Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

" S till went straight to voice mail," Luke Edgars muttered, hitting the end call button without leaving another scathing message. He'd already left four.

Abby looked up from the spread sheet she was analyzing on her laptop, her glasses perched precariously on the tip of her nose. She shoved them up with one finger. "Your cousin only contacts us when she needs help and can't trust anyone she works with. She could be in trouble. You want to trace her phone?"

Luke settled on the couch next to his wife. "Do I want to? Not really."

He peeked over her shoulder to see her open one of the special apps on her laptop. One only a select few people in the country had access to and permission to use. It didn't surprise him that she didn't need to ask his cousin's cellphone number. Abby was capable of remembering anything she saw. Phone numbers from twenty or thirty years ago could be called up in a second—Zoe's included.

"You know something?" he asked leaning close to whisper in her ear.

"What?" she said, not breaking her concentration on the computer screen as she tapped away, bringing up several screens of data.

"You have the sexiest mind."

Her fingers paused and she slowly turned to stare into his eyes. "You may have mentioned it a time or two."

"Only a time or two?" He captured her mouth with his for a slow kiss, pulling back just enough to let their lips part. "I need to tell you that more often."

She slowly blessed him with her smile. "Yes, I believe you should."

He grinned, gave her a quick kiss, then leaned back, draping his arm on the couch behind her. "So, where is my black sheep cousin hiding?"

"Why do you and your siblings call Zoe the black sheep?"

"When we were young, all of us, including Dave and Matt had light brown or blond hair."

Her eyes widened in surprise. "But their hair is so dark now."

"Yeah, it just got darker. Even Zoe's twin Zach had blond hair as a kid."

"Wait. Zoe has a twin brother?"

"Yeah, Zach. Commander in the Navy."

Abby slapped his thigh.

"Ow!" he said, jumping back and rubbing his leg.

"We've been married for two years and you're just now telling me that you have a cousin in the Navy?"

"He's always busy on a ship or someplace. Guess I just forgot," Luke said, draping his arm back behind her once more. "Anyways, Zoe came into the world with this head full of black hair. From that moment on it was like anything the rest of us would do, she was born to do the opposite. Even her dad, Uncle ZJ—Zachery Junior—called her his little black sheep."

"Uncle ZJ? The one who died in the Middle East when you were teens?" Abby asked, all her attention focused on him over the rim of her glasses.

"Yep. Dad's younger brother. His wife died in a car accident when Zach the third and Zoe were in elementary school, so they went to live with Grandpa Zach and Grandma Sophie."

"And Zoe continued to live up to her father's nickname for her, dragging you into trouble along with her."

Luke toyed with one of the long dark strands of his wife's hair. "I have to confess, I was still under the shadows of my older brothers when I was in high school. Zoe's rebellion, while not dangerous in the sense that she didn't go near drugs or alcohol, she like skirting the edge of legal. Going with her let me step out of their shadow. We would jump onto a train and ride it miles into the countryside, sometimes small towns, sometimes all the way to Cincinnati or Dayton. Then we'd catch another one and get back to our grandparents before dawn."

Abby stared at her shock. "You could've been killed or arrested."

"As an adult, I can see things from that perspective now, but as a fourteen-year-old? It was cool."

"When did it stop?"

"When we got back from Cincinnati after dawn one day and my dad was standing there waiting to take me to boy scout camp."

Abby laughed. "How long were you grounded?"

"Longer than Zoe."

"Why?"

"Dad wanted to impress on me that even though she was a year older than me, it was my responsibility to look out for her. To try to keep her safe. And that climbing onto a moving train wasn't just dangerous and reckless, it was against the law. And that there's always consequences to every decision you make, good or bad."

"Besides being grounded, what was your consequence?" she asked, empathy in her eyes.

"Dad was our scout troop master. I had to stay home while all my friends got to go spend a week camping with him. It would've been the first time I would go with Dad and neither of my brothers would be there."

Abby stroked her hand down the side of his face. "I'm sorry."

