one stayed long enough to complain. Tucker liked that about it. Transient. Forgettable. The sign outside just said NET TIME in flickering red, wedged between a pawn shop and a nail salon. The kind of strip mall joint nobody ever remembered driving past. Perfect.

He stepped in and paused just inside the door, letting his eyes adjust and his mind catalog everything. Automatic. Two ceiling cameras—one above the counter, one covering the row of terminals on the left. Both cheap dome housings, probably recording to a beat-up DVR in the back. No pan-tilt-zoom, no live operator watching. Good.

Four locals scattered through the room. Two kids sunk into gaming chairs with headsets on, shouting at each other in Spanish over some shooter. A woman in scrubs tapping at her phone while a printer droned beside her. A guy in a reflective work vest asleep over an empty Styrofoam cup. Nobody looking up. Nobody interested.

The clerk behind the counter barely lifted his eyes from his own screen. Skinny, mid-twenties, hoodie and earbuds. Tucker walked up, putting just enough weight in his steps to be heard, just enough presence to make himself real but not memorable.

“Computer?” the clerk asked, tugging one earbud out.

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “Half hour.”

“Five bucks. Cash only.”

“Perfect,” Tucker replied, laying a five on the counter, folded once. No card, no name, no paper receipt.

The clerk slid a scuffed plastic token across the counter and nodded toward the far right row. “Station twelve.”

Tucker took the token and moved down the aisle, letting his hand drift casually to his jacket pocket, feeling the small, smooth rectangle of the USB drive like a talisman. Standard black thumb drive on the outside; inside, Tails OS and the tools he needed to not exist.

He picked machine twelve because it gave him what mattered: back to the wall, screen angled away from the rest of the room, clean line of sight to the door, one of the front windows in his peripheral vision. No one could come within three steps of him without crossing his awareness.

He sat, adjusted the chair, and looked up at the monitor like a bored customer. The screen showed a Windows desktop clogged with icons: browsers, games, somehow still an AOL shortcut. The sort of digital mess that told him nobody here wiped anything.

He glanced up. The ceiling dome above this row had a faint dust ring, the pattern undisturbed. Nobody had touched it in months.

Good enough.

He slid the USB drive from his pocket under cover of his forearm, angling his body so the wide side of the monitor blocked the movement from the counter. It slipped cleanly into the front USB port with a quiet click. He took a breath, then laid his fingers on the keyboard.

Alt + F4, close the junk. Ctrl + Esc. Arrow keys, restart. To anyone watching, he just looked like a guy trying to get a frozen machine to cooperate.

The monitor flashed to black. The BIOS splash screen popped up—cheap off-brand logo. Tucker’s thumb hit the function keys in sequence: F12, F8, F10. F12 brought up the boot menu. Perfect.

He never lingered. Up, down arrow, USB device. Enter.

If the clerk noticed the reboot, he'd just assume Windows wanted an update. If anyone asked, Tucker could shrug and say the machine crashed. Most people barely understood how their phones worked, let alone a public terminal.

The screen went black again. Then a gray Tails splash screen appeared: a simple logo, ask-no-questions design. Even that, he scanned, checking for anything out of place. No weird artifacts, no error banners. He’d verified the image on his own laptop before loading it onto the stick. That laptop was inside a hotel room right now, powered down, battery removed.

The Tails welcome screen appeared: language selection, keyboard layout, a few options for additional settings. He left it simple. English, US keyboard. No persistence, no changes that might break the “amnesic” promise. He wanted this session to vanish when he was done.

He clicked “Start Tails.”

The system booted into the desktop. Everything familiar—just enough like a normal OS to feel safe to civilians, just different enough that he knew exactly where the knives were kept. The little onion icon in the corner started pulsing as Tor spun up.

Tucker sat still while the network established. Tor was patient work: bounce through enough nodes to make tracing a chore, trust the math and the obscurity. He let his breathing match the slow blink of the connection icon, the same way he’d matched his breathing to the rise and fall of a rifle barrel years ago. Different war, same discipline.

When the notification popped up—“Tor is ready”—he moved.

He launched the Tor Browser. The familiar warning page appeared. This browser routes all traffic through the Tor network. He skimmed the text out of habit, not need, and clicked through. First stop wasn’t Proton. First stop was verification.

