by Dale Mayer
“What about your electronics?” Ryland looked at her.
“Well, I have a laptop here, somewhere.”
“Maybe,” he said. “That’s something you need to find.”
She walked into her bedroom, grabbed a carry bag from the closet, one of the few things still sitting on the floor. She sorted through some of the clothes, looking for what she could use. She was just desperate enough that she would have to recycle most of what hadn’t been damaged too badly, although it looked like her intruder had taken a knife to a lot of things. By the time the men stepped into the bedroom, she had a bag of bits and pieces.
“We can’t find the laptop.”
She looked up at them, frowned, and said, “Did you check under the coffee table? There’s a little space, and I often just park it under there.”
Ryland disappeared from view.
“We checked everywhere else,” Cain said. He looked at the small bag. “Is anything salvageable here?”
“Not much,” she said. “Pretty much everything here has been cut up or sliced. I’ve got a couple changes of clothes, not necessarily in the shape I’d like them to be, but I’ll take what I can get just now. Even the bedding was slashed and so is the mattress.”
“I’ll take pictures,” Cain said, starting now with her bedroom. “Get whatever you want and also check the bathroom for anything too. Make sure you check the drawers. Then we’ll do a complete sweep of photographs, so you’ll have them for the insurance.”
Just then Ryland came back, sporting a big grin on his face. “It was completely hidden, just like you said. So, even when he dumped over the table, he didn’t see it.” He held up the laptop and a charger cord.
“Perfect,” she said. “I need to salvage something out of this mess.” She opened it and pushed the power button. When it fired up, she grinned, shut it off again, and packed it in her bag. She grabbed her bag and headed out to the living room. Cain followed, still taking photos.
“Did you want to look and see if you can find the mouse to go with that?”
“Looking for it still,” Tabi said.
“We need to widen our circle of suspects,” Ryland said to Cain. “If they’re supposedly after just Bullard, why would they go after the team?”
“That’s easy,” Tabi said with spirit. “To make sure the team didn’t go after them.”
Both men nodded.
“Are you ready to leave?” Cain asked. “I’ve got photos of every room for your insurance company.”
“Sure,” she said, looking around and spotting her mouse on top of a heap on the floor. “There. That’s the last thing I needed.” She snatched it up and tucked it into her bag.
“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ll have to come back with the insurance agent, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” Ryland said. “Just make sure nothing is left here that may be important.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ve got a hotel,” he said. “You can make your phone calls from there.”
“Fine,” she muttered. “But there’s got to be other stuff I can do to get my life back on track.”
“You can help us,” Ryland said.
As they walked out, she turned to lock the door and then shook her head, as it didn’t even lock anymore. “Since they got in so easily, why did they feel the need to break it all up?” she asked. And once again Cain took photos, and they just closed the door as best they could and headed down to the vehicle. “I’m notifying the landlord to at least fix the lock.”
“Is there any chance that somebody is watching us now?” she asked a bit nervously.
“Guaranteed,” Ryland said. “They’ll know by now that I’m alive and that Cain is here with me.”
“So how do you know that, while we were in there, they didn’t put something on the truck?”
Ryland looked at her and smiled, as he said, “We don’t.”
Cain was ahead of her. As they got to the truck, Ryland grabbed her arm and held her back slightly. “That’s exactly what he’s checking for right now.” As she watched, Cain pulled something from his pocket, turned it on, and ran it slowly around the vehicle.
“What’s he looking for?”
“Electronics that don’t belong,” Ryland said. “Like detonators or a cell phone, remote-access bombs.”
“What about good old-fashioned pipe bombs or even C-4?”
“We’ll get there,” he said, and, as she watched, Cain ducked underneath and checked the undercarriage of the truck. He walked all the way around and opened the vehicle.
“If he opened up that door, he could have blown up too.”
“That’s what the little machine in his hand is doing,” Ryland said.
“I get it,” she said, “but aren’t we relying on technology too much?”
“Have you got something against technology?” he asked, laughing.
Cain gave him the all clear, and Ryland nudged her forward and said, “Let’s go.” Inside the vehicle, all three of them sharing the roomy front seat, Cain started up the engine. Only as they pulled away could Ryland feel her relaxing. “Did you really think it would blow up when we drove out?”
“It felt like a distinct possibility,” she muttered. She linked her hands nervously in front of her, and he reached across, separated them, and loosely laced his beat-up fingers with hers. She looked down at his swollen hand. “You should be in bed,” she said. “You shouldn’t even be out here, dealing with this crap.”
“Well, somebody has a different idea,” he said.
“I get it,” she replied, “but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Bullard made a lot of enemies,” Cain said, beside her. “We just have to narrow it down to which one it is.”
