Page 80 of Don't Let Go

“Standby.” I hit two buttons on the keyboard, sweeping the camera angles by matter of habit as I chimed into both Locke and McQuade’s comms.

“Here,” Locke said.

“Online, Sugar Bear. Missing us already?”

“Of course, I am,” I answered with a grin, then connected the separate lines into one, so that the four of us were on the same call. “Remy is also online and needs to debrief. Are you secure?”

“As secure as can be at a completely abandoned facility.” Irritation discolored every single syllable of McQuade’s statement.

I sighed. “We’ll gather what we can. Maybe we’ve forced them to move and that’s not a bad thing.” If their operations were being delayed, it meant we had them on the back foot. Maybe it was petty of me, but I’d spent enough years hiding from them.

“Will do,” Locke said. “What do you have for us, Remy?”

I switched my view to the hotel he was at. One nice thing about the location—lotsof security cameras.Lotsof them. It took me a minute to find the bar they were in. I zeroed in on Remy first, then did a sweep of the room.

The cameras didn’t move, so I had to toggle from camera to camera to find the right angle.

“Stone is in a meeting. He’s been in a bar since we got here and he’s about six bourbons down. I half-expect him to stumble, stutter, and slur, but he seems to be flushed and that’s about it.” Mild disgust filled Remy’s voice.

There they were. He wasn’t wrong, Stone did appear if not ill, at least vaguely off. His face was damp. The cameras were all in black and white and the zoom was a joke. When did they install these? The early aughts?

“Who is he meeting with?”

“Working on that,” Remy said. “I want some confirmation. You got them yet, Patch? If you need a better angle, I can move. I’m also sending you a couple of pictures.”

“Oh good. The hotel’s cameras areterrible.They pixelate before I can bring them into focus. Send them over?”

“Already sent.” The few second lag felt far longer than it was, but then I wanted to seenowand in our high-speed world, any delay was too much delay.

The first image loaded via my phone’s connection and I switched screens to pull it up. The first one was an angle of the back of the heads of two men greeting Stone. He looked less than pleased to see them.

“Not a friendly meeting.”

“Not as far as I can tell,” Remy agreed. “I can’t tell if these are partners or bosses. But they arenothappy with him. Guy on the left is Peter Anton. He’s a little older and he has a couple of new scars but he’s definitely the same guy and when I knew him, he was ASIS.”

Australian Secret Intelligence Service. We didn’t hear about them as much in the States or even in Western Europe. FBI. DGIS. MI-6. Them we heard about.

ASIS was far more subtle.

“How long since you last saw him?” I asked, already pulling up a screen to try and tunnel ASIS. I wanted more information on Peter Anton.

“Ten years,” Remy answered. “Let’s just say, we were not friendly then, we’re definitely not friendly now. I didn’t like his work ethic and he didn’t like that I was a better shot.”

“Good to know,” McQuade said. “We got pictures of him yet?”

“Coming in now,” I told him as I tabbed back to the screen then matched the second photo to the ASIS profile. They really did look like the same person.

I forwarded both images to Locke and McQuade. The soft dings over the line told me they’d received the images. McQuade let out a little grunt.

While the third photo downloaded, I rolled back to the ASIS connection. It was going to take a moment to get in. They had some nice encryption. Very nice, in fact. They’d definitely invested in it.

Unfortunately for their programmer, tunneling through these was my bread and butter. I wanted his ASIS file and—there we went.

“He left ASIS seven years ago, while it doesn’t say he left in disgrace, he left in the middle of an investigation into abuseof power and position. Reading between the lines here, he was asked to resign and they made the investigation go away.”

That happened sometimes. If they didn’t want the egg on their face or if they didn’t have quite enough to force the issue.

“That’s three years longer than I think he should have been there.”

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