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Parker met her gaze. “I’m sorry to hear that. You have such great compatibility with everyone.”
“Codename.” Watson hopped onto Vivi’s shoulder. “Anchor word. Come to me, little bird.”
The room spun. Her stomach lurched. She sagged against the desk, the edges of her peripheral vision filling with dark spots.
“Vivi?” Parker’s concerned voice sounded far away. “Dr. Greene?”
Inside her mind palace, Vivi heard another voice. “Sherlock,” it had taunted that day over the phone. “Come to me, or your husband will be tried and executed in front of the entire world.”
The image of Ian outside that hotel flashed through her mind. Her last thought as she slid to the floor while Parker yelled for help, was,save Ian.
Seventeen
Sixty minutes passed, then ninety. Not a blip on their radar, no moves in fact at all by the one they wanted.
It took time to put a team together, sure, but had their quarry decided to stand down?
Ian paced the living room, the kitchen, the dining area. He’d double- and triple-checked to make sure he’d followed Rory’s instructions to the letter. He’d definitely let those watching know he was hunting the truth about Genevieve Montgomery’s actions on that night and how he’d been redirected from his original mission to kidnap Alon and instead had supposedly killed her.
He fingered his mic. “Coldplay, this is Idol. Any movement? Over.”
“Zip,” Hunter responded. “With the exception of the family a click to the west returning home fifteen minutes ago, it’s been me and the birds. Over.”
“Roger that.” His frustration continued to build. “Sit report. Anyone else?”
All replies were negative.
Birds. He thought of Vivi and her precious budgies. How much she loved those damn things.
She might have left him behind, but those little guys? Never.
How many times had he gone over it in his mind? It didn’t add up. Her leaving her cushy office. Getting on a plane and flying to Berlin.
Speaking of… He checked his phone but there were no messages from her. He definitely owed Cal a steak dinner and six-pack. Whatever he was doing to keep her busy seemed to be working.
But if nobody showed soon, he had to call it quits, at least for tonight. Hunter had joined them half an hour ago, the others holding their positions and staying silent, all of them waiting for any sign that their enemy was on the hunt.
So far, crickets. Rory had confirmed that nothing of interest had come across the sites he monitored, and there was no sign that MonkeyFingers had viewed Ian’s online searches or tampered with any of the intel he was searching for.
It was as if those monitoring the information had suddenly and thoroughly disappeared.
Typical of NSA or Homeland. But were they the only ones keeping tabs on a dead woman?
He wasn’t sure where that left him. Where it left Vivi. If their government, who’d been so provoked by the Jim Lawrence incident that they’d denied one of their premier psychologists a fair trial, threw her in a black site prison, had cared enough to keep tabs on her accounts and files until now, what had caused them to drop it in the past few days?
If it wasn’t an alphabet branch, then who? Lawrence himself? The man was no cyber genius, but had he added one to his ranks?
Had he wanted to add Vivi to his network, too? Get her under his control in order to hack her mind palace, as she always referred to it, and gain the ultimate intelligence on the U.S.?
A crawling sensation on the back of his neck had him staring at his cell and considering his next move. Return to SFI and take the abuse she was sure to heap on him? Remain put and see if anyone eventually joined them?
His team wouldn’t care if he decided to stay, but explaining it to her would cause a backlash he didn’t want. He wasn’t ready to quit just yet, though, and Cal had to be running out of ways to keep her distracted.
His phone buzzed in his hand, and he grimaced at the ID—Beatrice. She no doubt wanted an update and might be the person to force him to wrap this mission up for tonight. “Yeah,” he said, bracing himself for her to pull the plug. “This is Idol.”
“Return to base. We have a problem.”
His instincts went Code Red, the crawling sensation spreading to his chest. “What?”