In the address bar he typed a URL from memory—a simple check service that confirmed Tor exit nodes and DNS configuration. The page loaded, telling him what he needed to see: his IP geolocated somewhere in Europe, languages and time zone that weren’t his. DNS not leaking. No obvious red flags.

He pivoted to a generic news site next, something noisy and ordinary. The front page filled with headlines about politics, markets, a celebrity divorce. He let it sit there for a few seconds. If anyone glanced over, that’s what they’d see: a guy reading the news and wasting his five bucks.

Then he wiped the address bar and entered the real destination: the signup page for Proton.

The Swiss outfit’s logo appeared against a clean, white background. He scanned the browser’s address bar—https, padlock, the certificate data matching what he’d memorized. Tor sometimes introduced weirdness. So did attackers. You learned to be paranoid or you learned to be dead.

Satisfied, he clicked “Sign up” and selected the free plan. The storage limit didn’t matter. He didn’t need to live here. He just needed a mailbox that couldn’t be casually vacuumed up by some three-letter agency or bought out of a data broker’s catalog.

The username field blinked at him, waiting.

He thought of his father, of all the names that had followed the man like shadows: debts, aliases, cartel whispers. Tucker pushed those away. Emotions got people caught. Patterns got people found. He wanted something that meant nothing, to no one.

He typed a string of letters and numbers that looked like a teenager’s gamer tag, something forgettable and ugly: not a name, not a word, just noise shaped into an identity. The system checked availability. A second later, a green check appeared.

Password next. This mattered.

He didn’t pick a phrase. Phrases could be guessed. He built it the way Keys had taught him long ago: a spine of random words threaded with symbols and numbers, long enough to be a nightmare to crack, short enough to type quickly. He didn’t reuse anything from any other system. Compostable credentials. If this account burned, nothing else burned with it.

Proton asked for a recovery method. He paused there. Phone? No. Recovery email? Also no. There was no world in which he wanted to tie this address to another identity. If he lost access, the account died. That was fine. This was a tool, not a home.

He clicked “Skip” and accepted the warning.

A captcha appeared, warped characters in a muddy gray box. Tor exit nodes triggered extra suspicion. He solved one, then another, until the system finally relented and let him through.

The account creation spun for a moment, then the inbox materialized: empty, clean, like fresh snow. A little welcome message sat at the top. He ignored it.

He clicked into Settings and changed a few things: disabled loading external images by default, switched off unneeded notifications, set the session timeout shorter. Little things that made it just a bit harder for anyone to profile or track usage if they someday got access to a server log.

He sent a test mail to a dead address he knew would bounce, just to watch the system behave. Outbox, sent, error returned. Everything working.

That was enough.

He memorized the full address, probably didn’t need to, but old habits died hard. Then he reached into his pocket and fished out one of the three burners.  No loyalty points, no name. He quickly activated it.

He flipped it open under the desk, keeping it low, screen shielded by his forearm. He pressed and held the power button. The burner vibrated once, then lit up. No apps, no contacts, just a dialer and barebones menus.

Tucker’s thumb moved across the keypad. The number he dialed wasn’t saved. It lived in the same part of his brain that held grid coordinates and wind calls. He brought the phone to his ear and turned his attention back to the Proton inbox, eyes on the screen, posture relaxed. To anyone watching, he just looked like a guy reading an email on a weird Linux desktop.

The line rang twice.

“Yeah,” a voice answered, flat and unhurried. Keys never said his name on unknown lines. Good. People changed. Tradecraft shouldn’t.

“It’s me,” Tucker said quietly. No need for code words. The less cute you tried to be, the fewer chances you had to screw up. His voice stayed low, barely above the hum of the gaming kids behind him. “Line is dirty and short. You good?”

There was the faint click-clack of a keyboard on the other end, the background noise of a man whose hands never stopped moving.

“I’m always good,” Keys said. “You sound pretty. Must be using one of those discount carriers.”

“Local burner. Tossing it after this. Listen up.” Tucker kept his tone even, eyes on the inbox like it already held something interesting. “New box in play. End-to-end friendly. You ready to copy?”

