Page 73 of Her Defiant Warrior

“Ely hasn’t encrypted anything, so he’s making it easy. Wait a minute. Are you shitting me?”

“What?”

“He’s got everything filed in his Outlook. He’s got a file titled UAE, and sub-directories of Future, Consul, Revenue, Expenses. It can’t be this fucking easy. It just can’t be.”

Jase continued to look over his friend’s shoulder. He watched him open the revenue folder and then saw an encrypted e-mail. Gideon double-clicked on it. It required a password.

Gideon looked at Jase. “This is it. The dumbass is putting his payment e-mails in an Outlook file called revenue. I could kiss the guy, but Amanda already has that covered.”

Jase looked around at the study. “I bet if you moved one pencil an inch to the left, his head would explode.”

“Yeah, he definitely has OCD tendencies.”

“Did you find anything else relating to this evening’s assassination or kidnapping or what’s going on with the American consulate’s office?”

“I need time to really go through this tablet. Maybe an hour or two and I’d find something. Or less because he’ll have it so conveniently labeled.”

“I get what you’re saying, but what about Ryker? As funny as he’s being, I want to get him to a hospital. He puked again while we were in here.”

“How in the hell do you know that?”

“I heard him hurl into the plant by the hallway. Also, Mr. Comedian slurred his words a bit. He tried to play it off, but he did it.”

“I’ll check his pupils when we get back to the room. In the meantime, I need to get my suspicions about Brax to Kostya. I don’t know Brax’s number, and even if I did, I’d worry he was being monitored. Let me send off an e-mail.”

Jase nodded. God, he was sick of this fussy Southern house in the desert.

“You look like you want to get out of here as much as I do,” Gideon commented.

Jase looked down at the time on the screen. Three hundred. “Probably even more, but until we have something substantial, we need to stick with this,” Jase told his team’s second in command.

Gideon looked up from the tablet. “I agree. The one caveat is, if we need to get Ryker to a hospital, then we come up with another plan.”

“Agreed,” Jase nodded. “What are we going to do about tying ourselves back up?” Jase whispered as they headed for the hallway.

They looked up and saw Ryker holding up a handful of zip-ties with a lopsided grin. Too lopsided, in Jase’s opinion.

“Where’d you get those?”

“I went through the three duffel bags in the living room. I’m figuring they were the muscle twins and Spider’s. I hit pay dirt. No guns, but” he held up a set of brass knuckles. Then he held up three steak knives that he had obviously taken from the kitchen. “I love a woman who keeps her implements sharpened.”

“Nice job,” Jase said as he took a knife from Ryker.

“Thanks,” Ryker whispered as they closed the door to their room. He frowned as Gideon dragged him into the master bathroom and turned on the light.

“Fuck man, your right pupil is bigger than your left,” Gideon exclaimed in a low voice.

Ryker planted his hands on the bathroom counter and looked in the mirror.

“It’s minimal. This is what we call a Junior Varsity concussion where I come from. If you were playing JV, this would have you benched. If you were varsity, they’d slap your ass and send you back out onto the field.”

“That’s not funny,” Jase growled.

“Sure, it is,” Ryker grinned. “Your new girlfriend just isn’t giving you any yet, so you don’t have a sense of humor.”

Jase went hot as Ryker talked about Bonnie. “Shut the fuck up, McQueen,” Jase hissed. “The high school concussion schtick isn’t funny, the joke about my woman isn’t funny, and I’d normally hit you except you have a fucking concussion!”

“Keep your voice down,” Gideon shushed him.