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Chapter thirty-one

Reece

M y hand throbs as I throw another punch at the bag, but I can’t stop.

Every day I don’t find them, I become more and more on edge.

After breaking every coffee mug in our office kitchen, Arnold suggested I try going to the gym to relieve some of my pent up stress.

It’s saved the coffee mugs, but I don’t feel any calmer.

It just gives me somewhere to throw my frustration and anger.

After all, it’s my fault they went on the trip in the first place.

If I wasn’t so chicken shit of flying, I would have investigated the lead myself.

But I couldn’t fly, and they understood that.

And like the best friends they are, they volunteered to go check out Frank, the man who runs the charity division of the Danver’s Group, a man I was starting to have deep suspicions of.

Trouble was, he lived in Perth, Australia, so questioning him wasn’t easy.

The last call I had from them was after they had confronted him and he denied everything.

We had decided they needed to go check out the warehouse in Kenya to see for themselves if the rumors were true or not.

But they never made it there. The plane took off from Perth, and a few hours later it disappeared from radar .

My search team has been scouring the area that they went radio silent in with no luck, and I don’t understand why. Were they actually diverted somewhere completely different, landing in some foreign country, and are currently being held by someone?

I punch the bag again as my frustration boils. A plane can’t just go missing, there has to be some way of tracking it. But I’ve been told by multiple people that if the black box is damaged, and they have no radio, there is no way to find them.

I can’t believe that to be true in this day and age. I tried using find my phone on both of them but their phones just show their last location as Perth, meaning they probably switched them off before take off.

Wiping the sweat from my brow, I head to the showers to clean myself off. I’m in here a minimum of twice a day now, trying to keep my anger in check. But everyday it gets harder. They’ve been gone for over six weeks now. Six god-damned weeks .

I’ve failed them. But I refuse to give up, I’ll never stop looking for them until I find out where they are and what happened.

Was it related to what they were looking into?

I had a few private eyes follow Frank for three weeks, but they found no indication that he was somehow holding them somewhere.

What would King do if he was here, and I was the one missing?

He’d probably be at the office non-stop trying to invent some new tech to help.

He wasn’t a computer engineer himself, but he knew how things worked and was enough of a tech whiz to help found our company.

He could take Bower and my crazy ideas and figure out if they were actually possible or not.

Then we’d take the viable options to our team to build out fully.

But without his critical thinking skills and Bower’s wild card ideas, I was just left with me… and what good was I ?

I finish showering and get dressed in my slacks and light blue dress shirt with a navy tie. At least dressed like this, I felt like I was wearing my own form of armor, keeping the rest of the world from knowing what was going on in my head. Fake it till you make it, as they say.

Outside, Arnold is waiting for me and after a slight detour through the drive thru for some food, he drops me off at Titan Tech.

I push open the glass door and am immediately greeted by our receptionist, Lisa. “Mr. Benson! I didn’t realize you were coming in today.”

“Do I need permission to come to my own company?” I ask, not bothering to look at her as I swipe my ID card and it buzzes me through the turnstile.

“No! Of course not! If I knew, I would have had coffee waiting for you.”

“That’s fine, Lisa. Just send one up to my office when it’s ready. Actually—” I stop before I reach the elevator and look at my watch. One o’clock in the afternoon. Finally, looking at her. “Has anyone left for lunch today?”

“No sir, they’ve all been working hard since eight this morning. Some of them were already here when I arrived.”

My team worked incredibly hard, and even more so these past six weeks as they tried to figure out a way to track down Bower and King.

“Can you call Luigi’s and order their Italian Feast, enough for the whole team, including yourself?

” I want to give my team something to show my appreciation.

I paid them well, but it didn't mean I didn't appreciate the extra efforts they were taking to find a solution, even if I didn’t show it most of the time .

“Of course, sir! I’ll get right on that, then I’ll bring you your coffee.” She picks up the phone and I nod my head, pressing the call button for the elevator.

Our building was only four floors, but we owned the entire thing. The top floor was where the three of us had offices, along with a few other admin staff and several meeting rooms.

Floors two and three were where most of the team worked. They were wide open spaces filled with tech and computers.

The first floor, besides reception, had an additional meeting room, storage and a large kitchen and dining area.

The building wasn’t nearly as large or ostentatious as our competitors, but that’s what I liked about it.

Just because we could afford a forty story monstrous tower, didn't mean we needed one.

The building was perfect for us, big enough to house our team comfortably without having wasted space.

After stashing my bag and jacket in my office and taking a quick glance at my emails, Lisa enters with my coffee. “The food will be here in thirty minutes, I’ll have it taken to the dining hall and message the team once it’s arrived,” she tells me as she saunters up to my desk.

Instead of placing the coffee down, she holds it out to me, waiting for me to take it. I sigh, I hate when she does that. I don't enjoy physical contact with women, it sets me on edge and makes my skin crawl.

“You can put it there,” I tell her, pointing to an empty spot on my desk without lifting my gaze from my computer screen. She sets it down, but I notice out of the corner of my eye that she doesn't move, she just stands there, twiddling her thumbs like she wants to say something.

