Chapter 9
TARA
Knox Steele was onto us—onto me. He’d installed the cameras once, so he was damn well going to install them again. I couldn’t control when and where he would place them, or how much scrutiny we were going to come under, but I could control one thing.
Putting surveillance on him.
It was only fair.
I slammed open my office door and scanned the training area. All the recruits were busy sparring with Samaira and Sloane.
I marched to where they were practicing slamming each other to the ground, and everybody’s attention snapped to me.
For a second, panic gripped my body, just like it always did when someone looked straight at my face.
What used to paralyze me for hours now only lasted for a second.
I was going to make that panic disappear completely one day.
I cleared my throat and looked at Sloane. “You’re going to get a cool, tiny undercover mission, and you get to train three people in the field. You up for it?”
Sloane squealed and jumped on me, quite literally. Her arms and legs wrapped around my body, and I staggered back as I braced her weight with a chuckle. “Tara, I’ve been dying to go undercover. It’s been a while.”
She squeezed the life out of my throat, and I had to pinch her waist. “Get down, bitch. You’re taller than me.”
She chuckled and instantly jumped down, gripping my biceps in her hands. “But you’re stronger than me.”
She, then, turned to everyone with a delighted smile. “Samaira used to make me and Tara do these same exercises, and Tara beat me all the time. Don’t think that just because she’s the tiniest of us all that she’s the weakest. Tara could lift a fucking car with her hip thrust.”
Samaira cheered and bumped my shoulder with hers. “Damn right.”
I rolled my eyes at their antics, but I couldn’t stop the smile that slipped onto my face. “I was with you until the whole lifting a car with my hip thrust. Now, Sloane, I need you and three of your trainees in my office in fifteen.”
Samaira grabbed my neck in a chokehold. “But what about my training for them? We’re in the middle of it.”
I grabbed her by the waist and swept her legs from under her. Well, I tried to, but she just jumped over it, with my neck still in her ironclad grip. “Too slow, Panther. You need more training with me. How long has it been since you last sparred with me?”
Fuck. I dreaded sparring with her. “Probably last week,” I muttered from between her arms, as I tried to push all my weight down and throw her over my back.
She cackled as I barely managed to throw her down, knowing full well that she let me. She jumped back up on her feet, dusting herself off. “It’s been over a month since we sparred together. Tomorrow morning, seven o’clock. I want you in the ring.”
I growled. “Fuck you.”
She only smirked. “Bring that sass in the ring tomorrow. You’re gonna need it.”
God, she was cocky.
I flipped her off and turned around, walking back to my office, keeping the door open. “Fifteen minutes, Sloane.”
While the girls freshened up, I played with Shadow. He barked and rolled over as I held a treat up for him. With a light chuckle, I fed him his treat.
I gave him some ear scratches. “Good boy. Now, I need you to grab me anything with this scent.” I pulled out Samaira’s scrunchie from my back pocket and let him sniff it. “You got it, baby?”
He wiggled and bounded out of the office.
I had been training him regularly for years now to identify and pick up scents.
This was one of our everyday exercises. I hardly ever used Shadow for our missions, but you never knew when we might need his help.
Case in point: locating Knox Steele’s cameras in the parking garage.
Shadow dashed back into the office, with Samaira’s sweat-soaked towel hanging from his mouth. “Eww, baby. Drop that.” He immediately obeyed and trotted over to me. “But you did so well. Here’s your treat.”
He happily chomped on it as Sloane and the girls walked in.
Once they settled into their seats, I pulled up the blueprints of Knox Steele’s precinct, turning to the ladies. “You girls ready to bug Knox Steele’s precinct?”
A wicked smile stretched across Sloane’s face. “You’re being a bad girl, Tara.”
My own grin reflected the excitement buzzing through my veins. “Well, he bugged our place of work first.”
Sloane tapped her nails against the table. “Fuck it. Let’s do this. Show the cop who he’s dealing with.”
Ruby’s, Eleanor’s, and Harper’s smiles matched ours, and I knew these girls would be with us for the long run.
