The Billionaire's Redemption (The Billionaire's Kiss, Book Five): (A Billionaire Alpha Romance) (27 page)

“I need to look inside the plane,” I say.

“Fine. We’re getting on right now.”

“No, I need to look inside before my friends come with me.”

Duplass is about to lose it. “I have two dead men aboard that plane, Saunders – I do
not
need this bullshit from you right now – ”

“Then you shouldn’t have tried to double-cross me at the Eiffel Tower.”

Duplass is almost foaming at the mouth when Mailin intercedes. “Go on, go and look,” he tells me as he takes his boss aside.

“Wait here,” I tell the French guys. I take the laptop and backpack and check aboard the jet.

No cops. Just a pilot and a co-pilot going through their pre-flight check.

I call JP and Dominique with the cell. “Alright, it’s clear. Come on.”

Then I exit the plane and walk back to the car.

“Well?” Duplass asks sarcastically. “Is everything to your liking?”

“Yes,” I say, then lean down and address the French guys. “Okay, you can go. Thanks.”

They wave and drive off.

Duplass watches in utter shock. “What the hell?! I thought you said – ”

Three seconds later, another car drives up and JP and Dominique get out. Their driver immediately takes off and follows my two companions off the airfield.

“Oh,” Duplass says, his voice dripping with distaste as he realizes the precautions I took.

Then he gets a second look at Dominique.

“Oh,” Duplass says, his voice noticeably perking up.

I’ve been around her enough to become inured to her looks, so I tend to forget how stunningly beautiful she is. Even Mailin does a double take.

“These are my friends,” I say pointedly to Mailin, emphasizing
‘my friends.’

Mailin smiles. “I see.”

Duplass steps forward to Dominique. He hides his assholery behind a veneer of creepiness as he takes her hand and says smarmily, “
Enchanté, mademoiselle.
And you are – ?”

Points for Dominique: she grits her teeth and lets him do it. She even flashes him an
Oh, aren’t you so charming
smile.

Before she can answer, though, I snap, “JP and Dominique. No last names.”

JP grins at my private joke.

“Of course,” Duplass says, annoyed at being interrupted in his courtship. Still, he waves his arm in front of Dominique like he’s whisking her onto a fairytale carriage. “Well… let’s get aboard, shall we? We leave in just a few minutes.”

The first thing I do is plug into the plane’s onboard internet connection and check out Grant’s position.

His plane is now over the Atlantic, about four hundred miles off the coast of England.

Mailin and Duplass both look at the screen over my shoulder. JP and Dominique keep their distance; they’re apparently a little freaked out being this close to the FBI.

“Once we take off, can we get closer to Grant’s plane?” I ask. “Fly faster than they are, but not get
so
close they know we’re following them?”

“Probably. I’ll let the pilot know what we want,” Duplass says. “Where are they headed?”

“No idea, but the two best candidates are New York and LA. Epicurus was active in both those cities. What’s the range of this plane?”

“We can make it to LA, but after that we’ll have to refuel.”

“The good news is, they’re going to have to, too,” Mailin says. “Nothing smaller than a jet liner can go much further than 8000 miles, and it’s almost 6000 to LA.”

Duplass points at the screen. “You’re absolutely sure this is accurate?” he asks me.

“Yes.”

“I mean, you’re sure it’s
him
on that plane?”

“He swallowed the tracker. I saw him do it.”

“Yes, but what if they removed it and he’s still back in France?”

I’d actually considered that, briefly – back when I first looked at the screen and thought they might have cut the GPS tracker out of him.

It was an idea I’d quickly forced out of my head, but now Duplass was forcing me to confront it again.

“It’s possible,” I admit, “but it seems like an awful long way to go to throw us off track.”

“You claim this guy left $500 million in stolen paintings behind to frame your boyfriend,” Duplass sneers, “but you think putting a GPS chip on a plane is out of the question?”

Damn it.

Walked right into that one.

