She swallowed hard as he moved her around the table and forced her to sit in the only chair. In the light, her eyes shot up to his face and she gasped, nearly falling out of the chair with shock. “Fred… How-how are you… I don’t understand! You’re dead! Judge O’Connor saw your body with her own eyes. This isn’t real. You aren’t real.”
The judge’s ex-husband smiled. “Oh, I’m very real, Evie. Francis saw what I wanted her to see. I’ve been alive and well all this time. But I did change my name. You can call me Greg.”
Chapter 35
“First tango is behind the large boxwood shrub to the right of the front door.” Buzz’s voice came through over the coms, and Santo, wearing his night vision optics, looked through the scope on his rifle. They were a quarter-mile away from the house, but with the land so flat, the shot wouldn’t be difficult.
“Is tango two still in the same position?” Santo knew if he only disabled the first man, he would be able to shout a warning to the other man, putting them in a challenging position. They would be able to take the second man down, even if he knew they were coming, but he’d prefer to be ready for what they could expect.
“Yes. Still inside the house at the rear French doors. Obviously, they’re trying to cover both entrances.” With all his security cameras and programs fully operational again, Buzz had built a new firewall in a matter of minutes to prevent David from hacking their systems again until he could develop a more permanent solution.
“Snap, you know the drill. We need to take them down at the same time, and we need to take them alive. They might be able to tell us where Greg is headed with Evie.” Santo’s gut clenched as he said the words. Knowing the dangerous man had Evie terrified him. There were so many things he needed to tell her and he may not ever get the chance.
“I’m less than a klick away. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m in position.”
While Santo served as the sniper for their team, each one of them was a talented marksman. Having personally trained Snap, Santo knew without a doubt his friend could bring down the target. Santo remained focused on his target and saw the man cautiously peering at his surroundings. He also wore night vision optics, which told Santo whoever had hired him for his services had enough money to get some of the best mercenaries available.
The moon had been out when they jumped from the helicopter, but as he waited with Brusco by his side for Snap to get into position, dark clouds shrouded the moon and a drizzle began to fall. “As soon as both tangos are down, Lobo, we’ll need you to go in and secure them. Brusco, Snap, and I will head to the bunker to get everyone. Buzz, have you been able to find anything else to give you a hint about where Greg might have taken Evie?”
“While I’m grateful for the technology Stryker put into this bunker, my resources are limited. I need to get back to the communications room ASAP. It will allow me to search on a broader scale. I’ve been able to trace the movements of his truck on the highway, but he stopped in at the gas station in Hebbronville. A couple of other vehicles were there at the same time. The guy’s smart, unfortunately. He ditched the truck and grabbed a car, though from the angle of the view I could pick up on satellite, I don’t know which car he took. He timed leaving the gas station at the same time as two other cars left. I have no way of knowing which to follow.”
Santo let his breath out slowly, forcing his body to remain relaxed and ready to take the shot. He couldn’t let his emotions put the rest of his team in danger.
“I’m in position,” Snap announced.
“On my mark,” Santo said, lining up the man’s shoulder in his crosshairs. “Now.”
A half-second after squeezing the trigger, the man flew back against the house from the impact of the round. With his shoulder shattered, he couldn’t grip his rifle anymore and it tumbled from his grip and he slumped to the ground. “Tango one down.”
“Tango two down,” Snap replied.
“Move in, team.” Santo slung his rifle over his shoulder and took up a quick jog with Brusco at his side. Lobo would join Snap coming from the rear. In less than five minutes, they made it to the house. Lobo moved quickly, using zip ties to bind the hands and feet of the two men spewing obscenities.
Snap grabbed the keys to the four-wheelers and they arrived at the bunker within minutes. Stryker, Phantom, Buzz, Anya, and Elena waited for them and quickly climbed on. Elena and Anya rode together with Snap, and Phantom and Stryker balanced precariously with Brusco, while Buzz, the largest man on their team, hitched a ride with Santo. The women were silent and reserved, and none of the men talked until they made it back to the house.
Both Anya and Elena insisted on cleaning the house of the blood spatters both on the outside near the front door and inside the back door as soon as they arrived. Glass also littered the back entrance from where Snap’s shot had gone through the door to hit tango two. The men didn’t argue and knew it gave the women a way to keep their minds off everything happening.
The two men had been taken to a small room at the back of the house where Lobo had secured them to chairs. Neither were gagged and as soon as the team stepped into the room they began cursing colorfully. Their eyes widened slightly once the entire team of seven stood in front of them, and they chose to stop talking altogether and fell silent.
Santo stepped forward and addressed the men in Spanish, asking where Greg planned to take Evie. The men glared at him in silence. None of his teammates tried to stop him when he pulled his handgun and slammed the butt of it against each mans’ injured shoulder. Neither men shouted in pain, but grit their teeth and groaned.