He heard a chair creak, a different kind of tapping. Keys was shifting into work mode.

“Hit me.”

Tucker recited the address slowly, three characters at a time, like coordinates over a radio. He didn’t ask Keys to repeat it. The man missed nothing when silicon was involved.

At the other end, Tucker could hear the faint echo of a browser opening, a mouse clicking, the soft murmur of Keys’s breath when something pleased him.

“Swiss,” Keys said after a moment. “Good choice. You set recovery?”

“No.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Keys muttered, more to himself than Tucker. “You boys never do like leaving yourselves a way back in. Fine. I’ll treat it as disposable. Expect anything hitting it to be one-way only. That what you want?”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Tucker said. “You build yourself a new send-only persona to talk to it. Nothing that ever touched me, you, or the old channels. This is completely off book, dark as it can get, and I don’t want you busted.

There was a pause.  “Copy,” Keys said. “You want me to start feeding you anything specific?”

“Start with all of the intel I asked you to gather.  Send an encrypted zip file, send the encryption key separate in a recipe or something.  I want any Cartel chatter,” Tucker said. “Particularly Venezuelan and anyone new moving weight through Houston. Cross-index with port logs, trucking manifests, anything that doesn’t smell right. Dump it to this box in bursts, no more than three messages a day. Randomize timing. Nothing regular.  Again, the intel you were working on first.  I need that within the hour.”

“You’re asking for a firehose and a drizzle at the same time,” Keys said. “You know that, right?”

“I trust your aim.”

On the other end, Tucker heard a soft snort. Compliments made Keys uncomfortable. That was how you knew they were real.

“All right, Ghost,” Keys said. “I’ll build you something. Love it when you make bad choices,” Keys said. “Anything else?”

Tucker let a breath out slowly through his nose. “I want a tech package. Surveillance build-out. Like we took to Refugio.”

On the other end, keys clicked in a rapid, familiar rhythm. He could picture Jason back in his cave—three monitors minimum, dark room, empty energy drink cans forming their own perimeter, some obscure jazz track murmuring under it all.

“Yeah,” Keys said. “I figured you’d call for that. Already got half of it staged. You want the full ghost mode, or something lighter so you don’t freak out the locals when you unzip the case?”

“Full ghost mode,” Tucker said. “Bring your toys. I may need to dig into some data, track movement, scrub phone traffic, maybe sweep a few buildings. Think small-time corruption meets cartel curiosity. I want it quiet, clean, and off-grid.”

“Copy that.” There was a hint of a grin in Keys’ voice now. “You want the Regugio build as-is, or you want me to tweak for urban?”

“Urban. Denser signal environment. More noise. Houston’s loud.”

Keys whistled under his breath. “Yeah, she is. Okay, logistics first. Where am I sending the care package, Chief?”

Tucker shifted, pulled a folded scrap of paper from his pocket, and checked it even though he already knew the address cold. Never trust memory when it could burn someone else.

“Ship it FEDEX,” he said. “Overnight. Addressed to—”

He stopped, considered, then picked a name from a list in his head that only existed for situations like this.

“To ‘Miguel Ortega’ at this location: 1530 Greens Rd, Houston, Texas, 77032.”

“Say again, slow.”

Tucker repeated it, breaking the numbers cleanly, aware of how every detail mattered. Keys echoed the address back, each digit crisp, the sound of him jotting on paper overlaying the keyboard clicks.

“Got it,” Keys said. “FEDEX, overnight, Miguel Ortega, one-five-three-zero Greens Road, Houston, seven-seven-zero-three-two. I’ll scrub any breadcrumbs on my end.” A beat. “Standard Pelican case. Nondescript, beat-to-hell brown shipping box outside it. You sign with a fake scrawl and walk away.”

“Good man,” Tucker said quietly. “Run through what’s in it.”

“All right,” Keys said. Tucker could almost hear him lean back in his chair, switching mental gears from logistics to toys. “High level first. Then details. Don’t fall asleep.”

“I’m still breathing,” Tucker said. “Start talking.”

