Page 90 of The Wolves Come at Night
When they were creaking full, Jackson finished off her wine and sat back, hands folded on her stomach.
“So.”
Angelie imitated her posture. It wasn’t that she wanted to needle the detective, but Jackson was just so ripe for the picking. “So?”
“What’s next?”
Angelie waved a hand at Santiago. “We stay up all night crashing through the records until something jumps out at us. Legwork. Similar to what you do with your team, I suspect.”
“What can I do to help?”
A decent meal seemed to have tamed the beast. Jackson could be a righteous bitch, but Angelie suspected that deep down, she was more interested in getting the answer to Carson’s disappearance, regardless of the cost.
“Sleep. We will handle this part.”
“No way. If I’m in, I’m in. Give me a stack and let me help.”
“Suit yourself,” Angelie said. “This might be your last chance to rest, though. I doubt Game is far away. We find him, we’re rolling immediately.”
“Without a plan?”
“We’ll plan on the way.”
Jackson shrugged. “I’m fine. Just…give me something to do. I can’t just sit here.”
Santiago peeled off a fist-sized stack of papers. “I’m cross-referencing transactions with phone records. So far, I know he’s in Europe and has been for nearly a week. He’s supposedly been all over, Denmark, Amsterdam, Edinburgh. He’s masking his transactions so we’ll chase our tails trying to track his movements. He’s simply using IPs and false flags to lure us into following him all over the place while trying to stay off Interpol’s radar. But we’ve been trained in the same tactics. We aren’t stupid. We are not cats chasing a piece of string. One of the locations will be legitimate. We just need to find the right spot. We find Game, we find Carson. He will have her stashed close by.”
“Why not try to negotiate?”
“Because that’s what he thinks we’ll do. We have to surprise him by knocking on his door before he expects us. So we’re laying in our own false flags. Making it look like we’re following his trail of bread crumbs, so he doesn’t realize where, exactly, we are. While we do that, you can cross-reference the transactional data.”
Jackson accepted a highlighter, looked at it with a spark of amusement.
“All this technology, and this asshole will be thwarted by a generic study tool.” She toyed with the plunger for a minute, popping the fluorescent tip in and out of the pen. “Game’s been playing a long con. He took the time to get to know Carson, to find the right way into her world. He hacked her phone, but not before doing research on the developer of an app that Carson ended up using. As Gareth Maughan, he offered the developer a ton of investor money to gain access to his code, citing due diligence, and hacked in from there. He took over the app, and the app downloaded bad software onto everyone’s phones who were a part of the community. Then he waltzed right through the open door and started following Carson’s every movement. He timed her kidnapping with the delivery of the notes to Avery Conway, plus used Carson’s phone to send a text to confirm he had her. Those aren’t the actions of a hothead. That is calculated long-term planning.”
“Your point?”
“The Game you describe is a tool. A blunt tool, at that. These plans have an elegance to them. They took time, energy, patience. More than just money, obviously.”
Angelie said nothing. Jackson raised an excellent point, one she’d only partially considered.
“Are you saying you think someone is helping him?”
Jackson nodded. “I assume you have more enemies than friends.”
That made Angelie bark out a laugh. “You could say that. There are any number of people all over the world who would love to see me dead.”
“Then you should consider the bigger picture. Perhaps this isn’t just about Carson, and drawing you out. Perhaps this is about eliminating you, period.”
“It is possible. Though I see no reason to go to such lengths to kill me.”
“If you’ve retired, you’ve turned down a number of jobs, I assume. Maybe this was a sure thing. Maybe someone wants retribution for a wrong you’ve caused them, and Game is simply a means to an end.”
Angelie watched the blond head bend over the papers and sighed inwardly. The constant barrage of Jackson’s principles and scruples and insights was getting to her. Especially because they were logical and sound.
Few rational people decide to take lives for the fun. Some are monsters. Some do it for money. Some do it for revenge. But the rational people, people like Angelie? She was not a monster and fell squarely into both remaining categories. She’d had her vengeance on all who’d wronged her, though. That was how she met Jackson in the first place. She’d been poised for revenge and instead learned the truth about her childhood and her parents’ demise. She’d taken care of business, and she’d genuinely thought this was behind her.
Yet here she was, seated across from the very sort of person she steered away from at all costs, after a surprisingly companionable meal and a bottle of wine, working together to solve a problem.
