CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

 

NOAH COULDN’T REMEMBER having it so bad for a woman before, but after spending one amazing night with Peyton, he knew she was in his blood forever. He hadn’t been able to think about anything other than her the whole way to the police station. Hell, he was so preoccupied, he was damn lucky he hadn’t driven off the road. Even now, as he strode inside the building and headed upstairs to see Dwayne, he was still daydreaming about how much fun that quickie had been with her this morning.

He knew he was probably grinning like an idiot as he finally found his friend’s desk, but he didn’t care. Peyton was the kind of woman who made him not give a crap what people thought of him.

Dwayne was reading something intently on his computer screen when Noah walked up. “Finally. I was starting to think you weren’t going to make it.”

“Traffic was a nightmare,” Noah said, berating himself for staying for that quickie even though he would never really be able to regret it. “Hope I didn’t miss anything important.”

“Not yet.” Dwayne snorted. “As I suspected, the guy lawyered up immediately. But it looks like they’re ready to make a deal. I was about to go talk to them. You still want to listen in, right?”

“Definitely.”

Noah was interested in knowing what the asshole who tried to kidnap Peyton thought he might have to offer up for a deal, but he guessed he was about to find out.

“It goes without saying, but you were never officially here,” Dwayne murmured as he led the way down a long narrow hallway. “You’re here to observe only. Understood?”

“Hooyah,” Noah said.

Stopping, Dwayne motioned him into a dimly lit room with a two-way mirror that allowed him to see into the interrogation room. The man Noah had tangled with last night was already sitting at a table, along with a second man who must have been his partner in crime. In between them sat a gray-haired guy in a suit whom Noah assumed was their lawyer. All three men sat up a little straighter when Dwayne walked in and took a seat opposite them.

“I understand your clients have something they want to tell me, Mr. Carpenter,” Dwayne said to the gray-haired man.

Carpenter nodded. “In return for a deal, yes.”

“You know how this works,” Dwayne said. “Your clients talk and if I think the information is worth anything, the appropriate recommendations will be filed with the ADA. But it all depends on what they have to say.”

Carpenter hesitated, then nodded at the two men.

The one who’d grabbed Peyton and dragged her into the van took a deep breath. Without the ski mask, he didn’t look nearly as tough. “We were only trying to kidnap that writer because someone hired us to do it. We were never gonna hurt her. We were told to get an external hard drive from her, but she had a death grip on that frigging purse of hers.”

Noah tensed. If someone had hired these two idiots, that person was still out there and would almost certainly go after Peyton and her book again.

“Who hired you?” Dwayne asked.

“Two men,” the driver of the van said. “The one in charge—a dark-haired foreign-looking guy—never said a word. He just stood in the background and listened. The second one did all the talking. He had a New York accent and liked to talk loud, like he thought he was tough or something.”

Dwayne frowned. “That doesn’t really narrow it down. If you want a deal, you’re going to have to do better than some foreign guy and a loud talker from New York. I need a name.”

“They never used names,” Getaway Driver said. “And before you ask, New Yorker paid up front in cash. Five thousand in cash—each. We thought at first there were some kind of military or industrial secrets on the hard drive, but New Yorker said it was a damn romance book if you can you believe that.”

Dwayne ignored the meaningless commentary and stuck to the point. “Well, if you can’t give me a name, how about a description?”

“New Yorker was white. Maybe five-ten in height. Blond hair,” the second kidnapper answered. “The other one was older, maybe early fifties with dark black hair. Really expensive suit, though. Worth more than my car.”

Noah clenched his jaw. Getaway Driver’s description was about useless. They’d never be able to find anybody with information like that.

“Anything else you can remember about them?” Dwayne asked. “Tattoos or distinguishing characteristics?”

Both men were silent for a few moments before the first guy spoke again.

“It’s not really a distinguishing characteristic, but New Yorker had this irritating habit of twirling a damn pen between his fingers all the time. It was distracting as crap.”

Noah’s gut clenched.

Shit.

He rapped on the one-way glass with his knuckles to get Dwayne’s attention, then walked out of the room, hoping his friend got the message. Fortunately, he had.

“What’s up?” Dwayne asked as he met Noah in the hallway.

“I know the son of a bitch who hired those guys,” Noah told him. “The one they called New Yorker. It’s one of the editors at her publisher by the name of Scott Moore. He’s staying at the hotel where they had the release party last night.”

“You sure it’s him?”

“I’m sure. The description was dead on. He’s one of the few people that knew she kept the book on a hard drive in her purse and he spent the whole night twirling his pen between his fingers,” Noah said. “I’m going home to Peyton. Call me when you pick up Moore for questioning. I have no doubt your two suspects in there will ID him in a split second.”

As he raced down the stairs, Noah pulled out his phone and hit the speed dial for Peyton. It rang four times, then went to voice mail.

Dammit.

“Peyton, it’s me. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but Scott Moore hired those two guys who tried to kidnap you. He’s working with another man, but I don’t know who. Don’t open the door for anyone but me. I’m on my way.”

Noah cranked his SUV and squealed out of the parking lot, only realizing he was in front of a police station at the last second. He forced himself to ease off the accelerator. He wouldn’t do Peyton any good if the cops pulled him over. But the twenty minutes it took to get back to his apartment was pure agony. He called Peyton half a dozen more times, only to get her voice mail every time. In desperation he gave Sam a call, simply telling him that Peyton was in trouble and to get over to his apartment.

