by Paige Tyler
“Two men,” the driver of the van said. “The one in charge—a dark-haired foreign-looking guy—never said a word. He just stood in the background and listened. The second one did all the talking. He had a New York accent and liked to talk loud, like he thought he was tough or something.”
Dwayne frowned. “That doesn’t really narrow it down. If you want a deal, you’re going to have to do better than some foreign guy and a loud talker from New York. I need a name.”
“They never used names,” Getaway Driver said. “And before you ask, New Yorker paid up front in cash. Five thousand in cash—each. We thought at first there were some kind of military or industrial secrets on the hard drive, but New Yorker said it was a damn romance book if you can you believe that.”
Dwayne ignored the meaningless commentary and stuck to the point. “Well, if you can’t give me a name, how about a description?”
“New Yorker was white. Maybe five-ten in height. Blond hair,” the second kidnapper answered. “The other one was older, maybe early fifties with dark black hair. Really expensive suit, though. Worth more than my car.”
Noah clenched his jaw. Getaway Driver’s description was about useless. They’d never be able to find anybody with information like that.
“Anything else you can remember about them?” Dwayne asked. “Tattoos or distinguishing characteristics?”
Both men were silent for a few moments before the first guy spoke again.
“It’s not really a distinguishing characteristic, but New Yorker had this irritating habit of twirling a damn pen between his fingers all the time. It was distracting as crap.”
Noah’s gut clenched.
Shit.
He rapped on the one-way glass with his knuckles to get Dwayne’s attention, then walked out of the room, hoping his friend got the message. Fortunately, he had.
“What’s up?” Dwayne asked as he met Noah in the hallway.
“I know the son of a bitch who hired those guys,” Noah told him. “The one they called New Yorker. It’s one of the editors at her publisher by the name of Scott Moore. He’s staying at the hotel where they had the release party last night.”
“You sure it’s him?”
“I’m sure. The description was dead on. He’s one of the few people that knew she kept the book on a hard drive in her purse and he spent the whole night twirling his pen between his fingers,” Noah said. “I’m going home to Peyton. Call me when you pick up Moore for questioning. I have no doubt your two suspects in there will ID him in a split second.”
As he raced down the stairs, Noah pulled out his phone and hit the speed dial for Peyton. It rang four times, then went to voice mail.
Dammit.
“Peyton, it’s me. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but Scott Moore hired those two guys who tried to kidnap you. He’s working with another man, but I don’t know who. Don’t open the door for anyone but me. I’m on my way.”
Noah cranked his SUV and squealed out of the parking lot, only realizing he was in front of a police station at the last second. He forced himself to ease off the accelerator. He wouldn’t do Peyton any good if the cops pulled him over. But the twenty minutes it took to get back to his apartment was pure agony. He called Peyton half a dozen more times, only to get her voice mail every time. In desperation he gave Sam a call, simply telling him that Peyton was in trouble and to get over to his apartment.
By the time he slid to a stop in the driveway of his apartment complex, Noah was close to losing his mind.
The door to his place was ajar, like someone had left in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to make sure it was closed. Noah’s heart froze and dread began to settle in the pit of his stomach even as he shoved open the door and stepped into the living room.
“Peyton!” he called out. “Where are you?”
He was met with complete silence.
Three mugs lying on the floor caught his attention, creamy coffee staining the carpet around them. A little further away, the coffee table had been shoved slightly out of position. Those were the only signs of struggle, but Noah didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what happened. Moore and the dark-haired man had shown up at the apartment and talked their way in. Peyton had obviously trusted them enough to offer coffee, but then something had gone wrong. Since her laptop was on the table, it was almost a certainty that she’d caught the men trying to make a copy of the book or something like that.
A quick check confirmed that the stains on the floor were already cold and starting to dry. He hadn’t been gone very long, so that meant this had all happened a while ago, maybe shortly after he’d left.
He moved through the rest of apartment quickly, terrified he’d find Peyton on the floor in another room lying in a pool of blood. Moore had struck him as kind of a wimpy guy, but who knew how he’d react if Peyton confronted to him. And the dark-haired guy was a total wild card.
“Peyton!” he called again, running down the hallway, past the smaller bedroom where he had his home office, then into the master bedroom. She wasn’t in either.
The continued silence was deafening.
He paused long enough to open his gun safe and pull out the small frame 9mm Glock he always kept loaded there. He shoved the slim holster inside the waist of his jeans, then he was up and running down the hall.
On the way, he did a check of the bath, kitchen, and coat closest, confirming what he’d already suspected. Peyton wasn’t there. Moore and the unknown dark-haired man must have taken her with him. Noah wasn’t sure why, but it couldn’t be anything good.
A noise at the door made him spin around, the 9mm coming up to center on the person stepping into the apartment. If it wasn’t for his years of SEAL training that always hammered him on the importance of identifying his target before pulling the trigger, he probably would have killed his own teammate.
“Whoa, dude. It’s just us.” Sam held up his hands. “What the hell is going on? Where’s Peyton? And why are you standing in the middle of your apartment with a gun in your hand?”
