Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
VOODOO
Icaught the movement from the corner of my eye as O’Rourke focused on the screen where Alphabet worked. Shifting my position, I blocked any view O’Rourke might have of the hall or the stairs. Lunchbox stole away with Grace and that worked for me.
She needed the distraction—her stress etched in every furrow of her brow, tension cinched tight around her eyes—and for Lunchbox, it was more than a break; it was a lifeline. His fury at O’Rourke seeped into every exchange, volatile and suffocating, like cloth drenched in gasoline.
Their complicated history painted a target on every goal that we neither had the time or the patience for. As long as O’Rourke could be useful, Lunchbox would suck it up. He never let his own feelings dictate the mission execution.
When we were done with O’Rourke, though?
Well, his survival might be the only thing he could ask for, particularly because he’d burned so many damn bridges. His focus on our firecracker was doing him no favors.
“Where did they grab you again?” Alphabet asked as he reviewed CCTV footage, scanning forward in ten-to-fifteen-minute increments.
“Hotel lobby,” O’Rourke stated. “The New Rothschild.”
“Time?”
“Just after midnight.” There was some improvement in O’Rourke’s lack of playing coy. He kept his answers short and to the point.
Tabbing through the various screens, Alphabet’s jaw tensed.
The lobby appeared to be a dazzling homage to the opulence of the Gilded Age from the grand double doors to the marble floors veined with gold.
The wainscoted walls wrapped in a rich brocade wallpaper dressed up the space as much as the staff in their crisp livery.
The towering Corinthian columns rose like guardians on watch over the space.
“Betrayal must pay really fucking well,” Alphabet commented. “Let me guess, their toilet lids are done in gold too?”
“Be hard to clean,” O’Rourke deadpanned.
I almost snorted, but buried the reaction to keep it all business. “Why were you staying at a place like this?”
Enjoying luxury wasn’t a problem. I liked luxury. That said, this place was not just luxury, it was a lifestyle. The massive crystal chandelier was easily twenty feet across and it cascaded from the coffered ceiling and seemed to give the impression that it was made from diamonds.
Alphabet located O’Rourke strolling inside, dressed in a tux and tails.
“The fuck is this?” Alphabet asked, glancing up at the other man.
“Class and style. Focus.”
Everything about the decadent location seemed drenched in indulgence. This was not the ideal setting for a soldier, but O’Rourke was playing a very different role based on his current presence on the screen.
He was halfway across the lobby, strolling over the rich Persian rug in its deep burgundy not glancing at the oil paintings that decorated the alcoves along the mezzanine with their heavy gilt frames.
It looked like he was on his way toward a sweeping staircase, with its balustrade wrought in intricate bronze filigree.
The place probably smelled like money.
It wasn’t until he was five steps from that staircase when two men rose from the pair Louis XVI sofas. They were dressed in black-on-black suits and sported military precise haircuts. They looked like clones from a do-it-yourself Men in Black catalog.
One stepped in front of O’Rourke while the other moved behind him. O’Rourke barely slowed. But two more descended the stairs from the mezzanine level and another came from the left somewhere.
“Five-man team,” Alphabet stated, using the mouse to manipulate the view.
“There’s a sixth one you can’t see, but he’s upstairs.
I’d wager there was another five-man team ready to back these guys up, but they didn’t step into frame anywhere I could make them.
” The swelling of O’Rourke’s lip and the bruising of his jaw added some thickness to the words and distorted his dismissive attitude.
“Brief us on what they are saying,” I instructed. The fact O’Rourke actually gave the faintest of jerks amused me. He’d forgotten I was here.
Sloppy.
Very sloppy.
“I’ve been ‘requested’ to join their employer in a suite upstairs for an appointment.
” O’Rourke folded his arms. His shoulders drooped slightly, weariness showing up in his posture.
“They’re all armed. They all move like they know what they’re doing.
I could agree to see where we were going with it, or I could start an incident down there.
Based on what I could see? Resistance would end with a bullet in my head. ”
I didn’t disagree.
The conversation didn’t take as long as O’Rourke’s explanation and he joined four of the five in an elevator. The fifth one returned to the sofa to sit and he pulled out his phone. Probably alerting their employer to the imminent arrival.
