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I barely had time to register it, because as soon as my feet touched the ground, we began the slow trek back across the lawn to the bushes. Once there, Jax folded the cloak and slung it under his arm, and the three of us headed for Bo’s car. Frankie, Kira, and Mike had already left their positions.

“Report,” Wally said in my ear.

“Safe,” Jax replied. “You guys clear?”

“We’re clear,” Wally said. “See you soon.”

Bo unlocked the car, and I shrugged out of the backpack and climbed into the back seat. I fastened my seat belt and rested my head back against the seat, feeling the adrenaline rush subside. My head pounded, and I felt nauseous.

Jax turned around from the front seat. “That was textbook clean, Red. You were right to insist on going inside. Did you get the information you needed? We lost him on the mic when he went upstairs.”

“Thanks, and yes, I recorded everything. He’s got her for sure, and is involved up to his neck, but I don’t know where she is. It sounded like she tried to escape. He said if he doesn’t hear from my dad in forty-eight hours he’s going to…” I let the sentence trail off. I couldn’t finish it.

Bo and Jax were silent, too. They didn’t need me to fill in the blank.

“Then he said he’s going to go after my sister, Gwen, who’s on assignment in Brazil.” Anger tinged my voice. “He’d get rid of all of us—whatever it would take to get my dad’s attention. He also said he’s going to call Sampson in the morning with further instructions on what to do. But he has to buy some new burner phones first.”

“Good,” Bo said. “He’ll buy the phones and, hopefully, make the call from his car. That seems to be his modus operandi, so we should be in a good position, right?”

“No.” I clenched my fists in my lap, remembering the cavalier way Remington had talked about killing my mom and going after my sister. “We can’t rely on hope anymore. We have to be proactive.”

Jax studied me from the front seat. “What did you have in mind, Red? Force him to be in the car when he calls Sampson?”

“No. We’re going to go one step further. We’re going to give him the burner phone we want him to use.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

ANGEL SINCLAIR

We met back at Mr. Matthews’s farmhouse, greeting each other with hugs and high fives. Given the tension of last few days, it was one of my most euphoric moments ever. It felt good to hear the congratulations from the team and know that my plan had been validated, even as I knew that I couldn’t have done it without them. But now that I knew there was a hard deadline on my mom’s life, we couldn’t rest on our laurels. The night’s events had changed me. I had gone from hoping and wishing we could somehow succeed to knowing that we could and would.

Still, we had to act and fast.

It was crazy, but instead of being exhausted, everyone was energized from the mission.

“Since we’ve confirmed Remington and Sampson have my mom, it’s more imperative than ever that we control the communications.” I gently petted Mr. Toodles as he dozed in my lap. “According to Remington, we have forty-eight hours. We’ve confirmed that Remington and Sampson are involved, but we have to presume there are others involved, too. We need to find out where she’s being held. I sincerely doubt they’re going to blurt out an address to each other over the phone. That means we must get control of the communications and then make one or the other actually go to the spot where my mother is being held so we can follow them there.”

“How exactly are we going to do that?” Kira asked.

“We need to make sure Remington buys the phone we want him to.”

“But how?” Hala repeated. She sat cross-legged on the floor with a puzzled expression.

“You said you saw him purchase burner phones at Target when you were surveilling him,” I said. “That’s where we do it. We buy the burner phones first, then Wally and I are going to pack them with a few software presents we’ve collected Then we make sure those are the phones Remington buys.”

Wally looked at me, his brows drawn in confusion, as if he couldn’t wrap his head around what I was saying. “Wait. You want one of us to pose as a Target employee and sell him a loaded burner phone?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I said. “We go into Target and keep the real electronics associate busy somewhere else. We get Remington to purchase the phones we want, and we fake ring him up. As soon as he uses one of them to text or contact Sampson, we control the communications. We can then text Sampson from the same burner phone number, asking him to go check on the bird. Then,boom, we follow him to my mom.”

“Pretty clever, Red,” Jax said.

I shrugged but was secretly pleased by his compliment. “I like to think I’m just taking Professor Allard’s lectures to heart. She said that in order for the mission to work, sometimes the agent has tomakethe scenario they want happen. Iwantthis scenario. So, how do we get it to work?”

“Just playing the devil’s advocate here, but what if he doesn’t buy them at Target like he did last time?” Bo asked.

“We’d have to regroup,” I admitted. “But we can assume he’s comfortable buying them there. The location is near his house, and he doesn’t strike me as the type to buy things in a gas station or a 7-Eleven. It’s not a given, but at this point, we have to go with our best guess. He told Sampson he’s going to buy burner phones in the morning on the way to work. That Target is on his route. I think it’s a good bet that’s where he’ll go.”

“So, what’s the plan, Mastermind?” Mike asked.