Pitch Black: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 1) (28 page)

“Where’s Tia?”

“Still missing. I’ll find her, but I need help to do it. We’re doing this my way now.”

“No! He said he’d kill her. You can’t call the police.”

“I wasn’t intending to, but you’re not doing this alone. I’m going to call some friends.”

He groaned and slumped back into the seat, but didn’t argue any further.

Good. It would have been a waste of his breath.

As he was talking, and making a certain amount of sense, I avoided the hospital and the inevitable questions that would come from a visit there. We both wanted to avoid the police, which would likely be the end result. I’d had enough medical training to believe he wasn’t in serious danger. I’d had worse damage myself and still run a marathon the next day.

The guy who tried to kill him was a different story, though. For him, the danger was very real. I itched to get my hands on him.

I hopped in the driver’s seat and started the engine. Before setting off, I shoved the battery back in my red phone and turned it on for the first time in three months. The juice was low, so I plugged it into the charger and connected it to the car’s Bluetooth system. Seconds later, I was on my way back to Belgravia for the second time that week.

The night was deathly quiet as I sped down country lanes towards the motorway. With the adrenalin of the chase no longer flowing through my bloodstream, the journey back seemed to take twice as long. Or maybe it was the sense of dread building in my veins that made time slow? What was I going to say to my friends? And Luke? How would I explain my life to him?

I had no words.

At one point, he turned to me and mumbled, “I thought you couldn’t drive?”

“Technically I said I didn’t drive, not that I couldn’t.”

“Do you always go this fast?” I noticed he was gripping the sides of the seat, and his knuckles had gone a bit white.

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes and whispered a prayer.

Old life, meet Luke. Luke, meet my old life. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Chapter 28

ONCE WE HIT the motorway, I scrolled through the phone’s memory to the number I wanted, took a deep breath and hit dial. The line crackled as someone on the other side of the world answered.

“Nate?”

“Emmy?” Surprise was evident in his voice, but also a tinge of something else. Anger? Relief?

“Yeah.”

“Thank fuck. Why the hell didn’t you answer the phone the other day?”

Yes, anger and relief, both present and correct. I hadn’t been expecting him to be anything but pissed off. It was his normal demeanour, even when I hadn’t done something really, really stupid.

“I was busy. Are you at home?”

Virginia was five hours behind, and any normal person would be in front of the TV at nine in the evening. But Nate wasn’t normal and often slept in the office.

“Busy? Busy? I could see you were busy. What in the devil’s name did you need all that equipment for? And no, I’m in the control room. Someone’s got to run this company, and it sure as hell hasn’t been you.”

“Uh, there was a small situation. Actually, there still is. I could use some help.”

“What kind of situation? Are
you
okay?”

“I’m fine. Someone else is in trouble, and I’m trying to fix things.”

“If you’re ‘fine,’ where the hell have you been for the last three months? You vanished without a trace, leaving some cryptic fucking note. I’ve been monitoring hospitals and morgues the world over.”

Yep, he definitely had a scowl plastered across his not-so-pretty face.

“I’m sorry. I was messed up.”

“That’s it? You were messed up? You’ve put us through hell and now you phone one night out of the blue asking for help?”

I stared at the road, barely seeing the way ahead. I deserved his anger, but that didn’t make it any easier to take. “Please, Nate, I’ll explain later. I promise. But a girl’s been kidnapped and her life’s at stake. Could you put the animosity aside and lend a hand?” I thought of Tia, bound and gagged on the floor. “Please?”

“Fine. You know we’ll do whatever you need. But Emmy, we
will
talk about this later.”

That gave me something to look forward to, but I’d deal with it once the Tia situation was resolved.

“I need manpower. The girl’s been gone thirty-two hours now, and the ransom drop just got botched.”

“Got it. Now you’ve turned your phone on again, I can see where you are. You going to Albany House?” That was my home in Belgravia.

“That’s the plan. I need you to get a team together at the office, and I’ll go and brief them. Can you pull in everyone not working on a priority level one case?”

“Everyone? Do you have any damn clue what that’ll do to the running of everything else?”

Yes, I was perfectly aware of the merry hell it would create with the scheduling of all the other jobs for weeks afterwards.

“Everyone,” I confirmed.

Nate gave an exasperated sigh but didn’t try to argue. He knew I wouldn’t pull a stunt like this lightly.

“Fine.” He sounded like me. “I’ll make the calls and speak to you when you get back to London. Oh, by the way, Nick and Dan flew over to the UK when we spotted you in the house. They’ll be waiting for you to arrive.”

“That’s the best news I’ve had all day. I’ll let you know when I get there.”

“You’d better. If you do another runner, I’ll hunt you to the ends of the fucking earth.”

Aw, at least he still cared. “I’m back now, and I’m staying back. And Nate, I’m so, so sorry.”

“You can grace me with an explanation later. I’ll be waiting with bated breath. Now get off the phone so I can make some calls.”

Well, that went about as well as expected. I was definitely on Nate’s shit list, but I deserved it. At least he stayed professional rather than letting his feelings towards me impede the hunt for Tia.

When we arrived at the house, I drove straight into the garage. Luke was still unsteady on his feet as I bundled him into the lift. Usually I hated the thing and took the stairs, but it did have its uses.

I helped him into the kitchen and found Dan seated at the breakfast bar, a mug of coffee cupped in her hands. Nick spoke on the phone, staring out of the window, but he hung up when he saw me.

I’d known Nick Goldman since I was eighteen. My husband introduced us. They’d worked together on various black-ops projects until my husband quit his not-so-cushy government job to strike out with Nate instead.

When I’d come onto the scene, Nick had helped train me, and not just on the job. He’d educated me in the bedroom as well. Things didn’t work out between us, but we remained close, and when I was twenty-two, he’d become the fourth shareholder in our security company.

