Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Jorja flushed the toilet and went to the sink to wash her hands.
She grabbed the bottle of mouthwash and poured some into her mouth, swishing it around.
She didn’t even care who it belonged to at this point.
It was better than the taste of vomit. Logically, she knew there was a chance of people getting hurt.
It was a whole different ball game seeing someone you knew get hit with a bullet on body camera footage.
“And this is why I look for antiques and not terrorists.” She took a second to wash out the cap of the mouthwash. Every second counted in restoring her nerves before going back out to the war-room. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Remi reassured her. “It’s a rough job at times, and not for the faint-hearted.”
“You can say that twice.”
“It’s a rough—”
“Not literally.” She’d figured out sometimes Remi took what was said literally. But that was okay, she did it too, especially when she was tired or her caffeine hadn’t had time to kick in yet.
“Ah—”
“Don’t worry about it.” She grabbed some water from the fridge. “I do it too at times. Do you want water or Monster?”
“Black Monster, please.” He held out his hand but kept his eyes on the screen. “It tastes like sour jellies.”
She peered at the black cans. “I like sour jellies.” She took a second can for herself and placed a bottle of water next to Remi’s keyboard. “There, if we have water we can tell ourselves we are being somewhat healthy.”
“Good thinking.” Remi popped the tab on his can. “Gunnar is always bitching that I have too much caffeine and not enough water.” He lifted his hands off the keyboard and wriggled his fingers. “But these things are fueled by Monster and coffee, not water.”
“Keep a bottle on the table. He won’t know the difference.” She sipped from her can. “And you’re right, these do taste like sour gummies. I like it.”
They grinned at each other and went back to work, Remi keeping a close eye on the guys and his databases, and Jorja searching for a link to connect the orders for the missions and the list together.
She kept her eyes averted from Remi’s screens.
She didn’t want to have to heave up her stomach contents again today. Once was quite enough, thank you.
Boots on the ground means something totally different when I know the people filling those boots.
When Remi had to move away from his desk and hit the speaker, she heard Gunnar’s voice come over the wire. Her heart jumped.
It’s the Monster. Maybe I should stop drinking it. Is it like Red Bull, with so much caffeine it can cause a heart attack if you have too much?
She picked up the can, shook it, and peered into the hole to check how much she’d drank. Nope, it was still three quarters full. There went that idea.
“Zipper, Grizzly. Can you confirm those coordinates for our hostages again?”
“Copy, Grizzly, stand by.” Remi hurried back to the desk and rattled off coordinates from his notepad.
“Fuck,” Gunnar grumbled. “We are at that location, and this place is a ghost town. There’s nothing here but freaking weeds and a couple of birds in the trees. Do we have any known cave systems or tunnels in the area?”
Remi scanned his maps and clicked through some screens so fast Jorja couldn’t keep up. “Negative. If there are, they aren’t on any maps.”
“We’ll have Zombie do a scout. If he finds nothing, we’re headed to our extraction location.”
“Roger.” Remi pulled out his headset again and swore softly. “Shit. I’ve been afraid of that since you asked if the last job and this one was connected to the fucking list.”
“What does all that mean?” She nodded to Remi’s screens. “Most of it sounds like gobbledygook to me. I understand maybe every sentence or two.”
“It means our boys are out there on a wild ass goose chase.” Remi drank deeply from his Monster can, crumbled it in his hand, and tossed it in the trash so hard the trash can wobbled. “Something stinks, and it pisses me off that I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s understandable to feel that way about it,” she reminded him. “He’s your brother, after all.”
“It’s not just because it’s Gunnar. I hate not being able to connect the dots on something. Everything has logic behind it. Everything.” He picked up the headset and put it back on, then sat back down. “Keep hunting. The info is there. We just have to find it.”
“You mean the next dot is there.” She grabbed a tab of stickies and moved to the war-table, bringing the files with her. “I’m just going to try something, which worked before when I was stuck.”
“Go for it.”
She laid out the files on the table, opened both files plus the notes she’d taken on the list’s data sources, and blew out a breath.
The way the files were compiled didn’t make much sense to her, but clearly, they worked for Remi and the others in this format.
She needed them in chronological order. Tuning out everything else going on in the war-room, she got to work.
