By the time he’d made it back to their base camp, the prisoners were long gone on the Zodiacs, and the rest of the SEAL team was waiting for him. He’d take camping over five-star luxury resorts any day. The entire team, minus Remy, who was now somewhere between here and Belize, was present.
Gray nodded acknowledgment when Mason stepped into the campsite. Gray was one of the biggest SEALs Mason had ever met. The team’s standing joke was that Gray didn’t parachute out of the plane so much as he plummeted. Like a rock. Although he sprawled at ease on a pile of backpacks, there was nothing casual about the glance he raked over Mason. Blood stained his camo. He’d stayed with the injured Remy until the medevac lifted off.
Mason was last to arrive at the debriefing about to start. It was standard operating protocol to review every mission, identifying areas of concern where they could improve next time. The team sat in a semicircle, their attention focused on Gray. As soon as Mason dropped to the ground next to Levi, Gray reviewed the mission that they had just completed, beginning with their target’s arrival on Fantasy Island and ending with Remy’s medevac to Belize for emergency surgery. Since Gray’s maybe-girlfriend Laney Parker was a surgeon and she’d accompanied Remy on the flight, Mason figured his teammate had a fighting chance.
When Gray finished the medical update and Levi had confirmed Marcos’s handoff to the US Navy, Gray dropped a new bombshell. “We’re not done here,” he said.
“We get to vacation for real? Hooyah.” Levi leaned forward. “I’m borrowing your black AmEx, Mason.”
“Dumbass,” Sam said. Their field medic was a laidback Alabama boy, but his lean build and easy smile were deceptively mellow. He could kick butt with the best of them, and no one on the team swam faster or blew more stuff up. “He means you get to work overtime.”
Gray shook his head. “Real mature, Sam. And accurate. Our mission parameters have changed. We were charged with bringing in Diego Marcos, but now we’ve got a second target. Marcos has a brother, who operates as his right-hand man.”
“Would that be Santiago Marcos?” Maybe Maddie had it wrong. Maybe she wasn’t planning to shoot the wedding of a notorious drug dealer who, according to her, had invited his equally notorious younger brother to the celebration.
Gray eyed him. “Are you psychic? Or is there something else we need to know about? Levi already mentioned that you hit a snag earlier today.”
Maddie was definitely a complication. A beautiful, very alluring complication.
“We had a resort guest up on the hillside lookout spot.” The place had some froufrou name like Lovers Lookout. He didn’t think Gray needed to know that, or that the spot apparently starred front and center in Maddie’s bridal portfolio. “She had a camera.”
Gray scrubbed a hand over his head. “How long was she up there? Did she shoot the Zodiacs coming in?”
Yeah, but that was only the first problem in a long list. “The guest is Madeline Holmes. She’s a blogger, one of those girls who hangs with Ashley.”
Ashley waved a hand. “Maddie runs Kiss and Tulle. She covers destination weddings, wedding favors, wedding cakes, wedding dresses. Last month her blog had over two hundred thousand unique visitors.”
“In other words, any noun that can be modified by the adjective wedding,” Levi interrupted. Mason was willing to bet that Levi wouldn’t recognize a wedding blog—or a wedding anything—if it bit him on the ass.
Ashley made a face. “Pretty much.”
“Well, today she was covering sunrises.” He had no idea why a bride would want to hike up a hill at dawn in her dress for a few photos, but far be it from him to judge. “And she set up her camera yesterday to do time-lapse photography.”
“She likes to vlog,” Ashley said with a sigh. “And live post.”
Whatever vlogging was, he’d bet it was a security risk because Ashley made another face.
Gray cursed. “Give me options.”
“I snagged her media card, but she claimed she’d already transferred her pictures over the resort’s Wi-Fi.”
Ashley leaned forward. “I’ve been monitoring traffic in and out, but she’ll likely keep copies on her laptop. Unfortunately, our resident wedding blogger has been experimenting with time-lapse photography. Even more unfortunately for us, her photos got picked up by a national travel site.”
Ashley flipped her tablet around, exhibiting a series of sunrise photographs shot over the pier. The first half dozen shots were harmless unless you had a thing against waves and pretty colors. The next-to-last picture, however, was a problem. It showed a Zodiac shooting through the opening in the reef and heading toward the dock. Mason had a bad feeling that if he zoomed in, he’d see Marcos’s bodyguards bouncing over the water in that Zodiac. Worse, there was no sign of the Zodiac tied up to the dock in the next and final frame. The boat had disappeared in the thirty minutes between shots.