“Is it that easy?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s not easy at all. Somebody went to great lengths to send us off in different directions on wild goose chases, leaving red herrings, to make sure they aren’t caught.”
“So how will you figure it out?”
“We’ll chase down every thread we can and, with any luck, start finding pieces of the puzzle. Eventually we’ll have all those pieces.”
“That could take months,” she said, her skin pale.
“It could,” he said. “But, hey, it’s not like we have anything more important to do.”
Chapter 8
Tabi wasn’t that surprised when they ended up in a building that she wouldn’t even have recognized as a hotel. “How do you know this is even a hotel?” she asked. “There’s no big name, no doorman, no reception area, nothing.”
“It’s on the private side,” Ryland murmured against her ear, as he nudged her forward.
“More secret superspy stuff, huh?”
“Maybe,” he said cheerfully.
She looked at him and saw the tinge of pain on his face. “You need your antibiotics and pain pills.”
“And I need food,” he said, with a smile.
“I don’t think they’ll have a dining room here,” she said.
“Nope, but we can order in, anything we want.”
“What, like fast food?”
“Sure, if that’s what you’d like?”
She shrugged. “I guess pizza or something, if nothing else works.”
“Well, we could get a steak too, if we want,” he said.
She smiled. “How about steak and lobster?”
“If you want it,” he said. “Definitely.”
She shrugged. “I’d rather have a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Excellent,” he said. He loved the way she thought and how quickly her mind worked. “Agreed,” he said, as they walked down a hallway. “So this isn’t just about Bullard either, by the way. We have a lot of different guys who we have to go after now, in order to figure out what’s going on. But we’ll get there, I promise,” he added, as he showed her into the room.
When she saw the single room with two beds, she shook her head. “You guys don’t have room for me here.”
“Yes, we do,” Cain said. “As long as you’re willing to share.”
She shrugged. “I’m so damn tired, I don’t even care anymore,” she said, as she tossed her bag on the floor next to the nearest bed and crashed down on half of it. “I want to know what we’re supposed to do from here though.”
“We’ll order food, and you’ll call your insurance company,” Ryland said.
Cain added, “I’ll grab a shower. It’s been a bloody long night.”
“Good idea,” Ryland replied, as Cain turned and walked into the bathroom.
Ryland walked to the small table against the window and said, “Go ahead and make your calls before you crash.”
She frowned, looked at him, and said, “What made you so bossy?”
He chuckled. “Life.”
When he brought out his own laptop, she looked at it and said, “Where’d you get that?”
“Cain brought it for me.”
“Of course. I should have known. So, how long have you known Cain?”
“A dozen years,” he said, looking over the top of the laptop. “Why?”
“Just wondering,” she said. “Looks like he was there for you and anticipated what you would need.”
“That’s the way our team works,” he said.
She nodded, smiled, and said, “You’re lucky.”
“I don’t know about luck,” he said. “It’s a give-and-take deal, and it’s hard work.”
“I know,” she said sadly. “My brother was really important to me, and, since losing him, … since then, I’ve just kept myself … isolated, I guess.”
“You’d probably started to isolate yourself. Before you had friends, but then your brother needed more care, more support, so some of your friends drifted away. Then, by the time he was gone, you turned around and realized you were alone.”
“That’s about right,” she said, sitting up and looking at him. “I guess you’ve seen it happen before, huh?”
“Many times,” he said. “Because of the work we do, we sometimes see people in the worst situations imaginable, and we hear all kinds of stories. None of it’s easy, on anybody.”
“No,” she said, then got up off the bed, walked to the table, and sat across from Ryland. “I think you should take a few days off,” she said earnestly.
He shook his head. “No more days off for me. We have to work as fast as we can now. The fact is, the team has already been working on this in the background, but I’ll need to do some legwork pretty fast.”
“Do you think the bad guys followed us here?”
“Yes, and regardless of whether they’re trying to take out the team and Bullard—or take out Bullard and see what the team knows—Cain and I are targets.”
“Which makes me a target as well, just because I’m with you,” she announced. “How was that better than me staying at my apartment?”
“Well, your apartment was already targeted,” he said. “Do you think they won’t go back and see if you’re home?” He smiled. “You’re still better off here with us, where you’ve got some protection, than at home alone, where they could pick you up at any time and try to use you against us.”
She stared at him. “Are you serious? Would they do that?”
“If they could, yes,” he said simply. “Of course I would come and try to save you, as you saved me. And, if somebody would have taken you off the street and used you as bait, I’d definitely fall for it. But I would come with a team.”
“Which they would expect.”
He nodded. “They would, so it would end up being who was the smartest, fastest, and best shot.”
“Which would really suck because there’d be deaths on both sides.”
“They don’t calculate that because they just hire cheap local gunmen,” he said. “In which case, whoever it is won’t care about his team and would be happy to have them all go down—fewer witnesses.”
