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“You should definitely take offense,” Bond said.
I pulled out my water bottle and took a deep swig, then rustled through the console compartment for a piece of sugar-free gum. “I don’t get it,” I said when the foul taste was finally out of my mouth. “How can someone who is such a culinary whiz become an unmitigated disaster when the medium goes from solid to liquid?”
Jensen grinned. “Drinks bring out the charming, experimental scientist in me.”
That drew a round of groans and complaints from most of the team.
Penn slipped smoothly back into his professional role. “Jensen, let’s widen our perimeter on the street security camera. Go two blocks out in each direction.”
I sat forward. “Does something have you worried, Penn?”
“No, Boss. Just trying to give Kessler and Li more to do.”
I tapped off my mic and turned toward Bond. “Are you worried about what appears to be their unending need for adrenaline rushes?”
Bond glanced at me. “I worry about every member of the team for different reasons. I’ll let you know if anything rises to the level of real concern.”
I switched on my mic and turned back to the screen. “You’re awfully quiet, Sparks. Do you need anything? Tap once for yes, twice for no.”
She tapped twice, then a few seconds later, whispered, “Subject has dressed and is putting on make-up at the sink mirror. There are two other women in the locker room. Well, besides me, but I’m out of sight. I get the feeling she’s waiting for them to leave.”
“Let me know the minute they do,” Jensen said. When Sparks indicated everyone had left the locker room but Ashlee, Jensen squinted and typed furiously. “Alder, you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Yep,” Alder responded immediately. “That’s a different signature from the one we’re getting from her cell phone.”
“Faint, though,” Jensen said. “I couldn’t be sure until I knew the room was clear.” He glanced at me.
“Mind sharing with the class?” Kessler said.
“Jensen sent out a tracer, kind of a call looking for an answer,” Alder said. “We can see Sparks’s devices and Armand’s cell phone—those are known entities. There were a few other signals, probably the cell phones of the women who just left. And there’s one more. It’s faint and intermittent.”
“Meaning a device that’s internet capable but currently not connected to a network?” I asked.
Jensen glanced at me and grinned. “You do pay attention when I explain my tech requisition forms and why I need new toys.”
“Only as much as is absolutely necessary,” I said, although we both knew that wasn’t true. I’d learned more than I’d ever thought I would know about hardware systems from Jensen and software systems from Alder, and many of the ways both could be used to secure or breach or build or hack systems. It was part of the job I used to dread, but the more I learned, the more interesting it had become.
I felt a flash of regret, the strange sensation of mourning something that hadn’t yet passed. Even as we were surveilling a reporter for her own protection while searching for more chinks in the armor around the Carbonados, X was fighting, yet again—or really, still—to keep our operation funded. In more than a decade since she had started HEAT from scratch, she’d had a surplus of funding. But since our entanglements with the Carbonados had begun, as secretive as our operation was, we had blipped onto the radar of the Senate subcommittee. Since then, X had been fighting tooth and nail not only to protect the Alpha Team, but every team HEAT had dispersed across the world—more than twenty at any given point in time.
X repeatedly assured me that bringing down the Carbonados would calm the nerves of the senators and protect our future. I sincerely believed that she believed it, but during my years in the Army, I’d been mushroomed—kept in the dark and fed bullshit—more than once. As my seven team members chatted and joked and collaborated around me, I savored every second of it, in case that hard ball of dread deep in my gut was right in its prediction that, regardless of how the Carbonados operation panned out, the Alpha Team—and maybe HEAT itself—wouldn’t survive.
“She’s on the move,” Sparks said again.
“Should be on her way to the massage appointment that’s on the books but that no masseuses have on their calendars,” Alder said.
“And that mystery signal is on the move with her.” Jensen leaned forward in his seat. “Tam, can you follow her so I can stay locked in on it? I’m already trying to descramble it, but unless it gets stronger, it will take some time.”
Bond and I glanced at each other when Jensen used a nickname derived from Sparks’s first name when our team convention was to call each other by our last names, especially when in the field. We both turned back to our screens and watched the progress of Jensen’s decryption program running while also seeing footage from the minicam in Spark’s hair band as she stealthily tracked Ashlee. We watched Ashlee enter a room on the left side of the hallway and close the door behind her. Sparks set down her workout bag and dug through it, creating a plausible reason for stopping in the hall.
“Can I help you?” A male voice said behind Sparks. When she turned toward the speaker, we saw Ashlee’s kickboxing instructor.
“Oh!” she said. “Actually, I was just looking for my locker key.”
He furrowed his brow and glanced between her and the room where Ashlee was. “Are you sure? Because it kind of looked like you were following another of our clients.”
“Shit,” I muttered and made a mental note to schedule more tactical training for our nontactical team members for situations like this one.
“Flirt with him,” Kessler said. “Giggle, drop your eyes, and imagine yourself blushing.”
