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“No. Just your phone. I have been listening to your calls, for the last few days.”
That stung. I gritted my teeth. “You asshole. This whole time.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. But I was able to persuade Nicole that you would be sure to find any bugs or cameras with your obsessive bug-sweeping protocol, so she didn’t make me plant anything here,” he said. “I haven’t found anything running on my phone, but I leave it in a drawer by my bed, just in case.” Mick pulled out another phone. “I’ve got another one. With a sensor that alerts me if her ringtone sounds, so I won’t miss her calls.”
Amos stepped forward. “Okay, Mick,” he said. “What have you got for us that you can trade for your worthless, miserable life?”
“It better be fucking good,” Remy said, his arms folded over his brawny chest.
“I’ll give you all of it.” Mick sat at a computer and inserted a flash drive. “First off, their plan is to explode a huge motherfucking bomb at some financial summit in Portland.” He glanced at me. “The one you were supposed to go to.”
“The Emory Summit,” I said. “Right. I bailed, after the elevator incident.”
“They needed a suicide bomber,” Mick said, his voice flat and lifeless. “I was sure they were planning to force me to do it, by threatening to do some horrible thing to Jay. But they probably decided they liked Kat better, after I told them about the mob hit on her sisters. All the violence in her past tracks better with the—”
“You told Nicole about Kat’s past? For real? Youvolunteeredthat information?”
“I…I had to,” Mick admitted, miserably.
“The summit has already started,” I said. “It’s in full swing now. I was supposed to give the opening statements this morning.”
“Yes,” Mick said. “She decided to wait to nab you, until closer to the summit. They made their play in the elevator, but that went to hell, so they moved on to this.”
“If the summit has begun, the bomb could go off anytime,” Jed mused.
“They’ll reel me in first,” I said thoughtfully. “They’ll want me right on hand, to do their dirty work afterward. In all the chaos.”
“I bet she would wait to detonate the bomb until the moment when the most people possible are looking,” Freya said. “She’s a grandstanding bitch. She wants it to be seen by everyone.”
“So, the keynote address?” Darius mused.
Freya paged through something on her phone, frowning at the screen. “That’s tomorrow—no, it’s midnight thirty, so it’s today,” she said. “At noon. Jesus, it’s all happening right now. We’ve got no time.”
All eyes turned to Mick. He looked around, throat bobbing.
“So?” I prompted. “Where the fuck are they? How many? Give us everything.”
“I don’t have a lot,” he admitted. “Today was only the second time they made any physical contact with me, aside from the very beginning.”
“Which was what? Spit it out,” I prompted, through my teeth. I was going to have to drag this shit out of that dickhead.
“I met Nicole in a bar,” Mick admitted. “She chatted me up. Then she took me out into the parking lot and invited me into her car. I got in thinking I was going to get lucky. Then she showed me the first video of Jay, and my whole world went to shit.”
We all looked away from him. The conflict, being so murderously angry and also feeling his shock, horror, and despair—it made my flesh creep. “What did you do?”
“I was so blown away, I didn’t get anything more than her license plate that night,” he said. “When I followed it up, it was just a long-term rental from the Seattle airport. Reported stolen six months ago. When they told me they were coming today, I prepared as best I could. I still hoped I could save Jay, so I—”
“We don’t give a fuck what you were hoping,” Darius snarled. “We would have, if you’d come to us for help. We would have done any fucking thing in the world for you. But you didn’t, so fuck you. Stick to the point. What have you got for us now?”
Mick pulled up a city map. I came closer, recognizing the rivers and bridges of Portland, Oregon, a few hours’ drive from us. “I needed to find out where they were headquartered,” he said. “When she said she was coming, I rolled up about two hundred of the round mini traces in sand-colored putty and scattered them all over the helipad. I figured someone was bound to step on one of them, and take it back in his boot treads.”
“Did they?”
“Yes. Six of them made it into the helicopter. And they all went…here.” He pointed. “A defunct hydraulics factory in northwest Portland. It’s called Braithwaite.”
Darius nodded, slowly. “And you chose to let hours go by before telling us.”
“I was waiting to see if they contacted—”
