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A fuzzy picture filled one of his screens, bursting with what looked to Bethan like a pack of Grade A jackholes. But that wasn’t a purely professional response, so she shoved it aside and looked more closely. Eight men, all in good physical shape, though some of those muscles leaned toward steroids. They were all toting guns and ammo as they gathered around an all-terrain vehicle in some indistinguishable place. It looked hot, which made her imagine it was another desert, but then again they could have been squinting anywhere.

“The resolution sucks,” Oz said bluntly. “It’s very unlikely that I’m going to pull facial recognition off of thispicture. But it’s an overview, anyway. And there are other ways to narrow down the members here.”

“Death records, I can only hope,” Bethan said.

Oz nodded, his hands flying over the keys. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Three of these men are dead. If we get no love combing through the rest of them, we’ll revisit the deaths and see if there could be any shenanigans. We all know how easy it is to fake a death.”

Especially following a tour of a war zone, Bethan thought. She’d met so many soldiers who were out there trying their best to cling to an ideal in the face of almost unimaginable horrors, day after day. But then there were the others, who’d found human misery an excellentopportunity. To profit. To make a grab for power. Then to wield it.

She found it was usually pretty clear who was who.

“I don’t like how much time is passing for our scientist while we’re digging around in all this ancient history,” Isaac said, his arms folded across his chest. “It’s coming up on a month since he and his sister have been God knows where. I don’t like it.”

“I told Iyara Sowande that she could trust me,” Bethan said, the way she had in California. It didn’t get any less bitter. “So far, that’s nothing but a lie. And I’m not a liar.”

Jonas looked at her, black and steady, but said nothing.

Isaac nodded. “Understood.”

“Two more of these guys are easy enough to find,” Oz said, his voice as calm as it always was while his hands moved like liquid over the keys. “They both work for bigger security firms. Though not Dominic Carter’s, interestingly enough.”

“That leaves three men,” Isaac said. “If we can’t find them, we have to assume that might mean we already have. That one of them could be, for example, hiding in plain sight at Bethan’s family wedding.”

“What happens to aging mercenaries?” Bethan asked, allowing her spine to soften slightly as she stood there. “That’s not a philosophical question. I’m honestly curious.What’s the typical career path after you finish selling your soul for money?”

“Tropical island,” Oz replied.

“Easily accessible bank account in the Caymans,” Isaac countered.

“Hit man,” Jonas offered.

Everyone in the room looked at him, and he did that thing where he gave the impression of shrugging without actually moving.

“Your average mercenary generally goes for a squad so he can pretend that he’s the same as the military, only better paid. I figure it would have to be easier to go solo later. When you can’t keep up with the demands of work-for-hire wetwork and air-assault insertions into enemy territory.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought, have you?” Isaac asked from beside him. He shook his head. “That really warms the heart.”

“Seems like a natural progression,” Jonas replied.

“Better get on that, then,” Bethan said, ostensibly talking to Oz, though her gaze was on Jonas, too. “I’m sure they have social media for sociopaths, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” Oz said. “They call it social media.”

“I have a lot of questions for this guy when we find him,” Isaac said while Bethan was still grinning at Oz’s grumpy statement. “How they got into the safe house, then abducted two grown adults, is a puzzle, sure. But I want to know how he knew we were coming for the scientist. I want to know how they tracked us without our knowing it. That’s what’s keeping me up at night.”

It was possible that was a joke, too, as Isaac famously rarely slept. Though maybe that, too, had changed now that he had a life outside of Alaska Force to cuddle up with at night.

“They didn’t track us,” Bethan said when no one else responded. “They tracked her. Iyara. I would say they injected her with a microchip and set her up as bait.”

She smiled faintly when they all looked at her. “Maybe it was keeping me up, too.”

“There’s still the possibility she wasn’t bait against her will,” Isaac pointed out. “That she’s been in on this from the start.”

Bethan thought of the other woman in that battered old structure. Her bruised, determined face. “It’s always a possibility. But that has to be how they did it. And from a distance, because otherwise we would have made the tail.”

Isaac considered her for a moment, then turned his gaze to Oz. “You think you can narrow down these identities anytime soon?”

“It might take me a little while,” Oz admitted, as if it hurt him.