“Okay. Core of the kit is three laptops,” Keys began. “Ruggedized, matte black, no maker logos, stickers or serial tags on the outside. All the identifiers are etched where only I know to look, and I’m planning to die last. Each one’s been stripped and rebuilt from firmware up. No bloat, no tracking, no surprise friends calling home to Redmond or Cupertino.”

Tucker nodded, though Keys couldn’t see it. On his screen, a bland search page sat open, news headlines scrolling by in a language he didn’t care about. His eyes were on the reflection in the glass, on the door, on the way the clerk scratched his cheek and glanced at the clock.

“Laptop One,” Keys continued, “is what you’ll think of as your field station. Custom OS, burned to SSD. It’s pre-loaded with my signal mapping tools, RF survey suite, and the usual SDR interface. You plug in the dongle I include, fire up the package, and it’ll start painting you a picture of everything that’s screaming in your area—cell towers, Wi-Fi, cordless phones, baby monitors, cheap Chinese cameras pretending to be security.”

“Range?” Tucker asked.

“In an urban environment?” Keys clicked his tongue, doing math in his head. “Call it a couple hundred meters with the stock collapsible antenna I’m sending. More if you climb something or get clever with line-of-sight. It’s not NASA, but it’s enough for your neighborhood.”

“Okay.”

“Laptop Two is your clean comms box,” Keys said. “Think of it as your chapel. You only use it for talk and traffic we don’t want conflated with anything else. Encrypted VOIP clients, dead-drop mail, one-time pad tools, the whole quiet church. No browsing. No news. No porn.”

Tucker almost smiled. “You put that in the user manual?”

“Yeah, it’s on page one: ‘Don’t be stupid.’” Keys snorted softly. “That one’s got a hardened VPN chain baked in. Randomized exit nodes, time-based rotation. All traffic wrapped, then rewrapped. You crack that signal, you deserve the merit badge.”

“What’s Laptop Three?”

“That’s your vacuum,” Keys said. “For local data. It’s pre-loaded with drive imaging tools, file carvers, and some bespoke nastiness I’ve written over the years. You get hands on a machine—a dirty laptop, a burner phone you can cable into, a thumb drive you find under a bar counter—you plug it into Three and let it eat. It’ll rip copies of everything without changing timestamps. Like it was never there.”

Tucker absorbed that in silence, eyes drifting to the man in the work shirt, who had given up on job sites and was now staring at a used truck listing. The two boys at the far end laughed at something onscreen, the sound raw and young and oblivious.

“Cables and power?” Tucker asked.

“You’ll get a full harness,” Keys said. “Universal power bricks with clip-on adapters if you end up in some third-world motel that hasn’t heard of grounded outlets. Multi-port surge strip that looks like it came from Walmart but isn’t. Ethernet cables, USB-C, micro, mini, and a couple of old dinosaurs just in case. I’ll label them so even grunts can figure it out.”

Tucker grunted. “Watch your tone, sailor.”

“Hey, I’m equal opportunity,” Keys replied easily. “Now, outside the computers, you’ve got the fun stuff. First, a compact RF scanner—handheld, about the size of a thick smartphone. You walk slow through a room with that thing and it’ll chirp if anything is whispering in the RF band—hidden cameras, planted mics, trackers in the walls, that kind of party favor. Noisy environment takes more finesse, but it’ll give you a baseline. Think of it as a Geiger counter for electronic stupidity.”

“Useful,” Tucker said.

“Then there’s your little chameleon,” Keys went on. “A Wi-Fi audit box, hardened case, dual radios. You plug that bastard in, set it under a table, and forget it. It’ll map every network within reach, catalog devices, and if you give it permission, start coaxing poorly configured routers into showing their underpants. I’m not turning on anything aggressive by default—you have to throw that switch. But if you want to stand up a shadow network, it’s ready.”

“Shadow network?” Tucker asked, even though he had a decent idea.

“Yeah,” Keys said, warming to the topic. “Pop-Up LAN. You park it in a place with power, like the back of some office or a storage unit, and it can serve as your own encrypted Wi-Fi bubble, piggybacking off someone else’s internet while keeping your real traffic inside the shell. All the encryption is end-to-end, layered. Looks like noise on top of noise.”

“Off-grid enough?” Tucker asked.

“For most people on Earth?” Keys said. “Yes. Just don’t stream movies, okay? Throttle your footprint. In and out, light touch.”

