“David,” Elle said. “A gift from his visit last night.”
“Kinky visit.” Ryan looked at Isobel. “Can I say kinky with the kids in the room?”
“Who you calling a kid?” Jack snatched the bag of cookies from Ryan, making him lunge after it.
“Will you act your age for five bloody minutes?” Callum snapped at Ryan. “David is the least of our problems. Lake came up blank on our guy being a government operative. Nobody’s missing an undercover agent. There are no rumours or whispers coming from any of his contacts, and he has some heavyweight contacts.”
“Does that mean dead dude was a bad dude?” Jack said with sugar around his mouth.
“Aye.” Callum frowned at Jack. “Have some orange juice with all that sugar. Get a bloody vitamin into you.”
Megan made a suspicious coughing sound and appeared overly innocent when Callum glared at her.
“Here you go.” Isobel put a glass of juice in front of Jack, who downed it in one long swallow.
“Where’s the gear you picked up from Jack’s friend?” Callum asked Ryan.
“We just got here. Can’t a man have some food first?” He dumped a black leather sports bag in the middle of the table.
“You look at this already?” Callum asked Ryan.
“A glance. We were in a hurry. But I saw enough to worry,” Ryan said as Dimitri upended the contents of the bag onto the table.
Callum turned to stone as he surveyed the contents of the bag. Isobel came to stand beside him.
“What are these things?” She pointed at some black devices that looked like headphones, but weren’t. She knew—they’d tried to get them to work.
“Throat microphones.” Callum picked up one of the four sets. “Used by the military, law enforcement, mercenaries. The sensors are placed against the throat and they can pick up even the quietest whisper. It’s the way a team can communicate without making noise.”
“Oh.” Isobel stepped closer to him, wanting to feel the reassurance of his heat and strength.
Elle held up a strip of plastic with things welded onto it and wires jutting out. “This looks like it’s part of a communications system. Might be related to the piece you found at the pawnbroker.”
“These are detonators.” Dimitri picked up one of the long metal rods with wire connections on one end.
“Like for bombs?” Isobel wrapped a hand around Callum’s forearm and held on tight.
He tugged his arm away from her, and for a second she felt a surge of pain at the rejection, then he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her into his side. Right there. In front of everyone. She tried not to blush, but it was hard, and she wasn’t sure she succeeded. Callum, meanwhile, ignored everyone else and carried on poking through the pile of odds and ends.
“Can you get prints off these, Elle?” Callum said.
Elle shook her head. “I’ll try, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
Dimitri shoved some wires over to look underneath, and stilled. “Is that what I think it is, Elle?”
Isobel leaned in to see what he was talking about. There was a tiny glass cylinder, with wires and metal inside it, stuck to the back of some tape that was around one of the wires.
“Yes.” Elle sounded awestruck. “That’s an embedded version of an RFID chip.”
“Dumb it down for the blondes in the room,” Megan said, and tossed her long hair.
“It’s a radio frequency identification chip.” Elle looked up at them. “You all have them. They’re in your credit cards. They store a small amount of information, like your bank details or the code to unlock a door. You know those cards they give you in hotels instead of keys? Those use RFID. That’s what this is, only instead of flat and sealed into a card, it’s in a tiny glass tube and can be implanted under the skin. I’m surprised it’s still in one piece.”
“I think the wires and the tape protected it.” Dimitri reached into his pocket, produced a Swiss army knife, pulled out the scissors and cut the piece of tape with the glass on it, off the messy heap of wires. He passed it to Elle. “I don’t think they knew that was there.” He looked at Callum. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That this crew are all implanted with these things and that’s why they were so desperate to get the body back?” Callum stared at the chip, looking grim. “And why they took the guy I dealt with at Isobel’s house.”
“I’ve heard whispers about covert groups using these implants,” Elle said. “If no one knows you have them, then they’re a great way to keep information secure.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “No way for the enemy to get hold of your access key unless they cut off your hand and wave it at the lock.”
“And they’d have to know the implant was there in the first place,” Elle said. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d look for in a standard autopsy either. A tiny chip like this, implanted in the web between your thumb and forefinger would be pretty hard to find.”
“I would still want to pick up a team member’s body if I could, just to make sure the tech stayed secret,” Dimitri said.
“I don’t get it,” Isobel said. “If these chips are top secret and they were so worried someone would find it in the body, why leave him on the beach in the first place?”
“I don’t think they intended to be gone that long. I think they were planning on coming back for him,” Callum said. “But you moved the body before they could get it.”
She shook her head. “That’s an awful big risk to take.”
“Was it? You said yourself, no one goes into that cove.”
“I agree with Callum’s theory,” Elle said as she typed. “I checked all the photos of the beach. There was one set of prints other than the Sinclair sisters’ and the body. You saw two people get off the boat. It stands to reason that only one of them made it out of the cove.”
“So,” Dimitri said, “two people, carry something heavy off the boat. There’s an argument. It gets out of hand. One of them kills the other and has a choice: deal with the body right then, or get his cargo where it needs to be while it’s still dark.” He looked at Callum. “I would have taken the cargo and come back for the body.”
