If you recognize them, I can't take the credit. :) And a big thanks to Margaret once again for reading ahead and pointing out my typos. Thank you Maragret :)

Chapter 16—Not what you'd expect

Jace's POV

My impromptu meeting with the owner of Rangeman was one of those 'I can't believe that happened' things. I'd say it was a one-in-a-million chance, but these things have been happening to me all my life. My mother used to say I was lucky, my wife thinks I have ESP and instinctively know to be in the right place at the right time. Whatever it is, it's served me well over the years and now I'll be meeting with the Tech Director of Rangeman tomorrow. I know my shit so hopefully I'll be able to make a good impression and perhaps get on track for that job I really want. I'll pay my dues and do whatever I need to but I'd love to be moving towards something I'm already equipped to do. The guys at the firehouse were always giving me shit about my deciphering code whenever we had downtime instead of playing poker with them. What can I say; it's what I love.

Tasha was still asleep when I let myself into our hotel room. Not that I expected anything else. She slept like the dead.

I slipped into bed next to her feeling pretty good about myself. Maybe we'd be ok after all.

"Jace-y is that you?" she asked sleepily as I lifted the covers over us.

"Shhh. Go back to sleep. I just went for a run."

"Ok g'nite."

I didn't know about that. It was almost morning.

Hector's POV

There had to be a good reason for his request. Ranger never asks me to look at candidates that Miami is considering, so even though it meant not hacking into the cell phones of those Kings I had numbers for, I said 'yes'. I had planned to spend the morning checking their texting history to see for myself what the streets were saying about 'Nando's death. I supposed I could do it before or after the meeting but I had been hoping to get in a few straight hours of snooping.

I think most people walk around thinking their texts are secure and they pretty much text anything. For this I was glad, it gave me lots of opportunities to show off my shit. I didn't want anyone assuming I was getting stale. I liked to keep ahead of the curve. And right now the curve was saying what I planned to do wasn't possible. Of course it was; I just needed to figure out the carrier for each man and with only 3 or 4 possibilities in Jersey, it wasn't going to be hard. And besides, every carrier issues their own three-digit prefix. I'd been keeping track of who used what for years. I hoped to have enough information by noon to either start the process of bringing Tank and Lula home, or burying them deeper undercover.

I decided to get some sleep after I hung up with Ranger. I usually didn't need much but I wanted to be extra with it in the morning. Ranger was probably going to ask my opinion about Jason Williams and I really didn't want to let any of my first impressions slip away.

I got up around five and since I still wasn't cleared to work out, I took a leisurely walk outside to get the cobwebs out of my head. If I liked this guy, I planned to ask him how he'd go about hacking into someone's text messages. The pat answer would be that there was no way unless you could get to their phone to install a spy app, but security tech wasn't a pat area and I would be interested to hear his take on how he would do it...if it weren't illegal.

I stopped at the diner and got an eggwhite omelet and coffee to go and brought it back to Ranger's apartment on seven, which seemed to be my new home away from home. As I ate I brought up Tater's cellphone number. That turd was going to serve as my beta.

He had an iPhone5. I knew that because I saw him using it when we took him to the diner in Westchester. His phone number's prefix was 263 and from my notes this was a number issued by Verizon, unless of course he changed carriers somewhere along the line. I had a number of burn phones in my possession; all were jail broken and able to work off of each other's frequencies. I was going to make the assumption that he never changed carriers, so I picked up a jail broken iPhone, changed the frequency to that of Verizon then changed the phone number to his.

Viola, he had automatic cloud backup and all of his text messages appeared on the phone. No password protection either I might add. Sloppy.

I read through his texts and some of the shit he was texting was just plain disgusting. There were a number of pictures of women followed by comments ranging from what he thought was fuckable to what he thought should be 'eliminated from society'. And Vasquez seemed to agree with his taste: big boobs, nice booty.

Ok that wasn't the reason I was checking his messages. I wanted to know what the word on the street was regarding Fernandez' death, so I scrolled down to his texts from yesterday.

Someone named Talon said, 'one less mothafucka'

And the turd answered with, 'expected this to happen'

TALON: 'all of us, bro. On more than 1 occasion I was ready to do it myself'

TATER: 'me 2'

I guessed Bobby's intel was right on; there was dissension within the LKN.

I was on a roll, so I pulled out another burn phone to check the messages of another LK number I had. His name was Pedro, not Vasquez, just another Pedro.

I went through the whole process again only to not make a connection. Obviously this dude had changed carriers since he was issued his number. I took the next best guess and tried Sprint's frequency. Again no connection so I went to T-mobile. After all, that was the most jail breakable carrier out there. The frequency was good but unlike Tater, Pedro's phone was password protected. I wasn't about to sit around and randomly try passwords. The most common was 7777, which I tried before attaching the phone to my random password generator. It randomly tried over 400 4-digit passwords a minute and once it was done with all combinations, it moved on to the five-digit ones. It only took a few minutes before I was in. I made a note of this password and copied over the SIM chip before checking his text messages.

This dude was really into his Pitbull. There were four or five pictures of it texted last night. And it wasn't even a pretty dog. I scrolled below the canine beauty shots and found what I was looking for. Pedro didn't particularly like Fernandez.

