by Lori Ryan
*****
Logan looked up at the clock and blinked. He’d been buried in work trying to catch up after their mini vacation, but he was pretty sure Sam had left at one thirty to walk Billy and grab lunch for them. It was two forty-five. She should have been back a while ago. He looked at his cell phone and didn’t see any missed calls or texts.
He pulled up his messages and fired off a quick everything all right? text to her, and then went back to his computer, saving the file he was working on before sending another file to the printer. Turning back to the phone, he picked it up with a frown. No response.
Maybe she had stopped to talk to Chad or Jennie. He texted each of them, asking if they’d seen her. No’s came back in quick succession, followed by an everything all right? from Chad. It seemed they were all still a little on edge after all they’d been through the last few weeks. Sam was most likely fine. She’d probably just gotten into a conversation with someone at the park and forgotten the time, just like he had.
But that tiny tingling at the back of his neck said otherwise. The fact that she wasn’t responding to his text supported his gut. He walked to the lobby to see if Amanda had seen her and stopped short at the sight of Billy sitting at Amanda’s feet. Billy came over immediately, circling his legs as Logan walked closer to Amanda. God, he didn’t want to know why his dog was out here without Sam anywhere in sight.
“Hey, Amanda.” He tried to keep his tone light. “Where’s Sam?”
“Oh, are you done with your meeting? She said not to bother you, but she wasn’t feeling well. She went home an hour or so ago.”
Logan cursed and took off back down the hall toward Chad’s office. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. No way in hell Sam would leave without telling him, even if she did feel sick. Not unless she had a reason to. And for her to actually lie to Amanda and make sure someone was watching Billy, well, that didn’t add up.
He dialed Sam’s phone number as he and Billy made their way to Chad’s office.
“We have a problem,” he said to Chad as he entered his office. Jack and Chad both looked up from where they stood over Chad’s desk, looking at something.
“What’s up?” Jack asked.
“Sam. She took Billy for a walk an hour and a half ago and didn’t come back. I just discovered she left Billy with Amanda and told Amanda not to bother me since I was in a meeting.”
Chad raised his brows. “No meeting?”
“No meeting,” Logan confirmed. “I have a really bad feeling about this. She’s not responding to texts or calls.”
Chad dialed his phone and asked Jennie to come into his office. Since her office was only two doors down, she appeared quickly.
“Can you try to call Sam? See if she picks up?”
Logan tried not to freak. He knew what Chad was thinking. Maybe Sam was avoiding Logan for some reason. Maybe he’d done or said something to piss her off. Some part of him knew he hadn’t, though. He recognized the feeling churning in his gut right now. It was one he’d often felt out on deployments. He had learned to heed it. The one time he hadn’t, too many people had died.
Jennie tried both texting and calling, but got no answer, either. They all looked at each other and Logan’s heart hit the pit of his stomach. They had been wrong somehow. When they’d thought this was all over, when they’d thought Sam was safe. They were wrong.
He pulled up the Find My Friends app and checked for Sam’s location on his phone.
“Says she’s at home,” he said as they all walked out. There wasn’t any discussion about what they needed to do or who was staying and working. They would all go find Sam. Jack gave instructions to Amanda as they all left the office. They’d be back when Sam was found. All meetings and appointments needed to be cancelled for the next few days.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sam’s first stop was the ATM for cash. She’d left her phone at her town house on purpose, knowing that would bring Logan there. She went to the ATM and took out cash, and then went to a nearby hotel and holed up in a room. She logged on and got to work. First step, find out who had done the legwork for Diya. No way was she able to do all of that herself. Planting all of that evidence had taken some skills your everyday person simply didn’t have.
Sam began to troll hacker chat rooms and look for telltale little brags. Anyone talking about something big they had done or anything remotely looking like the kind of hack this would require. She also pulled up all of the info they’d tracked down that had pointed toward Lazarus Alonzo earlier. With any luck, if that info had been faked, she’d find a footprint somewhere.