Noah lowered his weapon as Wes and Lane followed Sam into the apartment, all three of them looking around curiously.
Every instinct Noah had urged at him to run out of the apartment in a mad effort to find Peyton, but he needed to tell his buddies what was going on first. Keeping it brief, Noah told them what he’d learned at the police station that morning. As he filled them in on Moore and his partner, he didn’t miss the looks that passed between his Teammates as he described the dark-haired man who’d apparently supplied the money to hire the kidnappers.
“We just got another intel briefing on Magpie this morning from Woods,” Sam said. “They’ve confirmed the man is somewhere in the western United States and told us what he looks like. That dark-hair guy with Moore fits the description Woods gave us.”
Noah considered that for a moment and realized that it made a lot of sense. Magpie was supposedly under a lot of pressure to come up with an immediate source of funding for terrorist operations. That pressure must have made him get personally involved in the acquisition of the largest source of funding available to him—Peyton’s manuscript.
“Okay, if we think the dark-haired man with Moore is Magpie, how does that help us find Peyton?” Noah wondered aloud. “Why kidnap her if all they wanted was her book?”
He and his Teammates stood there arguing over the possibilities, running the gamut from Peyton already being dead—which Noah refused to consider—to Moore and Magpie taking Peyton alive in order to force her to write the next book in the series—which seemed unfeasible—to Peyton having left on her own to chase after the men who’d taken her book—an idea that seemed even more unlikely.
“Maybe it’s as simple as Moore and Magpie taking Peyton with them as a hostage until they get away,” Sam pointed out.
Noah had to admit that was the most likely scenario. “Okay, assuming they’re interested in getting out of town, the question is, how?”
He was wondering
if he should call Dwayne when Wes pulled out his phone. “I may be able to answer that.”
A few seconds later, Noah heard him talking to Kyla, telling her what was happening and asking if she could hack into the security camera that monitored the border crossing points into Mexico, along with those at the ports, bus stations, and airports. It must be nice to have a girlfriend who could hack into anything even remotely electronic in nature. Which is why Navy Intelligence had hired her.
Noah had no idea what Kyla might come up with—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to wait around and see—but Kyla called Wes back two minutes later.
“Scott Moore booked a one-way flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico earlier this morning on Southwest Airlines,” Kyla said when Wes put her on speaker phone. “The flight is scheduled to depart from Terminal 1 at 1:15 PM. There’s no way to check on this Magpie guy until I scan through all the check-in footage, which will take a while.”
Noah glanced at his cell phone to see what time it was. Moore’s plane left in less than three hours. Assuming he arrived early like most people did for international flights, it was possible he was already at the airport.
“Thanks, honey,” Wes said before hanging up. “We owe you big.”
While that was certainly true, Noah’s mind was already a hundred miles away as he focused on how to find Peyton.
“There’s no way in hell Moore will be able to get Peyton on board that plane with him,” Lane said. “Which means either Magpie has her or they’ve left her somewhere else between here and the airport.”
Noah’s heart seized up in his chest. Lane had used a nice word for what they were all thinking. The truth was that if those assholes had left Peyton, it was because they’d killed her.
“Moore is our only link to Peyton,” he said firmly. “No matter what, we have to stop him before he gets on that plane.”
And hope she was still alive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PEYTON SQUEEZED HER eyes shut. Crap, it felt like someone was driving a spike into her head. She supposed that was what happened when someone slammed you into a wall. She couldn’t believe Scott had betrayed her like that. She was sorry he’d gotten the shaft from the publisher, but that didn’t give him the right to steal her book. Or kidnap her. Of course, she had a feeling that the other guy—the one actually responsible for her headache—was behind all of this.
She had to call Noah. Hopefully, he could stop the two men before they got away with her book.
Peyton opened her eyes slowly, ready to squint against the sunlight sure to be streaming through the windows into the apartment, but all she saw was darkness around her. For one terrifying moment, she thought the hit she’d taken had blinded her. No, she could see fine. It was dark.
Did that mean it was nighttime? Had she been unconscious all day? That was a terrifying thought all in itself. If she’d been out of it that long, why hadn’t Noah found her and taken her to a hospital?
Peyton tried to roll onto her side and ended up hitting hit her head again. She automatically reached up to rub the offended area and discovered her wrists were bound together with something tight, thick, and sticky. It took her a couple of seconds of twisting and yanking to realize it was some kind of tape. She went to tear at the tape with her teeth, but that’s when she realized she was gagged, too.
What the heck…?
She looked around the small space, able to see better now that her eyes had adjusted to the dim light. It took her less than a minute to figure out where she was, but when she finally did, her eyes went wide. She was in the trunk of a car. A car speeding down the road.
Crap, crap, and double crap!
Where the hell were Scott and Daris taking her? More importantly, what were they going to do with her when they reached wherever they were going? This was one of those moments when being a writer was a bad thing, because she had no problem coming up with all kinds of horrible scenarios about what they might have in store for her.
Peyton wiggled her wrists, struggling against the tape, but it was useless. She’d have to be Wonder Woman to tear the stuff. Then again, if she were Wonder Woman, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. She would have kicked those guys’ butts already.
