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Today everybody but Gideon and Mateo put in a full day's training at Little Creek SEAL center. Gideon was still handling the ‘faulty gas furnace’ that had destroyed his house. Jonas Wolff’s brother was a Battalion Fire Chief in Norfolk. He had enough pull with the Virginia Beach Fire Investigator to get them to go along with that story after a long weekend fishing together and him explaining the circumstances. Jonas was going to owe his brother.

Now they were all assembled at Kostya’s house. Gideon’s fiancé Jada was with them, and so was Lark Barona, their lieutenant’s wife. Jada was almost as good, if not better than Gideon, when it came to cyber shit. Lark was there because, as an award-winning journalist, she had sources around the world, and could often uncover things that would help the team when they were at a loss.

“It’s got to be Amanda,” Ryker said. “Come on, Braxton. She was all over you in Dubai. She recruited you to be part of the Kraken Elite. Don’t you agree?”

Mateo knew Braxton had worked undercover on that mission, and Ryker was correct. Braxton had the best chance of knowing whether Amanda Melton would have taken over the corrupt private military consulting company. Their methods were brutal. In the beginning, they were known to torture and kill whoever was necessary in order to get their finder’s fees. As time went on, they became the ‘go-to’ company to handle assassinations and whatever dirty work that people were willing to pay for. On their last mission in Dubai, they found out that a zealot in the CIA had hired them, but the CIA director assigned the Omega Sky SEAL team to stop the Kraken while he worked to discover the traitor in his organization.

Braxton got up from the ottoman where he’d been sitting and started pacing the living room. “Look, I agree Amanda would throw her own kids into a volcano to take over that operation, but I’m not so sure that all-male outfit would let her. That’s all I’m saying.”

Mateo thought about his mother. They’d come to America when she was recruited to work for DuPont. She had received her PhD in chemistry and had authored a white paper about cutting-edge polymers for her dissertation in Argentina when DuPont sponsored her to come to work for them in the United States. She’d struggled to work in an all-male laboratory, and that was a little over twenty-five years ago, but she’d succeeded.

“I think the right woman could take over the Kraken. Especially if she was cruel and brutal enough, and everything you’ve said about her tells me she is,” Mateo said to the group in general. “Tell me, Braxton, would she be willing to kill a couple of people, arbitrarily, just to instill fear in the others?”

“In a second,” Braxton nodded slowly. “You’re right, Mateo. She would. She has an ice-encrusted dollar sign where her heart should be.”

“Okay, so we go with the supposition that Amanda Melton is in charge. We agree she showed up from nowhere, and she’s Australian,” Jada said as her fingers flew over her laptop keyboard. “It’s likely that’s not her real name, but do you really think that was a real Australian accent?” She looked up at Braxton.

“Sure,” Braxton said. “She wasn’t faking. It was a stressful situation. She would have slipped if it wasn’t.”

“Wait a minute,” Gideon stopped his fiancé before she started typing again. “It wasn’t Australian. It was Kiwi.”

Braxton asked, “What’s Kiwi?” before Mateo had a chance to ask.

“New Zealand. They kind of sound alike, but not really. I should have picked up on it before.” He looked over to Jada. “We’re going to need a sketch, then do facial recognition of women coming from New Zealand to Dubai. It’s pretty much a straight shot. She might have had to make a stop in Australia, but it would have been a connection only.”

“Yeah, but if she’d been part of the Kraken for a while, why are you assuming she came from her home? She could have been operating anywhere in the world before going to Dubai.” Ryker said.

Gideon rubbed the top of his head.

“He’s got you there,” Kostya muttered.

“You’re forgetting the first rule in all of this,” Mateo spoke up. Everybody turned to him.

“Okay, Big Guy,” Gideon said. “Spit it out.” Then he sighed, and Mateo could see that he realized what he missed and he was pissed at himself.

Mateo grinned.

“Follow the money,” they said in unison.

Jada hit Gideon’s arm. “Are you telling me you haven’t been doing searches on how they’re getting paid?”

“Cut me some slack, Sweets. They haven’t had a successful mission that I’ve been able to track in ages, so how could I possibly follow the money?”

She pursed her lips and gave a sad shake of her head.

He held his head in shame. “Okay. Let me get you the names of the men who paid them when we were in Türkiye,” he said to Jada.

“Finding the Kraken is half of the equation, now tell me about your families. I want to make sure everybody is covered,” Kostya said as he looked around the room. “You first, Drakos, since your family is the size of a small town.”

Jase was leaning against a wall. It was the first time Mateo had seen him be anything but in full alert mode since the explosion.

“Bonnie and the kids and Grandma are with my folks. They’re not staying anyplace that is familiar. They’re at a friend’s bed-and-breakfast. She’s shut it down for the duration and went on vacation. My brother Bruno, who used to be with Homeland Security, is there with a couple of his buddies. I trust him. Things are tight.”

“What about your brother and sister-in-law?” Lark asked.

“They both decided to take their families to Hawaii. My sister Angelica set them up at some hot shot director’s beach house for a month. Malik told me he’d pay me to get into this kind of trouble every other year.”

Mateo was happy to see the left side of Jase’s mouth curl up just a little.