“But his plan goes to hell, because Isobel moved it while he was gone.” Callum looked back at her. “How soon after seeing them get off the boat did you go down into the cove?”
“I called my sisters as soon as I saw them with what I thought was a body, and we went down to the cove a few minutes after we heard their car leave,” Isobel said.
“And you were down there how long?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe.”
Callum looked back at Dimitri. “Not enough time for him to deliver his cargo and get back to the body before Isobel took it.”
“They must have been freaking out when they discovered the body was gone,” Ryan said. “If the cops had taken it, it would have been autopsied by now.”
Callum nodded. “And there was a chance they’d have found the chip. Elle, can you get the information stored on that thing?”
“If there’s any information on there, I can get it,” Elle said. “It isn’t exactly hard. You can buy an RFID reader from a local tech store. It’s just a case of finding the right one. But first, I can try my phone. It has tech in it that activates a passive RFID chip and transfers the information to the phone.”
“Does that happen with bank cards too?” Megan said. “Because my account increased dramatically when I married Dimitri, and I don’t want to lose any of it. It’s the best thing I got out of this relationship.”
“That’s my girl,” Dimitri said with a grin. “Always making me feel loved.”
She blew him a kiss.
“Yes, you can steal people’s bank information with a decent phone and a little know-how.” Elle dug out a piece of futuristic technology that doubled as a phone, and Jack actually whined at the sight of it.
“One day, I’m going to get one of those,” he said with the wistfulness only a
teenager could pull off over a phone.
“What the hell for?” Callum demanded.
“To text. To surf the net. To play games and take pictures. To look cool. What else?”
“When I was your age, a phone was for talking to people.”
“Dude, when you were my age, dinosaurs roamed Scotland.”
“I’m only forty-two, you cheeky wee arse.”
“Ancient,” Jack coughed into his hand, and grinned at Callum.
“Dinosaurs!” Sophie shouted. “I like dinosaurs.” She smacked the top of Callum’s head for emphasis.
Elle pressed the phone against the chip and swiped across the screen. A few seconds later, it beeped. “Got it. Let me send it to my laptop and we can see what it is.” She tapped at her phone screen, then sat back at her keyboard, her fingers flying. Which looked very strange with the fluffy cuffs around her wrists.
“Right,” she said. “We’ve got a couple of things on here, but not much. Remember that RFID chips only hold about two kilobytes of data. Which is nothing. It’s enough to store your name, bank account number, the code to your door, that sort of thing, but not enough to store massive amounts of information. Basically, these chips point the way to something else. The one in your bank card sends the reader to your bank, that sort of thing.” She leaned into the screen. “We have a bank account number, an IP address, and a code for something. No name.”
“Where’s the bank account located?” Dimitri said.
“Caymans, by the looks of it.”
“Can you hack the account, see who it belongs to?” Megan asked.
“I doubt it. The security is multi-layered. I could try, but there’s no knowing how long it would take and whether I’d be arrested before I got in.”
“I don’t get it,” Megan said. “You hack governments all the time. Isn’t a bank easier?”
“No. Banks are way harder.”
“I thought you could do everything,” Megan said with a pout. “You’ve shattered my illusions.”
“Delusions, more like,” Callum muttered. “Where does the IP address take you?”
“Checking that out now,” Elle said.
Everyone in the room seemed tense, expectant, waiting for the information they’d been chasing to be revealed.
“It’s dark web,” Elle muttered. “This will take a few minutes.”
Isobel looked at Callum, ready to ask what Elle meant. Callum felt her move and looked down at her. “The dark web is an area of the internet where information is exchanged anonymously. It’s where you can buy and sell anything. If it’s illegal, it’s on the dark web.”
“Oh.” She spied Sophie’s grinning face peering over Callum’s head and couldn’t help but smile at her. Her fingers were tight in Callum’s hair, but he didn’t say a word. “She’s hurting you. Let me take her down.”
“Darlin’, she’s three. There’s no way she can hurt me. Leave her be. She’s happy.”
And that was when it happened. Isobel felt the bottom fall out of her stomach, and her head felt light. And she knew.
She was falling in love with Callum McKay.
She felt him still. “What is it?” He searched her face, looking for answers, and Isobel looked away, afraid that she gave away too much.
“N-nothing.” She felt her cheeks burn.
“You’re lying.” It was barely a whisper, but she heard the steel in it.
“I’ll tell you later. I promise. Okay?” She looked back at him and saw the worry there. “I promise,” she said again as she leaned into him.
“Oh,” Elle said. “That isn’t good.” Her fingers flew and she leaned into the screen. “That isn’t good at all.” She suddenly switched the laptop off, turned it over and removed the battery and the hard drive. She looked at Callum. “They backtraced me.”
“Oh crap,” Ryan said, and immediately lost interest in his food.
Suddenly, Ryan and Dimitri were running.
“I’ll get weapons,” Dimitri called. “Megan, check the windows and doors.”
“On it,” Megan shouted, and ran.
“They know our location?” Callum asked Elle.
