by Lori Ryan
“Uh uh. I don’t buy it,” Chad said and Logan’s heart kicked into gear.
He didn’t know what would be better. If the note was right, it meant Sam had left him because she wasn’t sure of them. Wasn’t sure she wanted the life she’d said she wanted with him. It might kill him, but at least it would mean she was safe.
On the other hand, if someone forced her to write it, she was in danger. Possibly hurt.
“She loves you, Logan,” Chad said with a hell of a lot of conviction.
Logan raised his gaze and met Chad’s eyes.
“If she loves me, but she left, that means—”
“Yeah, that means.” Chad nodded. “We’ll find her.”
“Where do we even begin? Sam is the one we always call in a situation like this,” Kelly asked.
Logan picked up his phone. “We call in a ton of favors.”
“Zach is already on his way to meet with a few of the guys we know at the FBI. They’ve all worked with Sam. They owe her and they care about her. They’ll do what they can,” Jack said.
Chad nodded and started dialing his phone. “I’ll see if I can pull any more strings.”
The group was quiet and grim as Logan and Chad called as many people as they could. They weren’t able to get a B.O.L.O. out for her car, but unofficially every officer and agent in the area was watching for her vehicle. A few of the guys at the FBI were trying to track her online and others were checking hotel and motel records.
Logan swore bitterly into the phone, causing everyone to stop what they were doing to watch him. Because one of his contacts had just informed him that Diya Molov was likely behind Sam’s disappearance.
“What the hell? How did Diya get this close with no red flags being raised?”
He was quiet, listening for a minute, but the anger coursed through his veins like blood itself.
“Find out!” he barked and threw his phone onto the couch. He fisted his hands into his hair and tugged, wanting the pain as a distraction. This couldn’t be happening.
“Want to fill us in?” Chad asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Logan said, looking up. He needed to get his head back in the game … get out there and find Diya Bogolomov and her cousin.
“That was one of the SEALs I was working with on my last assignment. I can’t give you all the details,” he said, looking at Chad and the rest of the group, who nodded their understanding—they knew he had worked a lot of classified ops, “but he’s tracked someone linked to my past here. Diya Bogolomov has a lot of reasons to want to see me hurting and it turns out she’s been in Connecticut for the past two weeks. It’s no coincidence. We suspected she might have the identities of me and a few of my team members, but we hadn’t heard anything more. She was spotted in one of the airports and flagged, but somehow the people who should have alerted us never made the connection with my location and her movements.”
“How angry is this woman? How unstable?” Chad asked as Jennie put her arms around his waist and Kelly did the same with Jack. Seeing them all leaning on one another killed him. He wanted Sam safe in his arms.
“Very angry and very unstable. And, she’s likely well-funded.”
“What does she want?” Jennie’s voice reflected her fear.
Logan hadn’t ever really understood the meaning of the word despair until now. He felt utterly gutted at what he was about to say.
“She wants me to pay. She wants me to lose everything.”
No one spoke. They didn’t need to ask why. It went unsaid. They all seemed to understand Logan had somehow taken everything from this woman and she wanted the same for him. She wanted him to suffer as she had. Now, she was going to use Samantha to do it. She was going to take Sam away.
“All right,” he said. He wasn’t going to sit here. He couldn’t just sit back and let Sam go without a fight. “There’s no sign of a struggle here. Amanda said she came in and asked her to watch Billy and give him to me after a meeting I wasn’t in.”
The dog poked his head up at the mention of his name, but continued to watch the group, as if waiting for some instruction on how he might help.
“So, whatever made her leave, she wasn’t physically forced because no one was with her.”
Kelly nodded. “But something made her leave. And, if they didn’t simply take Sam or keep someone with her, they must be awfully confident that whatever they have on her is enough to make her come back. Or enough to make her do whatever they instructed her to do. Could this woman have reached out to Sam? Somehow convinced her that she needed to leave to protect you? That’s what would convince Sam. If she thought she was somehow protecting you.”
