Page 36 of The Bait

“Some kind of sedative,” Asher deduced.

Then they hauled both Yunho and Lucas to their feet and all but carried their listless bodies up the stairs. They got upstairs, one intruder on either side of Yunho and Lucas, and hauled them outside, into the dark.

And they were gone.

It took less than four minutes.

The cameras kept recording, though Asher pushed the screen away. They’d see if anything moved, but for now, not even the curtains blew in the breeze where the doors were left wide open.

“They never tripped the alarm system,” Asher said. He was so livid his voice was like ice. “They must have disabled it before they arrived. They knew the top door was a PIN pad. They knew the door into the war room would need a PIN pad and explosives.”

“And they knew exactly what mainframe box to take,” Harry added. “And where it was. They knew everything.”

“Like they had eyes in there,” Asher said. Then his eyebrows knitted in a scowl. “Or had someone on the inside, feeding them intel.”

Harry didn’t like that idea as much as Asher clearly didn’t like it, but it was a possibility.

He shrugged. “Aranya? They cleaned up that loose end real fast, didn’t they? If it was her...”

“I’d like to think it wasn’t. I liked her, as did Yunho. He trusted her and paid her so well that any money some asshole offered for information wouldn’t even compare.”

“Unless they took her family, threatened her that way,” Asher added.

“A possibility,” Harry said, because it was. And at this point, they had to consider anything. “I’ll google the news around the Ranong area to see if there’s any mention of Yunho’s island.”

Asher nodded. Then he rewound the footage back to the first sighting of the intruders’ gun glinting in the dark and watched it again, looking at anything he might have missed the first time.

“They came in from the south,” Asher said quietly. “Each of them had a specialty. Two for the hostages, one for the keypad and to blow the door, one for the mainframe and the tranquilliser.”

He listened to their voices and rewound it, and listened to and rewound, several times over. “Belarusian,” Asher said. “Maybe Latvian. Or Russian.” Then he sighed. “I can’t be certain. I’m out of practice. The old me would have known.”

Harry gave Asher’s arm a squeeze. “It’s likely they were just a team paid a lot of money. Their accents aren’tindicative of anything. I’m Australian and killed people all over.”

Asher shot him a pointed stare. “We came to Europe because those men were Croatian. Are you saying it was wrong? Have we wasted time? Time Yunho doesn’t have?”

“No, we came here because it was the only lead we had at the time. And if those guys are Russian or Belarusian or Latvian, and if that’s the only lead we have, then we’ll go there too.”

Asher frowned, almost sulked. “I hate not knowing.”

Harry’s heart hurt for him. He hated that he felt so helpless. “Then look at what we do know,” he tried. He knew Asher would get stuck in his own head, mad at himself for what he deemed a failure on his behalf. “What can you tell me about the footage?”

Asher’s eyes went back to the screen, where Yunho was now on his knees, sedated with that pad on his neck. “That those men are going to die.”

“Yes.”

“That one of them has or had an injury with his larynx.”

“Yes.”

“That I’m going to make it a whole lot worse.”

“Good. And?”

He paused, his voice quiet. “That I’m glad they sedated him, so he wouldn’t freak out when they dragged him off his island. So his anxiety didn’t kill him.”

Harry ran his hand up Asher’s back and gave his neck a squeeze. “Do you think they sedated them to make transportation easier? Or because they knew of his agoraphobia? It’s much harder to transport someone when they’re having a medical episode. It’s risky and unknown, and those are two things no transport team wants.”

Asher sighed again. “If they knew about the war room, then it’s likely they knew about his condition.”

---