Daniela di Grassi’s background was similar to mine. We met by accident in not-so-pleasant circumstances and just clicked. She moved in with us for a while and over bottles of wine and cold case files, we discovered she had hidden talents.

Dan could ferret, wheedle and cajole information out of people better than anyone. Her mind could assemble a jigsaw puzzle of clues into a work of art. Aside from my husband, she was the best investigator we’d ever had.

Along with Nate and his wife, Carmen, and Mack, the office geek, I trusted them with my life. They were my inner circle.

And neither of them looked happy.

I balanced Luke on a bar stool then walked over to where Nick and Dan now stood in silence. We stared at each other. I didn’t know what to say, and it seemed they felt the same way. Finally, Dan stepped forward and hugged me tightly.

“Ease up. Can’t…breathe.”

When she let go, Nick hadn’t moved. He was a statue, arms folded, brows furrowed.

Dan’s eyes were damp as she mumbled, “Where have you been, you stupid bitch? We thought you were dead.”

“You think I’m that easy to kill?”

“I s’pose not. Where the fuck have you been, then?”

I jerked my head towards Luke. “Living with him.”

She shot him a sideways glance. “Hot. But who is he?”

“Long story, but his sister’s missing, and I need your help to find her. He’s called Luke, his sister’s Tia, and he knows me as Ash. Neither of them know what I do for a living, and I’d like to keep it that way.” Luke groaned from the other side of the kitchen. “Before we do anything else, he needs his head stitched up.”

“You want me to do the honours?”

“Please. You’re hands are probably steadier than mine right now, plus he can’t stand the sight of me.”

She gave me a confused look. My hands never shook, not before. “Okay.”

“I need to call Nate, see where we are with a team.”

Nick followed me into my home office. That was what I called it, but it was more than that—it served as a backup control room should anything happen to our primary location in Kings Cross. He still hadn’t said a word, which stung, and now he slammed the door behind us.

“What the fuck, Emmy?”

Great. In the last two days, I’d managed to upset almost everyone I cared about.

“I’m sorry.” I was doing a lot of apologising tonight. If this kept up, I might just record a message.

“Sorry? Sorry? Sorry doesn’t cut it, baby. You ran off without a word to any of us.”

“I left a note.” I tried to defend myself, half-heartedly, because I knew he was right.

“A half-assed note that didn’t explain anything, just asked us to stop a fucking murder investigation.”

“Did you stop it?” I asked, holding my breath.

“Yes.”

I inhaled again. “Then it did its job.”

“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

“Nicky, can we do this later?” Say, sometime next century? “Finding Tia’s the most important thing here.”

“Fine.” He echoed Nate’s comment from earlier, and as a woman, I understood what that meant. I had two pissed off, monosyllabic men to deal with.

I settled myself into a seat and Nick grudgingly took the one beside me. Nate soon appeared on the wall of screens in front of me.

Nate was forty-one, a couple of years older than my husband. His dark brown hair had grown too long again. Carmen would be nagging him to cut it, no doubt. His tan skin spoke of his Cuban heritage, and on a normal day, women the world over would kill for his complexion. Not today, though. Today his forehead was marred with worry lines. The last few months had taken their toll on him too.

He could see me as well, and his first words were, “What the hell? Have you looked in a mirror recently? You look like a librarian on crack and your hair’s full of twigs.”

“Nice to see you too, Nate.” I ditched the glasses, which I’d kept on out of habit.

“Your team’s being assembled.” He was all business. “I’ve assigned Nye as team leader. He’s in the office already. You’ve got nine more people on their way in and another thirty-seven on standby for the morning.”

The monitor chimed and Nye, one of the supervisors in the London-based investigations team, popped up beside Nate.

“Evening, Emmy. Glad to have you back. Bloody hell, what happened to your hair?”

At least one person was happy to see me, but was my hair really that bad? I toggled a few buttons so I could see what they did. Eek! I looked like I’d been in a fight with a hedge and come off worst.

I explained the situation with Tia, going over the chain of events since the evening before last. “I’ll send over the photos of the tyre print. Get someone on tracing the van right away, would you?”

“Tom’s looking up the registration as we speak.” Tom was the control room supervisor, drafted in to help.

I’d liberated Luke’s phone from his pocket without him noticing, and I forwarded the text messages he’d received. There were three in total: the initial one with the photo of Tia, the ransom demand, and directions to the drop site. The first was sent from Tia’s phone, and each of the others came from a different number. Burner phones, most likely, but we’d try to trace them anyway.

The ransom was for £250,000, as I’d suspected, plus a copy of the source code for Luke’s latest piece of business security software. That explained the low cash demand. The software was in final testing right now, and worth a fortune in the right hands. A competitor or someone wanting to maliciously exploit its vulnerabilities would kill for it.

I discussed strategy with Nye, and we assigned teams to the phones, the van and the tyre track. Another team would go out to canvas for witnesses first thing in the morning, and the remaining staff were to comb through Luke’s life for possible links. The demand for the source code meant I’d all but discounted Tia being taken by an infatuated admirer or somebody connected with me.

“Check a guy called Henry Forster. He lives in Lower Foxford or somewhere near it. I’m fairly certain he’s too stupid to have done this, but he and Luke don’t see eye to eye,” I told Nye.

“I’m planning to look at everyone in the village, but I’ll start with him.”

“How can I help?” I asked.

Nye raised an eyebrow in surprise. I didn’t normally get involved at that level, so I felt the need to clarify.

“Tia’s important for me. I’ll do whatever’s needed to get her back.”

“Could you ask around your network? If we get any leads that need chasing down, I’ll call you.”