"It was the last time I hopped a train. And I weighed some of Zoe's adventures a lot closer from then on out. Usually, I managed to convince her to scale it back, for her safety, as well as preventing me from getting into trouble."

"Did she listen?"

"Until she graduated. Despite all her rebellion, her grades were good enough to earn her entrance to Georgetown. Her inheritance from her parents had been set in trust and she used it to go to Washington. Other than holidays the first few years, everyone but Zach lost touch with her."

"Until she showed up at the inaugural ball four years ago posing as the bodyguard for the arms dealer Adrian Becker," Abby said, her lips going into a flat line at the memory of that mission. Her first introduction to his cousin hadn't impressed her. But when they finally did arrest Bricker, and Zoe gave their homeland security team all the credit, taking none for herself because she wanted to maintain her cover, Abby had changed her mind about Zoe. She might not want everyone to know it, but the woman had a sense of honor and didn't want the lime light focused on her.

"So, have you found Zoe's phone?"

Abby focused on her laptop again and shook her head. "That particular phone is currently offline."

"How many phone numbers for her have you checked?"

"Seven." She went on to explain. "Your cousin tends to change numbers frequently. I suspect she uses burner phones that can't be traced back to her. Most people don't remember her number from one call to the next. Because she works undercover, she may even have a different phone for different people. It's what I'd do."

"You amaze me," he said, unable to keep the awe out of his voice.

"Why? Because I'd have a plan to keep people from knowing I was an agent if I was undercover?"

"No. Because you can just pull up seven phone numbers in the blink of an eye. Yours is the only one I know by heart."

"You're so sweet," she said with a smile.

"May I?" he asked, reaching for her laptop. In the first month they dated, he learned that if he wanted to use her laptop he needed to ask. Few things his wife was possessive of—truly, she'd give away every one of her possessions to anyone who needed it—was her laptop.

She handed it over. "Don't close anything. I'm still analyzing the spreadsheets for the various social media platforms."

"I wouldn't dream of it," he said.

Both of their laptops, phones and computers were all encrypted with the newest, most difficult software to prevent hacking. He opened a secure server tab to bounce the signal off several satellites of various countries. Not knowing Zoe's latest mission, he decided at least a dozen would be needed to frustrate any government or black-hat hackers trying to find out what or who he was looking for.

"I'd add on at least twice as many countries as satellites," Abby said from beside him.

His fingers flew across the keyboard. "This new program will erase my trail once I leave a satellite, but all the countries in between will slow down anyone looking."

"You'll just have to be faster," she said with an arched brow.

"A challenge?" he asked, still letting his fingers fly over the keyboard, accessing the eleventh satellite out of the UK which was fairly difficult to access for anyone but him and a few other elite hackers. The final satellite accessed and his search trail in place, he went back to the beginning and opened the program he needed to trace Zoe's phone from point of purchase until it went offline two nights ago.

"What's her latest number?"

Abby rattled off the number without hesitation and he quickly typed it in, not leaving any paper trail to be tracked. Her memory and his hacker skills made them a great team. God help their kids.

"How are you feeling today?" he asked, as he waited for the program to map his cousin's movements.

"Not too bad. The doctor's recommendations for saltines before I get up seems to help ease the morning sickness."

"How long does it last?" He turned to see for himself that she was feeling alright.

"Depends," she said with a bit of a sigh. "I remember your sister Sami saying hers lasted until the beginning of the second trimester. Judy said she only had it with her son. Your mom said she didn't have any at all, but poor Katie…"

"Yeah, don't remind me. She was still throwing up the week before she gave birth to the twins."

Suddenly a new screen popped onto the laptop. It was a list of all the places that phone number had been since its purchase a week ago. He clicked on the option to map out the locations.

"It started in DC," he said, pointing at the spot.

"Makes sense since that's where she's based," Abby said.

He enlarged the map and drew a line from the purchase spot to the next location and then the next. "Looks like she stayed in the DC area for the first few days after she bought the phone."

