Page 26 of Her Loving Hero

“I hate to ask. There’s probably nothing you can do.”

He muted his phone and went into the room. “Guys I’ve got to leave.” He pointed to his phone.

“You okay?” Gray asked.

“It’s Emily,” he said as he put his phone back up to his ear and strode down the hospital hallway. “I’ll be in my truck in just a minute. Can you start filling me in?”

“Like I said, there’s probably nothing you can do.”

“Just talk to me.”

* * *

Wyatt slammedthe door on his truck, causing his truck to actually rock.

Dammit!

He called Kane.

Voicemail.

Dammit!

He hit the keys to leave a voicemail, and it was not pleasant or kind and it contained a lot of colorful expletives. The bastard had better call him back fast.

It would normally take him five minutes to make it to the freeway, but he made it in two. He saw Kane’s number flash up on his dashboard.

“Do you ever pick up your phone?” Wyatt demanded.

“It’s one o’clock in the morning here in Virginia.”

“Whining is not an attractive trait in a SEAL.”

“I wasn’t the one who was whining,” Kane said smoothly. “I’m up now, what do you need? I’m at my computer.”

Wyatt zipped over to the fast lane on The Five freeway and quickly explained what was going on with Emily’s sister in Oman. “So, tell me, what do you have with the private chat?”

Wyatt prayed that Mr. Cyber Warfare had been able to figure out something.

“After I got off the phone with you, I started running it through a couple of high-end diagnostics that bumped up against the rogue code. Wyatt, I’ve never run into anything like it.”

Wyatt heard a woman’s voice in the background, then he was put on mute. When Kane came back on the line, he sounded kind of pissed, but then he the man focused. “If it hadn’t been for the malware protection that I had modified and installed, I would have been hosed.”

“Stop with the multi-tasking, and telling me a bunch of superfluous bullshit, did you get to the bottom of this, or not?” Wyatt was ready to kill Kane.

“Yes,” Kane answered. “I got into the chat. Three languages. Flemish, Arabic and English. They jumped around in the three languages in such a way that you couldn’t pinpoint that it was damn near impossible to pinpoint what they were saying. They used the diverse languages as code.”

Wyatt slapped his steering wheel. “So, you’re telling me you don’t know shit.”

“That’s not what I’m telling you. I had Asher read it, his Mom is from the Limburg Provence of Belgium, so he’s fluent in Flemish. We had it nailed with his help.” Kane sucked in a deep breath. “Wyatt, these people are nuts.”

“Define nuts,” Wyatt demanded.

“Oman has been paranoid about its border with Yemen for a couple of years now. They don’t advertise just how many troops and covert operatives they have patrolling that area, but Oman watches it as closely as the Arabs and Israelis watch the Gaza strip.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me something that everybody and their brother doesn’t know,” Wyatt said through gritted teeth.

“Well, they’ve been so paranoid about that border that they’ve let their guard down on the Saudi and UAE side. Especially UAE. Oman has been doing so many imports and exports since the new trade deal that they’re going to widen the Batinah Expressway.”