She can’t be dead. If I could just hold her, put my arms around her, tell her everything is going to be okay…
“It’s six forty-five,” Jason announced, giving another fifteen-minute warning.
Dylan shook his head, trying to clear his mind. Emotions were useless. He had to act. He had to find her. The only thing that would help him was his training. Latching onto his logic, he typed away, searching for any electronic breadcrumb that he could find on his monitor.
“Call your brother,” he told Scott. “See how long before he and the Texans get here.”
Scott nodded, grabbing his cell.
Jason was once again pacing around the large table. “You have to make this happen, Dylan. I don’t have any leads.”
“I will,” he stated flatly, feeling his intensity rise. “I’m uploading some files to the secure server. Cam can get to work on them when he arrives. When Scott’s brother and the Texans show up, they can help, too.”
Cam knew more than a little about hacking. The truth that had been kept under wraps for years was that Cam had hacked into their high school’s computer network when he was a sophomore. He’d been caught, thankfully. Their two dads had brought down the hammer, and that had been the turning point in his brother’s life that eventually led him to law school. Cam was the only man he truly trusted in the courtroom or anywhere else, especially with something this sensitive. He and Cam had each other’s backs always.
Jason was right. Erica needed all hands on deck. Having Cam here was something he needed, too.
Staring at a monitor, Scott shook his head. “This has Kip Lunceford’s fingerprints all over it.”
Jason hit the table with his fists creating a loud bang. “Damn it, I don’t need another maniac suspect to deal with. Mitrofanov is Destiny’s Most Wanted. He has to be behind this. Not Lunceford. For the love of God, the bastard is in prison.” The sheriff was on edge, like all of them. Time was ticking away and they were no closer to finding Erica than they had been when they’d started the cyber search for the needle in the Internet’s haystack.
Dylan wasn’t about to remind Jason that Niklaus Mitrofanov, a Russian mafia father, had paid a dirty politician to get a meeting with Lunceford at the prison. The sheriff knew it. They all did. All the charges against Mitrofanov had been dropped after the deaths of two state witnesses. Jason was working hard to uncover a link in the murders to the mobster. The Russian had a grudge against Destiny. His son had been killed here. Dylan had known many Mitrofanov types during his days in the Agency. Niklaus had been a lowly pickpocket back in Russia. He’d served time. When he’d gotten to the States, the man’s ambition had propelled him to his current status as kingpin of a large organization. Niklaus would never stop until the city was nothing but ruble or he was dead. If the bastard had anything to do with Erica’s disappearance, Dylan would find him and make sure the Russian joined his son in the grave.
Though Dylan found it hard to believe that Lunceford could have any reach now, after the new warden at the maximum-security prison had locked the lunatic up so tight, he knew the most impossible things often could happen given enough time and will. “What fingerprints of Kip’s are you seeing, Scott?”
“Believe it or not, any coder has a certain style that is identifiable to other techs,” Scott said. “See here.” Knight pointed to a line on the monitor in front of Dylan. “This sequence isn’t really part of the code. It’s more of a placeholder.”
Gen1us$KL$w1ns.
Dylan pondered the strange jumble, hoping to discover something, anything, that would point to Erica’s whereabouts.
* * * *
10:02 a.m., Friday – on the side of a highway
Erica felt the car stop.
She moaned as loud as she could, praying someone would hear her. But the sirens continued on, fading as the unseen police car passed her abductors’ vehicle.
I’m going to die.
Chapter Two
6:47 p.m., Friday – TBK Tower, Destiny, Colorado
Dylan stared at his monitor. “I’ve seen this before in lines of Kip Lunceford’s malicious code we discovered in the TBK network.”
Scott nodded. “It’s one of several of the bastard’s calling cards.”
Kip Lunceford, what are you up to?
Dylan’s normally regimented mind was betraying him. Speculation was part of his job. Always had been. Gather facts. Make deductions. Act. More facts. More deductions until the mission objective was achieved, whether target or extraction. But the visions of Erica that kept creeping into his head were clouding his judgment.
For Dylan, a cut-and-dried, by-the-book, systematic life made sense of a senseless world. He was, at his heart, an agent of death. Yes, all his targets had deserved their demise—more than deserved—but killing changed a man bit by bit. After his first kill, an Al-Qaeda stateside operative, several Jack Daniel’s bottles had comforted him for three days.
The next mission, two bottles and two days.
The next, a single bottle and a single day.