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Sel mumbled, “Solitaire? God, you guys are old.”
They both glared at him, and he decided that was a good time to look around the room. “Indio, Bennie, come with me, please. Let’s see if there is a manual way to get the air circulating. We can give them more time to get us out of here.”
Indio moved in front of Bennie and told him, “I’ll go with him. You stay here.”
“You don’t tell me what to do, dick.”
Sel was getting frustrated with them. He spun on his heel and said, “Listen, I might need you both. Get along, or don’t, but stop this shit.”
“Sorry, Sel,” Bennie said.
“Sorry, my ass. You like this guy, go fuck him. Have at it.”
He left and Sel could only smile. Bennie whispered, “Sel, your dad will kill that guy.”
“No, he won’t. I won’t let him.”
“Already acting like the boss. I’ll let you deal with your dad and uncle.”
“I’ve been doing that my whole life,” he said as they ducked under some coils of wires strung across the walkway. “Look at all this equipment. How did this not show up on his financials?”
“Rich people have a way of hiding anything.”
He thought of his own family and said, “Right.”
They found the fans, three of them taller and broader than the two of them put together. As they looked around for switches, Dex hollered out, “I’m in!”
Sel told Bennie, “Keep looking. I’ll go see what he can do for us.”
Back at the computer, Dex explained, “I can’t get to everything. There are passwords to just about all of it, but I went around the initial one. I can’t get the fans back on from here, but I can access the cameras, at least. I don’t hear anything, so the camera must only be video, no audio. And lurking around in the controls, it’s being sent out too. I can’t see where yet, but I’d make a bet, if I could.”
“To Brooks’s phone?”
“Yup. And not only that, but there is also a device somewhere in here that Brooks can operate from his phone, too. It kills cell signals. It’s off right now, but I can turn it on and off from here. If he turns it off to fuck with our search team, I can switch it back on.”
“Good. Keep trying to get the fans back on. Bennie’s looking for manual overrides, but there’s no sign of one over there.”
“That makes no sense. You didn’t see it, but Dallas found a laptop in the ranch office that was thirty years old, and the two others on the entire ranch were about that. Harrison had no working knowledge of such things. He knew enough to look up his bank balance. That’s it. So, set up all this to be run by computers?”
“Brooks?” Sel asked.
“They were estranged, at best. I doubt it. But it is possible Harrison thought his kids, the ones he claimed, could use this place. When we get out of here, we’ll contact them again. They didn’t know a thing about the panic room, didn’t mention this either. Who knows, but right now, we know he’s watching us. The good thing is, there are no cameras here. And the ones out there have no sound.”
“How is that good?”
“He won’t know that we’re in here figuring things out.”
Sel wandered back into the main living area of the bunker to see Jim drinking a beer and Avery eating an MRE. “These things ain’t half bad.”
Sel found Indio in the storage room, going through every unmarked box. “Hey.”
After glancing back at him, he grunted, “Hey.”
“You know…Bennie wasn’t trying to hurt me. Until recently, he was my bodyguard.”
“Didn’t think that,” he threw out, then ignored Sel again.
Sel was glad to hear it. That meant he thought he was hitting on Sel. “Well, he was just…trying to get through to me about a couple things.”
