6. April 13th

APRIL 13TH

TB

THWAP!THWAP! THWAP! THWAP-THWAP!

The sound of leather on leather filled the room. Each sound was punctuated by a male grunt at the expended effort, and a spray of sweat traveled from TB toward the bag. The bag jerked on its chain, but it didn't swing more than a few centimeters as it was being held in place by another set of hands encased in sparring gloves.

"C'mon, the boss never lets me get away from that fuckin' box. Pretty soon, I'm going to be stroking off to Siri's voice and sending out birth announcements for our daughter, Alexa. I gotta live vicariously through you."

"There's nothing to tell."

He worked hard to portray a sense of nonchalance and prayed that his sparring partner didn't go digging through his chats on a whim. In a moment of weakness, he had casually shared his invite to his "research buddy" job with his teammate, Midas, and now was wondering if he should be concerned that he had. Midas was an excellent hacker, and he could probably easily get into TB's private system and read what had really happened two nights ago.

And just remembering what we did, there goes my dick again.

"Well, what did she say to your invite?" the spotter asked.

"Nothing." A smack and a grunt. "I logged off." A series of quick jabs and grunts followed as TB let loose a succession of hits.

"No hint of yes or no?"

TB pulled up from his fighting stance and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. "I just told you, I logged off. There wasn't a chance for a declaration of intent."

Letting go of the bag, the spotter rolled his eyes, putting his hands on his hips. "I didn't ask for a declaration. I just asked if you had a sense of if she would agree to go or not."

Walking over to the lockers along the wall, he threw over his shoulder, "Midas. Listen to what I'm saying. I. Logged. Off. I didn't hang around to see what she'd say."

"You really do live by your nickname. You are a Total Bastard today. Almost as bad as Waters."

"Waters has no one to blame for that shitshow but himself."

Midas snickered. "Yeah. The supervisor of Operation Shitshow." He sobered quickly. "Demon texted me and said that Kubrick actually overslept yesterday. She's kept it together in public, but he's pretty sure he's heard her tossing and turning all night. Yesterday, she looked like she'd been crying. Said she's barely eaten since he left. Had to force her to at least eat a Zinger."

TB's gaze bounced to Midas' in surprise. "She loves chocolate. Like, she loves it better than sex."

"I don't know about that part. I've seen some shit on the surveillance video I can't unsee. Shows how gone the guy is that he forgot to give the signal to turn the cameras off. Let's just say our team leader is… thorough, and she's reaping the benefits." Midas shifted uncomfortably. "Anyway, when Demon handed her the Zinger, she burst into tears again. What a mess."

Both men walked over to the gym lockers, built extra-wide to hold bags of gear, extra changes of clothes, and other individual items specific to the team members' workouts. Midas pulled off TB"s gloves, then threw them in the bin for sanitizing. Both men unwrapped the tape around their knuckles. Midas sighed in exasperation. "I still don't get it. Why did he leave her? It's not like we're leaving tomorrow for Egypt. We don't have enough information to do that yet. I told God I still have a lot of research to gather before we can do that."

TB grunted in agreement and sat down on the bench to untie his shoes.

Midas froze mid-unwrapping, his eyes open, but his mind was obviously somewhere other than where his sight pointed.

TB looked at the cyber-geek with a frown. "What's wrong?"

Midas looked at him, then let his muscles relax with a shake of his head. He continued to unwrap his hands. "Nothing, really. I just wondered if maybe it was a test. You know, the boss ordered him back. To see how serious Waters was about Kubrick."

TB snorted. "I doubt the boss has the time, or the inclination, for that kind of game playing."

Opening the metal door of his locker, Midas reached past the huge gym bag hanging up and grabbed a white towel. After a quick rub down of his skull, trying to take off the worst of the sprayed sweat from TB out of the barely-there brown hair, as well as what he had accumulated himself from working diligently to keep the bag from swinging, he reached into the back of the locker again, grabbing a second towel.

