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“Friends.” She nodded. “But I guess now comes the hard part. Figuring out why all of this is happening.”
“While keeping you safe. Don’t forget that part.” Raul didn’t let go of her hand, curling his hand around hers. Heat from his hand rose up her arm. “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to have Hope and Felicity keep an eye on PIB to see how they are reacting to Toby’s disappearance.”
She smiled at him. “And to how SSS reacts to two of their operators being found trussed up with no memory of how that happened and how Toby escaped their grasp.”
“That’s right.” Raul smiled back. “Someone won’t be happy.”
“And we have to find that someone, right? Find out who Toby is threatening.”
Raul lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it. His beard was heavy, already growing out. There was a small bite of beard when he kissed her hand and she liked it. “My money is on you. And Hope and Felicity. You guys are amazing.”
They were nice words, and he seemed to mean them. He’d stopped smiling and gazed deeply into her eyes, completely serious. But there was a misreading of the situation here.
“Yousaved him, Raul. You were the one who went in, overpowered two men and saved him.”
“I would never have found him, not in a million years if you hadn’t done your magic trick. Following the tires. Man, that was just genius. Plus being so good with the drones.”
“But once I was there, I couldn’t have overpowered those men.”
He shifted, took her hand in both of his. Closed his eyes in pain. “No. Fuck no. That’s not your thing. Your thing is figuring shit out, my thing is to knock heads and kick down doors. Together, we’re quite a team.”
A team. Emma hadn’t been a team in years, not since the NSA. And even then, she and Hope and Riley and Felicity hadn’t been a team in the sense of working on the same things. They each had their field of specialization and were working on different projects. They were friends, though, and they banded together mainly in self-defense against the head of the department, the Boss from Hell. Not even she and Toby were a team at work. She was specialized in foreign markets and he was specialized in the domestic market. She’d always done her own thing, on her own.
So, the idea of teaming up with Raul was really enticing. But Emma was also a realist and didn’t want to read too much into the situation. They were teamed up temporarily because Raul had been sent by Hope and Felicity and his company to help her on this one thing. She couldn’t even read too much into the night spent together having sex, though that was spectacular. It was spectacular in her memory because she’d never had much of a sex life. Maybe from Raul’s point of view it was nice, but that was it. So, she would embarrass herself if she got too attached, thinking that by ‘team’ he meant ‘couple’.
Looking away from him was hard and it felt like turning her head away from a tractor beam. She looked at the walls of the hole in the wall diner, covered with cheap prints, then out on the colorful street, then brought her gaze back to his. “We’ll do our best, that’s for sure. Because I think there’s something serious here. Something that is dangerous.”
“Agreed.” He nodded. “Okay, we’re all fueled up and we’ve given Toby some time to recover. And Colin probably has something to get the drugs out of his system. Should we go?”
“Text Colin. Tell him we should be there in about twenty minutes.”
Raul texted, then looked at incoming messages. “Colin’s expecting us. And Felicity has a report on SSS. Put that away.” Because she’d been trying to sneak her credit card to the pretty Japanese waitress.
“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said and he rolled his eyes. “We’ll take Felicity’s report in the car. I really want to see Toby, make sure he’s ok. And see if he has a grasp on what’s going on. Why he would be kidnapped.”
“He was kidnapped for what’s in his head.” Raul stood and scrawled his signature on the bill.
No shit, Sherlock,Emma thought, but didn’t say. Raul had done nothing but help and it was entirely thanks to him that Toby was safe, though dinged. Raul was kind to want to share credit but there was no way she and Colin could have freed Toby on their own. That was entirely thanks to Raul’s bravery and skills.
Emma stood, too. “So, let’s get what’s in his head out into the open.”
“He’s gone,”Chris Ricks said on his cell.
Whitaker Hamilton III had been scanning a tech company’s prospectus with an eye to investment. That was what he told himself. Actually, he’d been daydreaming about the island just off Bali where a Russian mobster had built himself a palace worthy of Kublai Khan and hadn’t lived there more than a few weeks before being offed by a Belarusian mobster. Hamilton had bought it last week for a song because he’d been able to offer cold hard cash. Quite literally. A courier specialized in these transactions had hand delivered two suitcases with twenty-five kilos each of hundred euro bills, having flown in from Singapore on a private jet. Seven million euros. A steal.
The mansion was spectacular. A little gaudy, to be sure, and Hamilton was going to have to strip some of the gilt and replace the real zebra skin couches but those were minor details. The compound had three swimming pools, a spa, a gym, ten bedrooms and ten bathrooms, all waterfront property. The assistant who’d taken care of the transaction was so intent on cashing in on the property that he’d thrown in a small yacht as a sweetener.
The property had a staff of twenty, including a chef lured away from a five star restaurant in Hong Kong, a trained butler, cleaning staff, gardeners, two chauffeurs and the crew of the yacht. The agent had assured Hamilton that the staff would stay on and the most strenuous thing Hamilton would have to do was get out of bed in the morning and walk down to the terrace overlooking the ocean and consume his breakfast buffet.
Hamilton could feel the sun on his skin and smell the scent of fresh tropical fruit and was daydreaming about the parties he would hold when his cellphone rang and wrenched him away from the images.
It was ex-detective Ricks’ ring. Saying that Toby Jackson had escaped.
Fuck. “How?”
Ricks’ voice was somber and emotionless, but not defensive. It wasn’t his fuckup, it was SSS’s.
“Nobody knows, sir. I’m at the house right now and all we have is two operators in restraints and no memory of anything. One minute they’re guarding the asset and the next they’re trussed up like pigs without a scratch on them otherwise. And the asset is gone. We don’t even have a time frame.”
