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I got through the rest of lunch and then hurried home to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I had my own ideas beginning to form, but I knew there was no way I could do this alone, and besides, I’m new to this; Cierra and her friends seemed way more advanced for women who swore their husbands went out of their way to keep them in the dark.
Speaking of which, Mark hadn’t mentioned anything in days, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
* * *
MARK
* * *
“Did you get all that?”
“We did, yes. She just left; the other team will pick her up and follow her home. Do you know this rehab place or do we need to go looking?”
“I can have the name for you in a few. I’ll get back to you. And Hank, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. This was too close for me to pass it off to someone else. Blair should be here by tonight at the latest since he’s the one she called.”
“Yeah, but I think she might be a bit peeved at him for snitching her out.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“How does she look? Is she overly upset?”
“No, she looks reserved.”
“Okay, thanks for doing this. I’d do it myself, but she’d catch on, and I’d rather she not go into hiding and do her own thing to keep me in the dark.” We hung up after a few more instructions and I breathed easy again.
It's been hell trying to keep up with her since she had the phone from Cierra, which, when texting I had no idea what was being said. There was no way to encrypt the phone; the setup was too good, and I couldn’t get in no way no how, but I still had my usual tabs on her.
Since the women had told her about being tagged, she’s been extra careful, but she doesn’t know where the tracker is on her or that there’s more than one, so she hasn’t been quite able to keep me in the dark.
I never had to monitor her shit this much before, but now I can barely put down the listening device because I’m afraid that something might go wrong and I wouldn’t be there to protect her. It was Lyon’s idea to send a team here to keep an eye on her while I kept an eye on Jack and Jessica.
I’ve been thwarting her advances all this time and knew that soon they would have to come up with another angle, which I wasn’t sure what that would be. Their idea of seduction and blackmail wasn’t panning out, and I don’t imagine that whoever they were working for was going to waste much more time here on me.
I do get the idea, though, that they wanted me badly enough to have wasted two whole years on this one job; I just don’t see why. It wasn’t that they knew about Dad and the organization because we’d looked at that from all angles, and there were no red flags in that area. That had been my biggest fear when I realized that they weren’t who they claimed to be and went digging.
I don’t think Jack knows the first thing about my abilities, or he wouldn’t have gotten that close. Because I make it a point not to peek into other people’s minds without an invitation, it had taken me some time to catch on, and it was his strange dealings that had alerted me to the fact that something was off, and I took a little look and hated myself for not doing it sooner.
Morally, it’s something I’d had to learn from a very young age, and I was a pro at shutting down my abilities when needed. But beyond my abilities, they had never mentioned their boss in all this time, and I never caught a thought from Jack when we were working together.
That tells me that whoever is behind them is very powerful and exerts tremendous control over the people who work for them. That, or Jack, is so good at what he does that he doesn’t leave an opening.
If he contacts this person, I have no way of knowing because the phone he uses has a tracer on it, and nothing can be found. The only other thing would be his personal computer and hers, which they tend to wipe clean after every use.
I know all these things and have collected all of this information over the last year or so, but they’re good because they do almost the same things we do when we’re trying to cover our tracks. But now we had something else to work with, thanks to my wife. Maybe this would be the smoking gun we’ve been looking for all along.
CHAPTER15
Igot to thinking on my way home that none of this made sense. Who would spend two years on a setup just to get access to business contacts? There were many venture capitalists in the world, so why Mark? Why our company?
Were they going to use him as a puppet or something like that? Was it just the money? No, knowing what I know now, I don’t think it’s about money. Maybe for Jack and Jessica, it is, but not for whoever is guiding them.
I went home and pulled out my journal with the names of all the companies and their owners that Jack had shaken down over the years. “What was the last company before ours?” I tried to see the connection, but nothing was jumping out at me.
A software company in Simi Valley is a long way removed from us, and from what I could see so far, there was no correlation to us. We had no clients in common, had never done business with that particular company, and knew no one on their executive list.
Looking at the other companies going back at least ten years, there was no way to tell how they chose their victims from that either, so I was back at square one. There has to be a pattern, something that shows how they work, but I couldn’t pinpoint it with what I had.
