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Gideon blew out a breath. “Let’s tamp down the emotions and work the issue,” he said with authority. “I’ll call the police commissioner, then go up the chain from there. We have enough politicians and high-level clients to get someone on this. With this video, we should be able to get an investigation opened. Boone, you call your person with the FBI. If this is a kidnapping, we’re going to want them brought into this. Royce, you get on social media and press—I want her face plastered on every available network and internet site available. Keene, you scour the videos and see if we missed something.” We all nodded, getting our shit together and shoving it in a box so that we could do what we needed to do effectively. I might not know where our baby sister was or why she was taken, but I was sure as hell they would come to regret taking her.
I was still going through the video an hour later when Gideon stormed back into the room. It took a lot to anger our brother, but someone must have really worked to build the inferno because if a person could have steam actually coming from their ears, he would have at that moment.
“What’s wrong?” Boone asked. He hadn’t been able to get a hold of the Director of the FBI but had talked with another one of his contacts. While it wasn’t surprising that the director wasn’t immediately available, we held enough contracts and spoke with him often enough that he should have called us back by then. Even Boone’s contact, whoever they were, had been suspiciously quiet after the initial conversation. It stumped all of us why the FBI was dragging its feet. Not only was Alessia famous and beautiful, but she was also connected with A.T. Accardi Tactical trained the best of the best. The FBI, Secret Service, and even black ops and military teams trained with us. To say we knew the who’s who of D.C. wasn’t lying or being boastful. It was the plain truth. Yet all of our connections were failing us.
“The jet’s missing.”
We all froze. Even Royce, who was still trying to talk to a reporter at one of the local news stations, paused in his explanation.
“What thehelldo you mean, the jet’s missing?”
He gave me a look that clearly said I didn’t understand English. “It’s not in its hangar. I called to have the crew get it ready. I was going to fly to D.C. since we’re all getting the run-around from our connections over the phone. But apparently, you and I took it this morning with a pilot. They filed flight plans saying we took it to your place in Colorado, but the tower noted we headed in an eastern direction before we disappeared off their radar.”
“So we’ve got a missing sister, missing PSO, and a missing jet.” Royce summed the facts up, looking thoughtful.
“And Matteo is also missing,” Gideon added. “I got a call from a phone service on his behalf, letting all of his clients know he’s out-of-town attending his ailing father and will reschedule his appointments when he returns. Gia was supposed to have class tonight.”
I added that to the mental list of question marks.
“Where is she?” Boone asked. He was pacing behind Royce.
Gideon ran a hand through his hair. “I pulled her from school and have her hanging out at the training center. I don’t want her here with us as we deal with this, nor do I want her at home since we don’t know what’s going on. Some of my old teammates are in town, so she has several sets of eyes watching her as well as spoiling her rotten. She doesn’t have any idea something’s amiss.”
I went back to the video that showed Lessia about to be kidnapped, backing it up frame by frame before playing it again and again. I’d watched the same twenty seconds of the recording for the better part of an hour, trying to pinpoint what was off. Something about it bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out what …
“Sonofabitch!” I bit out, standing up so fast my chair flew over backward, a steady stream of curses coming from my mouth, some of which I hadn’t uttered since I was active military.
“I’ll call you back,” Royce said into the phone, hanging up before whoever was on the line said anything else. Gideon came over to my side of the table, looking at the now-paused screen, Boone doing the same.
“What did you find?” Royce asked, getting up to line up with the rest of us. All three of them studied the frozen image of our sister, trying to see what had gotten me so upset.
I backed up the image a few seconds, then played the recording. Alessia came into view, eating her ice cream. She walked a few more steps before I paused the image. “There!” I pointed at the screen. “See how she tenses for a split second, and her head starts to look right? She relaxes almost immediately and faces forward again, but you can tell she knows someone’s there.” Boone and Royce looked doubtful, but Gideon just looked at the frozen image, his lips pursed, a finger tapping his bottom lip.
I backed it up, then played it again and again and again. Eventually, all of them seemed to come to the same conclusion I had. “So she knows someone is sneaking up on her, or at least feels like something is off,” Royce admitted. “What does that mean?”
I played the video again, letting it continue to roll. I thought back to Brody’s warnings that I hadn’t really seen past the surface of my sister. “Let’s say she knew someone was targeting her. Why would a smart woman, one with some self-defense and classes in safety procedures for potential targets, ignore her training and not so much as look around at her surroundings and, a few steps later, put her head down while digging into her purse? Hell, even a normal woman alone wouldn’t walk down a darkened street with her head damn near in her bag. And what do you think the odds are that the answer to that question ties into why we’re getting the Texas two-step from all of our contacts, both here and in D.C.?”
It was Royce and Boone’s turn to swear as Gideon’s face turned contemplative. “You think she’s undercover? That’s kind of hard to believe, seeing as everyone knows who she is. And the model part isn’t exactly fake—there isn’t a fashion magazine cover she hasn’t been on.”
I shrugged, not exactly sure what I thought our sister was involved in. Despite that, I knew in my bones I was on the right track. “Think about it, the long stretches she’s not home, her tight lip about her work. And she’s protested at the tops of her lungs since she was a kid that she was more capable than we give her credit for.”
“But she mentioned the other day that Daddy wouldn’t let her enlist,” Boone pointed out.
“Which just makes that make more sense,” Gideon replied. “She couldn’t serve her country publicly the way we did. Maybe she found a way to achieve her dream, just not the traditional way.”
“So, what are we saying?” Royce asked. “That she’s CIA? Even if that’s the case, why would she let herself be targeted here, without backup, on home soil?”
“Is she really without backup?” Gideon asked. “Both Matteo and Brody are missing. And the jet.”
“Sounds like a rush job. No way was Brody supposed to be a part of whatever support system she was supposed to have. And stealing the Gulfstream definitely wasn’t according to plan, either.” I couldn’t help but point out the obvious.
Gideon knocked on the table twice before straightening. “Either way, it gives us a starting point. Between the four of us, we have a few contacts in the CIA. If she’s not one of theirs, there’s a whole alphabet soup worth of agencies in the U.S. that she could work for. But it’s as good of a place as any to start.”
“Sounds like I arrived just in time,” the voice from the door had all of us whirling around. The man standing there was the last person I would have thought to see, yet I wasn’t surprised at all.
Chapter 26
Alessia
