30. Oliver
30
Why does this feel like an ambush? Or worse, an intervention?
Julia Maddox Finnegan could give one hell of an evil eye, and she was giving it to me through the camera on what was only supposed to be a call with Falcon.
She was pissed. Glaring at me, and clearly so mad she’d yet to work up the ability to even yell at me.
Her husband, Finn, had his arm looped around her side, as if he might need to hold her back to prevent her from trying to crawl through the camera to strangle me.
Her wrath was merited. I’d disappeared on her same as everyone else, and she was mad as hell. We’d been through so much together with Tucker, and she’d saved my neck in Dubai. She deserved better from me. They all did.
All the more reason why I couldn’t go back. I’d walked away and abandoned those who loved me. I hurt them. Forgiveness wasn’t something on my radar—and it shouldn’t ever be—but I still planned to make use of the word sorry at every turn I could. And damn well mean it.
Standing behind Malcolm’s desk, with Mya in the chair next to me, I eyed the larger of the three monitors set up in his office. We were on a secure line, and not only were Julia and her husband there, as well as Falcon in Zurich, but so were Gray and Jack from their safe houses. Of course, Gwen and her father, Wyatt Pierson, were on the call, too. Teddy and Easton were absent from the line, but I hoped that meant they were still busy getting answers from the asshole they’d taken from the runway.
With no one yet talking, I went ahead and voiced my thoughts. “Why does this feel like an ambush? Or an intervention?”
“Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?” Julia was crying, and she had a hand on her . . .
Wait. I swallowed and braced against the desk. “Are you pregnant?”
“She didn’t want me to tell you,” Mya whispered as Julia nodded, swiping away her tears.
“I’m so sorry.” There was that word I’d wanted to come across as deep and meaningful, somehow sounding pathetic and weak. I scanned the different squares. Jack’s. Gray’s. Carter’s. And so on. Taking them all in. “To everyone, I’m sorry.”
“That’s not why we’re on the call.” Carter stepped in front of the other team members on site with him—Jesse McAdams was present, along with Griffin Andrews, Sydney Archer-Hawkins, and Mason Damn Matthews. Not that he was Falcon, but at this point, he was pretty much an honorary member.
“Did we hear from Teddy or Easton yet?” Mya redirected, and I mentally thanked her for drawing the attention away from me. Because if looks could kill, Julia was seconds away from murdering me.
Before anyone could answer Mya, Julia clamped a hand over her mouth as more tears spilled, murmured an apology, and took off.
I’d rather her yell at me than cry.
Finn cursed and gave a quick one-shoulder shrug, tossing out, “Probably the hormones. Give us a minute,” before the screen went dark.
I closed my eyes, seeing stars while hating myself all over again. Not that I’d ever stopped.
“She’ll be fine. We’re just bloody relieved you’re both okay,” Wyatt spoke up, his British accent sharp that time. Wyatt was on Echo Team with Finn, and he’d come to know Julia well.
For the sake of my sanity, I pushed away from the desk, opened my eyes, and forced myself to pull it together.
“Thanks to those assholes, I can cross skydiving off of my bucket list.” Mya attempting to joke was her way of coming to my rescue again. Along with their forgiveness, it was something else I didn’t deserve. Especially after I’d refortified my walls out on that deck and told her I had no plans to come back.
Relentless, stubborn woman. And I fucking loved that about her. That was the problem.
“Sure, sure. Like jumping from a plane was ever on your list,” Sydney teased before bolting upright in her seat, eyes wide. “Wait, rewind. You jumped from a plane? Easton said you safely took off.”
I let Mya take the wheel and share the events of our climactic afternoon, still a bit lost in my head and on edge with my old team all on the call. I’d expected dirty looks from the guys for abandoning them, but what I got was much worse—empathy in their eyes and slight nods of what I interpreted as understanding and support. Also, very much undeserved.
“Glad you’re good. We haven’t heard any new updates from Easton or Teddy, or received anything about Steve’s situation, but we’ll fill you in when we do,” Carter said when Mya finished her retelling of our day, throwing in a few of her made-up words as adjectives about skydiving. And fuck me, that almost had me smiling.