"Mostly in the Adams Morgan area," Abby pointed to the neighborhood in the northwest section of the District. "She made several trips to the zoo."

"A good place to meet someone for a secret meeting. Lots of foot traffic. Park benches to have a quiet talk. Typical trade craft for a spook. Also close enough to Embassy row to meet up with anyone from there."

"Yes," Abby agreed, "but she didn't actually go to any embassies with that phone. According to the times, she was located at various spots in Adams Morgan. If you look carefully, they seem to circle this one particular townhouse."

"How do you know it's a townhouse?" he asked, only to receive an arched brow you-doubt-me-look. "Right. It's a townhouse. Hers?"

"Since it's never actually at that house, but hours at a time outside it, I'd say she was surveilling someone there."

"Interesting. Here's another spot she spent time near on Q street," he said pointing to the spot where three dots appeared in a triangle around a building. "It looks like she's surveilling it, too."

"What's the exact address?"

He read it off and she got that quizzical expression on her face as she stared off into space. It was the one she wore whenever she was pulling images out of her mind to recreate something she'd seen or read before. Abby would find what she was looking for in what she called the filing cabinet of her mind. Patience was the key here. He'd learned not to push her.

"Remember that case we worked on money laundering for a drug cartel last year?" she finally said.

"The one we determined was backed by that billionaire banker who flew to his private island to avoid extradition and hasn't been off it since?"

"That one. This address appeared in that investigation, but other than him going there once for a party, we couldn't connect him to the owner of the house in any other fashion."

Luke sat back, staring at the screen, considering that information. Was Zoe working on something involving the same banker? "What was his name?"

"Scanlon." Abby moved the screen to show a red dot further west. "This is where she went Sunday. That was the day she called you."

"She headed west before dawn. She called me after the football game, the late one, finished."

Abby smiled at him. She once told him that he always told time on the weekends in the fall and winter based on when a football game began or ended.

"The Browns won."

"I know," she said with a shake of her head. "So, Zoe drove into the mountains, and stopped outside Roanoke, where she stayed for the next six hours, before heading west on eighty-one, where she picked up fifty-eight, still heading west, but more west by northwest."

"Probably looking to pick up twenty-three and head north to Columbus," Luke said.

Abby pointed to where the trail veered off the main highways up a winding road south of Norton, Virginia, where it stopped. "Then why did she end up here?"

"That is the question."

"That was two days ago, the night before that snowstorm whipped through the entire area. It dumped almost two feet of snow in those mountains."

"Dammit. What if she got stranded there?"

"And she didn't tell you why she wanted to talk with you?"

He shook his head. "Not me personally. She said she needed to talk to the Edgars Investigating Services team in person when she got here. I just assumed she was being dramatic."

"I doubt that."

"Why?"

"Because there's only a few reasons her phone stopped in this spot," Abby said, her face very concerned. "Her battery died and she doesn't have a charger. The battery died and she threw it out. Or…"

"Or, she's been in an accident of some sort and the phone is lost or damaged in some way." Luke handed Abby back her laptop then slumped back against the couch.

"Even though she's constantly changing her phones—and I'm certain that has to do with safety issues in her undercover work—your cousin, for the limited time that I've worked with her, isn't one to panic easily. If she called you about wanting to talk in person with you and the other members of the EIS team, she must be concerned about something she can't trust anyone she works with knowing. And if that's the case, she'd keep her phone charged just to be sure she had a line of communication with one of you." Abby closed the laptop and set it on the coffee table. "You know your cousin better than I do. What is your gut telling you?"

Luke heaved a sigh. "Despite her love of the dramatic, Zoe isn't one to ask for help, unless she really needs it. She's not only known as the family's black sheep, she's a lone wolf."

"Two cliches of animals that are natural enemies?"

He shrugged. "I know, but both fit her. It's like she's at war with not only everyone else, but herself."

"Interesting."

"I know. But if she called the family about something, it had to be important. And if it were, I can't see her just disappearing." He paused and met his wife's worried gaze. "At least not intentionally or willingly."