I launched into the plan of action. “Sloane, I’ll leave the technical planning to infiltrate the precinct up to you.
I need their department bugged. If you get to their briefing rooms or to Knox's office, even better. I’ll give you girls long-range audio devices that are easy to attach to a solid surface.
I need as many recording devices hidden in that precinct as possible, but no fewer than six.
I’ll give you this Wi-Fi chip to attach near a desk or a computer.
It will help me hack into their systems faster. ”
Sloane whistled. “Damn, girl, this is going to be fun. Give me a day to plan shit out. We’ll get started on the mission tomorrow. I’ll sit with the girls, and we’ll come up with our stories and outfits.”
“Sounds perfect. The faster we get into the precinct, the faster we gain insight into what they know about us.”
“Send me everything you have on the building. I’ll update you this evening.”
“Sounds good. Thank you, ladies.”
“It’s going to be so much fun,” Ruby squealed, bumping shoulders with Harper, who was already rattling off all the decoy options on their way out.
Once it was just Shadow and me in the meeting room, I pulled open everything I had on the Russian mob operation. It was time to start plotting out a way to destroy every single hideout at the same time. And for that, I needed every single Wildcat.
Operation Precinct Takeover
“Play us a good song, Shadow Panther,” Sloane’s voice crackled over the speaker in my office.
Lena and Naomi groaned in unison. My lips twitched, my eyes meeting Samaira’s grinning face, while all the recruits tried to hide their snickers behind their hands.
Completely ignoring Lena’s lethal glare, I played “Sound of da Police” by KRS-One.
I kept the volume low enough so she could hear her background music without drowning out my voice on the comms.
Sloane was going with Ruby and Harper. Eleanor was going to be the backup for tomorrow in case they didn’t get to install as many recording devices as planned.
Sloane had laid out the operation thoroughly. She had mapped out what each of them was supposed to do, the exact time when they would step foot inside the precinct, and the exact script they’d follow while dealing with the cops. Every second of the operation was planned to a T.
Today, Sloane was a woman in her fifties who went to the police station to file a complaint about her missing poodle.
Her alias was Gina Matthews, a woman with many curves, bleached-blonde hair, and a fake British accent.
She was born in England but had moved to the US when she was ten.
She’d married a rich businessman and had lived a life of luxury.
She was a woman of high society and even higher standards.
The hip-hop music playing in her background as she stepped into the precinct begged to differ.
We had a live feed streaming directly from her cleavage as she sauntered into the building like she owned the place.
She turned her body every which way, pretending to look at the bulletin boards, spitting her gum in the garbage can, and leisurely making her way up the stairs to the main floor of the precinct.
She stopped at the reception counter, smoothly sticking a recording device far under the ledge, as she demanded to see an officer to file her complaint.
She planted another device under a chair as she took a seat in the waiting area until her name was called.
A short partition separated the waiting area from the main bullpen, where several officers were seated at their desks to take statements. I cataloged every officer’s face, my eyes trying to find the one face that haunted my sleep.
We didn’t spot Knox moving around the precinct, but by the time Sloane had filed her complaint, Ruby had already waddled into the waiting area dressed as a heavily pregnant lady.
By the time Sloane had “accidentally” spilled coffee over Officer Brandon’s desk, slipped a bugged pen into his overflowing pen stand, and gone to the restroom, Ruby had started having “Braxton-Hicks contractions” right in front of one of the panicked officers taking her statement.
While three officers rushed to help her, Sloane “accidentally” collided with another officer right outside the restroom and smoothly exchanged his pen for one of ours.
By the time she was walking along the hallway toward the bullpen, Harper had arrived carrying a towering stack of seven boxes of pizza.
We already had twelve recording devices up and running in the precinct.
As Sloane rounded the corner out of the hallway, her feet slowed in front of a brass nameplate reading Lieutenant Knox Steele outside a closed office. She tried the doorknob, but it didn’t budge. Clearly, the man was paranoid.
“Don’t do it, Cherry.” I couldn’t help but speak up.
“There’s a small space between the bottom edge of the door and the floorboard. What if I stick the device under the gap?” Her whispered question echoed in the room.