She’d left out the part about her nightmares and had yet to share the bomb she’d dropped on me about her parents.
“There is something else.” Mya wrung her hands together, resting them on the desk. She peeked at me over her shoulder before addressing the team on-screen.
Here goes.
I remained quiet, too absorbed by what she was saying to remember the aches and pains in my body as I listened to her talk. I wasn’t prepared to accept that the Vanzettis were part of The Collective. I knew what that’d do to her, and she didn’t need any more pain in her life. She’d been through enough.
At the end of her bullet-point summation of facts, recounted as if they were details from someone else’s story, Sydney was the first to break the silence on the other end of our call. “There has to be another way The Collective discovered Steve worked with us. Maybe they spotted him on our trip in New York on the Fourth.”
“Unless it was your husband or kids,” Mya quickly discounted her idea, “aside from my parents, there was no one else who saw any of us together those two days. Plus, we took Carter’s second jet there.”
“And Carter’s pilots would rather fork themselves to death than betray him,” Jack jumped in. Carter rolled his eyes, but Jack was right.
“Mya,” Mason grated out, eyes pinning her with unmistakable worry.
Don’t be jealous. I’m not allowed to be anymore. They’re friends. Mason knew her parents, and he cared about her, so . . . That didn’t stop the chills from flying down my body. Didn’t ease the pain in my stomach at the idea one day they’d wind up together again because I walked away. I want her to be happy, even if it can’t be with me. I just wished so much it could be me waking up next to her forever.
“Just hear me out,” Mya said, as if trying to shut down Mason’s unspoken objections. “My dad could’ve secretly had Steve’s face checked for a name, then he decided on a plan of attack,” she shared, still seemingly unaffected by what she was suggesting. I had to believe she was wearing her journalist hat, acting as though this wasn’t her story but someone else’s. “The Collective wouldn’t have known before they reached out to Steve to force his hand that only Gwen was at the safe house. They probably hoped more of us would be there.”
“Then they found out Steve was following you to Canada to find Oliver, and they had a shot to, at least, get him,” Sydney went on, continuing Mya’s line of thinking. “They’d probably been searching for Oliver as well, and although they couldn’t get the rest of us, they had to go ahead and make their move.”
Gray stood, folding his arms over his chest, shaking his head. “I’m having a hard time believing this. Wouldn’t we have come up with something connecting them to The Collective sooner?”
“There are never connections. Not ones you can trace, at least,” I shared my thoughts out loud. “That’s why we wound up in this situation in the first place.”
“We’ve never found anything online about them. Not even a mention of their name,” Jesse noted.
“If you’re not on the internet these days, you basically don’t exist, right?” Jack said as his pregnant wife, Charlotte, joined him on-screen and gave me a little nod of hello. “Hell, we made sure the same held true for Falcon. No digital trace can be found of our team online.”
“There’s more than just a trace of us now,” I reminded them.
Falcon had all been seen together when baited to Thailand for our rescue. The hacker had sent Gwen digital evidence confirming they knew we worked together.
“Well, The Collective has to communicate their plans somehow, just in a way Gwen hasn’t been able to detect over the dark net. Maybe they’re not sending their plans via email, but they’re collaborating somehow,” Sydney said, joining Jesse and Griffin on the couch.
Once upon a time, we’d all be there together. Operating as a team. Now we were split up, and it was my fault. Had I not been caught, they’d never have risked their identities to come for me, and now?—
“They do have great hackers working for them. This mystery person is better than me,” Gwen reminded us, cutting through my thoughts. “Scratch that. They’re kind of on our team, so that person can’t be helping them. I mean, unless they’re playing both sides. Or they’re forced to help them, but then they’d know more about them, and they haven’t given us any-bloody-thing.”
Her dad patted her on the head as if she were five, his way of letting her know not to beat herself up. The man had missed out on twenty-plus years of her life because he hadn’t known Gwen existed. Unlike my dad taking off, Wyatt would’ve been there from day one if given the chance.
“Maybe they use carrier pigeons to send their kill orders,” Jack, the comedian on the team, joked.
“Pigeons,” Mya murmured. Then repeated the word with more conviction while shoving away from the desk. “Holy shit.” She whipped around to face me.
