Chapter Thirty-Three
Phoenix
I pulled out of Christensen’s driveway, and my work cell pinged with a new text.
Helios: She’s fucking naked. Get the fuck back here.
Potent anger flooded my system. The same damn anger I’d tasted once before, four weeks ago. It’d caused me to lose control then, and it had me dialing now.
Helios picked up. “Where the fuck are you?”
“Put her on the phone,” I demanded.
“Can’t. She’s on the roof.”
“Why the fuck is she on the roof naked?”
“Swimming.”
The anger in my veins foreign, I inhaled. Twice. “Where’s her suit?”
“Probably in her fucking bug-out bag. Where the fuck are you?”
“Fifteen minutes out.” Barely refraining from asking where the hell he was at that exact second, I went after the other fact I was livid about. “Where’s her backpack?”
“You told me to contain her. I fucking contained her.”
“Not an answer,” I warned.
“It’s the answer you’re getting, motherfucker.
You didn’t qualify containment. You want to cut a chick like that off at the knees, keep her from running?
You take her shit. So I took her shit. She didn’t run.
You’re welcome. You’re also fucking welcome because Cypher already has the number of the cell I found in her purse, and he’s running it. ”
I didn’t fucking thank him. “Your location?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, do you ever fucking listen? Where the fuck do you think I am? I’m standing in the goddamn suite, handling your shit, when I should be home handling my own shit. You have ten fucking minutes to get here. Then I’m either shooting her or leaving.” Helios hung up.
I dialed Cypher.
He answered immediately. “She’s not at the hotel. It’s like she’s a ghost.”
I stopped for a light. “Explain.”
He did. In rapid succession. “No red dress, no trespasser. No Isla Sennan at the Four Seasons or anywhere else on any security feeds.”
“I just spoke with Helios. She’s currently in the penthouse pool.
I’m sure they took the elevator up.” November had fucking found her.
Cypher should be able to do the same. “Run it again. Look for any edit history on the footage.” Not wanting this to turn into a fucking competition between hackers, I made the call not to tell Cypher about my conversation with Christensen.
“Already ran it three times,” Cypher replied. “There isn’t any evidence of a hack. I tracked her another way, but that’s not the only issue. You’re not on the hotel’s security feeds either, and neither is Helios.”
The light turned green, but I sat there for a fucking second. “Someone wiped their system.” For my petite intruse. Who the fuck was this woman?
“Not exactly.” Cypher typed. “This is more sophisticated. Someone did wipe her from the feeds—lobby, grounds, restaurant. But they replaced her image with another, currently registered, hotel guest. No other civilians are missing from my footage except you and Helios, and there’s nothing on the penthouse elevator footage.
Then the dining room tonight was on a loop from right before you showed until after Helios exfilled. ”
Fuck. Me. “There’s only one domestic agency currently using the technology that has the capability to do this in real time.” And I’d worked for them. Goddamn it.
“Negative,” Cypher stated cryptically.
I glanced at my watch. “I was in that restaurant an hour ago. At a minimum, we’re talking four locations and a dozen security cameras between ingresses and egresses, lobby, restaurant vestibule, and dining room. We both know who utilizes that level of real-time masking.”
“I meant negative on only one source with the capability to not leave any edit history, visual inconsistencies, or watermarks.”
“Who else?”
“Me and AES’s hacker.”
Shit compounded, and I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Where’d you get the technology, Cypher?”
“Same place November did.”
“You hacked the CIA.” While I was trying to stay off all alphabet soup agency radars.
“Only the servers that housed the software.”
“Do you know how many people I’ll have to eliminate if this gets out?”
“Six. Seven if you include November.”
Not an ideal way to start a joint venture with Alpha. “We’re not taking out November. Does he know you have the—what the hell is the program called?” If I had to, I’d delete it, but I was already thinking of its potential.
“If I know he modified a version, then he knows I did the same. On our servers, it’s under India-eight-Uniform.”
Sometimes forgetting who the hell I was dealing with, I silently repeated the acronym. Then I shook my head. “How’d you modify it?”
“The AI detection, clean plate gen, content-aware filling, and the masking and rotoscoping.”
I didn’t know as much as him about photo editing software, but I knew enough. “So all of it.”
“Essentially.”
“Assuming November did the same?” After today’s encounter in the garage at AES with November, and after the conversation with Christensen about this, I couldn’t come up with a plausible reason why November would erase Isla’s digital footprint.
“Don’t know,” Cypher answered. “Haven’t had time to try to look.”
“Don’t try.”
“Unadvisable.” He typed. “Know the competition.”
“Cypher,” I warned.
“Fine. Copy.”
“Sitrep on how you tracked Isla.”
“Helios gave me her cell number once he had her in the suite. The phone was off, but before you had dinner with her, it’d been on long enough for me to track her movements. She was on the hotel property. I worked backwards from there.” Cypher stopped typing and talking.
“And?”
“She’s staying at the hotel,” he replied absently.
“Had a two-bedroom oceanfront suite booked through next week. It was reserved under the name Stanton. I paid a staffer to move her pack to the penthouse before Helios got her up there. I also had him sweep the place. Except for food in the fridge, remnants of dinner for two, and almost ten grand in cash in the suite’s safe, there wasn’t anything else.
I had the staffer put the cash in her pack. ”
Ten grand? Fuck. “First or last?” I demanded, already wanting to eliminate whoever the hell this Stanton asshole was, but not before I found out exactly what she’d done for that money.
