“Yes, I promise.”
Sean beat him. Then he pulled an excited, tail-wagging Astro onto his lap, leaned back against the sofa cushions, and frowned at Nicholas. “You weren’t telling the truth. I really beat you all those rounds, didn’t I?”
“All right, you caught me. I was trying to spare my ego.” He said to Savich, “He’s too smart, he saw right through me.”
Sherlock nodded. “I’m the only one he can’t beat, right, Sean?”
“Well, Mama, maybe not this week.”
Sherlock grabbed both him and Astro up and swung them around and around, making Sean shout with laughter and Astro bark madly. She gave him a big smacking kiss. “No, no kiss for you, Astro. All right, my boy, it’s time for bed. You’ve humiliated Nicholas enough for one night. Astro, it’s time for your evening walkabout.”
“Good night, Uncle Nicholas. Good night, Aunt Mike.”
Mike shook his hand. “A pleasure to watch you trounce my partner. He occasionally needs trouncing. A lot of trouncing.” And even though she’d meant to keep her voice light, hey, all a joke, both Savich and Sherlock gave her a look that said everything.
They know there’s something going on. Mike looked over at Nicholas. His face was stone vacant and he was staring at his shoes as if the soft Italian leather held all the answers.
Savich looked from one to the other. “Whatever’s wrong, you two need to fix it.”
“There is absolutely nothing wrong, Dillon,” Mike said, jumping to her feet. “There’s absolutely nothing at all going on, not a single thing. Besides, I don’t want to talk about it. Nicholas, isn’t it about time you checked in with Ben?”
Nicholas nodded, punched in Ben’s cell number. Ben answered immediately. “You’re not going to believe this, Nicholas. We found trackers on both your personal cars and five of the vehicles you’ve used from the pool in the past month. Nice Beemer, by the way, you have to let me drive it sometime. The trackers are small, very small, state-of-the-art, placed in the engine block instead of the wheel well. It took some looking to find them. Someone has definitely been keeping track of your—our—whereabouts. From what we can tell, the trackers send a GPS signal strong enough that the person who’s following can watch your movements on a laptop, remotely, up to fifty miles away. Very sophisticated.” He paused, then, “And that’s how they found Mr. Hodges and our three guys.”
“Any chance you can reverse-engineer the data, see where it broadcasted to?”
“We’re working on it, but it’s a moot point, really. They’ve been turned off now. We’ve taken them all to the lab to be worked over for any DNA or fingerprints.”
“Unnecessary. We know who placed them.”
“Who?”
“Someone in COE, probably Andy Tate—he’s their computer whiz. Or Zahir Damari, aka Darius. It sounds more like him.
“Any movement on Gray’s end, on the nanotriggers Spenser engineered for his bombs?”
“He’s right here, hold on. Let me put this on speaker.”
There was a click, then Gray came on the line. “The triggers were definitely Havelock technology. Good catch, Nicholas. The only issue is they are on the market, being used by a number of people, legitimately. We’ll have to get a warrant to see who they’ve sold them to, and it will take time.”