“You’re professionals. We all know that. You’ve failed to accomplish what you were hired to do.” Santo spoke to them in English, certain they understood. From their sneers, he knew his assessment had been correct. “Give us the information we need, and we may put in a good word for you when you face accountability for your actions.”
Both men glared at him, and he lifted his gun, about to strike them again, but Stryker placed a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “Give Buzz a chance to pull up information. I want to hurt these bastards just as much as you do, but the longer they simmer in pain, the more likely they’ll open up to us. If Buzz can’t find anything, I’ll help you extract answers from them when we come back.”
Santo clenched his teeth in frustration but knew Stryker’s suggestion made the most sense. He looked at the two men. “If I have to come back to you, be prepared to talk. You won’t like what happens if you don’t.”
Buzz, Santo, Stryker, and Snap all hurried upstairs while Phantom, Brusco, and Lobo helped the women with the cleaning. Given the emotional upheaval they had just gone through, none of them wanted the women to be alone, especially given how vulnerable they all felt.
Buzz turned on his equipment and it slowly hummed to life. He keyed in coordinates, and slowly the multiple screens on the wall began to fill with satellite images. They all groaned when they saw the dense cloud cover prevented them from seeing anything. “That’s just what it looks like right now,” Buzz said, setting the time back by thirty minutes, and the images cleared. “I’m hoping I can tap into a security camera from the gas station to give me a better angle and know which vehicle Greg took.”
“Earlier when you described what you saw when he took Evie from the ranch, he kept one of the mercenaries with him?” Santo asked.
“Yes.” Buzz pulled up another screen on his computer and began to hunt for a security camera tied to the gas station. A window in the bottom left corner of the screen popped up with a flashing red light and what appeared to be coordinates. “What the hell?” Buzz squinted at the window, shaking his head.
“What is it? Is it another warning that David is trying to hack our systems?” Stryker asked tensely.
“No. It’s—I’ll be damned! It’s Evie! She saw the tracking devices I’ve been testing and I told her to take one for fun. She activated it. It’s been on since she left the house.”
Hope surged i
n Santo’s heart. “Do you mean you know exactly where she is?”
“Yes. We have exact coordinates. Let me pull up a map.” His fingers flew across the keyboard and his mapping program opened, showing an old farmhouse located where Evie’s tracker emitted a signal. “Greg must have her there. Hang on…” He keyed in something else on another screen and several letters and numbers appeared on the screen, complete nonsense to Santo, but clearly a message to Buzz. “He has a router transmitting from that location. He intends to get her to go into the game and deliver the information to him, and probably David at the same time.”
Santo’s heart pounded rapidly in his chest. “How far away?”
“Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.”
“We’ll make it there in ten. Send me the coordinates, Buzz. I’m going to get my woman.”
* * *
“I’m not going to help you. I know what you’re going to do. As soon as you have the information you want, you’re going to kill me. Why would I ever help you?”
Greg yanked on the wire around her wrists and she restrained her cry of pain. Feeling had started to slowly return to her wrists and hands with the break from her frantic struggles. The throbbing pain did little to take her mind off the complete shock Fred, or Greg as he called himself, had been alive the past two years, carrying out heinous crimes in South America.
“You know, that game David built really was a stroke of genius. It gave us a secret way to mingle without being suspicious to anyone. Until you somehow snuck in there and gained access as an administrator. Suddenly you went from insignificant to a real problem.”
“I’m glad I gave your life a little hell. Your wife wanted me to pursue it. She gets all the credit..”
“Ex-wife, Evie. Ex-wife. I’m surprised she came up with such an idea. She was always so high on morality, getting involved with something so criminal doesn’t seem like her.”
“She wanted to find your murderer. Your death devastated her.” Evie glared at him. “You deserve a special place in hell to rot.”
Greg yanked on the wire again and she rapidly blinked back the tears burning her eyes. “That’s why she made so many mistakes. It makes sense now. She must have been desperate. She didn’t know who I was, of course, though I knew she dabbled in it for some reason. I convinced her to give me more and more access to her account so I could ‘help’ her find bad guys. She fell for it. So typical of Francis to believe someone who spouts the words she wants to hear.”
“So what happened? If everything was moving in your favor, why did you lock her out of the site and have her killed?”
“I didn’t have her killed. Well, I guess I did indirectly.” He shrugged with indifference. “As soon as she gave me administrative control of her personal avatar, I had my tech whiz—”
“David. And he’s not yours. He works for many different criminal organizations. Don’t think you’re more important than anyone else in his eyes.”
“You seem to know a lot about all of this. Your avatar really stirred him up. David recognized your coding style from a few years ago. It is such a small world, isn’t it?”
“If you knew I was on the site and David is working with you, why did you kill her? You’d already kicked her off the site.”
“Yes, well, that’s because she discovered my true identity. I had to let the man I work for know about it, or I’d have both Francis and him out for blood. He decided to simply have her killed, as well as others tied to the site that could potentially turn on him.”
“Like the judges,” Evie breathed, connecting everything that had happened.
