Page 119 of False Flag

“But I bought them for you.”

She set down Fezzik and took the flowers from his hand. “Fine.” She entered her kitchen, opened the cupboard beneath the sink, and dropped them in the compost bucket. “Thank you for the flowers. Now say what you came to say and leave.”

He sighed, then circled the coffee table and sat on the couch. Fezzik, the little traitor, immediately jumped on his lap. He grinned broadly. “Aren’t you a handsome fellow? It’s nice to be appreciated by someone.”

“He’s Staci’s cat.”

“Ah, that explains why he’s so friendly.”

She wondered if anyone knew he was here besides Mrs. Birmingham. If not, she could probably get away with murder. Her neighbor didn’t have the best memory.

Teague stroked Fezzik’s head as he met Vicki’s gaze. “Planning where to hide my body?”

“Maybe.”

“You’ll regret it.”

“Not even a little bit.”

“You will. I’m in the Truther chat. I know where they’re gathering and why. What will happen once they do remains a mystery.”

Six days.

Six endless days without Staci.

Six days of fighting the urge to go back and protect her, even knowing he had a job to do that couldn’t be done from the inside. Not yet.

Days ago, Freya had commented in one of their meetings that the last time she came across a shield against signal intelligence this strong was when she and Cal were in DR Congo and had infiltrated the technical center of a Congolese minister who was trying to make a grab for the country’s trillions in mineral rights for himself.

Which returned everyone to the question of what, exactly, was Casper Osborne hiding?

It made Jake even more determined to break the technical barrier. Lloyd’s mapping files had to hold the key. Security that tight didn’t happen by accident, and Osborne had spent a fortune creating proprietary maps that were at an unbelievably large scale.

Jake was given only minutes to vacate the island, and he used the precious time to leave the only message he could for Staci—a single red rose he’d snatched from Osborne’s garden—left in place of the laptop that held Lloyd’s, and therefore Osborne’s, mapping data.

All he could do was hope she understood what the rose meant until she had a chance to go out on the water with the expedition team, enabling her burner phone to receive texts. Since that day, his focus had been on using Lloyd’s work to break through the barriers that kept Staci isolated on Letora.

One thing had become clear in reading Lloyd’s personal notes on the project and Gerard’s erratic instructions: the podcaster had no real plan for the fieldwork or even the documentary.

Jake suspected the expedition team was just killing time until a big event, and Staci was there to be blamed for whatever happened. No one knew what the podcaster and billionaire planned for their coup de grâce, but he had no doubt it would happen soon. They couldn’t keep Staci isolated forever. If nothing else, they had to know Jake would be asking questions.

He was fighting a countdown clock with no idea how many minutes were left until midnight.

Casper had given Lloyd access to proprietary mapping data for Letora Island from a survey he’d commissioned two years ago. The survey had been detailed and done by professionals with cutting-edge equipment. Jake was no GIS expert, but he knew maps—they were vital when entering enemy territory—and Osborne’s map of Letora was at a scale he’d never seen for an area of its size. In the forest, he could zoom in and identify individual trees.

Based on a map layer that had confounded Lloyd, Jake had come to believe one purpose of the survey was to determine the best placement for Russian signal blockers that had been provided by Osborne’s good friend Grigory Laskin.

Lloyd had noted his confusion about eight markers on the layer that had no data to indicate their significance. He wasn’t a mapping expert. He just knew that when he visited those locations on the island, his equipment didn’t work.

Neither the high-tech GPS unit nor his basic compass could get a reading or find north when near those mapped spots. Everyone at NSWC was certain Osborne employed signal blockers that relied heavily on electromagnetic pulses that would render a compass useless.

This, to his brother, said unexplainable mystery landform. Maybe even alien technology. And so he’d dropped a pin at the eight locations on the map he’d created for Gerard that identified places that needed to be investigated by the expedition team.

Jake had no clue if Gerard was aware there were signal blockers in those eight locations, but it was one of Casper’s smarter moves when he refused to give Jake access to Lloyd’s work.

Thankfully, Staci had already nabbed a copy.

After six days of parsing through data and consulting with NSWC and FMV, they had a plan. He knew where the blockers were located, and he’d been allowed to practice on similar devices that had been planted in the woods surrounding Lake Olympus Lodge a few years ago. He would hack the devices and configure them to fail simultaneously for a short period of time that should escape detection by Osborne’s tech team.