Collision Course, CH16 (Patreon)

Who the fuck does he think he is? I slam the door again. Open it and slam it. Damn it, slamming doors is supposed to make me feel better. He can’t just dismiss me like that. Not when we’re so good for one another. I shouldn’t have stopped the sex. If I’d known he’d cast me aside like that, I wouldn’t have.

At least I have the hotel room to remember us by. I touch my neck, feel his large, thick hand tightening on it. Just the memory makes me hard. How can he not want that again? Fuck his wife. Fuck his family. He loved what he did to me. It was right there in his eyes.

I slam the door again, and the frame cracks.

Fuck. Now he’s making me damage my house.

He isn’t getting away with this.

I fill half a dozen travel mugs with coffee, then head downstairs. The cool air in my computer room does nothing for my mood. I’m in his bank account. I’m on his Facebook page, LinkedIn, google.

Who the fuck still has a google page these days?

You name it; I am in it. And I will out him to everyone for the bastard that he is. I can’t wait for him to come crawling back to him after his wife kicks him out. I might take him back if he grovels.

Who am I kidding? I’ll throw him on my bed the instant he’s at my door.

I’m in his Twitter when I encounter a problem with my plan to destroy Benoit Thibault. I didn’t get that from his phone; I got that from an online search because for as much information as he had on there, my hunk is wouldn’t keep everything there.

I nearly dismissed the account. It isn’t the first by that name I come across. Benoit Thibault is something of a popular name in French-speaking countries. But the first picture is of a restaurant kitchen. On the same page is a family, and except for the white guy with them, it’s my hunk’s family. Digging further, that’s my hunk’s restaurant, his chain, his house.

What is that white guy doing with my hunk’s life?

For a second, no, a fraction of a second, I actually consider that my hunk has been the victim of identity theft. Wouldn’t that serve him right?

But then, the truth becomes evident and I am both pissed and fall for the guy just a little more.

The asshole stole Thibault’s identity.

I looked at the Twitter page.

Well, more like copied it.

I go through the cloned phone, go through every social site from it, and I get my hunk’s life. A copy of Thibault’s life. I go under the hood, look through those site’s codes. At least once, one of their IT guys notices me—I’m too pissed to be careful—and I slap them down, then send them on a wild goose chase after the Crimson Binome around the world so I can work in peace.

The code used to hitch over the real Thibault’s with my hunk’s copied life is elegant, precise, minimalistic. I look at a master’s work, and I have trouble believing my hunk did this. He’s good. I have no doubt that if he set his mind to it, there is nothing he can’t do.

But this contradicts the brutality I’ve experienced. He is careful after the fact, not during. If he’d done this, I’d been looking at a beautiful repair job after he’d destroyed the entire site.

Someone else did this for him.

I’m going to destroy them. There’s no two ways about it. He shouldn’t have to go to some hack of a hacker when he’s got me. As soon as I’ve figured out who my hunk actually is, I’m going to track down this hacker and remove them from our equation.

Okay.

My hunk isn’t Thibault. Is there anything on his phone I can use to identify the real him? There is nothing there about anyone other than the fake Thibault.

The phone’s out.

What do I have? The information on the rental, his arrival and departure details, which isn’t until tomorrow. He could leave early.

Getting into the rental company’s easy enough, I locate his rental, still on the road. To be safe, I insert a program to warn me when it’ll be returned.

Now what?

A refill.

I’m back at the screens.

So, what do I do now? I can’t simply wait for him to get to the airport. I doubt I’ll get him to drop the act even if I confront him. I need to get to who he is myself, but he hasn’t left me anything to work with,

Or as he?

I go through his social pages again. The ones where my hunk is Thibault. I study the pictures. I’m not an expert at visual manipulation, so as far as I can tell, they are authentic, but that isn’t important. What matters is that it is really him in them, not just someone who looks like him.

The FBI has a program that takes a bunch of pictures and if you give it a starting point of who the person it needs to find is, like a decent image of his face, which I have here. It can then find him in those other pictures and build a composite that is accurate enough it’s used to identify homegrown terrorists.

Getting into their system isn’t easy, they take their security seriously. I need two refills. But once I’m in, it’s simple to borrow that program, feed it my hunk’s images from the social sites and then get someone I can feed through their nationwide database of people.

Trust me, if you live in the US, you’re in it.

Well, unless you’ve taken steps to not be in it, like I have. Of course, that isn’t something you can do if you don’t know it exists—they’re very secretive about it. Something about an invasion of privacy law. And if you don’t have the skill to get into the system. There’s only a handful of us in the country capable of doing it. Don’t listen to those idiots on Reddit screaming how they’re always hacking their way into that system. Most of them are actors in the FBI’s pocket, looking to draw in real hackers so they can then take them out of circulation.

Those of us who keep operating do so because we don’t talk about what we do, we simply enjoy the results.

It takes another refill before I have anything useful. And in this case, useful is relative to the extreme.

I get a name.

Tristan. That’s about it when it comes to relevant information. The last name noted is Smith, but the arrest record where his name enters the system, when he was eighteen, has a note attached indicating they had to put Smith because they never got him to say his actual last name and that they are guessing at his age, although Tristan made no claim to be a different one when told they’d do that and it meant he would be tried as an adult.

I have a year and a place, and a picture of him as a kid. Fuck, he was a hunk even back then. That isn’t enough to get me to find his last name, but the file details why he was arrested, murder, and includes Tristan’s explanation for why he murdered the man.

He speaks in a neutral, disinterested tone that isn’t quite the one I heard my hunk speak in when he wasn’t emotional, but I can hear how it evolved from there.

