Warlords MC – The Complete Series
Warlords MC: Book 3 – Jack : Chapter 8

The men all brought in some of their equipment and laptops as Jade went to get Annabelle situated for a nap.

Jack had noted that at first, the little girl seemed scared of all the big men in the dining room when they had breakfast. She’d already smiled at him, but the rest she had been shy with. Then by the time they finished eating, she was giggling and seemed comfortable.

After about ten minutes, Jade came back in.

Most of the men were gathered in the dining room as they could all sit in one space and use their laptops.

They all looked up.

Jack did too, but then that was all he could seem to do whenever she was in the same room with him. Stare like a dumb ass teen with his first fucking crush. He did have the mission on his mind, but she’d crept into his thoughts and under his skin, it seemed. And… she stayed there.

She sat down at the head of the table so she could see them all at once and folded her hands. “Okay… This is the story. I only want to tell it once, so one of you or all of you had better record it.” She stared at Stone. “I mean it. This will be it unless I remember something later to add.” She let out a breath then started, “When I got to Braaken and made it out to the farm, I must have gotten there just after he…” she paused and her hands shook a littler.

Stone who’d been sitting next to her, slid her a bottle of water.

She took the cap off with a shaky hand and sipped it then set it down. “She had been strangled and poor Belle was lying over her crying. I never thought about anything but if she was alive and if Belle was hurt. So, I went over and knelt down. Then Belle raised her head and screamed. Something hit me on the back of the head and I went out. When I woke up, I was duct taped to a chair. That was when I met Oscar-Carmine or whoever he was. All I knew was that he had killed Sable. I asked him where Belle was. Then that is when he informed me that I would be going with him to take care of her and if I did anything funny or try to get away, he would kill her.”

Jack stared at her and she still seemed calm but he saw a bead of sweat trickle down along her temple. He was amazed at how well she held herself up while telling this horror filled story, but there were small telltale signs that she was barely holding that façade up. Like she had her hands clasped together tightly around the water bottle and she looked paler than she had when she first came in.

“Then he had a phone call.” She looked over at Jack. “As I told you, he had quite a few of these calls while I was with him. I wondered why he didn’t seem to care if I heard and saw all that he did and said. Then after a while, I knew. He was going to kill me as soon as he got someone else to take care of Belle.”

“So Belle is his kid?” Ace asked.

She nodded. “Yes. See… Sable told me about him years ago. How wonderful he was. How he promised to marry her. Bought her that farm to live on and moved her from the apartment she had in Braaken Ridge. Brought out a midwife when she had Belle. Supplied all the money she needed to live on. Well, he gave her anything she wanted or ever needed. All of it did sound great. But I never got to meet him. He was gone a lot. The few times I got to visit her, he was never around. It was a good thing…” She titled her head as she paused. “Or maybe a bad thing that I never did meet him before. I would have pegged him immediately. He is a pure sociopath. It is there in his eyes. He is cold blooded, careless to an extent and a stone cold killer.”

“Back to the calls and what all you heard,” Stone spoke now.

Jade nodded. “Well, at first, all he talked about was you guys.” She nodded at Jack and Ace. “How you were tearing down his work in Braaken and Big Timber, well the whole county. That you were moving in and he needed to leave.”

“That was when we saw her tracker move.” Stone nodded.

“And when I told the Hell Fire Riders to stand down,” Shay spoke up. “As I’d found the Spades were already heading to that estate as I’d finally located all of you.”

Ace, King, Deuce, and Jack all stared at him.

Jack didn’t know what to feel about this man. He was glad that he was alive, but he felt other emotions he did not want to deal with right now.

“Over the two days I was with him. He’d had like 10 calls. This is where I heard the names Widowmaker, Harquebus and the General. I did hear that they were angry with him for the failure in Braaken and for the fact that the… Spades were after him.”

Ace sat forward. “He used that name?”

She nodded. “He would yell to himself after a call, saying, ‘how the hell did I know the Spades were gonna show up in Braaken?’ Well, now I know that means you and you’re your brothers, but at the time, I had no idea.”

“So Wright at least, knew about you all.” Shay looked rattled. “He had kept an eye on you all this time.”

Ace nodded and he too, looked upset. “He was watching to see if you were really gone.”

“Yeah,” Deuce conceded. “I suppose it all makes sense now.”

Jack thought about this for a minute. So Shay or Eagle as he would always think of him, did have to hide for the last 4 years. He then remembered what Jade had said earlier. “So what is the Boom? Do you know?” he asked her.

“I don’t. But I have this.” Jade turned to her side away from the men at the table and fished into her shirt.

Jack’s brows rose as she pulled something out of her bra, apparently.

Jade slid it across the table. “I grabbed it off his laptop before I ran out of that house. I could smell the smoke and I knew I’d better get Belle out.”

