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“Then she might want to stop wearing so much perfume, it just makes me think she’s lying,” Mateo sneered.
“Yeah, well, you’re sitting in the back,” Gideon griped. “Think how bad it was for the Captain and me.”
“Captain,” Linc raised his hand. “Do you think the CIA had anything to do with them finding out who we were?”
“I truly can’t answer that question, Lincoln. But I’m going to have Gideon, Kane, Dev, and Clint looking into Kraken. Looking deep. I want to find out if two hundred years ago one of the Kraken men ever shared a saddle with a relative of someone who currently works at the CIA.”
“That would be our pleasure,” Gideon smiled.
“Tell me who all interacted with Kraken Elite, and specifically Sykes?”
Four voices shouted out, “Ryker.”
Ryker slumped down in his chair. “Come on, Nolan, you were the one who told him he would need surgery on his balls.”
“That was only after you called him needle dick for the seventeenth time, and he made a point of saying he would remember you,” Nolan called back.
Captain Hale sighed. “So it’s fair to say you both made an impression.”
Ryker and Nolan nodded.
“From what I remember in the debrief, it was only Landon, Nolan, Ryker, Linc, and Kostya who were there in Bismil, is that correct? So you were the ones who had real interactions with the man?”
“Not Linc,” Ryker said. “He was our sniper from the other building. They never saw him.”
“And they never saw the lieutenant,” Landon said. “He was hidden back inside the house, covering everything that was going on in the courtyard. So they really shouldn’t have targeted him.”
“They would have though, because he’s the leader of our team,” Gideon explained to Landon. “But how did they find out about our team?”
“That is the question, now isn’t it?” Captain Hale said. “Thanks for coming in tonight. You’re all dismissed. I’ll be in touch.”
23
“You do realize that Jada freaked Amy way the hell out, right?” Ryker asked Gideon.
Gideon rubbed the top of his head, then nodded. “Yeah, she can get that way sometimes.”
“I really wished she wouldn’t have done that. Amy has enough on her plate right now.”
Gideon looked over at Ryker from where he had been writing names on the whiteboard. “Are you saying you would have liked Amy flying down here last night? Come on, get real. Amy freaked out about some possible shit going on, or you and I really freaked the fuck out because Amy could be the target of a bomb at any goddamn minute, are two different things.”
Ryker shook out his hands, glad he wasn’t writing on the damned whiteboard, because his lettering would be unrecognizable. He kept thinking about Jerrod’s friend Lee, and how that psycho had his parents killed.
“You’re right, I want everybody I love way the hell away from me,” Ryker admitted.
They both turned as Nolan walked up. “What do you have to smile about?” Ryker growled. “Your ass is in the same leaky rowboat as mine, only you have Maggie and Iris here in Virginia Beach.”
“First,” Nolan started holding up one finger. “I did not call Psycho Sykes needle dick to his face seventeen times.” Then he held up his second finger. “Second, Evie Avery just picked up Maggie and Iris and is taking them to stay at her place in Jasper Creek now that it is fixed up.”
Ryker opened and closed his mouth. He was not going to make a snarky remark about Evie trusting Maggie to not lure people to her home and have it destroyed again. Gideon gave him a subtle nod of approval for his restraint.
“Have we all sent Kostya flowers?” Ryker asked the two other men.
It did his heart good to hear them laugh.
“How’s he doing?” Gideon asked Nolan. They all knew that Nolan would have the most inside scoop since he was the medic.
“He’s a tough son-of-a-bitch. He already tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom in his room so he didn’t have to pee in a pan. He only gave in because the nurse almost cried when he wouldn’t listen to her,”
