But why not allow Donovan a little happiness? Someone around here should have it.
David studied the screens arrayed around the back of his workstation, checking the camera feeds as well as the code he was constantly working on, constantly trying to improve the system that kept the operatives safe. He could clearly see all six subjects at the party. Ash was still near the door, Kirkland was flirting with a couple of women by the refreshment table, and Joss was playing dice with a couple of chauffeurs by the back door. Donovan and Kate were still in the middle of the dancefloor, but they were talking to a blond woman they both seemed to know.
David watched for a minute, wondering who the woman was. But then he was distracted by something else. He just wasn’t sure what it was.
There was something wrong with one of the pictures on his video feeds. He began pulling them up, one at a time. Something…something…and then he realized what it was.
He pulled up the camera feed from the safe house, then the one from Kate Thompson’s house. Looking at them side by side, it was so obvious. He should have caught it sooner.
Damn!
Someone hacked his cameras!
Those cameras were supposed to be hack proof, but he of all people knew that anything could be hacked given enough time and patience. Whoever had done this, they were smart. To hack them in such a small amount of time—they’d only been in Miss Thompson’s house for three days, only activated in the safe house for twenty-four hours. How the hell…it didn’t matter how.
“The safe house is compromised,” he said, pushing a button on his keyboard that allowed his voice to be heard by Ash only.
“What do you mean, compromised?”
“Someone hacked the cameras.” He continued to type on the keyboard as he spoke. “I’ve got a team headed over there to check it out.”
“How the hell did that happen?” Ash demanded of him.
David looked up at the monitor that showed Ash. He could tell, even from miles away and through slightly grainy video footage, that his brother was pissed. And he had right to be. This was David’s thing, and he’d clearly messed up.
“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”
“You’d better.”
David cleared the monitors, focusing on the code that ran the cameras. It was easy to reverse what the hacker had done, but he had to go a step further, to block the hacker from coming back. It took him a few minutes to search for the backdoor the hacker would have left to make reentry easier. That’s what he would have done. And he found it just as the team he’d dispatched radioed in.
“We’re approaching the house.”
“Proceed with caution,” he told them.
He pulled up the video feeds that covered the outside of the safe house. He identified the dark shapes of the remote team making their way carefully through the front yard. And then the screen went white.
“Oh, fuck me!” David cried, shocked into inaction for a second.
“We’ve got a problem, Ash,” he said a moment later, his voice shaking as he watched one, then two, then three of the members of the remote team begin to reappear on the screen. “You’re not going to like it, but you’re going to have to send them to Austin.”
Chapter 20
Donovan
“Alcatraz,” Ash unexpectedly barked in my ear. “I repeat, Alcatraz.”
Tension immediately raced through me. Kate was talking to her manager from the bank, Mrs. Talbot. I moved up close behind her and hissed in her ear, “We have to go.”
She glanced back at me, irritation clear in every line of her gorgeous face until she saw my eyes. Then she stiffened.
“I apologize, Mrs. Talbot,” she said politely, “but it seems we need to go.”
Mrs. Talbot’s eyes narrowed. “Is there some reason why?”
“Yes,” I said in my most authoritative voice, but I didn’t pause to explain. I simply took Kate’s arm and led the way through the crowd to a preassigned door at the back of the ballroom.
“What’s going on?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know,” I said between clenched teeth as I guided her through a narrow hallway and into a busy kitchen.
“You don’t know?”
“All I know is that Ash gave the signal for imminent danger. We have to go.”
She didn’t argue any more. She simply allowed me to drag her through the noise and mess of the kitchen and out the back door where Joss was waiting with the back door to the limo already open. She slipped me my weapon as I passed her.
We were speeding through the alley behind the hotel before the door was completely closed. Joss opened the petition between the two sections of the car and handed me an iPad she kept somewhere nearby at all times to help facilitate communication.
“Safe house compromised,” was all it said at the moment.
“What’s going on, David,” I said into my phone in the silent car, hoping he was still monitoring our smartphones for communication.
“There was an explosion.”
“What?”