He was quiet, listening for a minute, but the anger coursed through his veins like blood itself.
“Find out!” he barked and threw his phone onto the couch. He fisted his hands into his hair and tugged, wanting the pain as a distraction. This couldn’t be happening.
“Want to fill us in?” Chad asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Logan said, looking up. He needed to get his head back in the game … get out there and find Diya Bogolomov and her cousin.
“That was one of the SEALs I was working with on my last assignment. I can’t give you all the details,” he said, looking at Chad and the rest of the group, who nodded their understanding—they knew he had worked a lot of classified ops, “but he’s tracked someone linked to my past here. Diya Bogolomov has a lot of reasons to want to see me hurting and it turns out she’s been in Connecticut for the past two weeks. It’s no coincidence. We suspected she might have the identities of me and a few of my team members, but we hadn’t heard anything more. She was spotted in one of the airports and flagged, but somehow the people who should have alerted us never made the connection with my location and her movements.”
“How angry is this woman? How unstable?” Chad asked as Jennie put her arms around his waist and Kelly did the same with Jack. Seeing them all leaning on one another killed him. He wanted Sam safe in his arms.
“Very angry and very unstable. And, she’s likely well-funded.”
“What does she want?” Jennie’s voice reflected her fear.
Logan hadn’t ever really understood the meaning of the word despair until now. He felt utterly gutted at what he was about to say.
“She wants me to pay. She wants me to lose everything.”
No one spoke. They didn’t need to ask why. It went unsaid. They all seemed to understand Logan had somehow taken everything from this woman and she wanted the same for him. She wanted him to suffer as she had. Now, she was going to use Samantha to do it. She was going to take Sam away.
“All right,” he said. He wasn’t going to sit here. He couldn’t just sit back and let Sam go without a fight. “There’s no sign of a struggle here. Amanda said she came in and asked her to watch Billy and give him to me after a meeting I wasn’t in.”
The dog poked his head up at the mention of his name, but continued to watch the group, as if waiting for some instruction on how he might help.
“So, whatever made her leave, she wasn’t physically forced because no one was with her.”
Kelly nodded. “But something made her leave. And, if they didn’t simply take Sam or keep someone with her, they must be awfully confident that whatever they have on her is enough to make her come back. Or enough to make her do whatever they instructed her to do. Could this woman have reached out to Sam? Somehow convinced her that she needed to leave to protect you? That’s what would convince Sam. If she thought she was somehow protecting you.”
They were all quiet for a moment, as if each of them were trying to digest what Kelly had said.
“Oh, hell,” Logan said. “She thinks she’s protecting all of us. Sam’s plan to kill a SEAL.”
“What?” They all looked at him.
“The listening devices. Sam was bugged the day she told us how she would kill a SEAL. She would plant evidence against everyone the SEAL cared about and—”
“Oh, God. No!” Jennie knew, without him finishing the sentence what the plan entailed.
“What?” Kelly asked. “And, what?” She was the only one who hadn’t been in the room at Sutton Capital that day.
Chad filled in the rest for her. “In Sam’s plan, you set up everyone a person loves to go down for something criminal or something along those lines, then demand they kill themselves. You tell the person, they either kill themselves, or everything they’ve set up to hurt your loved ones gets put in motion. Sam meant it as a joke. She said you’d give the person a timeline. What was the timeline, Logan?”
“Forty-eight hours. You tell the person they have forty-eight hours to do it or you release everything you’ve got on their loved ones. If Diya was really listening, she’s sick enough to turn it around on Sam and actually do it.”
“And, Sam is—” Kelly started but couldn’t finish.
“Sam cares enough about everyone to do it.” Jennie said what they were all thinking.
Logan was hanging on by a thread, but he forced himself to steady his breathing and look his friends in the eye.
“We need to stop her. We can’t let her do this.” Shit. His voice didn’t sound anywhere near as steady as he’d like it to. “Where would she go?”
“Well,” Chad said, “she wouldn’t take it lying down. You can bet she has a plan.”
“So what would she do?” Jennie asked.
“She’d hack them,” Logan said. He knew it with as much certainty as he knew his name. She would hack them right back. She’d think she could protect them and take Diya on by herself. “What does she need to do that?”
“Nothing,” Chad said. “Just her laptop and an outlet. Space to work in and a shit ton of candy and junk food. But, her credit cards haven’t been used.”
Logan raised his eyebrows, but Chad just shrugged.
“I have the passwords to her accounts. I checked them all. She withdrew three thousand dollars in cash. That’s it.”
Logan made a mental note to find out why Chad had Sam’s passwords later, but for now he just filed it away. “So, she wouldn’t go far. She’s probably just nearby somewhere in a hotel.”
“Would she go home? To her parents’ house?” Jennie looked around the group.
Kelly spoke up this time. “No,” she said, resting her hand on her stomach as if to protect the baby from what was happening, but Logan saw Jack’s eyes narrow in on Kelly’s hand. The protective gesture wasn’t lost on him.
“She wouldn’t go home,” Kelly continued. “She wouldn’t want to put them at risk or tell them what was going on.”
Logan slid a glance to Jack, who still watched his wife like a hawk.
Logan set out plans for each person. “Kelly and Jack, why don’t you wait here and see if Sam calls her phone or comes back. That way, Kelly can get some rest. Chad and Jennie and I can meet up with Zach and come up with a plan to narrow down hotels and track her down. I’m fine with fighting Diya, but Sam’s going to do it with all of us at her back.”
Kelly opened her mouth as though she might object, but Jack took her arm and led her to the couch. The look on his face didn’t allow room for her to argue.
“We got it covered, Logan,” Jack said. “Mrs. Poole is with Maddie. She’ll get her dinner and put her down to bed. I’ll ask her to spend the night just in case we don’t make it back for a while. We’ll stay here and hope Sam gets in touch.”
Logan nodded, but he knew Sam wouldn’t come back here. He needed to get out there and find her. Help her.
Chapter 32
Sam sat back with a grin. She had him. A black hat hacker who went by the name of PriorOfTheOri, a reference to some truly evil characters in Stargate. He was really Peter Gatorelli. The man was making a statement using a name like that, and it wasn’t a good one.