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Ryker checked his watch for the eighteenth time since everybody had left the hotel. “The Polats should have landed forty-five minutes ago.”
“You gave me an update fifteen minutes ago,” Linc said disgustedly.
“And the meeting is due to start in thirty-five minutes.”
“Yeah, you let me know about that fifteen minutes ago too. Should I call you cuckoo, as in you’re a cuckoo clock?”
“I’m antsy,” Ryker admitted.
“No shit. I want to do something too, but you don’t see me irritating the fuck out of you, do you?”
“Hey, I know. I’m going to go irritate Gideon.”
“That sounds like a fine idea. Go for it.”
Ryker couldn’t leave the room fast enough. Besides tracking when the Polats would arrive and the meeting would start, he’d also been obsessing about the countdown for the Princeton boys. They were now down to twenty-one hours and twenty-eight minutes.
Ryker knocked on Gideon’s door and it was immediately opened.
“Yeah, yeah. You lasted longer than I thought,” Gideon said as he threw open the hotel suite door to let Ryker in. “I figured Linc would have kicked you out a half hour ago.”
“Nah, I didn’t really get on his nerves until fifteen minutes ago. Do you have any new information?”
“I wish I did.” Gideon sounded as pissed off and frustrated as Ryker was. “I mean, I’ve got more info on the two fucks that most likely have our boys. That’s Mehmet and Hamza. They will not hesitate to kill these kids. Hell, I think Hamza would have fun doing it. He’s a sadist. I think that he would fit right in with the Kraken assholes.”
“Did you get more dirt on them? How big of an outfit are they?”
“I was figuring they would have a small core unit, and then use contractors, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. I’ve been pumping all my sources on the dark net, and the contract mercenaries know to stay well away from Kraken because once you’re in, you’re stuck for life.”
“Yeah, that’s what Lee said.”
“A couple of mercs tried to get their buddies out of Kraken, and they were killed. And I’m talking guys who were some of the highest-trained Special Forces operators who had been doing mercenary work for years. They were assassinated.”
Ryker shuddered.
“Best that I’ve been able to tell, they probably have a force of about twenty that work for Frank Sykes, an American named Ely Roberts, and an Ethiopian named Lami Kassa. Normally one of these two would handle an operation like this, but the money is too big, so Frank is handling it. I think he doesn’t totally trust his men, which could be to our advantage.”
Ryker nodded. “Like they say, there’s no honor among thieves.”
“That’s why he’s so willing to kill the family of any man who tries to leave.”
“It’s not often that my big brother Jerrod looks scared about something, but he was definitely scared when he told Derek and me about Kraken Elite.”
“Normally we don’t go after other Americans, even when we’re overseas, but by the sounds of it Simon was just fine if we took some of these animals down.”
“Oh yeah, he was,” Ryker confirmed. “I got the feeling that even if they weren’t in our way, Commander Clark would be okay if we still took some of them out.”
“We’d be doing humanity a service,” Gideon agreed.
Ryker looked down at his watch. “Okay, we’ve blathered on long enough. Kostya should be following the Polat family by now. Isn’t the ETA from the airport to their house something like fifty minutes?”
Gideon nodded.
“So it’s a crapshoot as to who comes through first—Kostya, Landon, and Nolan, or Jase.”
“No, your wildcard is me.”
“Tell me, what have you got? Please say it’s something that will get Linc and I out of this goddamn hotel.”
