God, I was a mess.
I was barely keeping it together. Grace needed me strong and focused so that I could find her, and I was falling apart. Thank God for Payton. The newbie was being a rockstar. She seemed to always have a plan. A next step that we could take to find my little sister. I honestly didn’t know what I would have done without her. I could have called in every Whistler agent I knew and all of them put together wouldn’t have pushed as hard or fast as Payton had.
And the next step was for Payton to get kidnapped by the same assholes that took my Gracie. God, I was going to go to hell for going through with this. For watching and doing nothing as the brave young woman sitting next to me was drugged and dragged away by sex traffickers. But what other choice did I have? I would not just sit by and twiddle my thumbs while my baby sister was ravaged by strange and violent men. That was not an option. I needed to act. I would sacrifice anything to find Grace, and that included the newbie agent.
I needed this plan to work. Well, it wasn’t so much a plan yet as it was an idea. That is what I could do. I would handle the details for tonight. “We will need a tracker that they won’t notice,” I repeated my statement from earlier.
“I ordered one when we were at the hotel. It should have arrived by now.” Payton told me calmly. If Payton had already ordered the tracker that meant she has been preparing for this possibility for a while now. That fit with her pattern of thinking a couple of steps ahead. If she could keep it together as we discussed her being used as bait, then I could keep it together too.
“You said that you wanted to go to The Church, but I took out the bartender from that club. Plus, Grace was taken from there just last night.” Could it really have only been last night? It felt like I had been searching for and failing to find my sister for years. But it had been less than twenty-four hours. “I think we should set you up at the other club that some of the girls went missing from, Push.”
“That’s a good point. I missed that,” Payton said with a small frown on her face. I didn’t blame her for missing it. She was a newbie. I had planned dozens of tactical missions and I would focus and plan this one too. Grace was depending on it.
“They also haven’t been taking girls every night. We will send you in tonight but if nothing happens, we will call in the rest of the team and organize something more sophisticated and with more backup for tomorrow night.” I needed to reassure myself that if we didn’t find Grace tonight that there was still hope. If it didn’t work tonight, then it would work tomorrow night. I would call in Ethan and he would ensure that we found my Gracie tomorrow night.
The cab pulled up to the hotel and we didn’t talk again until we were inside our room. Payton glanced down at her watch and said that she needed to start getting ready. She looked through the shopping bags that had appeared on the couch and chose a couple to take into the bathroom with her.
“You should look through what I ordered and the other supplies that I have in my bag. If we are going to need more firepower, we will have to go across town.” With that semi-cryptic statement, she closed herself into the bathroom. I started by looking through the rest of the shopping bags on the couch. I found two Kevlar vests that were in my and Payton’s sizes, four smoke and four flash-bang grenades, three top-of-the-line GPS trackers, a full coms set, one Barrett M82 sniper rifle with ammo, and club clothes in my size.
Holy-fuck. This was some serious equipment to just show up in our hotel room. I thought back and didn’t remember Payton ordering any of this. The sniper rifle might come in handy if we had a spotter, but I was planning on breaching whatever location those scumbags were holding my Gracie. I would need handguns, shotguns, or semi-automatic weapons for that. I turned to the bag that Payton left on the bed. Inside this bag, I found three handguns, five boxes of ammo, an impressive array of knives, a little under fifty-thousand dollars in cash, four-burner phones, one laptop with a charger, a tablet, and two sets of passports and credit cards. One set was in the name Payton Taylor while the other was under the name Tiffany Peirce.
I stared at Payton’s stuff laid out on the bed. She had been carrying around this bag all day. Who the fuck was this woman. I lived, breathed, and worked private security and was no stranger to a go-bag. But this was a whole other level of preparedness. I picked up the two passports and compared them side-by-side. They both looked perfect. And very real. Payton had said that the alias Payton Taylor had been provided by the U.S. Marshalls, so I understood why that passport was good. It was a real passport that was issued by the United States. But how did she get her hands on an equally good one that must be a forgery?
I shook my head and dropped the passports onto the bed. Fake passports were not important right now. Making a plan to get my sister back without getting the newbie killed was. I returned to the GPS trackers and looked them over more carefully. The one that was the most accurate was also the biggest. About the size of a quarter. While the other two were of about equal quality but were much smaller. One was set into a centerpiece of necklace that Payton could easily wear. I opened each of the trackers and started paring them to my personal laptop. I was just finishing when I heard the bathroom door open and glanced up from my screen. My hands froze on the keyboard as I took in what I was seeing.
