11
Tywin
One measly break was all I wanted. Yesterday had been a double hitter with the Overtown situation and Arjen’s roadside ambush. Now, Rhi’s thundering voice immediately got my hackles up because he rarely got stressed.
“Are you telling me a search for a tattoo caused this?” I asked Rhi who was staring at his laptop like it had an actual mouth to spit out updates without computer codes and skilled hands typing in functions at a hundred or more words per minute.
“Yes, I’m telling you I took the partial drawing you gave me and created a digital composite of what the tattoo might look like, which is a medieval B, by the way. Anyway, when I did a search, I got an alert that was a legit warning, telling me I was…” He paused to throw up a few finger quotes. “…Researching restricted material, please discontinue search.” When I didn’t shut down the search right away, they shut down my program. You know how much power you have to have to shut down someone running an outside program? I’m talking stopped my shit in its tracks. I’ve never encountered anything like that before.”
The news had me stumped. I didn’t fully understand how a search from someone as skilled as Rhi could’ve been stopped by an outside source.
“Could it have been another program designed to take down other programs? Only agencies like the NSA or CIA have that type of power.”
“And us,” Rhi added. “We have enough power to do something like that.”
He wasn’t talking about himself or me. He meant our organization, the Ferali Syndicate.
“Maybe it was another organization like ours?”
He shrugged. “Not to sound arrogant, but our organization is tried, tested, and not easily fucked with.”
I chuckled because he was being arrogant.
“Anyway, I don’t know much yet. Whoever turned my shit off, they are good. I’m talking good like I trained them myself.”
I shook my head this time. In a way, I understood where he was coming from. He was the one we called to do what had been done to him. I was confident in my skills, but Rhi was on a level that had you thinking he had a chip in his brain.
“I can’t find any type of trail, no clue, no traces, no nothing,” he stated dejectedly. Rhi always had answers or knew how to find them. To see him puzzled worried me.
“So, to be clear,” I reiterated. “Anybody searching for that specific tattoo automatically gets flagged or stopped no matter where they are searching from or with?”
He nodded, but was squinting at codes, numbers, symbols, and letters that I was running through my head to decode. My cousins called me a geek, but they didn’t hesitate to request my geek skills to find solutions to the problems they encountered.
“That’s what I’m saying. A person or a group with enough power has a digital A.P.B out on your girl’s tattoo. I don’t believe they know my location, and they damn sure don’t know who I am, but they know I’m searching.”
Patrena was going to kill me. If my curiosity about her tattoo had put her in danger or had sparked the attention of a law enforcement agency, I’d never forgive myself. And why did her tattoo look so damn familiar?
“Rhi. I think I’ve seen that tattoo before, but I can’t figure out how or where I’ve seen it.”
“I’ve got a friend who does hypnosis. She can put you under to see if you can recall the memories.”
I stared, giving him the are-you-kidding-me expression.
“Don’t look at me that way. You can’t remember. I can’t search. We’ve got to figure out something. Are you sure she doesn’t know? Or is it she just can’t tell you anything else about where she got that tattoo or what it means? Are you going to tell her what happened when we searched for it?”
I gripped my forehead and squeezed. She had specifically asked me not to tell anyone about her tattoo and to forget I had even seen it. My interpretation of it was a stretch, but the clue I took from the half secret she’d given me insinuated that she’d gotten the tat either at birth or when she was a kid and her mother had died before revealing the mystery behind it.
Rhi scratched at his short beard, his eyes unfocused, indicating his brain was working at warp speed. He stopped processing and lifted his head to eyeball me.
“You know you’re going to have to tell her that you were snooping behind her back, right?”
I nodded. Rhi was the only one who knew about Patrena and me. I hadn’t spilled the beans to him, but when you’re friends with someone who can literally spy on Jesus, it’s kind of hard to keep a secret.
“I know,” I finally answered. “I pray that we haven’t set something in motion that’ll put her in danger.”
“I was the one doing the search. Therefore, if they come after anyone, it will be me. But, you still need to go and have that talk with your girl.”
I knew he was right. Patrena had practically begged me to forget about what I’d seen, and I had gone and sent up a red flag to a ghost who may want to harm her. Had my curiosity put Patrena’s life in jeopardy?