Page 120 of Shadow Operative

Austin suddenly sat up straighter in the chair across from her. “I think I found something.”

Gage and Nia crowded closer. He showed them on his computer some video footage of Rob’s apartment building. The time stamp showed it was just after midnight.

Nia gasped in a breath.

Someone familiar strode inside the building.

Someone she’d just been considering.

Sigmund O’Neill.

Nia’s heart beat harder. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

Was Sigmund behind this?

It was looking more and more as if that was the case.

chapter

fifty-nine

Gage shouldn’t be surprisedthat Sigmund was most likely the one behind this. The man had been a suspect in Gage’s mind the whole time, but he’d had nothing to prove it.

Now they had this evidence. Sigmund had come into the building at midnight and left thirty minutes later—enough time to kill Rob and frame Nia for it.

Gage had already called the man’s office. His secretary said he hadn’t come in today.

He was tempted to swing by the man’s home. Gage still might do that. But he couldn’t show up without a plan.

“What are you thinking?” Nia moved back to her seat on the couch, but the concern on her face was still evident.

“We need to figure out a way to catch this guy—in a way that no one gets hurt.” Rob, Darius, and Brittany had already been casualties.

“I agree.” Nia glanced at the time on her phone. “We only have an hour and a half before I’m supposed to give these people the cyber key information they want—and I’m still not sure what that information is.”

Gage nodded stiffly, hearing the mental clock ticking in his head. “I would call in backup, but there’s not enough time.”

A strange expression crossed Nia’s gaze. But as quickly as it appeared it was gone.

Her phone buzzed, and she glanced at it. Her face went paler.

“What’s going on?” Gage could tell by her expression that something was wrong.

“It’s Mario,” she told him. “He keeps calling, but I’ve ignored his calls. I don’t feel like dealing with him.”

“He’s calling about what happened at the cafe yesterday, I assume.”

She nodded. “I knew the police would want to question us. I knew our images had probably been caught on camera, and cops knew we fled the scene. We look suspicious.”

Gage couldn’t argue with that. “Has he left any messages?”

She nodded. “He sounds angry. Keeps telling me about how much trouble I’m going to be in and that there’s nothing he can do to protect me—not that he would. His words not mine.”

Gage’s muscles tightened again, even though he wasn’t surprised.

Nia glanced back up at him. “Should I answer? Should we just get this over with?”

“We can’t do anything rash,” Gage said. “Let’s just take five minutes to think it through. Then we can come up with our plan of action.”

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