“But, of course.” Jeremy waggled his eyebrows and lifted the projector higher to enlarge the image. Everyone gathered around, those in the front taking a knee so -people behind them could see.
“Okay, these first ones show that the license plates of the three Suburbans are all blacked out,” Marz said, switching among images. Each one showed a version of the last—-their attackers had smeared something dark over the plates. “So there are no leads there. Just an FYI.” Marz glanced over his shoulder to Emilie. The pair exchanged some sort of silent communication and, finally, Emilie nodded and averted her gaze. “This image,” Marz said, switching again, “shows the moment the attackers fired on one of their own.” A flare of light was just visible on the far side of the middle Suburban.
“Manny,” Nick said quietly, his tone full of regret. For Emilie. Even though her brother had been their enemy, they’d all gone out of their way to express their sympathies to her. Not only were she and Marz together now, but Emilie hadn’t had any knowledge of Manny’s criminal activities until Marz and the team told her.
Marz nodded. “Yeah. So it was clearly an execution.” From what Jeremy understood, both the authorities and the Church Gang were hunting for Manny after he’d gone on a spree and killed a cop and several Church--Gang henchmen, so these guys had apparently decided he’d become a liability. Scary to imagine what they’d do to Nick and the team if this was what they did to one of their own. Marz switched images again. “Now, this is the best thing I found in reviewing all the footage.”
The image showed a man firing from the rear passenger seat of one of the Suburbans, an automatic weapon in his hands.
“If you look at the guy’s bicep, you’ll see there’s a mark,” Marz said. “I spent at least an hour trying to enlarge and clarify it, and this is what I managed.”
The new image that appeared featured a detail of that mark. Everyone leaned in. It appeared to be a silhouette of a man’s head.
“I know it’s not great, but when I pair the enlargement with this image—-” A logo of a knight’s helmeted head in profile appeared next to Marz’s photograph. “—-I think it becomes clear what we’re looking at.”
Murmurs rose up from among Nick’s teammates.
“A tattoo of the company logo for,” Nick said. “Sonofabitch.”
“That’s some of the best evidence we have, right there,” Beckett said, leaning in to compare the images, “that Seneka was behind yesterday’s attack. Which only makes sense if they were also involved in what happened to us in Afghanistan.”
Running his dark hand over his close--cropped hair, Easy nodded. “Yeah. Because, otherwise, what would’ve motivated Seneka to attack?”
“Exactly,” Marz said. “So now we’ve identified Manny as a Seneka operative and at least one of the other attackers, too.”
“Finally we’re moving past purely circumstantial evidence to the hard stuff we can use to nail them,” Shane said, anger making his southern accent a little more prominent than usual.
Marz nodded and rubbed his hands together. “Now what we need to put all the details together is the information on the colonel’s chip.” Nods all around. “So Charlie and I will get to work on networking the machines and I’ll set up an organizational system to keep track of which files have been read.”
“Do it,” Nick said. “For everyone else, if you don’t have an immediate task this morning, rest up. Between reading those files and the watch rotation, there might not be much of that in the coming days.”
The group broke up into side conversations, and Jeremy continued to hold the projector as a few -people from the back came in for a closer look. When they were done, he finally returned the projector to the desk, dropped his hands to his sides, and shook them out. His shoulders had started to ache from holding the position for so long. Looking down, his gaze snagged on Charlie, who was giving Jeremy’s body a good, long look.
Jeremy felt it like a physical caress as Charlie’s blue eyes seemed to latch on to Jeremy’s hips, groin, thighs.
Holy shit. So much desire radiated off the other man that it took everything Jeremy had not to climb down from the chair, pull Charlie into his arms, and kiss him until neither of them could breathe.
Charlie’s gaze snapped upward and collided with Jeremy’s. The blond man’s face turned beet red and he made himself suddenly busy with some papers on the desk. Blood rushed southward through Jeremy’s body, and he jumped down before his erection became obvious to everyone in the room.
There was only one person he would like to have made his erection obvious to. If he didn’t find a way to get Charlie alone soon, he was going to lose it. He really was.
Jeremy scrubbed his hands over his face. When he dropped them, he found Jessica standing right next to him, her gaze glued to the computer monitor and her mouth hanging open.