Picking up the first sheet from one file, she marked the date it came in and noted what it contained in shorthand, then stuck it to the desk.
It took hours, until she had all the stickies in date order laid out on the war-table, but a swarm of butterflies fluttered in her belly when she finally saw something she hoped might be important.
She picked up three more stickies, scribbled something on each, and stuck them on the corner of the war-table near her right hand.
“I think I might have something you need to look at.”
“One sec,” Remi called over his shoulder.
“Affirmative, Grizzly. Orders are bring him back. The Italians will take over from Napoli.” There was a slight pause before Remi continued, “Copy that, bro. See you on the flip side.” He took off the headset, stood, and stretched.
“The boys are on a helo out with a prisoner.”
“I thought they were going for hostages.”
“You and me both, sister. You and me both.” The relief at having the team on a helicopter and as safe as they could possibly be for now was etched all over his face.
Did the guys realize how much Remi put of himself into keeping them safe?
She suspected not, and resolved to tell Gunnar just as soon as he got his pretty self back to Italy.
“What ya got?” Remi studied the stickies. “Lay it out for me. Do you have a system?”
“It’s in my head. I couldn’t explain it if I tried.” She picked up the last three stickies. “Do the names Tovsolta Sultanovich from Ti?nov in the Czech Republic, and Arthur L. Brant from Brentwood, New York, mean anything to you?”
“Sultanovich was KGB at one point.” Remi’s forehead furrowed, and he tapped his fingers off his chin. “At least someone of that name was. He was listed as a person of interest in the file for the mission where Gunnar was injured.”
“Correct.”
“I don’t know the name Brant.”
“The VPN all communication for both jobs was built by,” she handed him the third sticky “…Brant’s company, She Town.”
“Still not making the connection. Explain.”
“This email here came from Brant’s VPN, but Sultanovich’s computer IP.
” She flipped through one of the folders, kept her finger in the spot to make sure she didn’t lose it, and handed it to him.
“Not the DOD as it looks like on the surface. Want to take a guess who has the contract for the DOD’s internet security? ”
“That still…” He paused. “I’m going to need some more dots here. That’s a hell of a jump to make.”
“I thought so too.” She took the email back, replaced it in the file, and put it on the table before picking up the other folder. “Until I saw this.” She handed him the second email. “Remember how the second VPN was just a couple of digits off, but the original IP was completely different?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s because this one came from a computer within She Town’s head office in New York.”
“Okay…”
She wasn’t explaining this right, or maybe she was seeing things.
Jorja huffed and put the email he handed her back in the file.
“There’s only one way the orders for a job supposedly from the DOD came from either of those computers.
The chances of having one person lie are a lot higher than two.
” She pulled both emails out a little from the underside of the folders and pointed to the images.
“How big are the chances that their mockup of the logo would be exactly the same?” She went to her computer and pulled up the stock image site she’d checked earlier.
“Both have used this one, and not the logo from the Department of Defense website.” She put the images next to the screen.
“First rule of masquerading as someone else is use their logos and not one you buy from a site which is known for fudging with AI images.”
“Good catch,” Remi acknowledged. “So, we know both She Town and Sultanovich are in cahoots. We don’t know why.”
“Umm, maybe we do.” Jorja flipped to another screen, this time a Google search. “The reason I’m pointing this at Brant is his son was a Marine Raider on that mission with Gunnar and the others on the list. He didn’t come home alive.”
“Payback?”
“It makes sense,” Jorja replied. “I don’t know, maybe Brant’s mind snapped or something. Because everything I have on him, he seems like a legit stand-up guy.” She covered a yawn with her hand. “But losing your only son…”
“It’s easy to want to place the blame on the person who led the mission he was on,” Remi finished.
“Right? I don’t know how I’d react.” She couldn’t even imagine the pain Brant and his family were going through. “But I’m pretty sure pissed off and mad at the world would be one of the emotions I’d feel.”
“I can see that happening,” Remi said. “Let’s see if we can connect some more dots until the guys are back on the ground at a base, then we’ll call it a night and come back to it tomorrow with fresh eyes.”
“I like that plan.” She copied the stickies she needed, stuck them in order to a clipboard, propped it next to her computer, and got back to work.