“God,” she said, as she stood, spun around, and leaned against the wall. “This is mind-bending. Just a couple days ago, I was lying around on my boat, enjoying being out on the water.”
“Were you really? Or were you wondering what you’ll do with your life now?” he asked.
Startled, she looked at him.
He shrugged and said, “I just wondered.”
“Yeah, I was doing some of that,” she admitted. “Life tends to get in a bit of a rut after a while.”
“It does, indeed,” he said. “When you think about it, an awful lot is going on in your world. And it’s not all bad.”
“It’s not bad at all,” she said, “but I’m not exactly getting anywhere.”
“You’re totally getting somewhere.”
“Says you,” she muttered.
“I wish you could just deal with the day in front of you,” he said.
“Maybe, but at the same time, everything feels unfinished somehow.”
“And I think that would probably be normal,” he said.
“Maybe. I just want this all to be over with now.”
“You and me both,” he said, as he started tapping away, obviously focusing on what was in front of him.
She grabbed her phone, pulled up the last email she had from the insurance broker, and found the phone number. Quickly she called them. When she got someone she had dealt with for a few years, she was relieved.
“Hey, Sandy,” she said. “I was away on holiday, and I’m back now, but, while I was gone, my apartment was broken into, and vandals just went through and trashed everything.” She listened as the woman on the other end exhaled in dismay. “I know. I need to call the police, don’t I?” With that confirmed, she pulled out a piece of paper and jotted down notes. “Okay, if you want to open a file, I’ll have the cops come by and take a look and open up a case on it. A threat was on the mirror too, but I think it was probably just kids.”
She listened as Sandy rattled off what they would do about it. First, they would contact the insurance company who’d given her coverage and confirm the next step, having an adjuster out to see the property and the scene of the crime. The yacht was a different company but she’d contact them as well.
After the local police saw the crime scene as well, then she would have the apartment cleared out, and they would reimburse her, based on whatever her coverage was, for the furniture and personal goods. Thankfully she did have renter’s insurance, and, if any damage was done to the actual building, that would have to be taken care of by the building owner and management, under their own insurance policy.
“Thank you very much, Sandy,” she said, relieved she did have $25,000 coverage for personal belongings, which wasn’t a ton when she considered her electronics alone, but she would replace everything anyway. She had been given the chance to raise her coverage a while back and had done so. Good thing.
While she was at it, she went ahead and called the cops. She explained that she’d contacted the insurance company and been told that she had to contact the police about the break-in. By the time she had that dealt with that, she had agreed to call her apartment manager to let the cops in to see the crime scene tomorrow morning at nine a.m.
She hung up the phone and asked, “Did you order food?”
“Huh?” he answered, his voice distracted.
She glared at him. “Cain’ll be out of the shower any minute, and there’s no food.”
This time he lifted his gaze and said, “I ordered it.”
She sagged in a chair and nodded. “Okay. Did you find out anything interesting?”
“Yes,” he said. “On one of our cases about a year ago, we went in after some kidnap victims. We rescued all but one, a young girl we found, already dead. We carried her out of there, but obviously we couldn’t save her because she had died before we got there.”
“Ouch,” she said. “What about it?”
“The father was beside himself, and he blamed
us.”
“Why?”
“We didn’t get there in time, as far as he was concerned, and potentially that was part of it. I mean, if we could have gotten there a day earlier, maybe she would have been alive, but there’s no way to know. And we never found out why or how she died. So we don’t know if that timing would have made a difference or not.”
“And you think the father is behind this?”
“Instinct is telling me it’s somewhere around him. All attempts to find him have failed.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, he’s gone underground.”
“Well, that’s possible,” she said. “I mean, if he’ll put something like this in motion, he doesn’t want to be someplace where he could get easily found and caught.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Any family, friends, or anybody like that who you could talk to?”
“We actually worked with two of his men on another job after that. They were the ones who told us how upset the father still was.”
“Why were you working with them?”
“We needed a couple more guys, and Bullard gave them both a try. They were looking for more work, and they were under contract to the father but potentially were looking to move.”
“What happened to them?”
“They both went back to work with the father,” he said, sitting back. “And now that I think about it, since they went back, all they did was gather intel from us.”
“Meaning, they were working for the father all along?”
“That’s what I would expect, yes,” he said, frowning.
“So you expect those two men came after us?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Though that seems very simple.”
“What about this father? Did he have the means to do all this and the know-how?”
“Not necessarily. But he’s connected to some very big Saudis in the oil industry.”
“Well, they definitely have the clout and some big money,” she said, surprised. “But would they really care?”
“And that’s always the problem, isn’t it?”
“Maybe that’s just what they want you to think, because of the timing.”