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There weremany reasons I preferred staying here over the hotel where the K19 team was ensconced. The level of privacy and security this place afforded was definitely one of them. The other was its close proximity to the meeting site.
The next morning, the five of us each left the building through different exits and at intervals.
“Anything look out of the ordinary?” I asked Press when he arrived in the lobby a few minutes after I had.
“Not presently. However, I did spot someone watching the place last night when I looked at the security footage. As I said, it could very well be paparazzi. Regardless, we’ll proceed with caution.”
“I didn’t realize you and Beau were the sort to attract the tabloids.”
“We aren’t. However, we have a cousin who is.”
“Does he stay at your grandparents’ place often?”
“I can’t say whether it’s often. I do know he visits from time to time. By the way, Snapper and Kick checked the footage when they returned and said they saw the same guy.”
Once the rest of our crew arrived, we took the elevator to the eighteenth floor, where we’d be meeting in one of the suites.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Doc, opening the door when we arrived.
It wasn’t long before Ares asked us to take a seat so we could get started. “Who’s missing?” he asked.
“My brother stayed behind with Seraphina. We were followed by a photographer last night—”
“Take this offline,” he snapped, motioning for who I thought was Cayman and me to step out of the room.
“Sorry. He’s a little tightly wound this morning. He gets annoyed when someone usurps his briefings with something not on the agenda,” said the man with the British accent. Given he was the only one of the four Shadow Ops here who spoke with one, I was relieved when I guessed his name right. “Anyway, tell me about this photographer.”
I explained how I’d noticed someone taking our photo on our way to the apartment after dinner and how Snapper and Kick had gone out to take a look. “They saw the same guy Press did on the security footage.”
“Have that forwarded to us immediately.”
“Press already—”
I stopped talking when he sighed.
“Roger that,” I muttered instead of telling him Press had already run the image through facial recognition and nothing had turned up. The other thing I didn’t bother to tell him was how both Press and Beau believed the man was with the paparazzi, or that he appeared as tightly wound as Ares did.
Given our conversation took all of two minutes, Ares was still in the preliminary phase of briefing the plan once the container ship arrived in port.
Based on the information he’d received from the cargo operations center in Altamira, he’d created three-dimensional images of the containers and pinpointed the locations where those belonging to the same holding company that had booked the one out of Yavaros would be. The images appeared on a large-screen monitor.
“As you can see, there are eight highlighted. Some are in the interior as well as at the bottom of their respective stacks. There are two more the guy at cargo operations said were booked under a different name but he believed might be affiliated. Those are indicated here and here.”
Unlike the others, those two were mid-stack. I looked at Press, who raised his head.
“Yeah?”
“They’re at the bottom of the stacks.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Then, they can’t be soft tops.”
“Correct.”
“They’re transporting people. How in the bloody hell do they expect them to live?”
“It’s a damn good question. Given the cost to ship all these containers, they had to have devised a method to get air inside these things, or you’re right. They’d be transporting corpses.”
