Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
“She ordered a rideshare,” Josie says, glancing over her shoulder at me. “I pulled the app activity from her account. She was picked up in the alley behind the building at one fifty-seven. Driver named Omar Khalil and he took her to Capitol Hill. I’ve sent location tags to your phones.”
“She went to meet someone,” Reid says.
“She went to meet Adrian Schwartz,” I grit out angrily, pissed I didn’t see this coming.
Six days of confinement and an article almost ready to print. Someone offered her something she couldn’t refuse. Tessa made a calculation, she walked out that door, and she was wrong. I set the laptop down beside Josie. “She left this open for me to find.”
“The COO of RainVest,” Malik murmurs with incredulity.
“Schwartz clearly lured her out. Posed as a whistleblower, offered information she couldn’t get any other way.” I look at Josie, then back to Malik. “Her tracker bracelet signal is stationary on 522 toward Monroe.”
“They dumped it,” Sully says knowingly. “I’m betting that’s where her phone signal ends as well.”
“They’re headed into the mountains,” Reid surmises and I know he’s right about that. They will want somewhere private and out of the way.
Josie’s already working, her fingers moving across the keyboard with focused intensity. “I’m pulling SAPG property records now. Shell company land holdings in Snohomish, Chelan and King counties.” She glances at BOB’s interface on the secondary screen. “BOB is cross-referencing against known SAPG operational history in the Pacific Northwest, rural properties registered to entities with SAPG financial connections, and utility accounts that show intermittent usage consistent with a safe house rather than a primary residence.”
“How long?” I ask.
“Thirty minutes,” she says. “Maybe twenty if BOB gets clean matches.”
“What else?” Malik asks, looking at me.
“The rideshare driver,” I say. “We need to know if he saw anything—a vehicle, a plate, anyone waiting outside.”
Reid is already on his phone. “I’ll find him.”
“Maybe check the restaurant cameras,” Josie says without looking up. “I’m pulling the Capitol Hill traffic network now. I’ll be able to track them that way for a while, but if they’re out of the city, that won’t do much good.”
“And we call Hara,” Malik says. “You were just sitting across from him an hour ago. He gets a call, he starts his process, he pulls whatever federal surveillance assets he has access to.” Malik holds my gaze. “We give him everything and we let him run his track.”
“That’s fine, but we don’t wait for him,” I say. “He won’t be able to mobilize as fast as we can.”
“Agreed,” Malik confirms. “But we give him the information because when this is finished, we’re going to need him to be the one with jurisdiction over whatever we find at the end of this road.” A pause. “Understood?”
“Understood.”
Josie pulls up the Capitol Hill traffic feed. I don’t know how she’s hacked access, nor do I care. I’m just glad she’s good enough to do it.
“Here it is,” she says, zeroing in on a black car outside of the restaurant where Tessa met Schwartz. She advances the footage until the front door of the restaurant opens and Adrian Schwartz walks out with Tessa. My heart hammers against my rib cage, fear clogging my throat. She’s going with him willingly, but there’s no way she’d do that. Tessa might dive head first into dangerous situations, but that’s a level of stupidity she doesn’t possess. My only guess is that he has leverage on her.
Josie freezes the frame and zooms in on the vehicle’s license plate. Partial. B-something-7-something-4. “Running it now.”
She feeds the number into the system and BOB starts working combinations while she simultaneously pulls the highway camera network. The car appears again fourteen minutes later on the I-5 on-ramp heading north, and then again on the SR 522 interchange heading east. She tracks it through three cameras before the network ends.
“Last confirmed position,” she says, dropping a pin on the map. “Time stamp three seventeen p.m.”
“Logically, they’re heading into the Mt. Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest,” Malik says, rubbing his jaw.
It’s the best bet, if I were willing to bet on Tessa’s life. The Cascade Mountain Range runs north-south from British Columbia down to California. The Mt. Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest is on the western slope of the Cascades closest to Seattle, and 522 is a direct shot. If they were going to go into the North Cascades National Park, they would have followed I-5 north, which is good in some respects. That area of the Cascades is incredibly rugged and remote. Not that the Mt. Baker area is much better. The terrain is all steep mountains, logging roads and thick old-growth forest.
“BOB says there’s an 82 percent chance you’re right,” Josie says, its property analysis results on the same map. Three properties are flagged within a hundred-mile radius of that exit: two registered to shell companies with SAPG financial fingerprints and one showing utility usage consistent with intermittent occupation.