Deadly Games - Cate Noble [43]
Harry still wasn’t buying the story that Gena had jumped from a moving vehicle. He knew her too damn well. Sober, she was vain with a capital V. So even if she’d managed to scrape up enough courage to jump, ultimately she’d have worried more about the potential damage to her face and chickened out.
Now had she been drunk …
Most likely she’d fallen out of the truck. He didn’t care what Edguardo said, the door must not have been shut all the way. At least Rocco or another driver hadn’t run the bitch over when she’d hit the pavement.
That Rocco now had Gena in his possession wasn’t the absolute worst-case scenario, though it wasn’t ideal. Harry still had a couple of cards to play.
Finding out where Rocco had stashed Gena was job one. The private plane that had ferried Rocco to Sugar Springs had flown back to D.C. without passengers. Harry hoped that meant Rocco had picked a safe house in Texas. The Agency used a lot of third-party contractors for security, which made it easier to circumvent.
Harry was also waiting to learn where Rocco’s sister and her kid were staying. Snatching one of them was not Harry’s first or second choice, but if he ran out of other options …
He slowed, turning off the highway. A few minutes later he pulled up beside the Winnebago he’d left parked at an RV station near Brownsville.
Inside, he booted up his laptop while microwav-ing a frozen dinner he’d grabbed at a convenience store. Then he brewed a pot of coffee. It was going to be a long night. By the time Harry had wolfed down the food and poured coffee, his laptop completed its security protocols. A slow process to be sure, but necessary.
He opened a browser and began retrieving e-mail from various sources. There wasn’t much.
The Rialto cartel wanted a progress report, which was a subtle way of saying, “Hurry, we’re waiting.”
“Well, you’re just going to have to keep waiting,” Harry muttered as he typed a reply that was equally subtle and vague. Wrapping up details now. Hope to have final timeline in 72 hours.
Reading it reminded him of the stakes. Damn it! He needed to make contact with Rufin.
His cell phone rang with the special ringtone he’d assigned to his CIA mole Ian Brown. The traitor.
“Have you found them?” Harry asked.
“No. Rocco hasn’t called in or contacted any of the Agency resources for a safe house.”
“Are you monitoring all his known aliases?”
“Absolutely. But no hits.”
“I expected as much,” Harry said. Rocco had a knack for keeping a ready supply of secret IDs. “I take it you’ve had nothing on Gena’s IDs then, either.”
“I even tapped her health insurance records, but either she wasn’t hurt badly enough to need medical attention or she’s using an alias, too.”
“What about Rufin? Any headway in tracking his location?”
“None. Though an opportunity might open if they catch this Taz character. Max Duncan’s fiancée, Dr. Houston, seems confident that Max is closing in on Taz. If Rufin is truly the only one who can retrieve those data chips, then perhaps we need to follow Taz once he’s in custody.”
“Maybe I should join the hunt for Taz,” Harry said, only half joking. “We need to watch Dr. Houston more closely as well.”
Ian cleared his throat. “If we could manage to get the research on those chips, would we even need Dr. Rufin? Abe Caldwell seemed certain someone on his staff could replicate the Serum 89 formula from the research notes.”
It bothered Harry that Ian knew so much about Serum 89, a mind-control drug the late Dr. Viktor Zadovsky had invented.
Had Abe Caldwell really confided in Ian to that degree? Or did Ian have access to more data than he let on? True traitors always looked out for themselves first. All the more reason to debrief and unplug Ian as soon as possible.
“Abe Caldwell overestimated his researchers,” Harry said. “There’s only one scientist I know of who could replicate the Serum 89 formula. A man who worked with Viktor Zadovsky in Belarus.”
Harry was bluffing. He damn sure