Throwing the used towel in the laundry bin nearby and beginning to strip, he continued his argument. "I wonder if your Flame's really who she presents herself to be. I mean, I wonder if she's really a hottie, or if she's just a normal chick, or if she's, like, three hundred pounds and seventy years old. Maybe that's why she won't commit to meeting you."

TB scrunched up all of his facial muscles. "Since when did you become as shallow as your twin?"

"I'm not," he defended himself. "I'm just trying to figure out why she wouldn't jump at the opportunity."

"Kink makes a lot of people nervous," TB countered with a shrug, returning his attention to his shoes. "Publicizing their interest takes a lot of courage. Even when they're in a safe space, like The Library, a club that's designed specifically for people in the scene, new people struggle with the worry of being judged. The fact that all the people around them are also in the same club often doesn't register. She's pretty shy and probably obsessing over what others will think about her." His shoes unlaced, he moved to pull his sweat-drenched T-shirt over his head and snapped it at Midas. "And not that it matters, asshole, but the club owner told me she was very good-looking."

"Yeah, but you know women. They stick together. And I looked up your research pimp, Mistress Tabitha, and that woman is smokin' hot. There's always that pretty-girl's-best-friend thing."

Shaking his head in disbelief, TB stood and lifted the latch on his locker. As the metal door opened, a loud bang went off, and projectiles flew toward his face with no time to get out of the way. TB dropped to the floor face first, and seconds later, after his ears cleared, all he could hear was cackling, whooping, and hollering. Turning his face back toward the locker, his eyes traveled from the floor of the locker, where he saw a pair of Under Armour running shoes, a pair of well-worn jeans, a tight blue tee exposing full tattoo sleeves and neck, and finally, the face of one of his other teammates. Nemo, the jackass, had stuffed himself tight into the locker and now stood in there with an empty confetti cannon in his hands. Pastel rectangles of paper floated through the air and covered TB, Midas, the floor, and the bench.

Midas, Nemo's fraternal twin, was shaking his head but laughing.

"You fucking prick!" TB yelled at the man in the locker. "That's the third time in two days. Just fucking stop already. What are you, five?"

Inside the locker, the young South African was still laughing so hard he was turning red. Nemo was the chick magnet of the group with his killer body, golden tan, blond hair that was in a pseudo-military cut, just too long and glued straight up, and baby blue eyes that were always lit up with laughter. He had a smile that was set with perfect, straight white teeth, and deep dimples on either side. He was also the practical joker of the group, and sometimes, he didn't know when to quit. Like now.

This fucker is going to pay.

"Hope you liked your stay in the locker, Nincompoop," TB growled. "It's going to be your new home."

Before Nemo could get a word out, TB closed the locker back up and put the combination lock on it. Backward. He banged on the locker twice. "Good luck getting out of that."

Then he walked away.

Banging began from the inside of the locker, with its occupant hurling invectives at TB's retreating form. Midas was still laughing, but he was also yelling at TB to get his ass back there to let Nemo out. TB ignored them both and went into the shower room to clean up.

Serves the douchebag right.

An hour later,Nemo was freed from his cramped prison, and the entire team was arriving at the conference room for the daily meeting.

The whole team had taken their seats around the table, minus their teammate, Demon, who was currently guarding Hollywood film director Kai Serrano, also known to them by her nickname Kubrick. Her brother had gone missing months earlier, and Waters had been assigned as a consultant on her current movie project down in Honduras in order to watch over her. The belief was that her Navy SEAL brother, Ka-Bar, had been captured, and now his sister was in trouble due to him passing information to her for safekeeping. Just a couple of days ago, they had learned that the "information" in question was actually Ka-Bar's girlfriend from his teenage years, who was very pregnant with what they assumed was his unborn child.