They were all quiet for a moment, as if each of them were trying to digest what Kelly had said.
“Oh, hell,” Logan said. “She thinks she’s protecting all of us. Sam’s plan to kill a SEAL.”
“What?” They all looked at him.
“The listening devices. Sam was bugged the day she told us how she would kill a SEAL. She would plant evidence against everyone the SEAL cared about and—”
“Oh, God. No!” Jennie knew, without him finishing the sentence what the plan entailed.
“What?” Kelly asked. “And, what?” She was the only one who hadn’t been in the room at Sutton Capital that day.
Chad filled in the rest for her. “In Sam’s plan, you set up everyone a person loves to go down for something criminal or something along those lines, then demand they kill themselves. You tell the person, they either kill themselves, or everything they’ve set up to hurt your loved ones gets put in motion. Sam meant it as a joke. She said you’d give the person a timeline. What was the timeline, Logan?”
“Forty-eight hours. You tell the person they have forty-eight hours to do it or you release everything you’ve got on their loved ones. If Diya was really listening, she’s sick enough to turn it around on Sam and actually do it.”
“And, Sam is—” Kelly started but couldn’t finish.
“Sam cares enough about everyone to do it.” Jennie said what they were all thinking.
Logan was hanging on by a thread, but he forced himself to steady his breathing and look his friends in the eye.
“We need to stop her. We can’t let her do this.” Shit. His voice didn’t sound anywhere near as steady as he’d like it to. “Where would she go?”
“Well,” Chad said, “she wouldn’t take it lying down. You can bet she has a plan.”
“So what would she do?” Jennie asked.
“She’d hack them,” Logan said. He knew it with as much certainty as he knew his name. She would hack them right back. She’d think she could protect them and take Diya on by herself. “What does she need to do that?”
“Nothing,” Chad said. “Just her laptop and an outlet. Space to work in and a shit ton of candy and junk food. But, her credit cards haven’t been used.”
Logan raised his eyebrows, but Chad just shrugged.
“I have the passwords to her accounts. I checked them all. She withdrew three thousand dollars in cash. That’s it.”
Logan made a mental note to find out why Chad had Sam’s passwords later, but for now he just filed it away. “So, she wouldn’t go far. She’s probably just nearby somewhere in a hotel.”
“Would she go home? To her parents’ house?” Jennie looked around the group.
Kelly spoke up this time. “No,” she said, resting her hand on her stomach as if to protect the baby from what was happening, but Logan saw Jack’s eyes narrow in on Kelly’s hand. The protective gesture wasn’t lost on him.
“She wouldn’t go home,” Kelly continued. “She wouldn’t want to put them at risk or tell them what was going on.”
Logan slid a glance to Jack, who still watched his wife like a hawk.
Logan set out plans for each person. “Kelly and Jack, why don’t you wait here and see if Sam calls her phone or comes back. That way, Kelly can get some rest. Chad and Jennie and I can meet up with Zach and come up with a plan
to narrow down hotels and track her down. I’m fine with fighting Diya, but Sam’s going to do it with all of us at her back.”
Kelly opened her mouth as though she might object, but Jack took her arm and led her to the couch. The look on his face didn’t allow room for her to argue.
“We got it covered, Logan,” Jack said. “Mrs. Poole is with Maddie. She’ll get her dinner and put her down to bed. I’ll ask her to spend the night just in case we don’t make it back for a while. We’ll stay here and hope Sam gets in touch.”
Logan nodded, but he knew Sam wouldn’t come back here. He needed to get out there and find her. Help her.
Chapter 32
Sam sat back with a grin. She had him. A black hat hacker who went by the name of PriorOfTheOri, a reference to some truly evil characters in Stargate. He was really Peter Gatorelli. The man was making a statement using a name like that, and it wasn’t a good one.
