“Fine. I’ll get on a plane and come to you. Just tell me where.”
“No, I think I’ll send my jet to get you, the one you were so adamant about not utilizing last time. And I don’t want to give you a chance to pull any of your famous Phoenix stunts. You will come to me the way I insist, and Miss Wilde can go free.”
Wyatt made an exaggerated what the hell face, obviously wanting Riley to pretend to be skeptical of the plan.
“How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you’ll let her go?”
“Unlike you, I’m a man of honor. I do not arrive at a home under the guise of accepting hospitality and then steal from others.”
Riley rolled his eyes. Yeah, Sayed was a prince among men.
“Subterfuge is not my way,” Sayed continued. “If I’m going to shoot you, you will know it is me. That is true power, looking your enemy in the eye as he dies.”
The man obviously meant every word, Riley had to give him that.
“Fine. You’re a man of your word. You trade her for me.”
“My jet will be there to get you in twenty hours. Be ready. If you’re not at the Reddington airport, I’ll assume you’ve decided Miss Wilde should die slowly and painfully.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’ll assume the same if I get word of any law enforcement or government intervention in my direction. No tricks this time, Phoenix.”
“Just don’t hurt her.”
The phone went dead.
There was silence all around him as he stared at the phone.
Zac broke it. “Okay, people. Phoenix bought us a few hours. Let’s not waste them.”
“Ray and I will inventory exactly what weapons we have,” Dorian said. His hand hadn’t moved far from his wife’s the entire time they’d been on the plane. Riley had never seen any two people so in sync with each other.
“I’ll help them.” Finn jerked his thumb toward the back, face tight. “Let us know what the plan is, and we’ll be ready.”
It couldn’t be easy for Finn, not after what had happened to his wife Charlie when she’d been kidnapped last year.
“Our best bet is to infiltrate as soon as possible,” Gavin said.
Good. As soon as possible Riley liked. It meant less time Wildfire was in that bastard’s clutches.
Wyatt placed the electronic tablet on the small table between the four chairs facing each other. “Sayed’s security is pretty much impossible to get around from the outside. It’s why we used Phoenix in the first place to get the kids out a couple of weeks ago. We needed to get inside.”
Gavin nodded and pointed to an area on the screen. “The one weakness is near the southwest corner. It’s hard to guard with manpower, ironically because of Sayed’s motocross course. But to make up for that, he’s bulked that area up with electronic security. Security that can only be accessed from inside. Cutting the feed and alarm from the inside is our best bet.”
“Okay.” Riley nodded. “How do we get inside?”
Wyatt and Gavin shot each other a look. That wasn’t good.
Wyatt shrugged, then ran a hand through his black hair. “Probably paying someone off. Someone local. I can already tell you it’s not going to be easy—people around there are pretty terrified of Sayed. We weren’t successful when we tried before.”
Gavin sat down in one of the seats and turned the screen toward Zac and Riley. “The next best option would be to sneak in as workers ourselves. But Sayed will be on alert for something like that, and it won’t be as fast as we need it to be. He isn’t going to allow any unknown entities inside right now.”
Zac picked up the tablet. “Okay, he’s highly fortified. What are our outside-the-box options?”
Both men were silent for long minutes. Riley stood and started to pace, biting his tongue to stop demanding a plan. Everybody here was working toward the same goal.
“Single parachute in the dead of night,” Wyatt finally said. “We considered it very briefly, but then decided it was too risky. It’s not much more than a suicide mission.”
Riley stopped pacing. “Would it work?”
Wyatt shrugged, shaking his head. “Possibly. But we eliminated it because the level of expertise required in skydiving was beyond us. Even with the hours we logged in the army.”
Riley leaned against the table and looked at the guys. “It’s not beyond me.”
Every stunt he’d ever completed, the hours of work preparing and practicing and bleeding, not just in skydiving but in it all, was coming down to this. “I’m one of the top ten skydivers in the world. If it’s doable, I can do it.”
Gavin shook his head. “That’s just it. We don’t know for sure that it’s doable.”
Fuck that. “If it will save Riley, I’ll make sure it’s doable. The slimmest of chances is better than no chance at all.”
Zac nodded. “Okay, then unless we come up with another plan in the next hour, we go with this. Wyatt, Gavin, get us all up to speed on what’s going to happen once Riley successfully parachutes into Sayed’s property and cuts off that security feed. Let’s figure out what we need.”
Riley nodded, glad Zac was treating it like a foregone conclusion that he would be successful.
Because he would be.
Chapter 28
Riley applied pressure to the knife wound on her arm. One of Sayed’s men had thrown a cloth napkin at her and yelled something in Arabic, which she assumed meant to stop bleeding all over the place.
The cut could probably use a few stitches, but it wasn’t going to kill her. This Sayed guy really had a hard-on for jerking Boy Riley’s chain. She was just the most convenient tool for doing that.
The one good thing that had happened since she’d woken up on a plane surrounded by people who wanted to kill her? It definitely put her MS in perspective.
Sitting here in this plane with this psychopath, she could die any minute.
She wanted to live, MS or not.
She peeked out from under her hair at Sayed to where he sat across from her on his luxury jet that was all champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Seriously. There was gold-plated stuff everywhere. Sayed might as well take out a billboard with his picture and the words Hey, I’m rich.
She didn’t talk to Sayed, hadn’t said anything since he’d backhanded her in the mouth when she’d tried to warn Riley he was in trouble. She needed to be smart. Stay alive for…however long it took Riley to get to her.
It was just a matter of time before that happened. She knew about the undercover work he’d done with Linear Tactical, and that he loved it. They would get her out. Plus, he owed her one, right? They’d agreed she’d saved his life twice, and he owed her.
Looked like he’d be paying that debt sooner than expected.
Her job was to stay alive until he arrived. Pretend to be passive. Weak. Lie. She’d certainly had enough practice over the past week doing that—but lying to the wrong person.
No more lying to Riley, no more hiding.
As long as she got out of this alive.
“Nothing more to say?” Sayed raised a dark eyebrow at her. “American women always have something to say.”