The big boss, known only as God, because they never saw him and only spoke with him over the speaker, had called Waters and his team back to L.A., forcing them to abandon Kubrick, something that was not sitting well with their team leader, who had fallen in love with the sassy director. Technically, Demon had also been called back, but Waters had refused to leave his lover there completely unprotected. However, their team leader was less than happy, and both parties of the couple were nursing some seriously broken hearts.

Waters stood at the front of the room, remote in hand, next to the oversized telescreen. His normally intense but blank facade was cracking. There were exhaustion lines around his eyes, his mouth pinched, and he looked pissed. Like Midas, he kept his dark blond hair cropped close to his head, but it was a little on the long side right now, and it was easy to tell he had been running his fingers through it in frustration.

Again. His own damn fault.

"Okay, now that we've moved on from high school antics of shoving people into lockers," Waters bitched, "we can get down to business." He pressed the blue button that powered on the starfish speaker in the center of the table, then pressed the red button that secured the locks on the doors, tinted the windows to block anyone from seeing inside, and dimmed the lighting to a slightly red tint around the wall edges. "God is online. Let's start with an update on Zahra."

Steel piped up from his side of the table, his silver eyes boring into Waters' figure up front, where he had his head focused down on a briefing folder. "I ran down all the technicals on the break-ins at Kubrick's trailer. Impossible to track their ingress and egress, so unsure if it's connected to the package reveal or not. No luck yet pinning down a location on Ka-Bar's woman."

Midas' fingers whirred and clacked over his keyboard, and the telescreen on the far wall filled with images. Ka-Bar. News articles about the woman who featured front and center on the screen. The very beautiful, very pregnant Zahra Kader, seventh child of Pharaoh Kader, the richest man in Egypt. Also, a very subtle picture of Kubrick in the upper right corner.

I'm sensing the boys are sending an underhanded message to the bosses. Sneaky bastards.

"I've got facial recognition running as requested, but so far, no hits. Wherever she is, she's well hidden. I also have no intel on hired hits for Jacques, the French ambassador, or the location of his family since I found their abandoned vehicle. Also, confirmed no hits contracted on Kubrick or chatter that she has a package he sent."

"Dark web?" TB asked.

"Negative there as well," Midas replied.

Waters' gaze had snagged on Kubrick's picture. His jaw ticked, but other than that, no reaction.

His face went back to the folder in front of him that TB would bet his last paycheck had pictures or references related to Kubrick buried at the back.

"So chances are this is happening in-house with the Kader family. Fucking fabulous. I love nothing more than creating an international incident," Waters snarked. "Anything at all about Ka-Bar"s location?"

The computer expert brushed his powerful hand over the top of his head, hunching his bulky frame over the laptop on the table. "Not exactly. But, literally about fifteen minutes ago, the computer tracked down the notice he punched his trident through. It's for an international film festival at Cairo University. It was an ad for a showing of Taken.''

Various expletives flew around the table.

The disembodied voice of God came over the speaker. "So, we know he was grabbed while in that warehouse, and he must have had his suspicions that this would occur if he had the foresight to pull down that poster."

"So where does that leave us, then?" TB asked.

"Hellah, nowhere," Midas admitted. "All we have now is confirmation that he's missing by force, not by choice."

"And now that we know she's pregnant, we know there's no way in hell that he'd voluntarily leave without them," Steel added.

"We don't know for sure if it"s his kid. He could be just trying to help an old girlfriend."

Steel shook his head. "Regardless, he wouldn't leave any woman stranded."

Ouch! That was a low blow.

The silence in the room weighed heavier than any elephant. All the men looked around at each other, with the exception of Waters, who refused to look at anyone.

God cleared his throat, breaking the tension. "So, what's next?"

Midas shrugged. "I've got facial recognition running twenty-four-seven, but I'm out of monitor space for possible locations. And to be honest, it's probably a waste of resources looking for him that way if he was captured."