If she got out of this, she was going to ask Noah to teach her some of his SEAL moves so she could defend herself in case some other crazy assistant editor tried to steal her book again and stuff her in the trunk of a car.
She stopped struggling against the tape, hope surging through her. If anyone could find her, it would be Noah.
Peyton tried to find solace in that while fighting back tears when the car suddenly slowed and turned before finally coming to a stop. From outside, she heard the distinctive echo of a plane taking off. It was still fading into the distance as the car door opened, then closed. She tensed as footsteps came around to the back of the vehicle. A moment later, the lid of the trunk opened.
Humid air rushed into the already blazing hot space, making it hard to breathe through the cloth stuffed in her mouth. She squinted against the brightness, lifting her bound hands to shield her eyes. Thankfully, Scott moved to block the sun. Daris stood a few feet behind him, completely uninterested in the entire situation.
Scott regarded her almost regretfully, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “I’m sorry we have to leave you in here, but we don’t have a choice. When I get to Puerto Vallarta, I’ll call the police and let them know where to find you.”
Peyton’s mind did a few quick calculations and realized Scott’s plan would leave her trapped in this damn trunk for four to five hours…at least. She’d roast to death.
She started shouting against the gag in her mouth, cursing at Scott in between trying to tell him he didn’t have to do this, that she wouldn’t say anything to anyone. But with the gag in her mouth, all that came out was muffled noise. Not that it would have mattered. Scott slammed the trunk closed with a resounding thud, leaving her in darkness.
Tears burned her eyes again and this time she didn’t try to hold them back. It was already over ninety-five degrees out today. The temperature inside the trunk of this car would easily reach a hundred and twenty. Sweat was already soaking her clothes and dripping off her face. She’d never make it until Scott reached Mexico and called someone.
Noah was going to have to find her soon or she was dead.
* * * * *
NOAH LEFT HIS SUV at the curb and raced into the airport, not giving a damn if the vehicle got towed. He didn’t have time to dick around looking for a space in the parking lot. He had to find Moore and Magpie before the assholes went through security. If that happened, there was no way he’d ever reach them.
Behind him he heard the squawking of tires and knew Sam and the others had pulled up to the curb to help, but he had no intention of waiting around for them.
The airport was packed with people and weaving his way through the maze was like navigating an obstacle course. All while looking for a needle in a haystack. He prayed he got lucky.
Scott Moore was nowhere to be seen around the Southwest check-in counters and Noah’s stomach dropped. Cursing, he headed toward security. This was his last chance to stop the a-hole.
Please let there be long lines today.
Noah froze when he saw a man with blond hair standing in the line of people waiting to go through the TSA checkpoint. Noah couldn’t see his face, but his gut told him it was Moore.
The guy turned to chat with the woman behind him. That’s when Noah got a good look at his face and knew without a doubt it was Moore. Noah looked left and right but didn’t see anyone that fit Magpie’s description. For all he knew, Magpie might not even be here.
Noah slowly walked toward Moore. The last thing he wanted to do was spook the guy. Moore looked nervous enough already.
Noah moved casually as he walked along the security line, running through his options. If this were a SEAL mission, his plan of action would be simple. He’d pull his weapon and put a bullet in the guy’s leg, then pol
itely ask him exactly where he’d hidden Peyton. But doing that wasn’t an option, not unless he wanted TSA all over him. Not to mention the uniformed cop who stood nearby. Something told Noah they wouldn’t be interested in listening to his story.
He was still a few feet away from Moore when the man spotted him. The color drained from Moore’s face, his eyes taking on a panicked look. He threw a quick glance at the TSA checkpoint, then at the exit door half a football field away. For a minute, Noah thought he might try to make a run for it, but instead, Moore darted out of line and slammed into the side of the unsuspecting cop.
What the hell was the man doing?
Then Noah saw him jerk the cop’s gun from its holster and he knew exactly was Moore was doing.
Shit.
“Stay back!” Moore ordered, swinging the weapon back and forth between Noah, the cop, and the startled TSA agents. “Everyone stay back!”
Moore didn’t need to tell anyone twice. All around Noah, frightened people screamed and ducked for cover. From the corner of his eye, Noah saw Sam, Wes, and Lane, working to get people out of the danger area but there were so many people and most of them were frozen solid.
Noah held up his hands and stepped closer to Moore. He had his 9mm tucked firmly inside his waistband but adding another weapon in this situation wouldn’t help. In fact, it would probably make everything worse.
“Take it easy, okay?” he said. “I don’t care about the book. I just want to know where Peyton is.”
The gun trembled in Moore’s hands. “Peyton’s fine. I’ll call and tell you where she is after I get where I’m going.”
Moore couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to think the cops and TSA were going to let him get on a plane after this, was he?
Noah opened his mouth to urge Moore to put the gun down and tell him where Peyton was, but a sharp voice cut him off.
“Drop the gun and put your hands in the air! Now!”
Out of the corner or his eye, Noah saw a second cop had arrived and was aiming his weapon at Moore.