She dumped the stash of candy she’d picked up on the way over onto the bed, crossing her legs crisscross-applesauce-style on the bed. Using her teeth to open a Kit Kat wrapper, quickly followed by a Twix bar wrapper, she began to scan. It might take her hours, but she’d find out who had helped Diya and then she’d fix it so none of them could touch her or Logan or the people she loved, again.
Thankfully, Sam was quite used to spending hours in front of a computer screen, trawling for one small piece of information, one tiny clue to lead her in the right direction. She was used to the eye fatigue and the grogginess. She cranked her music up in the background and kept on going.
And that’s when she saw the first telltale signs. Damn it. She should have seen it before. She should have realized the trail leading to Alonzo was too clean. When she looked closely, she saw tiny traces that something was wrong. The money that supposedly went from Alonzo’s account through a number of cover companies, eventually landing in the account of one of the men who attacked her? The trail actually had one other stop, but it hadn’t been a stop along the way. It was the originating account. Alonzo hadn’t sent that money. Diya Bogolomov had.
Sam cursed under her breath and kept digging. She knew whoever was doing this would have left a clue somewhere. That was the thing about most hackers. They wanted credit. They craved it. Even if this guy had been paid to keep his mouth shut, somewhere there would be some little slipup. She’d bet on it.
*****
Logan cursed as he picked up Sam’s phone and scrolled through the alerts. No sign of her in the town house, no sign she’d been around to receive any of the alerts.
“Is her computer here?” Chad asked as they made their way through the town house. Kelly had just arrived, over Jack’s objections. Jennie was filling her in on all they knew—which was, basically, nothing. A whole lot of nothing.
“No.” Logan knew Sam kept her laptop locked in her desk drawer when it wasn’t in use. Her desk drawer stood open and empty at the moment.
Chad shook his head. “I wonder if that means she took off voluntarily or—”
He didn’t finish the thought.
Logan looked around the living room. He didn’t know what to think and he honestly didn’t know where to start.
“Logan?” Jennie’s voice was soft and laced with…pity? She came down the small set of stairs that led from the kitchen to the living room and glanced at Chad. Kelly and Jack hung behind her.
“What is it?” He had a feeling he sounded a hell of a lot harsher than he wanted to.
She handed him a slip of paper. Christ, he didn’t want to look at it. He didn’t want to know what it said. Because suddenly he had doubts. He was wondering if maybe, just maybe, Sam had simply left.
He looked down and read the lines and felt the kick in his gut all the way down to his balls. Chad came and quietly took the note from his hands and read it.
“Uh uh. I don’t buy it,” Chad said and Logan’s heart kicked into gear.
He didn’t know what would be better. If the note was right, it meant Sam had left him because she wasn’t sure of them. Wasn’t sure she wanted the life she’d said she wanted with him. It might kill him, but at least it would mean she was safe. On the other hand, if she was forced to write it, she was in danger. Possibly hurt.
“She loves you, Logan,” Chad said with a hell of a lot of conviction. Loga
n raised his gaze and met his eyes.
“If she loves me, but she left, that means—”
“Yeah, that means.” Chad nodded. “We’ll find her.”
“Where do we even begin? Sam is the one we would always call in a situation like this,” Kelly asked.
Logan picked up his phone. “We call in a ton of favors.”
“Zach is already on his way to meet with a few of the guys we know at the FBI. They’ve all worked with Sam. They owe her and they care about her. They’ll do what they can,” Jack said.
Chad nodded and started dialing his phone. “I’ll see if I can pull any more strings.”
The group was quiet and grim as Logan and Chad called as many people as they could. They weren’t able to get a B.O.L.O. out for her car, but unofficially every officer and agent in the area was watching for her vehicle. A few of the guys at the FBI were trying to track her online and others were checking hotel and motel records.