By the time he slid to a stop in the driveway of his apartment complex, Noah was close to losing his mind.

The door to his place was ajar, like someone had left in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to make sure it was closed. Noah’s heart froze and dread began to settle in the pit of his stomach even as he shoved open the door and stepped into the living room.

“Peyton!” he called out. “Where are you?”

He was met with complete silence.

Three mugs lying on the floor caught his attention, creamy coffee staining the carpet around them. A little further away, the coffee table had been shoved slightly out of position. Those were the only signs of struggle, but Noah didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what happened. Moore and the dark-haired man had shown up at the apartment and talked their way in. Peyton had obviously trusted them enough to offer coffee, but then something had gone wrong. Since her laptop was on the table, it was almost a certainty that she’d caught the men trying to make a copy of the book or something like that.

A quick check confirmed that the stains on the floor were already cold and starting to dry. He hadn’t been gone very long, so that meant this had all happened a while ago, maybe shortly after he’d left.

He moved through the rest of apartment quickly, terrified he’d find Peyton on the floor in another room lying in a pool of blood. Moore had struck him as kind of a wimpy guy, but who knew how he’d react if Peyton confronted to him. And the dark-haired guy was a total wild card.

“Peyton!” he called again, running down the hallway, past the smaller bedroom where he had his home office, then into the master bedroom. She wasn’t in either.

The continued silence was deafening.

He paused long enough to open his gun safe and pull out the small frame 9mm Glock he always kept loaded there. He shoved the slim holster inside the waist of his jeans, then he was up and running down the hall.

On the way, he did a check of the bath, kitchen, and coat closest, confirming what he’d already suspected. Peyton wasn’t there. Moore and the unknown dark-haired man must have taken her with him. Noah wasn’t sure why, but it couldn’t be anything good.

A noise at the door made him spin around, the 9mm coming up to center on the person stepping into the apartment. If it wasn’t for his years of SEAL training that always hammered him on the importance of identifying his target before pulling the trigger, he probably would have killed his own teammate.

“Whoa, dude. It’s just us.” Sam held up his hands. “What the hell is going on? Where’s Peyton? And why are you standing in the middle of your apartment with a gun in your hand?”

Noah lowered his weapon as Wes and Lane followed Sam into the apartment, all three of them looking around curiously.

Every instinct Noah had urged at him to run out of the apartment in a mad effort to find Peyton, but he needed to tell his buddies what was going on first. Keeping it brief, Noah told them what he’d learned at the police station that morning. As he filled them in on Moore and his partner, he didn’t miss the looks that passed between his Teammates as he described the dark-haired man who’d apparently supplied the money to hire the kidnappers.

“We just got another intel briefing on Magpie this morning from Woods,” Sam said. “They’ve confirmed the man is somewhere in the western United States and told us what he looks like. That dark-hair guy with Moore fits the description Woods gave us.”

Noah considered that for a moment and realized that it made a lot of sense. Magpie was supposedly under a lot of pressure to come up with an immediate source of funding for terrorist operations. That pressure must have made him get personally involved in the acquisition of the largest source of funding available to him—Peyton’s manuscript.

“Okay, if we think the dark-haired man with Moore is Magpie, how does that help us find Peyton?” Noah wondered aloud. “Why kidnap her if all they wanted was her book?”

He and his Teammates stood there arguing over the possibilities, running the gamut from Peyton already being dead—which Noah refused to consider—to Moore and Magpie taking Peyton alive in order to force her to write the next book in the series—which seemed unfeasible—to Peyton having left on her own to chase after the men who’d taken her book—an idea that seemed even more unlikely.

“Maybe it’s as simple as Moore and Magpie taking Peyton with them as a hostage until they get away,” Sam pointed out.

Noah had to admit that was the most likely scenario. “Okay, assuming they’re interested in getting out of town, the question is, how?”

He was wondering if he should call Dwayne when Wes pulled out his phone. “I may be able to answer that.”

A few seconds later, Noah heard him talking to Kyla, telling her what was happening and asking if she could hack into the security camera that monitored the border crossing points into Mexico, along with those at the ports, bus stations, and airports. It must be nice to have a girlfriend who could hack into anything even remotely electronic in nature. Which is why Navy Intelligence had hired her.

Noah had no idea what Kyla might come up with—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to wait around and see—but Kyla called Wes back two minutes later.

“Scott Moore booked a one-way flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico earlier this morning on Southwest Airlines,” Kyla said when Wes put her on speaker phone. “The flight is scheduled to depart from Terminal 1 at 1:15 PM. There’s no way to check on this Magpie guy until I scan through all the check-in footage, which will take a while.”

Noah glanced at his cell phone to see what time it was. Moore’s plane left in less than three hours. Assuming he arrived early like most people did for international flights, it was possible he was already at the airport.

“Thanks, honey,” Wes said before hanging up. “We owe you big.”

While that was certainly true, Noah’s mind was already a hundred miles away as he focused on how to find Peyton.

“There’s no way in hell Moore will be able to get Peyton on board that plane with him,” Lane said. “Which means either Magpie has her or they’ve left her somewhere else between here and the airport.”

Noah’s heart seized up in his chest. Lane had used a nice word for what they were all thinking. The truth was that if those assholes had left Peyton, it was because they’d killed her.

“Moore is our only link to Peyton,” he said firmly. “No matter what, we have to stop him before he gets on that plane.”

And hope she was still alive.