Fucking genius. “That’s brilliant. Do it.” I quickly checked the now-up-and-running cameras in the precinct’s hallway.
Three of the officers were panicking as Ruby acted her tits off while Harper kept the rest of the officers busy trying to figure out who placed the order and whether they deserved to keep the pizzas.
I could see the officer who’d gone to the restroom step out into the hallway.
“Cherry Cheetah, one of the officers is headed your way from the restroom.”
Sloane quickly dropped to her knees, and in under ten seconds, she had the device planted under the door.
By the time Ruby had calmed down a little and Harper was busy inspecting every pizza with the officers, Sloane had already walked out of the precinct.
She had successfully installed twenty-one audio recording devices, four cameras, and a fucking Wi-Fi Pineapple—a device that would help me connect to the precinct’s internet and access every single system in place—in the women’s restroom.
Checkmate, motherfucker.
Once Ruby and Harper were out of the building, and each of them left in their separate vehicles, all of us in my office cheered and clapped for the three of them.
While the ladies were en route to Wildcats HQ and everyone had cleared out of my office, I hacked into the precinct’s security systems and glitched up their surveillance feeds from this morning.
They wouldn’t be able to access a single photo of any of the ladies’ faces when they eventually went back to check for the culprit. Because I was damn sure Knox Steele would find some of these devices.
Once the ladies returned, we popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate Ruby and Harper’s first successful undercover mission.
After we devoured some gourmet lunch that Dominic’s chefs so graciously prepared for all of us, I gathered Lena, Samaira, and Sloane in my office.
Naomi was busy with her patients in her medical unit upstairs, right across from her apartment.
Samaira let out a very loud burp as she took a seat. “God, why do we arrange meetings after lunch? Fuck, I need coffee.”
On the other hand, I was still buzzing from all the cameras and recording devices. It literally felt like Christmas to me. I had no idea if I was gonna sleep tonight.
Lena looked at me and scoffed. “Tara, you can’t stop smiling.”
I chuckled and winked at Sloane. “All thanks to Sloane, Ruby, and Harper.”
Lena tapped her nails against the table and opened her notebook. “Alright, what’s this about?”
I opened the NYC map with all my notes and the spreadsheet with the schedules, then turned to the ladies.
“I’ve narrowed down five areas that I’d like all of us to monitor.
They are the zones with the highest rates of kidnapping for young men and women in the past three years.
We can all take turns. The recruits can partner up and do the monitoring.
That way, we can have all the bases covered.
Of course, I’ll install hidden cameras in each of the suspicious alleys, crossroads, and streets.
So we don’t need to spend entire nights in these locations, but it would be good to do some groundwork and get a feel for the area.
If we spot any suspicious activities, people, or vehicles, it would be good to note them and have proper documentation.
“I’ve also prepared a schedule for all of us. The five of us—and yes, Naomi too—can handle one location on our own. The recruits can go on the other days and report back to us. I anticipate that we would each need to go about twice a week. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.”
Lena looked over everything, her eyes moving from the map to the schedule to her notebook.
“This is great work, Tara. The monitoring seems like a good training exercise for all the recruits. As for the schedule, let’s have at least one of us present on the streets every night, irrespective of our assigned location.
In case something goes wrong somewhere, or if the recruits need us, we can be in the field and reach them quickly. ”
I jotted that down. “Got it. I’ll edit it and send out the revised schedule to our team email.”
“Sounds perfect,” said Sloane, stretching in her seat, still dressed in her Gina Matthews outfit of a vintage leopard print shirt tucked in a flared designer skirt.
Samaira caught me noticing Sloane’s outfit and chuckled. “You’re taking the first night, Tara?”
“Yes. I’ll also debrief the recruits. We’ll start tonight.”
“Perfect. Be careful out there. No fighting. No recklessness. This is just a recon mission,” Lena said, her eyes narrowing at me in a motherly warning.
I raised my hands in surrender. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m not Sami.”
“Hey.” Sami scowled.
I winked at Sami and turned back to Lena. “It’ll be fine. I promise.”