“Keep an eye on that one,” I said, but Alphabet had already tabbed the image over to a secondary screen as he switched the view to the elevator.
It took a minute to get into the right feed but the image cut out as soon as the doors closed and it went to static.
“Eighteenth floor,” O’Rourke said before Alphabet could ask. I had my suspicions—a sharp cry drifted from upstairs, muffled by the closed doors but not quite enough to silence it entirely.
My dick went hard at the very vocal evidence of our firecracker getting off with Lunchbox. Lucky bastard.
“Got it,” Alphabet said almost on the heels of the sound reaching us. O’Rourke started to shift but Alphabet slapped something on the keyboard.
There was a clear view of the elevator until the hall indicator illuminated for going up, then it also cut to static.
“How long were you with them?” Alphabet asked, his fingers flying.
“Less than an hour. I had an escort to go back down too. They stuck with me until I lost them in Queens.”
For one long moment, Alphabet and O’Rourke seemed to freeze as though someone hit pause on a video. The look the two men shared in any other context would probably have made me laugh.
Then O’Rourke shifted to grab a chair and dragged it over. The moment he sat, Goblin settled right beneath the table next to Alphabet. The dog had been on watch since I got here, likely responding to the tension and on guard.
Goblin relaxing eased some of the rigidness locking up my own spine. Still, I wasn’t going off my watch. O’Rourke had not earned much trust. Right now, he was in the position of forced ally. We would use him, but we weren’t going to stretch it much further.
Burn us once, shame on you.
Burn us twice, you will never get to thrice.
The poetic dialogue popped up from some vague memory, but I couldn’t place it. Probably a movie.
“Got it,” Alphabet said and pulled my attention back to the screen. “Come on, show us how fucking cocky you bastards are…”
“There,” O’Rourke said, leaning forward like he could make their tracking happen faster by force of will. “You’re going to lose them.”
“Excuse you, I don’t lose my targets,” Alphabet stated, his fingers all but flying over the keys before he switched one hand to a track ball and the other on the keyboard. The images snapped as he began to rotate his view.
“You already have, they went south,” O’Rourke argued. “You’re tracking me.”
“Hmm.” Alphabet’s noncommittal sound just seemed to aggravate the other man. “Is that what I’m doing?”
Before he could respond, however, another vehicle popped on the screen and Alphabet paused the view, snapped a screenshot, then ran a facial rec in the corner.
It matched by 88% the man who had been following earlier. A little grainy, but good enough.
“Son of a bitch,” O’Rourke swore.
“Don’t talk about my mother that way.” The half-distant comment carried no heat or really any of Alphabet’s attention. Instead, he’d switched from following O’Rourke to the car—not the man he identified in the car—the car.
“Holy shit…” The low exhaled curse from O’Rourke had me almost leaning forward.
“Not so fucking clever now, are they?” The deep sense of satisfaction apparent in voice said everything it needed to convince me we had a lead.
Exhaling slowly, I relied on sniper breathing to keep my reactions under control. No rushing. No ordering. No directing. No pretending we could force a speedier answer by hovering. Alphabet knew exactly what he was doing. He was our resident expert for a reason.
The minutes trickled past as the screen reflected Alphabet’s manipulations of the system. He tracked the car out of Queens, through Manhattan, then onto Jersey via the tunnel. From there, he picked up the vehicle on the other side—new license plate.
An hour later—based on the timestamp—they traded the car for an SUV and got on the turnpike. They continued almost relentlessly south for the next several leaps. Not once did Alphabet try to rush ahead, he verified and when his next snap didn’t reveal the car, he backtracked.
“Fuck,” O’Rourke half-whispered the word, his hands flexing against his thighs.
Impatience swarmed over the man, but like me, he kept his comments to a minimum.
It took almost two brutally painstaking hours, and two hot coffees—I made O’Rourke accompany me while Alphabet worked—before Alphabet fist pumped in the air.
“Got them.”
All I needed to hear to surge forward. “Show me.”
“At the risk of minimizing your admiration of my genius,” Alphabet said.
“I’ll skip the details on just how many systems I had to hack to do this, but I tracked two of our identified goons to a location just outside of Alexandria, Virginia.