“What is it?” I knew that look. Her beautiful mind was speeding through information. Processing. Solving a puzzle.
The way she stared at me with narrowed eyes and lips partially open, I’d swear she was trying to Jedi-force her way into my head so I’d know what she was thinking. “Pigeons?” I repeated, not following.
. . . Until I did.
Until that light-bulb moment happened, and my thoughts centered on a memory from Thailand. I drew it up in my mind right down to the boat, and the crates, and the freaking birds at the pier on Valentine’s Day where I’d snapped mostly photos of Mya.
“You two plan on filling us in on your telepathic conversation?” Jack asked, easily picking up our vibes. Reading us like we were currently reading each other.
“On February fourteenth . . .” Mya slowly faced the screen, her chest still rising and falling as she worked through the problem in her mind.
Jack filled the silence a beat later. “Also known as Valentine’s Day, yes.”
“An anonymous source sent a tip about an exchange I wouldn’t want to miss. Something connected to my story. A plane brought in some ‘precious’ cargo, and then it was transported down the river by boat. We were even given the heads-up as to which pier it was being brought to and on which boat. So, we waited there, and watched as pigeons were handed off to what looked like a delivery man there for a pickup. We figured it was just a bad tip, and I’d assumed the pigeons were the winners from whatever recent race had happened, because why else would a few pigeons be sold like that?”
“People race pigeons?” Gray asked, as shocked as I remembered being back in the day. “And they pay money to buy the winners?”
Gwen began typing at her second laptop, and a moment later, shared, “Apparently. Some winning birds have sold for over a million.”
“Well, damn.” Jack leaned back in his chair, resting his hands on his chest. “But what does this have to do with, well, anything?”
“My editor was always on my ass about what I was up to, so every day I sent a writeup to her. I shared my dead-end lead about the birds, along with the photos Oliver took.” Mya left out the part that ninety percent of that day’s photos had been of her, and she’d most definitely excluded those when syncing with the company’s server. “What if that’s what put the bullseye on us? What if we saw something we weren’t supposed to? Something related to The Collective. And I basically told them all about it with that email to my editor.”
“You’re not actually suggesting The Collective uses birds to relay their evil plans, are you?” Jack sat upright, shaking his head in surprise. “I was joking.”
“Not in the literal sense, at least not how they were used in the past.” Mya pulled the chair up and sat while squeezing her eyes closed, clearly trying to latch on to a memory or an idea.
“The Collective doesn’t trust the internet, because they know nothing is safe there from hackers.” Gwen sounded as though she was on board with Mya’s line of thinking, but was I? “So, they communicate in a way no one would ever suspect. Even their delivery people dropping off or picking up the cargo would be clueless. They probably hide messages in an old-school USB within the crate. Or use something that can be easily destroyed for good after it’s been read.”
“The pigeons could just be symbolic of how they were used in the past, which is why they chose them. Plus, pigeons are about the last thing that’d raise red flags with customs,” Sydney added on.
“Can you remember anything else from that day that’d be helpful, so we can track where the pigeons were coming from or going to from there?” Gray asked. “Your hotel room in Thailand was raided before we could get there. All of your stuff was gone, so we can’t access that.”
Mya took a moment, then shook her head while studying me. “But Oliver might. He’s not nicknamed Kodak for nothing.”
Birds. Not just any birds, fucking pigeons. Were innocent little birds really what led to our covers being blown and us being taken?
Closing my eyes, I did my best to pull up the scene from that day by the pier, going through a play-by-play of every image like a slideshow in my mind.
I reached beneath my shirt and grasped Tucker’s ID tags as if somehow he’d have my six. Help me work through these memories. Anything relating to Thailand gave me a sick stomach and flu-like chills.
My mind kept circling back to Mya in that sundress instead. It took her holding my arm, letting me know she also had my six, to get past the brain chaos and focus.
If this longshot theory was remotely right, and it’d somehow help us take down enemy number one, then I had to pull it together and help out.
“There was a crate beneath the cages,” I shared. “A standard wooden shipping crate.” I nodded, the memory peeling back. If only I could use my fingers to zoom in on the image to get a better look. “Five numbers in red were on the side next to the letters USA.”
