Aztec Treasure
Investigators

Spider Monkey’s POV

Arrowhead Pack House

Six Days Earlier

Vic woke me up from my nap, spoiling a hot dream about us on a deserted island. “Frank and Colletta are just pulling in, and they want to talk you your team right away.”

Vic woke me up for work? Dang it, the dream was just getting good! I blinked my eyes as I checked the time, groaning because it had only been an hour. “Don’t they need to relax and eat for a while first?”

“No, they slept on the plane. Come on.” He helped me up, and I went to the bathroom right away. Bathroom trips were frequent as my pregnancy advanced, and I rarely slept more than four hours straight. If I didn’t wake for the bathroom, my back was aching. I did my business, washed the sleep out of my eyes, and came back out. “I don’t know what they want, but Chase asked me to keep an open mind.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

“It usually isn’t. Come on.” It was nice enough to go outside, and we weren’t under lockdown anymore. The breeze off the cold lake helped wake me up as we went up the hill to the Pack House. We were among the last to arrive at the Alpha’s conference room. Our entire computer team was here; Brian, Rick, Teri, and Claire. Frank Donovan was standing behind Claire’s wheelchair.

Vic and I took our seats near the Alphas and the Pack leadership. Frank and Colletta Grimes sat at the head of the table, along with Councilman Nehemiah Pensky and Council IT Specialist Lisa Funk. Colletta looked around the room; she didn’t look happy. “I’m sorry to ask you here on such short notice, but a decision is required. I can’t make it for you.” Over the next twenty minutes, she and Frank laid out what was going on in Washington. I wasn’t shocked at the scope of the rot, not after all the government computers I’d hacked. Every time I kicked over a rock, the bugs would scurry away and hide somewhere else.

The Sons Task Force was a recent example of how out of control the Federal government could be. Even though the Steel Brotherhood was the victim, the FBI’s Task Force went after Chase and his family. ‘Warrants? We don’t need no stinking warrants!’ They used the CIA to listen to our phone calls, obtained our bank records, hacked our medical records, and intentionally failed to warn us of an upcoming attack on our Pack. It only stopped because Chase and Colletta used the information I’d found to reach a deal with the Justice Department, giving us recognition and immunity.

The table was a little shellshocked by the time they finished describing what happened on their trip. “The President is determined to root out this conspiracy, wherever it leads. She doesn’t know who to trust outside of us; anyone who has been in the Washington machine was suspect. The President wants our assistance in the investigation. If we are to help, we will need everyone in this room to do it.”

Wow. “You want us to go to Washington?”

Frank nodded. “There are multiple options I want to put on the table. The President would get you credentials, clearance, and access to the personnel and computer systems used by the Secret Service, CIA, and FBI. In the first option, we form our own Task Force and perform an independent investigation, using resources here and borrowed from American Packs.”

Vic was shaking mad. “Frank, you just said the Deep State would not hesitate to take out anyone in their way. Are you seriously thinking about placing our Packs in the crosshairs of the US Government machine? What happens to us if they kill the President or she loses the next election? You’ve put all our chips on one number.”

“Yes. It is the most straightforward option but the one with the highest chance of success.”

I was not too fond of the idea, and I wasn’t shy about saying it. “I’m not putting our child in danger by openly going after these people. What other ideas do you have?”

“We send a team to Washington to operate in secret. We monitor the workings of the Task Force, supplementing their information with our own. Like we did with the Sons task force, we look for actions or inactions that point towards members being part of the conspiracy. If we find anything, I pass it on to the President or someone she trusts.”

I shook my head. “These people don’t take a dump without scanning the bathroom for bugs, and they have aggressive computer technicians. We’d have to work from inside the building, probably from the computer rooms. It might be obvious if a bunch of us show up.”

“And you’d need people in the Secret Service and CIA Headquarters, not just the Task Force,” Claire Bennington said. “The Task Force will only have the data they’ve brought from the other computers. They won’t know what was left behind. You need to crawl through those computers from the inside if you’re going to uncover anything.”

“And that means putting undercover agents into the agencies at great personal risk,” Frank Donovan said. “That rules out Claire and Spider; they can’t leave Arrowhead. It’s too dangerous.”

“I agree,” Vic said. “We’ve got a great team here, but they need to STAY here and stay undetected. We still have enemies in the Cartels and the FBI. I don’t want us adding more.”

Colletta looked around the table. “Are you all in agreement?”

“Rori agrees as well,” Chase said. “They stay.”

Frank’s shoulders relaxed. “I’ll inform the President that the investigation the Task Force does will be the only one. The next question is this; should we get involved from here, or stay clear of the whole mess?”

Chase leaned back in his chair. “If they succeed in killing the President, we lose our best ally in the government. It’s not possible to go back in hiding anymore. It is in our best interest to help her.”

“I agree,” Frank Donovan said. “I swore to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This conspiracy is the biggest domestic threat of our lifetimes.”

“What can we do?”

“We work from the outside in,” I said. “The Cartels, the CIA agents who tried to take Maria, the black site workers, and the weapons. If we uncover something, we act on it ourselves or pass it on. Either way, we aren’t working for anyone but ourselves.”

“If you can get us data Spider can’t hack, we can do independent analysis,” Claire said. “We can be a check on the official investigation.”

“What would you need,” Frank asked.

This part was easy. “Lots of people. I need more hackers, data analysts, investigators, forensic accountants, former field agents? They need to be discreet and trusted, though. It does no good if we get infiltrated.”

Frank Donovan perked up. “Frank, you and I both know people with extensive knowledge of the Cartels. Good people, now retired, who know how to keep their mouths shut.”

“A budget,” Claire said. “The people we need won’t be cheap, and they’ll have to live and work here at the Pack, preferably in the Beta House.”

“Money is the least of our worries,” Chase said. “If I know our Spider Monkey, she’ll turn a Cartel investigation into a moneymaking venture.”

I had to smile at that; I was good at making other people’s money disappear. “You do need a bigger pool,” I said to laughs.

It didn’t take that long to bring the team together. The Pack did a quick repurposing of the basement and my office, turning it into office space. We filled up our guest rooms, and others stayed in the Pack House or with other members. My team now numbered twenty-seven people, from young hackers I knew to retired agents.

Frank shuttled back and forth to Washington, bringing us updated information from the Task Force and carrying back our suggestions. He was the only person we dealt with directly; since he was still a senior agent in Homeland Security, there wasn’t much he couldn’t get.

It was a race for time, and I liked our odds.

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