Page 111 of You Found Me
Ah hell.
It was worse than that.
She was pretty sure she’d fallen in love with her warden.
Chapter Eighteen
After a weekend spent feeling like the bastard he was, Ward was in no mood for a Monday morning meeting. The two faces staring back at him on the video call didn’t look happy about it either.
“So what you’re saying is we’re no closer to our mark than we were a week ago,” he said in a carefully guarded tone. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“We're making progress.” Annie, elegant in a crisp pantsuit that probably cost more than his first car, sat in a hotel room that looked too expensive for their budget. “I admit it’s not as fast as I’d like.”
“Where are you?” he demanded. “Why do you look like you’re about to have brunch with the president?”
“New York.” Annie sipped her coffee. “And I look this way because in about an hour, I’m seeing the president of the Costume Designers Guild for background information.”
“For the record, I’m in a truck stop parking lot near Phoenix, Arizona,” Spencer said.
He was in their company van/tech support/mobile command hub. On the outside, the van looked like every other black, windowless barge, but on the inside it was the Bat Caveand Tony Stark’s lab shoved into a bread box. Spencer was in his element, surrounded by all the gadgets and monitors. His hair looked wild and unwashed, and Ward would bet money on his shirt being able to stand on its own.
They’d been rattling at him for ten minutes, but the words “we found him” hadn’t come out of their mouths.
He’d now spent more time in Wires Crossing than he had in a decade. People were getting used to seeing him.
He was getting used to seeingher.
His rule book mocked him.
“Ward?” Annie knocked on the fancy end table next to her. “Spencer, is he frozen? He looks frozen.”
Spencer peered at a monitor off to the side. “No. The connection’s fine.”
How long had they been talking?
Dammit.
“Run it by me again,” he said briskly, then pulled a pad of paper over and got ready to take notes old school. Writing things down made information easier to process, and it also forced concentration. It was a trick he’d learned in high school, and it still worked.
“I updated the shared spreadsheet,” Annie said. “All five primaries are listed with details of their past associations and any other information I was able to gather. Spencer’s filling in some of the blank spots, and we’ve managed to strike two from the list already.”
“Just two?” Frustration made him snap his words like a whip. “It’s been over a month. These people aren’t CIA or MI6, right?”
Spencer busied himself with something Ward couldn’t see.
Annie arched an eyebrow in a way that put CEOs and politicians in their place. “It’s not like we have a big team on this. I’m playing rover and Spencer lives out of his van so he can hijack protected servers and sift through ridiculous amounts ofdata. If you want us to move faster, we need more boots on the ground.”
Ward held up both hands in surrender. “Sorry. It’s been a lot of late nights this week. Tell me who you’ve eliminated and why.”
“Late nights?” Annie asked, then shook her head. “Never mind. We’ve booted the WWE guy, Stuart Ackleson, and Alban Markey, the second assistant director. Markey was in Paris with his new girlfriend during the concert in question. The night of the break-in, they were spotted at Viracocha. Remember, it’s that hot club where Dominic Prince and the lead singer from Starborn went at it.”
“The memesthatspawned are legendary,” Spencer said. “I’ve used that image of them getting sprayed with water to generate a few myself.”
Ward crossed Markey off his list. “Great. What’s Ackleson’s alibi?”
“He was, shall we say, otherwise occupied the night of the concert.” Annie looked coy.
Ward raised his eyebrows at that. “What’s her name?”