He and his younger brother, Justin, were kidnapped by a man claiming to be their father, although Tristan had never seen him before that day. He was eight. He wasn’t as aware of how people acted as he is now—when he recounted this—so he believed him and carried his brother, still a baby, away, thinking they were going on a ride and would be back later.

What follows is a recounting of ten years of horror that if I have been in his shoes would have led me to kill the man who did that to me, too. Dear Old Dad is fucking lucky all he did was sell me to a pimp.

That gives me a date and state, it’s enough to find the missing person’s report. That gives me a last name. The woman who filed it, forty-eight hours after they were kidnapped, died three years later of health complications resulting from her spending all her time looking for her sons.

The police barely bothered.

The joys of being black in a mostly white city in the US.

Despite the mitigating circumstances, the judge still sentenced my hunk to too many years in prison because Tristan had demonstrated a level of premeditation and lack of remorse for what he did that couldn’t be ignored.

I would love to see what that man would have done after being held in the back ass end of the woods for eight years and basically tortured daily. Did the guy not listen to Tristan’s reasons? I wish the killing had also taken place in the middle of the wood, instead of close to a road as Tristan tried to escape with his brother, only to be caught by their kidnapper. A passing driver saw Tristan kill the man, and that was all it took to get the police to chase a black man down, arrest him, and condemn him despite plenty of reasons to justify his actions.

I try to find Justin, to see if he is someone who can lead me to my hunk, but he is placed within the child care system and vanishes. No amount of hacking gives me an explanation other than the negligence the department is well known for.

Tristan spent one of those too many years in prison, and of course, there is nothing reported, which tells me he was already careful enough not to get caught when he had to break someone’s arm in self-defense.

He wasn’t released. He escaped. Good for him. He is arrested three more times over the next five years. That longest prison stay is seven months. The last time he was caught, they didn’t even make it to the prison.

Then he simply disappears.

There is the occasional officer who makes an official request for a search on him, but only I know they were asking for Tristan since they always use a different name. It’s the picture that matches.

How none of those requests lead to a manhunt, considering the number of law enforcement Tristan killed in his escapes, is only explained when I find that same code within the FBI’s database as I did within his online social life.

Okay, so maybe I won’t destroy that hacker, since they have worked to keep my hunk safe, but when I find them, we will still have a talk about whom my hunk belongs to. They better not have untowards intentions for him, otherwise, things will not go well for them.

I’m starting to build a database of that code when my program informs me Benoit Thibault is returning his rental. I snort. Nice try buster, but I know who you are now. It doesn’t matter what name you use, I will find you.

I hack the airport security. Okay, hacking is a strong word here. I basically just walk in, digitally speaking. And I’m not the first. It’s like this place is a hacker training ground. If Katherine ever needs a city client, I’ll point her to the airport.

I find Tristan. No, I’m done calling you Ben. You’re either My Hunk or Tristan going forward; learn to live with it. And anyway, you’re way more of a Tristan than you ever were a Ben.

Come on, who bought that one.

I follow him out of the rental office and jump from camera to camera as he goes into the airport, stands in line to get his departure chanced. Still going back to Montreal. That must be where he’s been hiding all these years. Because of the change, he has a six-hour wait until his flight.

I could be there in under forty-five minutes. Thirty, if I really drive.

And then what?

Fuck. What can I do in a public place? Being in public plays to his advantage. Can I hack the airline and find him a fight somewhere else? One of the smaller airports?

Where is he?

I backtrack five minutes and find him heading into the restroom.

Ten minutes later, he’s still in there. Maybe the local food didn’t agree with him. Some of Phoenix’s cuisine is an acquired taste. Another ten minutes and I start to suspect he’s playing a different game. I give him another refill, which gets stretched when I need to get another batch of coffee going. I need a machine that can make more than a dozen cups. Maybe one of those that grind as I need it. I saw something like that on the restaurant convention’s website.

I review the minutes it took me to get my coffee; he didn’t exit. So I go back to when he entered and look it over again. I find him on the third viewing, now dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and wearing a baseball cap that had hair poking out from under it. That’s clever. It threw me off because I love that dome of his.

Okay, I love everything about him.

He exists the airport and gets in a taxi.

What?

There’s no way he’s local, and I never knew. Absolutely no way. I hack the taxi company, but they don’t use a centralized direction system, the assholes. I have to follow them using city cameras, which, fortunately for me, there are a number of them.

My hunk is let off in a semi-industrial district, with offices on one side, and low rent residences beyond that, but he isn’t going there. He slipped between a convenience store next to a printing company and I almost lose him.

Almost.

He knows what he’s doing. He utterly vanishes from the city cameras. Unfortunately for him, we live in an era when those aren’t the only ones around, or connected to the internet. I’m into every business and industry in that neighborhood under five minutes. I even find a handful of private cameras that really have no business being there, or looking into those buildings where—okay, I don’t need to see that.

Pervert.

I find him through those cameras as he steps onto a storage locker company and I try to get into their security system, but it isn’t online. I lose sight of him between two rows of lockers large enough to have cars in them.

I quickly set up my remote access to this system because I am going to need it, I am sure of that, and grab the dedicated laptop out of its locker. Then I am heading for the garage, but first I need to stop by the kitchen and hope I have enough travel mugs there. I won’t have the time to stop for coffee once I’m out of the house.

Probably don’t have the time right now, but let’s be reasonable. I want to be sane when I finally catch up to him.

He probably thinks he’s home free, so he’s going to drive out of there and I can bet he will manage to avoid all the roads with city cameras on them, but I am going to be right behind him. And with my system already monitoring the storage lot, he is not getting out of there without me knowing about it.

I will have my reckoning, Tristan, and you will give me the manhandling that I deserve for it.