He was a man who would take money from anyone, to do anything, and apparently, that included framing innocent people like her friends and family, with the goal of forcing her to commit suicide. Sam swallowed hard because it was her own idea. She meant it as a joke, but the fact that this plot had come straight from her own mind made her feel sick.
She began to document as much as she could, outlining PriorOfTheOri’s moves as he set up her friends and family, capturing evidence in screenshots and putting them into a file for the FBI. It took her hours, but she needed to make sure her friends and family would have the evidence needed to clear them if things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.
Her stomach churned, primarily because it was now nearly midnight and she’d been eating nothing but junk food and the coffee she’d brewed in the hotel coffee machine. She looked at the clock. Room service wouldn’t be available for a few more hours, so she’d just have to wait.
Shoving aside the nausea she felt, she read through post after post by PriorOfTheOri in chat rooms. The guy was in his mid-twenties, but he had the demeanor and sense of humor of a teenager. He came across as being seventeen, not twenty-seven.
She would need to get his hard drive and fast copy a clone of it. That was the thing about most black hats. They took their online security seriously, but they didn’t take physical security into account enough. If she had to bet, she would put her money on his laptop simply floating around his hotel room somewhere. Sam knew just who to call to help her get ahold of it.
The phone rang a few times before one of the twins answered. They weren’t really twins. Ember and Evie were geeky gamers who had made a ton of money with software designs a couple of years back. They’d taken their earnings and gotten plastic surgery. A lot of it. They now looked similar enough to one another to be dubbed “the twins.” And, twins that could grace the cover of a men’s magazine, at that.
They still liked gaming, but they also liked to party. Sam knew they once partied with PriorOfTheOri. She remembered the stories that had come out of that night and cringed.
“Ember?” There was music in the background and the noise of a lot of people talking over it. She could almost picture the mind-scrambling flashing lights and mob of people that would accompany that music. She should have texted. She hung up and sent a text. Call me. 911.
The phone rang within minutes and the background was a little more muffled, like they’d found a hallway or bathroom.
“Sam? Is that you?” Giggling. Lots of giggling.
“Let me talk to her,” Sam heard and then recognized Evie’s voice.
“Hey, girl, you coming out tonight?”
Sam laughed. She didn’t party with the twins very often. It wasn’t her style. But every once in a while they convinced her to go out with them. She usually regretted it when she was hung over in the morning.
“Can’t tonight. I’ve got an emergency. Can you guys help?”
“Always,” came the simple answer. Sam had been friends with the twins long before they’d become the pretty women everyone wanted to know. They bonded back when they had only personalities to go on, not looks, before Sam had made her money with Tangled Legacy and they made their money with their apps.
“You guys remember PriorOfTheOri? You partied with him in California once?”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. Thinks he’s God’s gift and all that. Really, the guy’s a sleaze,” said Evie.
“He did nothing but grope me all night and he’s not grope-worthy,” Ember called into the phone.
Sam cringed. “Um, any chance you can go party with him tonight? I need you to reach out, find out where he is and then fast copy his hard drive for me.”
To their credit, the girls didn’t even question her. They agreed and went trolling for PriorOfTheOri right away.
Sam waited, pacing, the whole time. Ember texted updates, but that didn’t make the hour and a half it took to find him in a chat room and reach out go any faster. A little longer to get an invite to his hotel room and the twins were in.
Sam itched to get in there herself, but that wouldn’t work. She had to assume PriorOfTheOri knew what she looked like. She had to be content with the texts back and forth with Ember that included vomiting gestures and emoticons of shooting a gun at one’s head, as the girls worked at getting PriorOfTheOri drunk enough to pass out.
Sam didn’t want to know if they helped him along with any drugs or what they might be doing to convince him to keep doing shots. She’d prefer to stay in the dark about some of it. By 3 a.m., she received a final text. Got it. On r way.
The blonde twins grinned when Sam opened the door to her hotel room.