"Well, we know where he was hiding out initially, and we know about when he was there. Can we run what little CCTV footage we have on people who were in the area at the same time and see if we get a hit that way?" TB asked.

"We tried that. Backtracked a week. Didn't even see hide nor hair of Ka-Bar himself, let alone anything truly suspicious," Waters replied.

"Given his skill set, I'm thinking we'd be more likely to find someone that's linked to the snatch and grab than it would be finding Ka-Bar himself," TB pointed out. "It might be a good idea to rewatch those recordings and look for repeating non-repeaters."

"Repeating non-repeaters?" Nemo asked.

TB turned his head to him. "Yeah. Repeat visitors."

"The area Midas narrowed it down to is a frickin' street market. Most everyone will be a repeater," Nemo pointed out.

Sighing, TB asked, "When you two cased a museum, there were always people who came back regularly, yes?"

Both Nemo and Midas nodded.

"People are creatures of habit. They have favorites. They stick to places, people, and things they like and know. The same goes for their entertainment. Guards are trained to watch for people who repeat. The elderly woman who stops at the museum after church on Sunday. The family that always goes to the movies on Tuesdays and orders the same snacks. The mother who takes her baby to the park and meets with other mothers every Friday morning for a play date."

Midas snapped his fingers. "The grocery store!"

TB smiled. "Now you're catching on."

"What are you blathering about?" Nemo asked in confusion.

"Think about it, bro. When you go to the grocery store, what path do you use?" Midas shook his head. "Never mind. I forgot. Unless you're stalking a girl, you don't go to the store."

"None of us go to the store, jackass. Cherry places delivery orders."

"You know what I mean," Midas returned.

"I see where you're going, Midas," Waters jumped in. "People follow the same order of the store. They start almost automatically in whatever aisle is closest to the door."

"Right. And the reason that the frozen aisles are closest to the checkout is because you don't want your ice cream, or whatever, to be out of the cold any longer than it has to be. People don't go to the ice cream aisle, then go shop for bread, soup, chips, etcetera."

Waters made the connection. "So what we're really looking for are repeaters who don't repeat a pattern."

"Exactly," TB confirmed.

"Huh? That sounds like an oxymoron," Nemo said.

"Wow. Did you save up all your pennies to buy that word, Nerfherder?"

Nemo grinned. "Nice movie reference. There's hope for you yet."

"The point is," Waters interrupted, "the average person is socially conditioned to patterns in their behaviors. But what happens if you need to do something in a space where you can't avoid cameras, like a store, but need to go unnoticed?"

Midas looked at his brother. "Dude. You know this answer. Walk yourself through the Metropolitan Art Museum job."

Nemo's brow furrowed. "Well, I never went to the same rooms in the same order. I went through different doors if there were options. If I ate there, I ordered something different every time; I tried to never get waited on by the same server. Didn't pay the same way or tip too much, too little. I even went in through different doors from the outside, even if it was just one over from the one I'd normally…" His face cleared. "Ah. Now I get it. Watch for the people who are repeating things, but they're doing them differently every time."

"Okay, so Midas, back on the video surveillance," God ordered. "Other ideas?"

"I can go back and hit the ground again," Steel offered. "Maybe I missed something."

"Unlikely," God barked, "but we need to do something proactive. I'll consider it. Give Midas a week to try and dig up some direction, then take Nemo with you."

"Field trip!" Nemo hooted.

Steel's face was blank, but TB imagined the man wasn't all that thrilled with the partnering. Still, TB did have to admit, when Nemo was on a job and had an objective, he was frighteningly focused and meticulous. He was just annoying when there was downtime. Or he ran his mouth. Or cracked his gum. Or breathed.

"Anything else on Ka-Bar?" There was silence around the table. All of the men were looking at each other, wondering if any of them were going to bring up the elephant in the room—Kubrick.

Waters snuck one last glance at the telescreen, swallowed, and then plowed on as if sensing the direction of their thoughts. "All right, next. The Library."