The men all stared down at it. It was a small flash drive. Smaller than a pinky fingernail, in fact.

Stone reached out and took it. He handed it to Reaper. “Get in on it, then whatever is there, print it out.”

Reaper nodded and plugged it into his laptop.

The men all sat quietly.

“Of course it needs a password,” Reaper grumbled after a long moment.

“It is Boom,” Jade told him. “B-O-O-M.”

Jack stared at her. “How do you know?”

She shrugged. “I saw him type it in. Like I said, he kept me with him almost at all times, me and Belle. And he didn’t care what I saw or heard.”

“So is there more that you can tell us?”

She sighed. “Whatever it is… it will happen in more than one place but all at the same time. Plus, Widowmaker works in the State Department and the General…” She looked around. “Is of course, at the Pentagon.”

“He told you this?” Jack asked.

She nodded. “He bragged about everything he knew. It was like freeing for him. He could tell someone about this huge secret coup. He planned for me to be dead so he told me lots of things. Some of it I did not understand though.”

“Like what?” Jack asked.

“Like did I know what fault lines did when disrupted? Geological stuff. That isn’t something I don’t know too much about.”

The men all raised their brows at this.

“Bingo!” Reaper called out. “I’m in. Now, I will send this to all your laptops. I have it firewalled. Jack, I see you have your laptop, so for the Spades to have access to this, I need your IP.”

Jack turned his laptop around.

Reaper tapped some keys on it then on his. “Okay now, we all are in the loop. Recon?”

“Yeah?”

“Print it all out.”

Recon plugged in the small copier he had to his laptop and the printing began.

Reaper looked at the pages. “And of course, it’s all encrypted.”

“I can’t help you with that part. I’m sorry,” Jade said as she locked eyes with Jack for a second. Then she got up, headed to her room, and stayed with Belle.

Of course, Jack could not move his eyes from her until she shut the door. Then he looked at some of what had been printed out. Most of the pages were nothing but broken lines, while some had a border and some did not. The other papers seemed to be some kind of lists.

By the time the sun started going down, the group was frustrated beyond any sort of reason. They’d all searched through the papers to no real conclusion. Not a one of them could figure out what the files really were.

Dewey had gone out to the living room and Stone went with him.

When they came back in about twenty minutes later, they nodded at Shay.

Jack noted this.

Apparently, so had Ace. He stared at Shay with a questioning look.

“They are calling in the one person that can help us with this mess of a puzzle,” Shay told him.

Jack stared at him, as did his brothers.

“And who would that be?” Ace asked.

Dewy let out a sigh. “My woman. She’s being flown in.”

“You have a woman coming here?” Ace asked look entirely puzzled.

Stone chuckled despite looking tired. “Not just any woman. She can decode anything. Stuff that looks like Japanese even. She is the only person who could figure out how to decode any of this.”

Ace looked doubtful.

Shay stood up and stretched. “You can believe him. She has worked with us before and even I have no one better at my disposal.”

“Damn right,” Reaper agreed.

When Jade came back in a few hours later, she sat back in the corner of the room just watching everyone. Then she got up and went to the kitchen.

After a while, Jack could smell something delicious. He rubbed his eyes and got up. He headed to the kitchen.

Two huge pots were boiling on the stove and a third seemed to be simmering.

“Alfredo and pasta,” Jade said from where she pulled out a large sheet of garlic bread from the open oven. She set it on the counter next to three others.

“It’s a lot of Alfredo,” he noted.

“There are a lot of big men out there.” She laughed.

“I’ll get the plates and silverware together.” He headed to the cabinet.

“Okay and I’m glad Deuce did all those dishes earlier, as we are gonna need them all over again.” She moved the pasta to the sinks and drained it into a colander. Then dumped it all back into the pot. She went to the fridge and grabbed butter then spooned it into the hot pasta.

Jack watched her.” I never heard of doing that.”

She put some into the other pasta. “You’ll love it.”

Jack stared at her for a long moment thinking how he would love to eat her and forget the dammed pasta. He shook his head and went out to get the men to help set the table.

The men all looked tired and frustrated.

Deuce’s face lit up. “Do I smell pasta?” He stared at the plates in Jack’s hands.

“Yep and lots of it.” Jack set the plates on the table. “Start setting them up and I assume we can move the papers and laptops for now.” He looked over at Shay. “Since Eagle here is convinced that we need this specialist.”

Shay shrugged. “You will see it and believe it.”

“Well, I hope so as we have only 3 days now,” Ace commented.

“Yeah,” Deuce added as he came back in with silverware and napkins. “Until…BOOM.”

The men all paused.

Jack did too. Boom was an ominous word all by itself. It meant only one thing…Something or many something’s were going to blow the fuck up.