Page 18 of The San Marco Heist

She shrugged. “Will’s mom had one of her episodes that woke him up, so he figured he’d get to work on the drone we’ve been tweaking. I got a ping he was checking out my code, so I hopped on a chat and… you know. Here I am.”

I could have hugged her for how excited she was to be collaborating with her best friend. Instead, I was about to destroy that mood. “Let’s go up to your lab.”

Brie was our computer whiz, but Will was our gadget guy. He’d been in London for the past eight months, taking care of his sick mother. Evidence of his absence littered the room, from his empty desk to his shelves Brie refused to fill. She’d been spending more and more time in her lab working with him than before, even though it was remote. She’d always been a night owl, but with him four hours earlier than us, she’d taken to arriving at the office by four or five in the morning.

The plush sofa at the back of her giant workspace called to me, but if I sat, I’d crash. The nap this afternoon hadn’t been enough to make up for the trip to Boston, the party, the escape home, the meeting… and Mum wanting us to take on another job with insufficient prep time.

“I’ve got some bad news, Brie.” I rolled my neck, inhaling the old scent which still clung to the sweater. She wouldn’t take this well. For how much Emmett and I excelled in the family business, she’d failed at everything required for field work. She was brilliant, but she was a feeler, unable to separate work from reality. The way my heart climbed up my throat almost made me think I had some of that in me, too. “Emmett’s in trouble.”

She snorted, waking her computer to reveal Will’s smiling face.

He yawned and ran a hand over his wavy brown hair. “Everything okay, Brie?”

“Yeah, it was Scarlett and a client.” She leaned to the side so the camera had a clearer shot of me. “Apparently, Em’s in trouble.”

“Just an average Saturday night around there?” He laughed.

“Unfortunately, no.” I touched Brie’s shoulder, and she looked up at me, her joking face falling. “Some guys broke into a game he was playing and kidnapped him.”

Brie gasped, shuddering so strong I felt it. “Kidnapped?”

“The guy downstairs was with him, but I’m not buying his story until we’ve cleared him.”

Will nodded, but Brie’s mouth was still hanging wide.

I squeezed her shoulder, a lifetime of lessons on how to calm the churning in my stomach running through some part of my subconscious and almost working. “This is no different from Friday night. We were all in danger the moment we approached that house, but careful planning got us out safely.”

“What do the kidnappers want?” asked Will.

“The Codex.”

“It was already shipped, wasn’t it?” he said.

With a nod, Brie turned to her desk. Will remained full screen on her third monitor, while her central one switched to our secure tracking system. “Courier came for it at three this afternoon. It could be in London by now.”

Dammit. “Getting it back from the courier or the client isn’t an option without ruining our reputation.”

Will’s focus was somewhere offscreen. “Why’d they think he had it? We bypassed the Maguire security feeds around the library, didn’t trip any of the alarms, and you had a clean exit.”

To them, everything had gone off without a hitch. To me? I’d been replaying every tiny failure. Losing intel, losing Zac, a staff member who’d questioned me going into the library, the delay with Malcolm, my emotional response to him, the revved engine… Mum’s voice echoed in my head as the list grew, reminding me of both where I’d messed up and that I had to focus on the present moment. “What if the guy who took Zac’s phone got information—”

“Not likely.” Brie blew a raspberry. She switched to a new window and pointed at a grid of characters that made no sense to me. “Zac’s phone was destroyed the second whoever lifted it turned it on.”

“Fine. Then it could be the gunman who went after him, someone who recognized me from the recon at the architect’s office, or—”

“Or we missed a camera at the Maguire mansion somewhere.” Brie tapped her keyboard in thought.

“Or someone shared a selfie on social media,” added Will.

I pulled Malcolm’s phone from one of the hidden pockets in my tights. “We’ll do a full Lessons Learned session later. Right now, we need to focus on the fact that Emmett’s kidnappers want something we don’t have. They’re going to call in an hour, and I need to figure out a plan.”

“Where does the guy downstairs factor into this?”

Will’s jaw set. “I’m calling Rav.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” I held the phone up. “It’s too up in the air for Rav to do anything but get pissy. The guy’s name is Malcolm Sharpe. He claims to be a PI and an old friend of Emmett’s who was taken with him.”

“Why’d they let him go but keep Emmett?”

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