Free Dark Web (DARC Ops Book 2) by Jamie Garrett Page A

curious.”
    “And why would I do this?”
    “Because you might get a good scoop. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
    “Not for me. I just film what they tell me to film.” He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “But I’ll tell you what. There’s a bomb-ass taqueria place just down the road a few miles.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Tansy was shocked at his sudden turn, and pleased. But he didn’t have time to make yet another detour.
    “Don Pedro’s,” he said. “Come back here with a chorizo breakfast burrito and I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Hmm . . . I don’t think I’ll have time for that. What about something at the gas station? More smokes? Porn mag?”
    He frowned.
    “Okay. Should I just grab another candy bar?”
    A few minutes later, Tansy and his new friend were sitting at a picnic table in front of a long-vacant diner. Amongst the empty junk-food wrappers on the table sat a police scanner hooked up to a laptop.
    “I guess you do know what you’re doing,” said the guy. “This looks pretty legit. How’d you learn all this stuff?”
    “I dropped out of school,” Tansy said as he fiddled with the controls via his laptop, setting up a decryption generator that could crack into the right frequency. “How else would I find the time?”
    “So, this is illegal, right?”
    “Yeah,” said Tansy. “And you’re an accessory, so keep it on the hush.” He turned up the volume knob on the scanner until they could hear someone speaking. It sounded perfectly clear, a man’s voice describing a reconnaissance report. Something about three gunmen, with sniper rifles, on a rock ledge, on the north end of delta sector.
    “Who is that?” asked the guy, his eyes widened. “The cops?”
    “FBI. It’s their encrypted channel.”
    They spent the next twenty minutes transfixed by the radio, listening intently to each transmission, after which they’d quietly go over what they’d just heard. It was mainly Tansy translating the military-ese for the news guy, summarizing the situation as a standoff between armed civilians and FBI tactical units. The gunmen, who were more often referred to as “suspects,” were on someone’s ranch, which was more often referred to as a “compound.” They were currently in hour thirteen of the standoff, with both sides holding firm. The compound’s occupiers refused to leave, or even lay down their arms, or allow the FBI access. And of course the FBI wasn’t going anywhere.
    Most of the chatter was about the positioning of assets and snipers, the coordinating of times and plans. Occasionally they would talk of negotiations, relaying the comments and requests of the compound occupiers to and from central command. Still, the information was scant and heavily coded.
    Although no one in the transmissions came out and said it, Tansy had a good idea who the FBI agents were after. It was the same group he’d been after himself: Nevada’s Sagebrush Militia. At one point they had been after Tansy, contacting him last week about a hacking job, offering a pretty penny for him to access a heavily fortified server. Something had seemed off, and so he’d brought the offer to the attention of DARC Ops. He and the team had only needed to look at it for just a few minutes before they decided they weren’t touching that deal with a fucking ten-foot pole.
    The Sagebrush Militia members were not just a band of extremists. They were Nevada’s lunatic fringe. And they were well-armed, maybe even well-funded, considering the juicy fee they were willing to cough up to a hacker. If they ever were successful in finding a hacker, it was almost guaranteed that their scope was well beyond software pirating or stealing some intellectual rights from a startup in Silicon Valley. Considering their current real-life actions, which apparently called for FBI snipers, MRAPs, and highway blockades, whatever actions they’d wanted carried out online could not be good.
    It was now Tansy’s job to