Chapter 8

While the girls and Ryan made margaritas, Corbin, Bit, Nick and I relaxed on the couches in the living area. Bit was typing on her phone, adding up some numbers.

Corbin smiled, "So my bet is nothing less than $500,000 through the day..."

Nick nodded his agreement, but I said, "I think it's more like $750,000 with all the stuff we bought too. Those extra laptops, burner phones, iPads, and shit didn't come cheap since we paid consumer prices."

Bit typed a few more numbers and said, "Well depending on how much they spent on Amazon on the ride home ... they're already at $740,000. My guess is Chris is right and they most likely went over $750,000. Ryan alone could spend $100,000 on Amazon in five minutes..."

I laughed, "I never thought two days ago I'd be sitting in New York betting on if we spent over half a million dollars in a day ... I thought I'd be curled up watching some terrorist asshole scratch his ass on guard duty while I waited for the okay to put a bullet through his head."

Corbin laughed, "So you're saying you'd rather be there?"

Nick shook his head, "Theo only person who might rather be there is you. It's not socially acceptable to blow up houses here. I think it's been at least 24 hours since you've blown something up. Going through withdrawals yet?"

Bit's phone chirped before Corbin could answer and her eyes bugged out a little. She jumped up and ran over to Ryan pulling him aside to talk. I sighed, "Well that can't be good."

Nick added, "Is anything good in our life not interrupted? You should be use to it now."

Ryan put down his drink and headed for the stairs as Bit waved us over. She said, "All of the teams we've been tracking just came back online and with huge amounts of traffic moving through each one. We're not sure what's up, but Ryan is going down to see what's going on. We'll let you know as soon as we get an idea."

I nodded, "Okay ... should we be prepping to leave or something?"

Bit frowned, "I'm not sure really. My best guess is that they're coming back on line early and scrambling since you stopped their attack. We don't know enough about their organization to make any real guesses." Her phone beeped again, "I've got to head down there. I'll call you as soon as we know anything."

She grabbed a soda on her way to the stairs. I leaned back against the wall, "Well I guess our vacation time might be a little shorter than we thought." Caroline leaned up against me as silence reigned for a little while.

Emily finally broke the silence, "So on that note, I think I might take this one here and go just curl up in my room until we hear something." We all nodded and sort of split apart, Caroline and I staying in the kitchen as the others headed for their rooms.

She leaned up against me and looked up, "Let's take that pitcher and curl up on the couch. I could use a drink." I smile and pick it and two glasses up following her to the corner. I sit down and she pours us drinks before curling up in my lap as she sips her drink. We enjoy the silence until she finishes her drink and puts the cup down. She turns to face me, rubbing against my cock and asks, "Enjoying me in your lap are you?"

I laugh a little, "Well you kinda sat down right on it ... I'm still a teenager dear." She rolls her eyes and slips out my lap. I groan, "Well that wasn't quite what I wanted there..."

She smiles, "Oh I know what you wanted asshole. Not right now. I just want to relax." I shrug and she curls up under my arm, both of us drifting softly off to sleep after a little while.

Bit shakes us awake, "We've got a problem. Downstairs in two minutes." She heads for the bedrooms and bangs on the door, letting them know the same thing as Caroline and I stretch and start down the stairs. We walk into the ops room, looking around at the dozens of screens around the room.

I blink a few times, "Jeez this would give me a headache."

Ryan overheard me and laughed, "You get used to it. We really only use five or so, the rest are just status displays. Have a seat, I just need to finish this real quick." He goes back to typing, rolling between two different computers every ten seconds or so. Bit comes in leading the others and Ryan says, "We're good to go. Want to explain?"

Bit nods, "So when the groups came back online two hours ago, they started moving huge amounts of data between them. We'd never them move this quickly after switching places. We now know they are scrambling after the last attacks. We believe that the failed attack has escalated their timetable now. They're prepping for something, we just don't know what yet. But all the activity has given us one advantage. We managed to find that one of the locations has been issuing orders. Instead of everyone coming online and doing their assigned missions that they were already notified of, this time they received orders over the network. While we're not able to break the encryption on the orders yet, we do know where they came from. They're in Amman, Jordan."