Payton was dressed in a leather mini skirt and some sort of black see-through lace top that revealed a red corset top underneath. Her hair was a straight mass of thick glossy black that hung down past her shoulder blades. Her mostly bare legs looked impossibly long in the three-inch stiletto heels she was wearing. She looked fucking gorgeous in a slutty way and I found it hard to tear my eyes away. If she was one of the prostitutes that I came across after a job, I wouldn’t have thought twice about hiring her.
She must have noticed that I was pairing the tracking devices because she picked up the one inside the necklace and started looking it over. “Do you think that these will work?”
I cleared my throat before answering. “Yes, but I would like you to try to wear at least two. That one,” I pointed to the one in her hand, “also has a listening device so I will be able to hear what was being said on your end.”
“What about the coms? It would be nice to be able to talk to you.”
“It would be nice, but they are kind of obvious. I am afraid that if these guys find an earpiece on you, they might assume you are law enforcement and kill you.” I saw Payton’s hands shake as she put the GPS tracker back down and a spike of guilt tore through my soul. Was I really going to let the newbie do this? To reassure myself about having some level of control in this situation, I told her, “I will be able to hear everything that you say. If you find yourself alone, you should describe what kind of security you observe, how many men are present, and if they are packing.”
I then forced myself to give her a way out. “We will also set up a safe word. If you feel that your life is in immediate danger say the word ‘Christmas’ and I will get you out.”
The real question was if I would really try to get her out before I found where those mother fuckers were keeping my sister. Even if Payton panicked, letting the cartel take her to where they were keeping the other girls was the best and fastest way to find Grace. I don’t think I would intervene to save a girl I have only known for a few weeks if it means losing my chance at saving Grace. It made me a lying asshole, but right now I don’t care about anything but getting to my sister and killing the motherfuckers that hurt her.
“How are you going to do that?” Payton was not only questioning me but also the part of the plan that was the thinnest. Getting both her and Grace out alive. If it turned out to be a small operation with just a couple of guys left to watch the girls, then I have no doubt I could handle a rescue mission. I would just go in and kill all of them. But I didn’t have the backing of my team and there was no way they could get here in time for tonight. If the cartel were keeping the girls in one of their major bases of operation, then me going in by myself guns blazing would most likely get myself killed before I ever made it Grace. And that would leave my sister in the hands of human traffickers -- not going to happen.
“I am going to ask your boyfriend for help,” I finally answered.
Payton crossed her arms across her chest and declared, “Joey is not my boyfriend.” The petulant tone of her voice combined with the outfit reminded me that this girl wasn’t much older than Grace. I was asking a hell of a lot from a twenty-four-year-old newbie. If she fucked this up, my sister could pay the price. How did I end up here, with everything riding on the wits of a girl who isn’t even who she portrayed herself to be?
“I know,” I reassured her in an attempt to calm her down. “But not only does McDonald want to take down this cartel, but he also has feelings for you. If I call him after you are taken with a location, I have no doubt that he will bring out half of the FBI to make sure you come out of this safely.” It took a minute, but she eventually nodded her head in agreement. Payton also believed Agent McDonald would come when I called. I just had to place that call after Payton was kidnapped by human traffickers. If I did it before, McDonald would do everything in his power to prevent her from being taken. It’s what any man would do for someone they love.
I didn’t think that I would need to enter the club and decided against wearing the ridiculous club clothes. I did slip the Kevlar vest underneath my shirt and tucked one of Payton’s guns into my waistband. I was planning on carrying the other guns and the flash/smoke grenades in a bag along with the extra ammo. Payton picked up one of her knives and fingered the edge while she watched me pack up the weapons. It was clear that she wanted to arm up too.
“Same goes for weapons as the coms. Letting you carry any weapons might give these guys an excuse to kill you.” I told her bluntly. Her lack of experience in this area was going to give me a coronary. I would give anything for an experienced Whistler agent right now. This was why Cole wanted more women to become agents, sometimes the job called for something that only a girl could pull off. Like walking into a bar in a miniskirt and pumps to get kidnapped by sex traffickers.
“I know. It’s just the last time I went out without any weapons I was literally stabbed in the back.” I blinked at her, confused by that statement. Then I remembered that she had been jumped during Whistler training. That was why Ethan brought her down to Cuba to work with our team in the first place. I was being so hard on this girl when in reality she had done amazing work in the last twelve hours. She had figured out that Grace had been taken, got me to New York on a private Jet, inserted us into the FBI investigation, coerced information out of the bartender, found multiple leads on possible locations, and now was preparing to allow herself to be kidnapped while remaining calm. She had done all this while still injured because she had been attacked a couple of weeks ago.
After all I had been through with Payton in the last twenty-four hours it felt like she was already a member of my team. If we pulled this off and found Grace, I was going to make sure that she had that spot on the team if she wanted it. It would be the least I could do after going through with our plan for tonight.
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