Page 5 of Jonas

What the hell?

“Sorry I’m late,” Garrett strode into the room with a stack of files in his hand. He tossed them on the table before he pulled out a chair and sat.

“I’m not,” I piped up. “Cash won the coin toss. I’m in no rush to get into a moving vehicle with Combat Crash Cash.”

“I’m an excellent driver,” Cash lied.

I reached out for a file and shook my head. “Whatever you say, Rain Man.”

Cash drove like he was back in Fallujah dodging IEDs and suicide bombers.

“If we need a getaway driver after a bank heist,” Easton put in.

“That’s the truth,” Garrett mumbled.

“Whatever, old man,” Cash slapped back. “You already trading your truck in for a minivan?”

Garrett flipped Cash the bird and launched into his brief. “I went over all the intel we have on Bolin Chen. SimpCo is a business-to-business corporation. That’s wholesaler to retailer. Bolin’s on the Forbes Top Ten Billionaires list in China. He’s currently at number eight. Last year he was number five, but the owners of that clock app took top billing and knocked him and the others down the list. Bolin’s brother, Jun De Chen, works for the Ministry of State Security. I still don’t have intel on Jun De.”

“None?” Easton inquired.

“I didn’t find any either,” Nebraska put in. “It’s like the man’s a ghost. There’s record of his birth, his schooling, information on low-level jobs in the CCP. But when Jun De made the move into the MSS I lost the lead.”

Zane grunted. “This or that…CIA or MSS. It’s a toss-up, which one of those agencies is more full of shit. If Jun De is a Chinese spy, any intel you find on him will be a waste of time. What do you have on the deposits Derrika mentioned?”

I glanced around the conference table, belatedly realizing my team leader was missing.

“Where’s Layla?”

“Stomach bug,” Kira muttered, not taking her eyes off the screen of her laptop. “Or at least that’s been her story the last week.”

“What’s that mean?” Cash asked.

Kira shrugged. “You know, the kind of stomach bug that happens every morning and is gone by noon.”

We didn’t have a set schedule for briefings, but they normally happened in the mornings except last week. They’d all happened in the afternoon. And now that I was thinking about it, Layla had looked…different.

“Are you saying Layla’s knocked up?” Cash said like the words tasted bad.

“I keep warning you fuckers what happens when you don’t glove up, but no one wants to listen,” Zane muttered. “Now we’ve got seventy-two children running around, led by Linc’s semen demons. If we’re not careful, they’ll plan a coop and overthrow the office.”

Zane was exaggerating, but not by much. Red Team alone had a football team’s worth of kids. Add in Gold Team’s offspring and there were a lot of kids running amok. Now it would seem Blue and Silver would be adding to the mix.

Cash’s hands came up in front of him like he was warding off the specter of children.

“Don’t look at me. I took care of that potential problem.”

And that was what Cash had been taught—children were a problem. A lesson that had started when he was born and had been reinforced throughout his childhood until he broke free. And his freedom came in the form of being barely a teenager and homeless. It also came in the form of him permanently ridding himself of unwanted problems. The fuck of it was, he was great with our teammates’ kids. He was the fun uncle who egged them on and he was always the first to jump into a Nerf Gun battle around the office.

“What about Austin Wentworth?” Nebraska quickly changed the subject. “He was Bolin’s connection to Maddon.”

My gaze went to her in an effort to gauge if she was covering for her friend, or if she was simply more interested in digging into her nemesis. Maddon Judd, the very dead CIA-officer-turned-traitor and the reason we were in this mess was Nebraska’s mentor and best friend to her adopted father. Before his death, he’d sold a detailed blueprint for a terrorist attack on US soil to the Chinese. A plot that included the order in which to carry out each strike for maximum impact. Bridges, ports, data centers, cyber-attacks, electrical grid. Each hit strategically timed to cause mass pandemonium and fear. Beyond that, it would tax our first responders.

“Last known location, Wentworth was in London,” Garrett said. “He wasn’t hiding his movements. Now he’s vapor. I went over Derrika’s report. I don’t think she’s made the connection, even though Wentworth uses Bolin’s B2B as a wholesaler.”

“That doesn’t track,” I started. “Wentworth is real estate development.”

The man’s area of operation was Africa, mainly in Cairo, Nairobi, and Durban.