According to land titles, it’s owned by a private corporation that is in turn a subsidiary of a subsidiary ad infinitum.
Beneath the shell game is Patriot Exports, a division of a cover company once used by the alphabet agencies to move large cargo around the world. ”
“Government ties,” I muttered. “Check.”
“I think co-opted ties, because the location itself is not a warehouse or a corporate building. In fact, it’s not much of anything other than a house, a barn, and some fields with cows grazing.” He shifted our view to a satellite overview.
“But?” I prompted.
“But,” Alphabet said with a grin as he rolled his head from side to side and cracked his neck from side to side. “What it does have is an underground bunker, complete with low level access and…” He wiggled his fingers like a magician preparing to do a show and hit a key on his keyboard. “CCTV.”
I wasn’t the only one gaping at the screen. Even O’Rourke looked stunned.
“Why the fuck would someone running all those secrets have a network accessible surveillance system that can be hacked into?” His expression sobered abruptly. “Wait—”
“To bait someone like me into a trap,” Alphabet answered, smug smile firmly in place. “Too bad for them that I always ghost my intrusions so I can send their bots off on wild goose chases.”
“In about fifteen minutes, we’re going to know everything they do, specifically, the operatives working on it, who they are in bed with, is it actually a government operation or is it government adjacent…”
He rose slowly, stretching as he went. His back cracked lightly, then his shoulders before he began to move.
The limp was there for one step, but then he exerted force of will and erased it from his posture.
Goblin rose, stretching as he went and moved to join Alphabet on his slow pace around the room.
“Don’t touch it,” he said without glancing back and O’Rourke pushed out of his own chair.
“I wasn’t planning on it.” The edge of defensiveness in his voice betrayed him, however, and Alphabet just shot him a look.
For his part, O’Rourke didn’t deny but he did throw his hands in the air before pacing away.
Neither left the room fully and I shifted my stance to keep an eye on both of them and the computer.
The map to the location was still up on the screen so I took a beat to study it. I didn’t know the place, but that didn’t mean anything. We had a number of bolt holes across the country and overseas.
Forward planning meant you had the place ready to go so it was there when you needed it whether it was tomorrow, next week, next month, or even next year. Government facilities had to have a certain amount of transparency, but you didn’t give shadow ops their name for fun.
“Once we have the information locked down,” I said. “You need rack time.”
Alphabet scowled at me, but it was more the expression of a man who wanted to get a thousand other things done and none of them had anything to do with sleep.
He could and would go without sleep. All of us did when the mission called for it.
Right now, we were on a limited clock, but we were also down a very vital part of our team.
We couldn’t afford fuckups on any level. Rather than argue, Alphabet just nodded once but flicked a look at O’Rourke.
“He has a bed downstairs,” I reminded him and O’Rourke scowled.
“You still don’t trust me.” He actually sounded irked.
“Clearly,” I told him. “Don’t push your luck.”
Cause we could just as easily solve the problem of him with a bullet. I didn’t want to execute him on a whim, but I also have very little patience for a prolonged argument of any kind.
“Fine.” The capitulation came almost too easily and I narrowed my eyes as I studied him as he cracked his knuckles, then his neck, before he popped each of his shoulders.
While he didn’t relax after the release of tension, he did seem to settle. I wasn’t the only one shooting him a skeptical look. Goblin sat in the middle of the room, between Alphabet and O’Rourke, but his hackles weren’t up.
Good sign.
“Wondering why I’m not arguing?” O’Rourke asked and I shrugged.
“Not particularly.” It was a lie, but honestly, I didn’t even care what his truth behind the action was as long as he did as he was told. “We don’t have time for bullshit.”
“Agreed,” O’Rourke stated. “Trust has to be earned. I can cooperate.”
I didn’t snort or make any other sound of disagreement, nor did Alphabet. But when O’Rourke paced away from us again, I met Alphabet’s eyes and raised my brows.
He shook his head.
Nope, we didn’t have a bead on O’Rourke’s game—yet.
We would though.
His game.
Bones’ location.
Who took Bones.
We’d have a nice little checklist that we would then make our way down and cross off all the problems.
One. By. Fucking. One.