Tucker’s gaze slid toward the front door again as it opened and a man in a reflective vest leaned in, checked the wall clock, and then backed out without stepping inside. Just looking to see if they were still open. The bell jingled again, then silence.

“What about phones?” Tucker asked quietly. “If I need to listen, not just see.”

Keys paused, not because he didn’t have something, but because he was probably deciding how far to go.

“I’m including a low-power cell interceptor,” he said finally. “Before you say ‘stingray’—no. It’s smaller, quieter, and designed to live in a duffel without cooking you. You set it up in a fixed location, give it a small window of operation, and it’ll watch for unshielded SIMs in the area. It won’t go hunting the whole city; that’s how people get noticed. But if you want to know who’s hanging around a particular block, or who visits the same spot twice, it’ll give you metadata. Numbers, IMEIs, movement patterns.”

“Live content?” Tucker asked.

“Occasionally,” Keys said. “If they’re dumb and the network’s lazy. But I’m not promising you NSA-grade interception here. Consider it a lattice of breadcrumbs instead of a live tap. Enough to see patterns, not enough to get you hauled in front of Congress if it leaks.”

“Good,” Tucker said. “I’m not looking to start a war with the phone company.”

“Yet,” Keys muttered.

“What else?”

“Optics set,” Keys said. “I’m dropping in six micro cameras—button and screw-head style. Self-contained, battery powered, with magnet mounts and adhesive. Resolution’s good enough to read a license plate at twenty feet, frame rate solid. You place them on doors, under counter lips, in corners, wherever you want eyes. They talk to a relay hub in the case that you cable into Laptop One. You’ll get a grid of feeds, all timestamped.”

“Wireless?” Tucker asked.

“Short-range encrypted,” Keys said. “Think building, not city block. The further you push it, the more dicey it gets through concrete. I’ll give you two repeaters in case you have to hop signal around corners.”

The telenovela on the clerk’s screen spiked in volume for a moment—some dramatic argument in rapid Spanish—then dropped again. Tucker’s Spanish was good enough to catch the rhythm of betrayal and lies, even without processing all the words. Houston liked its drama loud, in fiction and in blood.

“Audio?” he asked.

“Always,” Keys said. “You’re getting a small assortment of digital mics—pen, key fob, and a wall-wart charger that’s not really a charger. All record locally and upload when they see the relay. Voice-activated, low noise. You can hide them in plain sight.”

“Any drones?” Tucker asked, half knowing the answer.

Keys clicked his tongue again. “Tempting, but no. Not on this run. You start flying toys in Houston airspace, somebody bored with a scanner is going to get curious. If you absolutely need aerial eyes, you call me back and we escalate. For now, keep it ground-level.”

Tucker accepted that. “Power draw on the case?”

“Reasonable,” Keys said. “You’re not running a server farm. With everything plugged in and humming along, you’re still talking about what two laptops would pull in a coffee shop. One decent extension cord, you’re fine. If you lose power, the critical pieces have internal batteries that give you a few hours of grace. Enough to shut down gracefully or bail.”

“Tracking on the case?” Tucker asked. “If someone jacks it between your desk and Greens Road?”

“It’ll know,” Keys said. “I’ve got a passive tracker in the frame. It doesn’t broadcast unless I wake it up from this end. If FEDEX takes a detour to Juárez, I’ll see it.”

A small silence stretched between them, filled on Tucker’s end with the soft clatter of keyboards and a printer spitting out pages. The woman at the printer cursed under her breath in Spanish, gathered her stack, and left in a flurry of cheap perfume and tired footsteps.

“Look,” Keys said, voice dropping a notch. “You’re walking into Houston with a ghost rig, Chief. That’s a lot of eyes and ears to turn on in a place that already runs hot. You got a specific target yet, or is this just ‘because it’s Tuesday and you’re Tucker Nash’?”

“Specific enough,” Tucker said. He let it sit at that. “I want to be able to see who’s moving around me, who’s talking where they shouldn’t, and what they’re leaning on to feel safe. I won’t light up the whole city. Just my edges.”

“Okay,” Keys said quietly. “Copy that.”

