I rolled my eyes. “Asshole,” I muttered.
“But you love me anyway,” he said with a cheeky grin.
“Yeah, yeah.”
I went to my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I checked the time. The team still had about three hours before they landed in Indonesia. I hit Marco’s number, hoping the plane’s Wi-Fi was strong enough for the call to go through. He answered on the first ring. “Tony? What’s wrong?”
As soon as I heard my brother’s voice, I wanted to break down. I sank onto my bed, holding my phone in a shaking hand. I could barely get the words out. “Greg’s been taken.”
“Fuck.” There was the sound of movement, and he spoke to someone else before he came back on the line a short while later. “I’m in the private room with Michael and Liam. I’m putting you on speaker. Tell us what happened.”
Telling the story to my brothers was harder than it had been to tell the people currently occupying my living room. I very much wanted them here with me now instead of halfway around the world.
“The timing of this is kind of suspicious,” Michael said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s pretty convenient that your main search-and-rescue team is out of the country on the same day Greg gets kidnapped. What are the odds?”
I was going to argue with him, but then I thought about it. Personnel extraction missions happened maybe once a month. But still… “How could he have known? It’s not like we post the information anywhere online.”
“Wait,” Marco interrupted. “Didn’t you say he came to the office with a fake food delivery? What would have been the purpose of that? Greg doesn’t work for you. He’d have had zero chance of seeing him there.”
“Shit!” Michael exclaimed. “Text Liz right now and tell her to get the bug detector out of my office. Tell her not to say anything aloud.”
“Does she know where it is?”
“She does,” he said. “I taught her how to use it and asked her to sweep the office at least once a week.”
I quickly texted Liz and was relieved when she answered me right away. I got up and paced my bedroom while I waited for her to conduct her search and get back to me. Finally, her text came in.
I found a listening device under the lip of the reception desk.
I relayed the information to my brothers. “Tell her to drop it in a glass of water,” Michael said.
“Got it.” I texted the instructions to her.
Done.
Thank you. I’ll keep you posted and let you know when we find Greg.
“So he was able to find out that our team was going out of the country and probably thought you wouldn’t have anyone to help you search,” Marco said.
“But how would he know that?” Liam asked in the background. “You don’t list the names of your search-and-rescue team on your website.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“What?” all three of them asked.
“Liz had this bizarre conversation with someone who wanted to know how our extraction team worked. He specifically asked about our computer expert. Paul Langer knows that’s how we found him.”
“And he assumed if I was out of the country, you wouldn’t have another hacker to help you,” Michael added.
“He’s making a lot of assumptions,” Marco commented.
“To be fair, until recently, we only had the one team,” Michael said.
“By the way,” Marco began. “Why are you talking to us instead of working on finding Greg?”
