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Sean said, “You will not lose on purpose this time. Do you promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Sean beat him. Then he pulled an excited, tail-wagging Astro onto his lap, leaned back against the sofa cushions, and frowned at Nicholas. “You weren’t telling the truth. I really beat you all those rounds, didn’t I?”
“All right, you caught me. I was trying to spare my ego.” He said to Savich, “He’s too smart, he saw right through me.”
Sherlock nodded. “I’m the only one he can’t beat, right, Sean?”
“Well, Mama, maybe not this week.”
Sherlock grabbed both him and Astro up and swung them around and around, making Sean shout with laughter and Astro bark madly. She gave him a big smacking kiss. “No, no kiss for you, Astro. All right, my boy, it’s time for bed. You’ve humiliated Nicholas enough for one night. Astro, it’s time for your evening walkabout.”
“Good night, Uncle Nicholas. Good night, Aunt Mike.”
Mike shook his hand. “A pleasure to watch you trounce my partner. He occasionally needs trouncing. A lot of trouncing.” And even though she’d meant to keep her voice light, hey, all a joke, both Savich and Sherlock gave her a look that said everything.
They know there’s something going on. Mike looked over at Nicholas. His face was stone vacant and he was staring at his shoes as if the soft Italian leather held all the answers.
Savich looked from one to the other. “Whatever’s wrong, you two need to fix it.”
“There is absolutely nothing wrong, Dillon,” Mike said, jumping to her feet. “There’s absolutely nothing at all going on, not a single thing. Besides, I don’t want to talk about it. Nicholas, isn’t it about time you checked in with Ben?”
Nicholas nodded, punched in Ben’s cell number. Ben answered immediately. “You’re not going to believe this, Nicholas. We found trackers on both your personal cars and five of the vehicles you’ve used from the pool in the past month. Nice Beemer, by the way, you have to let me drive it sometime. The trackers are small, very small, state-of-the-art, placed in the engine block instead of the wheel well. It took some looking to find them. Someone has definitely been keeping track of your—our—whereabouts. From what we can tell, the trackers send a GPS signal strong enough that the person who’s following can watch your movements on a laptop, remotely, up to fifty miles away. Very sophisticated.” He paused, then, “And that’s how they found Mr. Hodges and our three guys.”
“Any chance you can reverse-engineer the data, see where it broadcasted to?”
“We’re working on it, but it’s a moot point, really. They’ve been turned off now. We’ve taken them all to the lab to be worked over for any DNA or fingerprints.”
“Unnecessary. We know who placed them.”
“Who?”
“Someone in COE, probably Andy Tate—he’s their computer whiz. Or Zahir Damari, aka Darius. It sounds more like him.
“Any movement on Gray’s end, on the nanotriggers Spenser engineered for his bombs?”
“He’s right here, hold on. Let me put this on speaker.”
There was a click, then Gray came on the line. “The triggers were definitely Havelock technology. Good catch, Nicholas. The only issue is they are on the market, being used by a number of people, legitimately. We’ll have to get a warrant to see who they’ve sold them to, and it will take time.”
Mike said, “Gray, anything on the money trail?”
“Now, here I have more for you. We ran a forensic accounting on the guy Adam Pearce found, name of Porter Wallace. He’s definitely managing a few portfolios on the side. I found a link between him and Larry Reeves—the insider at Bayway. The money was moved into Reeves’s account from an offshore account in the Caymans. It’s closed now, totally untraceable. But Wallace went to Grand Cayman three weeks ago. Stands to reason he opened the account, put the money in, moved it when he was given the go-ahead, then closed the account. We’re going to pick him up in the morning, have a nice long chat, start taking apart his entire world. The warrant was issued an hour ago. We’re planning a five a.m. knock at his house. From what I can tell, he’s been a very bad boy.”
“Any ties to organized crime you can find? We could make a nice RICO case against him.”
“On the surface, it looks like he’s only been working with COE. I’ll keep digging into his background.”
Mike leaned over the phone. “Gray, who is this guy, anyway, this Porter Wallace? How does a Wall Street broker get hooked up with Matthew Spenser?”
“It’s a small world. Wallace is from Hartford, Connecticut, went to Avon Old Farms, a swanky private boys’ school—”
Nicholas interrupted him. “Gray, you found the link. Matthew Spenser went to Avon. They must have known each other in school. Whether he’s helping out of the goodness of his own heart or he believes Spenser’s ideology or he’s being threatened—either way, we have a direct tie to Spenser. Well done.”
Mike was grinning. This was huge. “This is great, Gray. Thank you. Next time we’re at the Feathers, your beer’s on me.”
“I’ll take the beer gladly, but I’ve got to point out that Adam Pearce really got everything we needed. I simply followed the trail. I’m very glad you talked him away from the dark side, Nicholas.”