I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself down so I don’t snap at her. “Was there something else?”

“Oh, I… I just wanted to say it’s admirable how much you care about your business partners, and how hard you are working to try to find them.

” I can’t stop the frown from covering my face.

They weren’t just my business partners, they were my best friends, my brothers.

They were my family. “If you ever need someone to talk to, you know you can always come to me?”

So that’s what this is about? She wants me to cry on her shoulder?

She’s always hinted at wanting more than an employee-boss relationship with me…

and my brothers, but I have zero interest, nor do Bower or King.

They know to keep things professional and not mix business with their personal lives.

I’d love to get rid of Lisa but she hasn’t crossed the line of being inappropriate yet, she just skates it enough that we know what she wants without saying anything that could get her fired.

“Let me know when lunch is here,” I say in dismissal. I sense her shoulders drop in disappointment, but it says how much she really doesn't know me if she expected me to give any reaction to her offer. Being closer to her would be no comfort to me, in fact, it would make me feel worse.

“What is that?” I ask, looking over Hendrix's shoulder at the monitors full of what looks like ocean currents combined with data streams. “Is that Siren? ”

Siren was one of the many AI interfaces the team has been working on over the years. It was originally designed for climate and environmental modeling, disaster prediction, and real-time global monitoring, it’s still a work in progress but has come a long way in five years.

“Yes. I don’t know if it will work, but I had an idea.” I can hear the excitement he’s holding back. He has what he thinks is a good idea, but is afraid to show too much enthusiasm and have it fail.

But it doesn’t matter because his excitement is infectious, especially when it comes to finding my brothers, we’ve had no solid ideas in weeks.

“Explain.”

“Okay, so you know how we tried to create that weather mapping program to see where the plane could have been pushed off course to?” I nod and he quickly continues. “Well, I was thinking that maybe we’re looking in the wrong spot. We’re looking in the air when we should be looking in the water.”

“Currents,” I say, trying to figure out where he’s going with this. “That would explain not finding the wreckage, I suppose…” I trail off, still trying to piece it together.

“Yes. But we integrate it.”

“We looked at current charts the first week, they didn’t help,” I say, feeling deflated.

“Remember the Pulse watch prototype?” he asks. “The biosensor we built for long-term vitals monitoring? King was wearing it.”

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “It didn’t work the way it was supposed to, though.

No real range. It stored data but only pinged satellites every few hours, and even then, half the time, the signal got lost. He only kept it on because he liked the design and it functioned as a normal smart watch just fine. ”

“Exactly.” He clicks over to another screen showing logs of satellite data dumps. “I told Siren to start scanning for analog signals that don’t match current registered devices. I wasn’t expecting much, but... I got this.”

He zooms in. Beneath the distortion, I can see it, a faint, repeating signal.

“It’s not location-tagged,” I say, feeling my mind skate the edge of hope and disappointment.

“No,” Hendrix agrees. “Too damaged. Whatever happened on that flight likely fried most of the transmitters. But the watch’s fallback mode is analog. It’s trying to ping. Not often. Not strong. But it's there.”

My breath catches. “And if it’s still pinging…”

“Then King is still alive,” Hendrix says. “Or at least… he was, recently.”

I lean in. Hope prickles sharp and sudden along my spine. “This doesn’t give us coordinates,” I say, trying to stay grounded. “We still don’t know where the signal is coming from.”

“Right,” he nods. “But we know what to listen for now. That watch has a unique rhythm, slight variances in the biometric readout, plus a time-stamped transmission loop. It’s like a fingerprint.”

I meet his eyes. “And if we build a listener net through satellite APIs, low orbit backscatter analysis, and sub-oceanic reflectivity patterns,” I finish, my voice picking up, “we can triangulate it.”

“Exactly.” He grins now, the excitement breaking through. “We can’t find the location yet, but we’ve got the algorithm to do it. Siren just needs time and access to the right feeds.”

I nod, already running calculations in my head. “We’ll need private satellite access. High-altitude relay points. Maybe even partner with DeepSeaComm, see if their sonar buoys picked up anything unusual. ”

“We’ll get it,” Hendrix says. “One way or another.”

For the first time since the plane vanished, we’re not chasing shadows. We have something real. Not a location… yet. But a path to get there.

“Keep that signal locked,” I say, my hand clamping on his shoulder in approval. “Tell me what you need.”

Hendrix nods, turning back to the screen. “I’ll send you a list right now. And get Jackson and Peters in here so we can rotate.”

“I’ll get Lisa to set up break room two for you guys to sleep in, and we’ll make sure to have food deliveries coming at every mealtime. This is our main focus now, you have every resource at your disposal, plus you’ll all be paid triple time for as long as it takes to find them.”

He shakes his head. “You don't have to do that. Bower and King are as much a part of this company as you are. Everyone loves them and we would do this for free to get them back.”

I give his shoulder another squeeze in thanks. “Regardless, you’ll be compensated.” I turn to leave and call back over my shoulder, “Send me that list asap.”

“I’m on it,” he says without turning away from his screen.

As I head back to my office, the knot in my chest loosens for the first time in over six weeks.

I don’t know where they are. But now I know how to find them.