Wicked Intentions(45)

He motions for me to extend my arms. I obey silently and he frisks me for weapons, head to foot. When he doesn’t find any, he asks if I’d like a drink.

I decline. He pours me one anyway—vodka, straight—and points to the closest chair.

“Why don’t you sit there for the flight?” he says, his voice as quiet as his eyes are hard.

It’s not a request. I sit. Then he gives me the drink and a smile so chilling, I shrink back into the chair.

He switches to Italian. “The vodka will help.”

I answer in English. “With what? I’m not afraid of flying.”

“Not the flight,” he says, still in Italian, still smiling. “With what comes after.”

He leaves the bottle on the table in front of me and goes to sit at the back of the plane with his two friends as the engines roar to life.





Twenty-Eight





Ryan




“Take it easy, brother, calm down, I can’t understand you—”

“She took the diamond!” I holler as I take a corner at top speed, tires squealing. “She’s gone, Mariana’s gone!”

The Bluetooth in the truck emits a crackle, then silence. “Well, that fucking sucks,” Connor says.

“I’m on my way to Metrix right now! We need to scramble the team and get everyone locked and loaded—”

“The team?”

“—and ready to go within thirty minutes!”

“Sorry, I’m not following. You know where she went?”

“Thirty minutes!” I shout at the top of my lungs and disconnect the call.



* * *

I fly so fast through the streets of lower Manhattan, it’s a miracle I don’t kill anyone, including myself. By the time I arrive at Metrix, I’ve achieved a tenuous grip on my fury and am able to slow at the gate and punch in the security code instead of gunning it and trying to crash straight through like my adrenaline would like. I park, jump out of the truck, and hump it across the parking lot without even closing the driver’s door.

Connor has already beat me here.

The big steel door slides open, and he’s standing with his arms folded over his chest, wearing his usual black boots, cargo pants, T-shirt, and Glock, along with a credible poker face—although I can tell he’s on high alert.

“What’s the 411, brother?”

I hold up my cell phone. “Let’s get the satellite up. I’ve got a bead on her.”

He turns and strides beside me as I head to the war room. Even at this hour, all the computer stations are manned. We don’t even get a single curious glance as we blow past the crew. They’re used to seeing us in combat mode.

“You wanna tell me what happened?”

“You know what happened,” I growl. “She took the diamond and left.”

“Uh-huh. And what precipitated that?”

I stop dead in my tracks, swing around, and stare at him. “Precipitated? Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”

Connor spreads his hands wide in a placating gesture, so I know what’s about to come out of his mouth is gonna be something I won’t like.

“All I’m asking is, did you two have a fight?”

“Jesus. Fucking. Christ,” I grind out.

“’Cause when you guys were here earlier, I was getting the vibe that she was basically…in love with you.”

“Of course she’s in love with me, dickhead!” I roar, my face exploding with heat.

Connor blinks. He drags a hand over his dark hair, shorn short like he always wears it. “Yeah, you lost me again, brother.”

I lift a hand and start to count the obvious facts on my fingers. “One: everything was peachy keen one minute, afterglow like a motherfucker painting my bedroom walls pink; the next minute, she’s gone. With the diamond. Two: she left a cryptic fuckin’ note with some weird Peter Pan quote her and Tabby were yakkin’ about the night they met. Three: She made a call on the cell phone I gave her right after I went into the shower and right before I discovered her gone. A call that lasted exactly forty-six seconds before bein’ disconnected from the other end. Guess who she called?”

“Reynard,” Connor says immediately.

“Bingo. Only the number she dialed was rerouted all over the fuckin’ place and bounced off practically every fuckin’ telecom satellite we got up in space before bein’ encrypted and obfuscated all to hell, then pingin’ back to a Chinese restaurant a block away from my house.”

Connor’s eyes turn poison black. Crazy-person black. The black of a man who’s getting ready to go to war. “Vincent Moreno. And that ping-back was his way of telling you he knows where you live.”