Another few keystrokes. Tucker could almost see him pulling virtual sliders, checking inventories, tagging items.

“I’ll throw in a couple of extras,” Keys added. “Encrypted thumb drives preloaded with your usual templates, some custom scripts if you need to spoof MACs or burn quick disposables. Also a small Faraday pouch—if you ever pull a phone off someone and don’t want it chatting before you decide what to do with it, you drop it in the bag and it goes deaf until you say otherwise.”

“That’s good,” Tucker said. He watched twin boys log off their computers and leave, their chairs rolling back with squeaks, the bell over the door chiming again. The room felt quieter without their noise.

“Anything you don’t want?” Keys asked. “Last chance to say ‘no’ before I start throwing in flamethrowers and EMPs.”

“No explosives,” Tucker said. “Not in this box. I don’t want anything that goes boom inside city limits with your fingerprints on the invoice.”

“Understood,” Keys said. “Pure surveillance, pure comms. No bang. I’ll keep it sterile.”

Tucker said. “How soon can you get the case on the move?”

“I’m building the manifest now,” Keys said. “Warehouse has a late drop window for priority shipments. I can have the Pelican repackaged and in a FEDEX truck in, say, three hours. You’re in Central, they’re processing overnight at the hub by dawn. Call it delivery by ten-thirty local, maybe earlier if the driver’s ambitious and doesn’t stop for breakfast tacos.”

“I’ll be there when they open,” Tucker said.

“Use gloves,” Keys added automatically. “Don’t bring the box here, don’t open it in view of any camera you don’t own, and don’t let it sit in your car where some idiot can smash and grab it. You treat that case like it’s a live weapon, because it is. Just quieter.”

“Understood,” Tucker said.

“Last thing, run your own checks on this line’s exit nodes.” Tucker let his gaze drift to the Tor icon, then to the corner of the café where the security camera sat in its plastic shell, blind and dusty. “If you see anything weird in the path, let me know next time we touch. Different number, different box.”

“Always weird on Tor,” Keys said. “But yeah. I’ll watch for extra weird.”

There was a moment of silence that said more than words would have. They both understood the stakes without needing to say “cartel” or “dead father” or “Houston turning into a shooting gallery.” Some things lived between the lines.

“I’m done here in two,” Tucker said. “Destroy logs on your side related to this number.”

“They won’t even be born,” Keys replied. “Go dark. I’ll light up your new box when I’ve got something you’ll hate to read.”

The line clicked off. Tucker closed the phone, pulled the back cover, and popped the battery in a single fluid motion under the desk. He slipped both pieces into different pockets. They’d meet a dumpster soon.

On the screen, Proton still showed the empty inbox. A small satisfaction touched him. This box would never hold a newsletter or a grocery list or some half-forgotten flight confirmation. It would only ever carry things that mattered, and it would probably die young.

He logged out of Proton, closed the browser, and opened Tails’ disk utility. A quick glance confirmed what he already knew: no internal disks mounted, no swap files. The entire session lived in RAM. He clicked the shutdown icon.

Tails asked for confirmation. He approved it.

The screen went black, then the machine powered down completely. No reboot, no return to Windows. When someone next powered this box on, it would be like he’d never been there. At least, not in any way that mattered.

Tucker pulled the USB drive free and palmed it, letting it disappear back into his jacket pocket with the same casual motion he’d use to pocket a receipt. One more glance around the room—kids still yelling at their game, clerk still hunched over his own monitor, camera still collecting dust.

He stood, pushed the chair back under the desk, and wiped his fingertips once along the edge of the keyboard and mouse. It was more habit than necessity. In a place like this, the fingerprints of a thousand strangers overlapped like rings in a pond.

As he walked to the door, the clerk looked up just long enough to nod.

“Done already?” the kid asked.

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “Got what I needed.”

He stepped out into the Houston heat, the door chime tinkling once behind him. The noise of the strip mall washed over him—traffic, distant sirens, the murmur of a city that never slept and never really paid attention. He slid the USB deeper into his pocket, feeling the tiny weight of it against his palm.

Somewhere on the other side of the network, Keys was already turning that new email address into a weapon.

Tucker moved toward the parking lot without looking back.  Now, find a car.