Logan swore bitterly into the phone, causing everyone to stop what they were doing to watch him. Because one of his contacts had just informed him that Diya Molov was likely behind Sam’s disappearance.
“What the hell? How did Diya get this close with no red flags being raised?”
He was quiet, listening for a minute, but the anger coursed through his veins like blood itself.
“Find out!” he barked and threw his phone onto the couch. He fisted his hands into his hair and tugged, wanting the pain as a distraction. This couldn’t be happening.
“Want to fill us in?” Chad asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Logan said, looking up. He needed to get his head back in the game…get out there and find Diya Bogolomov and her cousin. “That was one of the SEALs I was working with on my last assignment. I can’t give you all the details,” he said, looking at Chad and the rest of the group, who nodded their understanding—they knew he had worked a lot of classified ops, “but he’s tracked someone linked to my past here. Diya Bogolomov has a lot of reasons to want to see me hurting and it turns out she’s been in Connecticut for the past two weeks. It’s too coincidental. We suspected she might have the identities of me and a few of my team members, but we hadn’t heard anything more. She was spotted in one of the airports and flagged, but somehow the people who should have alerted us never made the connection with my location and her movements.”
“How angry is this woman? How unstable?” Chad asked as Jennie put her arms around his waist and Kelly did the same with Jack. Seeing them all leaning on one another killed him. He wanted Sam safe in his arms.
“Very and very. And, she’s likely well-funded.”
“What does she want?” Jennie’s voice reflected her fear.
Logan hadn’t ever really understood the meaning of the word despair until now. He felt utterly gutted at what he was about to say.
“She wants me to pay. She wants me to lose everything.”
No one spoke. They didn’t need to ask why. It went unsaid. They all seemed to understand Logan had somehow taken everything from this woman and she wanted the same for him. She wanted him to suffer as she had. Now, she was going to use Samantha to do it. She was going to take Sam away.
“All right,” he said. He wasn’t going to just sit here. He couldn’t just sit back and let Sam go without a fight. “There’s no sign of a struggle here. Amanda said she came in and asked her to watch Billy and give him to me after a meeting I wasn’t in.”
The dog poked his head up at the mention of his name, but continued to watch the group, as if waiting for some instruction on how he might help.
“So, whatever made her leave, she wasn’t physically forced because no one was with her.”
Kelly nodded. “But something made her leave. And, if they didn’t simply take Sam or keep someone with her, they must be awfully confident that whatever they have on her is enough to make her come back. Or enough to make her do whatever they instructed her to do. Could this woman have reached out to Sam? Somehow convinced her that she needed to leave to protect you? To keep you safe? That’s what would convince Sam. If she thought she was somehow protecting you.”
They were all quiet for a moment, as if each of them were trying to digest what Kelly had said.
“Oh, hell,” Logan said. “She thinks she’s protecting all of us. Sam’s plan to kill a SEAL.”
“What?” They all looked at him.
“The listening devices. Sam was bugged the day she told us how she would kill a SEAL. She would plant evidence against everyone the SEAL cared about and—”
“Oh, God. No!” Jennie knew, without him finishing the sentence what the plan entailed.
“What?” Kelly asked. “And, what?” She was the only one who hadn’t been in the room at Sutton Capital that day.
Chad filled in the rest for her. “In Sam’s plan, you set up everyone a person loves to go down for something criminal or something along those lines, then demand they kill themselves. You tell the person, they either kill themselves, or everything they’ve set up to hurt your loved ones is released. Sam meant it as a joke. She said you’d give the person a timeline. What was the timeline, Logan?”
“Forty-eight hours. You tell the person they have forty-eight hours to do it or you release everything you’ve got on their loved ones. If Diya was really listening, she’s sick enough to turn it around on Sam and actually do it.”
“And, Sam is—” Kelly started but couldn’t finish.
“Sam cares enough about everyone to do it.” Jennie said what they were all thinking.
Logan was hanging on by a thread, but he forced himself to steady his breathing and look his friends in the eye.
