Page 54 of Dark Horizon New Dawn

38

NEGAL

"Does it matter who took Margo?" Negal asked. "In either case, none of your people can show up at the hotel. You will be immediately recognized by the Doomers. My teammates and I are best suited for this mission. We can enter the hotel shrouded in invisibility and search for Margo, going room to room."

What Negal was concerned about was what was being done to Margo in the meantime. If any of those maggots touched her inappropriately, he would tear the skin off their bodies one inch at a time.

Kian smiled indulgently. "No, you can't. Shrouding doesn't work on surveillance cameras, and I'm sure the first thing the Doomers did was to either take over the control room or hack into it. They will see you even if you shroud yourselves. That being said, you do have one advantage over us. You don't activate the built-in immortal alarm for some reason. You could go in disguise, and they won't know that you are not human."

That was true to some extent. He remembered meeting Magnus and the other immortals for the first time. He'd sensed that they weren't human, but they hadn't known what to think of him and Aru. Later, he had learned that their so-called built-in alarm hadn't been activated by the presence of gods. It only worked with other immortals.

Still, wearing a disguise seemed like such a primitive method. "Can't you do something about the surveillance? Your hacker can access it remotely and put it on a loop. By the time the Doomers figure out that they are watching the same thing over and over again, we will be done."

"That might be doable." Kian put his whiskey glass down. "But a disguise will be much easier to do and with less possible fuckups. You can shroud for only a limited time, and you will need to open doors to search rooms, which will not go unnoticed. I don't have a problem with the ghost stories that will start, but I'm sure the Doomers will figure out what's going on. On the other hand, if you disguise yourself as hotel personnel, let's say plumbers, no one will give you a second glance."

Toven chuckled. "Three extremely good-looking guys with plungers will not go unnoticed. I'm sure they will garner a lot of attention."

"Eva will have to work her magic on them," Kian said. "She can cover their faces with fake beards and pockmarks and whatnot."

"Guys," Mia said from the couch. "You are missing the most important part. If Jasmine's boyfriend took Margo, by the time we get there and Negal and his friends go to investigate, the scumbag could have gotten her and Jasmine very far away from the hotel, and there will be no clues left as to where he took them. Besides, you will need to question the staff and the guests if they saw anything, and how are you going to do that with the Doomers watching the hotel?"

"Good point." Kian sighed. "We need a diversion to draw them away."

Negal lifted a hand. "First, we need to determine that they don't have Margo. Otherwise, creating a diversion will be pointless."

"True." Kian drummed his fingers on the table. "So, you and Aru go in and search the rooms for Margo, pretending to be plumbers or service guys. I doubt Dagor will agree to leave Frankie's side while she's transitioning, so he's not going to come. Once we are sure that Margo is not in the hotel and that the Doomers don't have her, we create a diversion to draw them away. The question is, what kind of diversion?" He looked at Turner. "If you have any ideas, please feel free to share."

"A group of Guardians can enter the hotel and openly start asking questions. The Doomers will not attack with so many human witnesses. They will wait until the Guardians leave and try to ambush them somewhere less public. Except, we will turn the tables on them and ambush them instead."

"Won't they be expecting that?" Kalugal asked. "They know that we know that they are there, or at least they suspect that we know."

"Rank and file Doomers are not that sophisticated," Lokan said. "They will assume that we are the stupid ones who didn't figure out that they are waiting for us. If we wave the proverbial red flag in front of their eyes, they will attack. My concern is the Doomers watching the harbor. I think we should still go ahead with the plan of pretending to be a regular cruise with humans on board and have several groups leave the ship in disguise. Cabo is a tender port, which means that we go ashore using water taxis that can take only a few passengers at a time. That works in our favor. It would have been much more difficult to pull it off in a regular port where everyone disembarks the gangway right onto the dock."

Onegus nodded. "The Guardians who go to the hotel will need to disembark before we get to Cabo by using the lifeboats like we did in Acapulco, and Turner will have to arrange for vehicles once again. When they arrive with cars to the hotel, the Doomers will assume that they drove from Acapulco, which would have taken just as long by land as it will take us by sea, even with the big loop around the Sea of Cortez. Cars can travel much faster than ships."

"I like this plan." Kian reached for the whiskey bottle and refilled his glass. "The force will split into three groups, each arriving separately. First, Negal and Aru will arrive in disguise and search the hotel. If they determine that Margo is not there, a large group of Guardians will continue to the hotel to create the diversion, while the third group will wait on the town's outskirts." He looked at Turner. "What do you think?"

39

KIAN

Turner tapped his pen on his yellow pad. "I think that we are tired and not considering all the possible angles."

The guy was probably referring to everyone other than himself and was just being polite. Turner hadn't said much during the meeting, and he had probably devised a dozen different strategies by now.

Kian wracked his brain, trying to figure out what he and the others might have missed, but he was coming up empty.

"Do you want to guide us through your thought process?" he asked Turner.

"Of course. I'm not saying that I have the answers, only that we weren't methodical in our approach."

Right. The guy was trying to spare their feelings so they wouldn't look dumb when he revealed those different angles they had failed to consider.

Toven pushed to his feet. "I'll brew us coffee. We definitely need the boost."

Turner flipped to a new page on his yellow pad. "Let's analyze the situation methodically." He lifted his eyes to Kian. "To figure out who took Margo, we can have Roni hack into the hotel's surveillance servers and go over the recordings from where Mia last talked with Margo and until she called her and didn't get an answer. The second thing we need to do is trace Margo's phone. The perpetrators probably dumped it somewhere, but even that can give us a clue as to where she was taken to."

What Turner had said sounded so obvious and logical that Kian couldn't understand how he hadn't thought of it. Was he really that tired? Or maybe it was the whiskey?

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