“What?” Cypher asked.
“Stanton,” I clarified. “First or last name?”
“Only.” Cypher started typing again.
“Your staffer know who Stanton is?”
“Not exactly. Only that everyone was warned to give VIP treatment to your trespasser.”
Christ, this was not the direction I saw this going.
“How was the suite paid for?” A month ago, the intruse in a green bikini breeching my property didn’t have two cents to rub together.
Tonight, the same woman was in a designer red dress and heels, carrying a jeweled purse, and had ten thousand dollars in her oceanfront suite.
I didn’t know if I was being played by a woman working the oldest profession known to man or if Isla Sennan was Agency. Hell, she could be an operative for any damn intelligence agency.
But something told me she wasn’t.
A covert operative wouldn’t have lost her shit in the storm on my ship.
A trained agent wouldn’t have fallen apart under me—not even a submissive one.
Not like she had. Or maybe I was losing my edge and my goddamn mind over a woman who’d disarmed Ares, picked locks, escaped the Paragon before three Tier Ones caught on, avoided security cameras everywhere, and trespassed into my head like fucking naegleriasis.
Jesus.
Cypher’s response cut into my thoughts. “The suite was paid for in cash. Other than that notation in their system, there’s no other record of the transaction.
But last night I got security footage with clear audio of the valets helping a couple out of a black Escalade.
Male driver, female passenger. Valet called the driver Mr. Stanton, but the female passenger wasn’t the trespasser, and the driver’s image matches another guest I ran facial rec on who’s name isn’t Stanton. ”
“André Luna’s security outfit has a fleet of armored Escalades.”
“Wasn’t one of his. Already ran the plates. SUV was a rental picked up at Miami Executive two days ago under a different name. No security footage of the rental leaving the airport.”
Not good. Not fucking good. “Keep running it down.”
“Copy that, but I’m maxed out here on both square footage and server capacity. You get me space yet?”
Christ. The building. “Yes. You take occupancy tomorrow, oh seven hundred. Then tomorrow evening, the location for the meet at nineteen hundred hours will be the twenty-ninth floor. Let everyone know, including Alpha. You’ll initially have to give the team security access to get upstairs, but then have key cards ready for them to leave with.
Tell Chaos to relocate the Denalis to the building’s garage. Then I’ll take it from there.”
The typing stopped. “I take occupancy tomorrow.”
“Yes. I’ll be in the air.”
“Going to?”
“Need to know.”
“And if you don’t come back?”
The question, from Cypher, gave me pause. “Something I should know about?”
“Besides the disappearing trespasser, your shit wiped from the hotel servers without either of us behind it, and the high-rise you bought that’s right next door to Adam Trefor’s?”
Ignoring his first comment, needing to track down the source behind his second, I addressed his third statement. “Alpha doesn’t have a problem with it.”
“Yeah? And what about the dozens of SEALs working for him who are used to a paycheck not challenged by competition?”
“I don’t know one SEAL or Delta operator doing this solely for the money.
” Yes, they all benefitted from the sizable salary commensurate with the risk, but they took the assignments because the alternative was civilian life.
Warfighters didn’t leave the battle simply because they separated from the military.
“Conlon” was all Cypher stated.
“Fine,” I qualified. “Victor is motivated by money, but he was a Marine.”
“Ask any Marine, and they’ll tell you there’s no was about it,” Cypher countered. “Once a Marine, always a Marine, but my point stands. We’re encroaching.”
We weren’t. I was. “Noted.” I pulled up to the hotel and drove around to the rear entrance I’d been using.
“Good. One more thing. Your trespasser sent a text right before Helios showed up. Single word. Whale. It went to a burner with a local area code. Phone’s off now, but it doesn’t matter.
I wouldn’t have been able to trace the last known location when it was on.
Encrypted, scrambled, it pinged all over the place. ”
Whale.
I’m the goddamn whale.
Rethinking everything, I scanned the back of the hotel and the cars parked near me. “She sent the text?”
“Phone was in her possession when it went through.”
Fucking great. “Heading inside now. Usual entry point. Track my movements. Reverse hack if you don’t see me on the security footage.”
“Call in Saint,” Cypher countered. “He was at the Agency longer than you, Helios, and Ghost combined. He still has one foot in Langley. Get him behind this.”
That was the problem. I didn’t want Saint or any agency behind this. “I’ll think about it.” I wouldn’t. “Keep me posted on the status of my movements on the security feeds.” I hung up, then sent Judas a coded text I rarely used, but one my entire team was familiar with.
Me: Code Red.
My cell rang ten seconds later, and I answered. “You local yet?”
“No. Where do you need me?”
“Virginia Beach by oh eight hundred.” I gave him the location of the airstrip I’d be flying in to.
“Copy. Equipment?”
“Your usual.” He’d know what I meant.
“Roger that.”
I hesitated.
Judas picked up on it. “Something else?”
“Secure line?” Judas always used his own equipment.
“Yes.”
“Copy.” I gave him a heads-up. “This is not a Paragon op.” It was as much as I was willing to download over the call, encrypted or not.
“Understood. No footprint. No team.”
He didn’t have to confirm it. Judas always operated the same, completely off the radar, but I appreciated the confirmation. “Thanks.”
“Oh eight hundred.” Judas hung up.
I got out of the Denali, and my personal cell pinged with a text.
I’m turning off the phone now.
Shoving the cell into my pocket, I didn’t reply.
I couldn’t.