“That was too easy,” Ember said, seemingly sober.
Evie dropped down on the bed. “Speak for yourself. You didn’t have to drink with him.” She slurred her words and shut her blue eyes, rolling onto her side with a groan. “I had to let him feel me up four times before he passed out. Tequila doesn’t work nearly as fast on his scrawny ass as it should.”
Sam grimaced. “I’m sorry, Evie. I owe you.” Evie waved her arm in dismissal, but kept her eyes shut.
“She kept the idiot busy while I pulled his hard drive, fast copied it, and put it back. Talk about wham, bam thank you ma’am. Or, mister,” said Ember with a grin. “What now, girl?”
“Now,” Sam said with a grin of her own, “we get to work.”
She opened her own laptop and pulled up the notepad function on her screen, ready to write code. Ember dropped down beside her on the couch and opened the laptop they’d brought in with the copy of PriorOfTheOri’s hard drive and both women went to work.
Sam gave her a quick explanation of what they were looking for and then they were silent as they worked in tandem. They had hacked together many times in the past and they quickly sank into a rhythm that had them working quickly and efficiently. It wouldn’t be long now.
“I don’t understand, Diya. Why are we still here?” Yoshi asked as they sat in Diya’s car outside the hotel. It was the middle of the night and he was sure Diya hadn’t slept yet. He had slept for a couple of hours earlier, but the quality had been poor and he had a crick in his neck from leaning against the car window.
She didn’t answer him. She just continued to look out the car window as if waiting for something.
“Diya?”
She sighed heavily and turned hollow eyes on him. She had lost weight over the last few weeks. Her face was beginning to look gaunt and haunted.
He felt a tug in his heart for her. She was more a sister to him than a cousin and he wished he could shelter her from all of this. He should have been there the night the murdering Americans had come to slaughter their family. He should have been there to either defend them or to die by their sides trying.
But then, if he had been, he wouldn’t be here to help Diya now.
“What is it, cousin?” Yoshi reached for Diya’s hand.
She took his hand in both of hers and held it, as her eyes met his. “I’m just so tired, Yoshi. I need to finish this. I need to finish this for them.”
/>
“We will, Diya. We will. Rest now. Close your eyes. I’ll watch,” he said gesturing toward the hotel, although he didn’t know why she felt this frenetic need to watch the American woman until the end.
If it was what his cousin needed, he’d do it for her.
She closed her eyes and lay her head back against the seat. He turned to look at the hotel. He would keep watch for Diya. For his only family left.
Chapter 33
Logan paced in the offices of Sutton Capital. They had been there all night, trying to track down Sam. There was no sign of her anywhere and none of their contacts in local law enforcement or the FBI had been able to find any hints of where she was.
His thumb tapped the grip of his weapon in his holster as he paced, a comfort somehow in knowing it was there. Probably not exactly healthy, he knew, but it was helping.
Billy came to him again from where he had settled to watch him in the corner. He jumped lightly to stand on his hind feet, resting his front paws almost delicately on Logan’s arm. Logan took a deep breath and looked down into the eyes of the dog who had come to mean so much to him.
“I need her,” he said to the dog. Great. He was talking to his dog now.
Billy continued to stare at him, ever patient.
“All right,” Logan said, rubbing a hand down his face before moving to sit on the floor with Billy. As soon as he sat, Billy climbed across his lap and lay there, letting Logan run his fingers through the thick fur of his coat as though anchoring Logan.
Yeah, that was better. That helped.
He looked out the recently-repaired window as day broke and the dark gave way to a gray light. There was very little traffic on the streets below them, but it was growing steadily.
Fifteen hours had passed. If Diya gave Sam the forty-eight hours her plan had called for, he was hopeful she was still safe.
He knew Sam. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—kill herself. So, if Logan hadn’t found her before forty-eight hours was up, and she hadn’t done what Diya had told her to do, what would Diya do then?
