The door to the war room swings open and Storm marches out, a scowl on his face and rage in his eyes, followed by Sergeant Williams looking smug as shit as she glances around the room. “Malcolm West, you’re up next. Everyone else can have a seat somewhere and I’ll get to you eventually.”
As soon as Blaze walks into the room and the door closes, we all congregate around the tables in the middle of the room. Lincoln walks up to me and pulls me into his arms as he releases a sigh.
“Are you okay?”
I nod, glancing behind him as Tate walks up. “I’m fine. What about you guys?”
“We’re good, little sis,” he assures me before we all sit down together. Travis pulls his chair closer to mine before sinking into it and grabbing my hand. Storm sits in the middle of the group before scrubbing a hand down his face and sighs.
“I’m not going to lie, y’all. This is… fucking bad.”
Ali grabs his hand in between both of hers and gives it a squeeze. “What is it, baby? Why are they here?”
“They have a video of a man… a man who looks and sounds exactly like me but he’s saying shit I didn’t say, shit I wouldn’t ever say…”
“Like what?” Travis asks as he grips my hand tightly. Storm blows out a breath and shakes his head, the stress of the situation showing in every movement of his body.
“He talked about how hard the club had worked to be an asset to the community but that, despite everything we’ve done, we were still treated like second-class citizens. Then he started talking about if the people of Baton Rouge wanted to be afraid of us then we were going to give them something to be afraid of. He said we were going to start attacking the city for their neglect and carelessness…”
“Jesus,” Chance hisses, leaning back in his chair. My heart races as my mind struggles to wrap itself around everything he’s saying.
“How did they get this video?”
Storm scoffs. “A concerned citizen brought it to their attention after it was posted on the internet.”
“This is so fucking bad,” Travis groans, dropping his head back and closing his eyes as he grits his teeth. “Fucking Warren. It’s got to be.”
“How, Streak? How in the fuck does this person in the video look like me and how the hell am I ever going to clear my name when they have what looks like concrete evidence? I’m totally fucked and if this is Warren, this club is fucked, too. He just fucking won.”
Chapter Twenty
Travis
Sighing, I scrub my hand down my face and lean back in my chair as the computer screen in front of me blurs but it doesn’t matter because the moment I close my eyes, the video of Storm threatening the city of Baton Rouge plays in my mind. I’ve probably watched it close to twenty times since last night and I know the whole damn thing backward and forward. Not that it helps us any because as it turns out, the video is exactly what I thought it was – a deep fake. Albeit a very good one and if I didn’t know Storm personally, I might not have even noticed that it wasn’t real. Which is why my newfound knowledge will be no use to us in clearing Storm’s name.
Last night, Sergeant Williams and her merry little band of psychos spent hours in the clubhouse, first interviewing each and every one of us, including Rowan who has only been here for like two weeks, before having her team execute the search warrant they obtained while they were questioning us like terrorists. They tore the place apart, looking for any evidence of the attacks she is convinced we have planned or weapons to bring those plans to fruition but in the end, they found jack shit. But that’s just because all of our guns are very well hidden. Finally, after four hours of dogging us, Williams breezed out of here but not before promising us that this was far from over and that she would be keeping her eye on us.
As soon as she was gone, Blaze called Rodriguez to see if he knew anything or had heard anything but he’s almost as much in the dark as we are when it comes to this case. He did say that Williams has been sniffing around the club for about a week but he couldn’t ask any questions or dig into it for us since the top brass knows about his involvement with the club and they’ve been watching him. It’s nice to know that with as much good as we’ve done and all the people we’ve helped, we’re still looked at like criminals in this town.
Fuck.
Maybe fake Storm has a goddamn point.
“You got anything for me?”
I open my eyes as Blaze marches into my room and sinks into the chair next to my desk and I shrug, pointing to the video paused on my screen. “It’s a deep fake but that’s not going to help us.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” he asks, his brows furrowed as he studies the screen. Sighing, I sit forward again and press play. The video begins playing but I’ve slowed it down significantly and when we get to the right spot, I pause it, pointing to fake Storm’s blurry face in the frame.
“See this?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
“It happens so quick in the real time version that you wouldn’t even notice it or you would think it was a camera malfunction but it’s not. This is proof that this video is a deep fake…”
“Yeah,” he sighs, cutting me off. “You keep saying that but what does it mean? What the fuck is a deep fake?”
“Basically, someone took a shit ton of pictures of Storm and then ran it through a program that used artificial intelligence to analyze his face and make a copy of him.”
He scowls at the screen. “So this video is… what?”
“This video is someone, who is not Storm, standing in front of a camera and mimicking his voice to say all this shit and then on the computer, they swap the other face for Storm’s to make it look like he is the one threatening the city and promising violence when really, it’s someone else.”
“Okay,” he murmurs, scrubbing his jaw as he stares at the screen. “And how hard is this to do?”
I shrug. “Just depends on the person.”
“How hard would it be for you to do?”
“Fucking cake,” I tell him, shaking my head. “This video is really well done, so well done that in order to get it dismissed as evidence, we would need to bring in fucking experts and shit.”
Sighing, he turns to me. “You think it’s Warren?”
“I do. He’s shown before that he is skilled at computers or working with someone who is and he’s had the time to watch us and get more than enough photos of Storm to make a deep fake this good. From there, he just finds someone with the same body type as Storm and he’s fucking golden.”
“But what about the voice?” he asks. “And his tattoos. How did they get all of this put together?”
“With enough time, anything is possible and he’s had two fucking years, boss. I mean, have you seen the shit they can do in movies now? This is nothing,” I tell him, pointing to the screen and he blows out a breath as he drops his head into his hands.
“And there is no way to dispute it?”
I shake my head. “Like I said, you’re gonna need an expert. I noticed some things that didn’t fit Storm but I know him very well and I see him almost every fucking day. To Williams, this looks like a perfect copy of him. Plus, people don’t really know about deep fakes and the harm they can do. When someone sees a video of something, they believe it as fact and that’s going to be fucking hard to fight.”