“They were too fast, Callum,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have expected it after the way they’d wiped their operative’s background. They have someone on their team who’s really good.”
“And they know we were looking into them? Here?” Callum said.
Elle was obviously shaken. “Yes.”
“Callum.” Isobel’s voice shook. She couldn’t help it. She felt like her whole body wanted to shake and keep on shaking until she disappeared entirely. “What’s happening?”
He held her. “There’s a team in the area. The ones who blew up your house. The ones who saw my face. They now know we’re onto them and they know where we are.”
“The police…”
“By the time they get here, it could be too late. And the local police force isn’t equipped to deal with something like this. They won’t be armed.”
Isobel looked at Jack, who was paying close attention to every word Callum said. He looked so much older than his years. And he looked ready to fight. Her gaze shot to Sophie, who was tugging at Callum’s hair and watching everyone with that intense expression she got. She knew something serious was happening, she just didn’t know what.
Callum let go of Isobel’s waist and stepped back. He put a hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye. “The police might not know how to handle this, but we do. Dimitri, Ryan and I are ex-military. Elle and Megan have been in situations like this before now and have had training in handling weapons. You have to trust us. We will keep you safe.”
Isobel nodded, just as a light above the door started flashing.
“The perimeter has been breached.” Callum lifted Sophie from his shoulders and handed her to Isobel. “Get downstairs. Now. Jack, Elle. Move it. Downstairs.”
They turned and ran.
CHAPTER 25
THEY DIDN’T HAVE COMM DEVICES, so there was no way for Callum to keep in touch with his team. They were working blind, and he didn’t know what each of them was dealing with. The team had brought a few weapons with them and Callum had a couple stashed in his house, but it was nowhere near what they would need if they were under a full-scale assault.
His phone buzzed as he ran down the stairs, and his heart surged. Phone. Text. It was better than nothing. He pulled it out. Dimitri.
Three in front.
His phone buzzed again. It was Ryan.
Two back.
Five men.
Callum’s mind was racing as he hurried the women and kids into the basement. The room wouldn’t protect them for long. It wasn’t a proper panic room; it was an old guy’s project that Callum had tinkered with because he’d been at a loose end for months.
His phone vibrated. He looked at the screen. Megan.
Two big-ass cars coming down the drive.
“Who the hell are these people?” Callum muttered.
Elle pulled him aside as they rushed into the underground room.
“I got some information before the backtrace shut me down.” She looked visibly shaken, which didn’t bode well for what she had to say. It took a lot to shake Elle. “I saw the ACAB Militia logo.”
Callum actually felt sick. His eyes shot to Isobel, who was terrified and desperately trying to hold it together for her kids. Jack was scared but clearly determined to help. He’d deliberately positioned himself between his little family and the doorway. Callum felt a surge of pride for the boy. His eyes went to the tiny three-year-old in Isobel’s arms. Sophie’s little thumb was in her mouth as she watched Callum intently. The trust he saw when they looked at him, changed something within him. His life clarified. He’d found his purpose again. It was standing in front of him, and he would do everything within his power to save them and give them the secure life they needed.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told them. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“
What’s the ACAB Militia?” Isobel asked.
Callum’s jaw clenched as he quickly decided how much he should tell her. His memory brought up an image of the letters tattooed on the dead guy’s knuckles. He’d thought it was the more common use of the acronym. He hadn’t even considered other possibilities. If he had, they wouldn’t have been in this position. He’d have taken Isobel and her kids far from Arness and called in every resource he could get his hands on to protect them.
But he’d been careless. And now, they were stuck in a makeshift bomb shelter with one of the most dangerous groups on the planet bearing down on them. And Isobel deserved the truth.
“It stands for Anarchy, Chaos, Annihilation and Brotherhood. They’re a group of mercenaries, disenfranchised gang members and self-taught military. They’re guns for hire. Terrorists without a country or a home. They take jobs that cause as much trouble as possible, and they only care about the money.”
“Oh.” Her eyes clouded with tears, and she blinked fast. “Okay. Thanks.”
Callum touched the keypad on the gun safe beside the door at the bottom of the stairs. There were two handguns inside. Not enough to defend them for long. He took one out, inserted the clip and checked the gun. He did the same with the other one before looking at Elle.
“You still practising at the range?” After the Peru mission, he’d made it mandatory for everyone in the London office to know how to use a weapon.
“Yes. I can even hit what I’m aiming at now. Mostly.”
That was good enough. It had to be. He handed her his spare gun. It looked completely out of place in her hand. Blue hair, yellow dress, pink handcuffs, purple Doc Marten boots—and a Beretta. Callum ran a hand over his face and hoped they wouldn’t all die.
Jack put his arm around his mother’s shoulders, his serious gaze on Callum. “What can I do?”
“Protect them. You still have the stun gun I gave you?”
Jack nodded, but it was clear he knew it wouldn’t be enough against the team coming for them.
“Elle.” Callum turned to his blue-haired tech. “You need to get hold of Lake. Tell him he needs to call in everything he has, and get it here fast. Tell him we don’t know what we’re dealing with, but let him know who it is.”
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