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Understanding hit and she mentally smacked a palm to her head. If RING was at any of those compounds, the night could act as cover for them, but just as easily reveal their location. From the video, they knew there were three, plus the driver. If there were more members at their base of operations, which Parker assumed to be the case, they needed food and water, survival gear, and sources of power.
The abandoned military bases had generators, running water, and quarters where the previous soldiers rotating through shifts could catch some rest. But that created a multitude of potential ways the terrorists might expose themselves in the dark. Even a guard with a cigarette could be spotted from overhead. Lights, infrared heat, the sounds of a generator—it could all reveal their location.
“Horse?” Emit echoed Moe. “I have a Land Rover that will climb any of these mountains. A few ATVs as well.”
“A truck with a horse and a hauler. I need a beast who doesn’t spook easily and is solid on this terrain. One who can climb well. They can get places even an ATV can’t, and they’re a lot quieter. Won’t give us away.”
“You know how to ride?” Parker asked.
His self-assurance bordered on swagger. “Don’t you?”
Another thing he’d never told her. “Four years of riding lessons, in fact.” She glanced at Emit. “Make that two.” Jeb snickered. Trace and Moe looked at her with surprise. “What? We’re shorthanded so I’m pitching in. Which base are we hitting first?”
Moe glanced away before she could decipher whether he was annoyed or unruffled by her joining him, staring into the distance again. “We’ll take the closest. Jeb, you take the farthest. If we find nothing at either, we’ll tighten our circle until we do.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Jeb said.
Emit tapped his phone’s screen. “I have more than one drone, you know. Let’s get back to the house. We’ll put all of them in the air and see what we can find before you go off on horseback.”
Parker felt dumb for not assuming he had more. This was Emit Petit. He was his own country with top-notch everything, from tech to security. “Why didn’t you send one out to find the van?”
He paused in his typing. “I did. I have five, and they all went into the air moments after I was alerted about the crash. None of them could get here in time to catch the van.”
Moe thought this over, rubbing his chin. “Which means RING was close enough to disappear quickly after the abduction.” He looked in both directions, the dark highway disappearing into the vast night. “Otherwise, it would’ve been easy to pick them up. They couldn’t disappear into traffic out here in the middle of nowhere, but there are plenty of natural hiding places.”
“What about satellite imagery?” Parker asked.
Emit pocketed his cell. “Working on that now. At the time they hit, the satellite that covers this section was turned away, pointing south. We still might be able to narrow it down if we can spot anyone coming and going from those three bases.”
Had they known how to time the kidnapping so that satellite imagery wouldn’t catch them? If so, they also knew how and when to hide their movements. “The onboard cameras didn’t show which direction they came from or which way they escaped?”
“They approached from the west. The cameras were damaged in the crash, so no confirmation of the direction they fled.”
“They were lying in wait,” Moe stated. He’d crossed the road and wandered down the side, pointing to a graveled area under a copse of trees. “Tracks run from here through the grass to the road. Some wicked tread on those tires.”
Which didn’t provide them with anything more than what they already had. “I want to run Lydia and every RING member through TrackMap. See if there are any connections.”
Emit opened the vehicle’s door for her. “I already fed in Romalov, and it’s working on him. My resources are yours.”
In the back of her mind, she wished she had the guts to put Moe in the software program Emit had developed to find even the thinnest ties between people. Relationships, education, employers…hell, even favorite restaurants or vacation sites came up in some searches. If two people had ever shopped at the same store or visited the same hair salon, if they’d shared a crush on the same boy band, ever had the same mail carrier, or frequented a particular coffee shop—anything that had caused them to cross paths was flagged and analyzed. She wondered what TrackMap might reveal about the damaged hero she’d fallen in love with.
Maybe she didn’t want to know. While the program might offer insight into Moe’s past, the one thing it couldn’t tell her was the thing that mattered most.Do we have a future together?
Since the age of nine, she’d dreamed about a big farmhouse and a piece of ground. A husband and kids, along with dogs, horses, and maybe chickens. Her family and Savanna’s sharing holidays, birthdays, vacations at the beach, and backyard barbeques.
That childhood dream had faded over time, her adult life taking her on many paths she’d never expected. Yet, it lived on in the recesses of her mind and continually resurrected itself when she saw Savanna and Trace with each other. They were partners and friends. They had a red-hot sex life and were working on their own family. If they could have all that, why couldn’t she?
She slid into the backseat, Moe hopping in beside her. He smelled of fresh night air and dark secrets, ones that made her shiver against her will. She bit the inside of her lip, resisting the urge to link her hand with his and lean into him.
“Cold?” he whispered against the ridge of her ear.
She swallowed to keep from shivering again. The chill in her bones wasn’t from the mountain air or the fear creeping into her gut that they were already too late to save Lydia.
She lowered her voice and spoke only to him as the others finished gathering the spotlights and climbed in. “What if they didn’t kidnap her because they wanted informationfromher, but rather, because she had critical information about them that she was going to expose?”
“Then it’s already too late,” he said, confirming her worst fear. “But if that were true, they would have sent a single assassin and killed her on the spot. We’d be shipping her body back to England, rather than initiating a search and rescue.”
True, and yet…she could tell from the way he tapped his fingers on his thigh that he, too, wondered if that wasn’t a possibility.