“We need to stop her. We can’t let her do this.” Shit. His voice didn’t sound anywhere near as steady as he’d like it to. “Where would she go?”
“Well,” Chad said, “she wouldn’t take it lying down. You can bet she has a plan.”
“So what would she do?” Jennie asked.
“She’d hack them,” Logan said. He knew it with as much certainty as he knew his name. She would hack them right back. She’d think she could protect them and take Diya on by herself. “What does she need to do that?”
“Nothing,” Chad said. “Just her laptop and an outlet. Space to work in and a shit ton of candy and junk food. But, her credit cards haven’t been used.”
Logan raised his eyebrows, but Chad just shrugged. “I have the passwords to her accounts. I checked them all. She withdrew five hundred dollars in cash. That’s it.”
Logan made a mental note to find out why Chad had Sam’s passwords later, but for now he just filed it away. “So, she wouldn’t go far. If she only has five hundred, she’s probably just nearby somewhere in a hotel.”
“Would she go home? To her parents’ house?” Jennie looked around the group.
Kelly spoke up this time. “No,” she said, resting her hand on her stomach as if to protect the baby from what was happening, but Logan saw Jack’s eyes narrow in on Kelly’s hand. The protective gesture wasn’t lost on him.
“She wouldn’t go home,” Kelly continued. “She wouldn’t want to put them at risk or tell them what was going on.”
Logan slid a glance to Jack, who still watched his wife like a hawk.
“Kelly and Jack, why don’t you hole up here and see if Sam calls her phone or comes back here. That way, Kelly can get some rest. Chad and Jennie and I can meet up with Zach and come up with a plan to narrow down hotels and track her down.” Logan set out plans for each person.
Kelly opened her mouth as though she might object, but Jack took her arm and led her to the couch. The look on his face didn’t allow room for her to argue.
“We got it covered, Logan,” Jack said. “Mrs. Poole is with Maddie. She’ll get her dinner and put her down to bed. I’ll ask her to spend the night just in case we don’t make it back for a while. We’ll stay here and hope Sam gets in touch.”
Logan nodded, but he knew Sam wouldn’t come back here. He needed to get ou
t there and find her. Help her.
Chapter Thirty-two
Sam sat back with a grin. She had him. A black hat hacker who went by the lame name of H3sthat600d but who was really Peter Gatorelli. He was a man who would take money from anyone, to do anything, and apparently, that included framing innocent people like her friends and family, with the goal of forcing her to commit suicide. Sam swallowed hard because it was her own idea. She had meant it as a joke, but the fact that this plot had come straight from her own mind made her feel sick.
She began to document as much as she could, outlining H3sthat600d’s moves as he set up her friends and family, capturing evidence in screenshots and putting them into a file for the FBI. It took her hours, but she needed to make sure her friends and family would be protected if things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.
Her stomach churned, primarily because it was now nearly midnight and she’d been eating nothing but junk food and the coffee she’d brewed in the tiny hotel coffee machine. She looked at the clock. Room service wouldn’t be available for a few more hours, so she’d just have to wait.
Shoving aside the nausea she felt, she read through post after post by H3sthat600d in chat rooms. The guy was in his mid-twenties, but he had the demeanor and sense of humor of a teenager. He came across as being seventeen, not twenty-seven.
She would need to get his hard drive and fast copy a clone of it. That was the thing about most black hats. They took their online security seriously, but they didn’t take physical security into account enough. If she had to bet, she would put her money on his laptop simply floating around his hotel room somewhere. Sam knew just who to call to help her get ahold of it.
The phone rang a few times before one of the twins answered. They weren’t really twins. Ember and Evie were geeky gamers who had made a ton of money with software designs a couple of years back. They’d taken their earnings and gotten plastic surgery. A lot of it. They now looked similar enough to one another to be dubbed “the twins.” And, twins that could grace the cover of a men’s magazine, at that.