WEJA: 'Only an idiot would mess with that company. What was he thinking?'

PEDRO: 'I knew he was an idiot a long time ago and I never understood why he did things. Dude had an ego problem'

WEJA: 'Dude had a lot of problems'

PEDRO: 'Tater?'

WEJA: 'Tater is 2 stupid. Vasquez'

My thoughts entirely and I didn't need to read any more, at least not now. I had my meeting with Jason. I shut down the burn phone, grabbed one of my laptops in case I needed it and headed down to five.

I wasn't sure where they were having this interview but it was either Ernesto's office or a conference room. I tried Ernesto's office first, the door was open and no one was there. I could either walk around randomly or I could ask at the front desk. Since time was a factor, I stopped by the desk. Gary, who I'd met briefly the other day, was on duty. I nodded hello and walked over. I mentioned that Ranger had asked me to conduct an interview and that I was looking for the conference room that had been booked for Ernesto. He looked on screen and then pointed down the hall.

"Room 2, on your left."

I thanked him and took off.

The door was closed but the walls were glass so I stopped outside and waited to catch Ernesto's attention, which didn't take long. He nodded hello, said a couple of words to the good-looking black man he was interviewing, then got up to open the door for me.

"Hector, I'd like you to meet Jason Williams. Jason, Hector Santiago. I'll leave you two to talk and I'll be back in about twenty minutes. Is that ok Hector?"

"Sí. That should be enough time."

I wasn't sure if Jason knew anything about me or what I did. Ranger just said he was interested in a tech position, so I introduced myself. He seemed to already know that the tech department of Rangeman was under my domain so I assumed Ranger mentioned me to him as well.

I liked him immediately. I could tell he was smart and knowledgable…and there was something else about him that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Plus he reminded me of Ranger. I had just asked him how he would go about getting the text messages from someone's phone when there was a knock on the conference room door. I didn't think my twenty minutes were up and was about to shoo Ernesto away but when I looked up it was Estefania.

I thought they were leaving for a mini vacation?

She seemed to want to come in, so I told Jason that she was my partner and the boss' fiancé and that she probably wanted to meet him, so I invited her in.

"Stephanie Plum this is Jason Williams," I said, foregoing the whole formal introduction.

They shook hands and she looked a little spooked, like she had received an electric shock. I looked over at her for some sort of an explanation.

"I'm sorry. Wow. Um, there is only one other person that has ever given me that little jolt to the back of my neck like that. Hector you know the connection that Carlos and I have? Well I just got that same electric tingle from Mr. Williams."

"I'm sorry," he said, "I would never intentionally hurt you. Are you ok?"

She nodded yes and then looked at him intently. "Can we try that again?" she asked offering her hand.

He took it and they shook once more. She looked momentarily stunned but she was smiling so I guessed it was ok.

"Wow," she said again. "How do you do that?"

"Do what? I'm not doing anything intentional. I'm sorry…"

"No, don't be…wait, can I get Carlos? I'll be right back."

So much for my interview.

"I'm sorry for the interruption Jason. I guess Steph is going to bring Ranger in. While we have a few minutes let's continue our conversation. Tell me how you'd get to someone's text messages."

"Well there are spy apps out there that are untraceable by the recipient, although you'd have to get to their phone…but I doubt that is what you're asking me."

I nodded no.

"Ok, let me take this from another angle then. Theoretically if you know the carrier, it's frequency and the phone number of the person you want access to…and they had cloud backup you should be able to pull it down onto another mobile device after changing that phone's number over to the number you want to spy on. I've never done it, it's probably illegal and…"

"When do you want to start," I asked with a big smile on my face and my hand held out to welcome him onboard. "And I hope you don't mind living in Trenton, it's where our home office is."

"Thank you, but can you offer me…?"

"I can do anything I want. I'll confirm it with Ernesto but I'd like to bring you into my tech group in New Jersey. Very few people would come to the conclusion you just did. I want you on my team."

It was at that point that Stephanie, Ranger and Ernesto appeared.

Before this turned weird again I told the group that I had just offered Mr. Williams a job in the Trenton office, but he had yet to accept.

"Please call me Jace and yes, I'd love to work with you. My wife has family in the Trenton area so we were actually looking into Rangeman there first. You had no openings so I got on the waiting list for Florida."

Estefania stepped forward, with her hand out to Jace. "Welcome aboard," she said shaking hands and getting that look again. I gathered she got another 'tingle'. "Carlos, shake hands with Jace and tell me what you feel," she ordered.

He rolled his eyes at her but extended his hand to Jace and offered him a welcome. I saw him step back a little during the handshake.

"Carlos?"

"Yes. It's like the electricity I get when I sense you nearby. I thought it was our personal connection. I'd never felt it with anyone else and I was pretty sure ours was based on a male/female thing. I'm sorry Jace, no disrespect intended."

"No, I didn't take it that way. Can you two explain what you're feeling? I didn't notice anything different when I shook hands with you?"

Stephanie began telling him about her spidey sense and he stood there with his mouth open, "I have it too," he finally blurted out.