“The judges don’t know who my boss is. Few people do. He’s leading a group of people to make some radical changes in this country, and I’ve been facilitating efforts on my end in Colombia.”
“So you know who he is. And yet, here you are, trying to do something without him knowing. You’re not loyal to him. He should have ordered for you to be killed as well.”
Greg’s smile made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. “He’ll never know. Which is why it’s in your best interest to help me. If you give me the data I want and delete the entire site, including the hidden files, I’ll let my employer know you are no longer a threat, and killing you will only draw more attention to his actions than letting you live. I can put an end to the hit put out on your life.”
Evie’s mind raced. She knew she couldn’t trust him. At the same time, though, she wanted to get into the hidden rooms and pull up the critical data so Santo’s team could use it to pursue the person leading the treasonous activities in the United States. The only way she could do so required David not to block her, and she knew Greg controlled the situation.
“How are you able to convince him I’m no longer a threat?”
“I’m working closely with him on many things. All I have to do is share with him that the site has been disabled and all evidence is destroyed. He’s in a powerful position—if you tried to claim you had seen anything on a site no longer visible, he could destroy you.” Greg seemed confident in what he said. Evie knew, though, he wouldn’t be satisfied with such an ending. Greg blamed her for the situation he found himself in.
“You’ve changed.” Her eyes raked him from head to toe. “I knew you weren’t worthy of her when I first met you, but she never stopped loving you. Even when she knew you had started to get involved in criminal activities, she believed she could save you. Now you brag about your power in Colombia. How many people have you killed? How many lives have you ruined?”
“I only kill people when there isn’t someone around to do it for me. I’ve built a career for myself. I know you wouldn’t approve given your penchant for the law. But I’ve become someone with power. Don’t push me any further. I can make you very uncomfortable and you’ll end up begging me to let you do what I’ve asked.”
“Do you promise me you’ll get this leader to lift the hit on me? Do you promise I can return to a normal life once I do what you want?”
He smiled and used a finger to make a cross over his heart. “I promise.”
Evie nodded slowly and turned towards the computer. “What do you need me to do?”
* * *
He rattled off instructions to her to get to the hidden rooms following a specific path David had designed that bypassed all of the blockades he had put in place. He had made it an easy way for someone to either cheat or gain access to illegal chats with very little effort. As she worked on the computer, he paced the room, looking out the windows and rain began to fall outside. The tension in his body told her he feared being discovered. She hoped the tracker Buzz had given her worked and she had a chance to survive.
“Have you got it yet?” he demanded, walking up behind her. She had deliberately opened a second screen to prevent him from seeing her actual progress, and all he could see were the lines of code she typed in to get into the files. “What is taking so long?”
“I haven’t worked with this data in two years. I’m trying to remember everything.”
“Work faster. We’ve already been here too long.”
Evie kept her eyes averted from the body on the floor on the opposite side of the room. From the amount of blood on the floor, the man had to be dead. Greg seemed to have forgotten all about the body.
With Greg peering out the dirty windows on the other side of the room, she clicked open the other screen and pulled up the data files she’d discovered in the final hidden room. She didn’t spend any time trying to read it or understand it. She made a copy of the large file and jumped into the other window, firing off a message to Buzz with the log attached. If she didn’t survive, at least they would have the information.
Greg began to head back to her and she jumped into the log, manually deleting the entire file. She scowled at the computer. “Something’s wrong,” she said, looking up at Greg.
“What are you talking about?” He came around and stood behind her.
“I’m looking at the log now. It’s emp
ty. Everything has been erased. No matter what I key in, I can’t pull up any data.”
“That’s impossible. Aren’t there two files you created? Go into the other one. See if the data is in there.”
Evie reluctantly navigated to the other file. The barbed wire dug into her flesh with every letter she typed, and she considered asking Greg to remove it to help her but discarded the idea. His paranoia seemed to be rapidly increasing, and she didn’t know how much further she could push him.
“There’s data here, but it appears to be old.” She hadn’t known what she would find in the second room but felt immense relief discovering the most recent string of information dated nearly eighteen months prior.
“I don’t care. Send the file to David. He’ll be able to use it.” He rattled off an email address for her to send the file. He continued to hover behind her, but she could tell he knew little about computers, which made it simple for her to grab a blank file and attach it in the email she fired off to David from Greg’s email account.
“Is it possible David already got the data from the first file?” Evie asked with false curiosity.
“Impossible. He’s been anxiously waiting for you to do this, same as me. Neither one of us can afford for my boss to know what we’re doing. If he had gotten the data, he would have told me.”
“Would he? Or would he set you up so you’d leave your precious operations in Colombia and take such a risk here in the United States?”
Greg’s fair skin turned a shade of red. “It certainly is convenient for you to have discovered the lack of data. What did you do? You’ve never been good at lying, Evie, and it shows on your face now. What did you do?”
Protected in His Arms: Elite Texas SEALs Page 33