“And Mariana’s headed to him with the diamond in exchange for Reynard’s life.”

“She’s lucky you trust her,” he says, after a beat. “With her history of running out on you, most other guys would’ve figured this was the same thing.”

I turn and head toward the war room again. “Yeah, well, don’t give me a medal yet, ’cause I told her the phone was untraceable, which it isn’t.”

“Good thinking,” Connor says. “Unless Moreno or one of his men take it away from her at some point, which we have to assume they will.”

“We’ll still be able to locate her.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“I might’ve put a tracker on her sweatshirt,” I grudgingly admit.

When he doesn’t say anything, I go on. “And one on her belt. And another one in each of her boots.”

He chuckles, shaking his head. “Ain’t love grand?”

“Don’t judge me!”

“I’m not, brother. I’ve got GPS on every piece of Hello Kitty shit in Tabby’s closet.”

I push through the glass doors of the war room, muttering. “You must need extra bandwidth.”

The command center in Metrix—referred to by everyone as the war room—is exactly what its name suggests. All our ops are planned and monitored in the large rectangular space. It’s the central hub for every mission, the beating heart of the company, the one place I know that will be able to pinpoint Mariana’s location to within a five-foot radius.

An array of electronic equipment bristles from every wall and flat surface. Computers, video screens, satellite monitoring systems, you name it. In the center of the room is a long black table surrounded by leather captain’s chairs. One end of the room has a raised dais with computer terminals. I think it was modeled after the combat ops center at the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker complex in Colorado Springs, but Connor won’t admit it.

He’d never fess up to getting ideas from the Air Force.

I jog over to the nearest computer terminal, pull up the tracking program linked to my phone, and navigate to the map. And there’s Mariana, designated as a cluster of red dots, her location irrefutable.

Six thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean and climbing.

“Shit,” Connor says. “She’s in a bird. Gonna need to scramble the FBI.”

“They’ll take too long!” I growl in frustration. “Fuckin’ paper pushers!”

I look over at him and he sees my expression. “Oh no. Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“Ask Tabby to hack into air traffic control and see which flight has those coordinates.” I point at the screen. “Find out where it’s going. And see if she can fiddle with the onboard flight management system to get it to slow down a little, or at least tamper with the fuel gauge readout or something else so the pilot has to make an unscheduled landing.”

His brows lift. “Would you like her to make it rain, too, brother?”

After a moment, I ask, “Can she do that?”

He just shakes his head, sighs, and removes his cell phone from his pocket.





Twenty-Nine





Ryan




The flight is hours long. I don’t know exactly how many because I don’t have a watch and there aren’t any clocks on the plane, but when we begin to descend, the sun is rising over the distant horizon in a brilliant orange glow, and I can finally see land.

I unbuckle my lap belt and rise. Instantly, all three men behind me rise, too, watching me like hungry vultures.

I don’t bother pointing at the lavatory. They can fucking figure it out on their own.

Slamming the door behind me, I turn on the faucet and splash cold water on my face. I’m exhausted. I need a shower, clean clothes, and to brush my teeth. I use the toilet, flush, then comb my fingers through my hair. I’m hot, so I drag the hoodie over my head and enjoy the relief of cool air on my bare skin.

A tinny metal plink catches my attention. I look down.

In the sink, caught next to the drain stopper, is a round metal object the size of a dime. I instantly recognize it, because I’ve seen this thing before. I pick it up and stare at it until my hand shakes with the hot rush of adrenaline flooding my veins.

GPS.

My mind is a sudden blizzard of flying goose feathers. I have to stuff my fist in my mouth to stifle my groan.

What do I do? If Ryan follows me, Capo will kill him. And me. And Reynard.

Which he’ll probably do anyway, my brain unhelpfully reminds me.

I stand holding the tiny tracker until there’s a knock on the door and a sharp question in Italian.

“Give me a minute!” I snap. Then I’m overcome with terror at the thought of what will happen if Capo or his men discover this device.