“Five? Zip code of origin, maybe? Or possibly a code,” Sydney suggested. “Happen to remember?”
“I think so.” I opened my eyes after recalling the numbers. “85250.”
“Give me a sec,” Gwen said, already typing. “Scottsdale, Arizona. Paradise Valley.”
“The younger brother and his family live there.” Mya looked up at me. “Sylvester Soren.”
“That’s a good enough link for me.” Carter’s attention moved to another screen, presumably to Gwen, as he requested, “Look into any past shipments involving these racing birds around the world. See what you can find out.”
Mya was back on her feet again, letting go of my arm, drumming her fingertips against her lips, lost in thought. “Soren sent those birds to Thailand with a message, and not long after, that pharmaceutical company went bust and their competitor’s stock soared.”
Wyatt braced against the desk where he stood by Gwen and asked, “How in the hell would your source know about this shipment unless they’re part of The Collective? And if that’s true, why in the bloody hell would they want you to know that?”
“Billion-dollar question, Dad,” Gwen said with a shrug, and he sent her a lopsided smile. Doubtful the man ever tired of hearing her call him that. I could relate. I’d missed saying it without my dad around.
“More to think about, I guess.” Mya’s sigh was probably less from feeling defeated and more so from being overwhelmed.
I’m right there with you.
“Confusing anonymous source aside, this does have me wondering something.” Mya used air quotes when asking, “What if the Sorens are a metaphorical ‘pigeon’ themselves? They’re the middleman, if you will, for The Collective. The messenger who not only handles falsifying news stories but passes along orders and intel. What if that’s their role in all of this?”
“They’re not at the top of the food chain, they’re the hub of the wheel that connects everything, and that’s why they’re still alive despite everything that went down in Thailand with us,” Gwen translated Mya’s thought into a brief summation, all the while typing at her laptop, following Carter’s search request.
“Craig Paulsen gave us the Sorens’ names, and I doubt he even knew how significant of a lead it was, or the Sorens’ role in the organization. He must’ve somehow heard it in passing.” Carter didn’t try to hide the bitterness in his voice, and I didn’t blame him when it came to that asshole.
Sydney nodded in agreement. “If the Sorens are in charge of delivering orders or requests for the group, then they can also determine which ones are sent and received. They can ensure no one else in the group knows their names have been exposed to anyone, especially to those the President tasked with hunting them. They can make sure that message never gets out to the rest of their group,” Sydney pointed out, and fucking hell, I really hated these people. All of it.
“A wheel. Well, a circle of any kind has no points.” Mya stopped tapping her lips. “Yet something has to make it go around, which is the hub. That’s the Sorens’ place in all of this.”
With my dad somewhere in the house, I hid my ID tags and tried to keep up with the analogies.
“There really is no head of the table. No one family is in charge, is there?” Mya continued. “Knights of the Round Table concept. Equality among members. Explains a lot, now that I really think about it.”
“These last four months, it’s just been the Sorens after us, then, right? You all assumed The Collective knew our identities because of the hacker’s message, but what if it’s just the Sorens who know?” I had to make sure I was understanding what was being suggested here. “The Sorens kept Falcon’s names a secret from their other group members knowing if word got out to The Collective as a whole, their family would be targeted. The Sorens couldn’t let anyone know we got so close to them.”
Mya nodded. “And our names may have made it to the news because of what happened with the police and Interpol, but that doesn’t mean The Collective had a clue our arrests had anything to do with them if the Sorens kept their mouths shut.”
“Because the Sorens never released their racing pigeons, or whatever it is they do, to transmit messages to the others,” Jack commented, a touch of humor to his tone, his way of keeping the heavy shit a bit lighter. “The Sorens saving their own asses, in a sense, helped save us from having the entire Collective after us, I guess.”
“That means the Sorens have access to every group member, though, if they’re the hub.” I was finally connecting the dots, still shocked Jack’s joke about pigeons of all things brought us here.
“That also means our mystery ally, this hacker, has to be undercover with the Sorens themselves.” Mya had to be right about that, too. “And for some reason, the hacker doesn’t want us to know that.”