I try to recover. “It’s possible – but from what we know about Epicurus, he doesn’t like to show up himself at these attacks. He always seems to be operating from a remote location. He’s sees himself as the chess master, not one of the pieces on the board. So it makes sense that he wants to get Grant back on his own territory.” I pause, then decide to be completely honest. “Plus, if they
are
staying in France, I have no idea where they would be or how I could track that.”

“So this is our only shot, basically,” Mailin says.

I can feel my insides curdling with fear. “This is our only shot.”

“Can you hack their plane?” Duplass asks.

Mailin and I look at each other. I hadn’t thought of that.

What little hope I had about the GPS tracker begins to increase.

“It’s a possibility,” I say with growing excitement. “If they have a continuous internet connection, I can triangulate their satellite feed because I know their position from the GPS tracker.”

Mailin immediately dampens my mood.

“
But…
to do that you’d have to hack a number of satellites and communications networks,” he reminds me. “Which would be
highly
illegal.”

SHIT.

I forgot I was sitting here with the FBI looking over my shoulder. We’re going to have to go through judges, and court orders, and warrants – all of which will take days, if not weeks.

Any possibility of hacking the plane is over before it began.

But then Duplass, strangely enough, kind of gives me an out.

“When did you ever let the legality of a situation stop you?” he says sarcastically.

I look him dead in the eye. “Let me get this straight: you’re willing to let me break the law in order to find Epicurus?”

Duplass walks across the aisle and plops down catty-corner to me in one of the jet’s leather seats. From that angle, he can’t see my screen. “I’m sitting over here. I have absolutely no idea what you’re doing over there, because I’m not a hacker.”

Huh.

Maybe I misjudged this guy.

“What about Mailin?” I ask. “Is he going to sit over there with you, or can he help me out?”

Duplass looks at Mailin. “I would highly advise against it. Anything you do, you do on your own. It’s on your head.”

“But you just said – ”

“Eve,” Mailin warns me quietly.

“I didn’t do anything but state the facts,” Duplass says. “I’m not a hacker. I have no idea what you’re doing on that laptop.”

Now I understand. “So if we catch Epicurus, you get all the glory. But if things go sideways and you need a scapegoat, you’re going to hang me out to dry, and you’ll sure as hell throw Mailin under the bus.”

“
Eve,
” Mailin says more urgently.

Duplass doesn’t speak, but his tight little smile says it all.

No, I didn’t misjudge this asshole at all.

JP and Dominique exchange looks like,
Is it too late to back out?

“I’m going to... ‘monitor’ the situation,” Mailin tells his boss.

“Mailin, no. I can do this on my own.”

“You probably can. But two heads are always better than one.”

“That’s nice, Mailin, but – ”

“It’s been years and years since you’ve hacked any websites,” Mailin says. “You could use somebody who’s been hacking recently.”

I scrunch up my face. I want to say,
What? No, I’ve been –

But then I realize what he’s doing.

He’s lying to protect me from his boss.

Whether Duplass buys it, though, is another matter.

I glance over at JP and Dominique, hoping they’re not going to contradict Mailin.

I needn’t have worried. They’re career criminals. They know what’s up, and they both keep quiet.

“If Epicurus has any alarms set in place,” Mailin cautions, “you could set them off. Then we lose the advantage of surprise.”

My newly-found hope dwindles. “That’s possible, too.”

“Do you think they know we’re coming after them?” Duplass asks.

“He might. Although from what I know about him, he’s an arrogant son of a bitch. He probably thinks he beat us and that there’s not a chance in the world we can outsmart him… which is maybe why he didn’t order his men to search for a GPS tracker.”

“Unless he
does
know, and this is all a decoy,” Duplass says, pointing at the laptop.

I hate this guy.

What I hate even more is, he might be right.

“This is all I’ve got,” I snap.

“And that’s what you’re here for,” Duplass sneers. “So do your thing.”

ASSHOLE.

But he’s right: that’s what I’m here for. To use my skills to find Grant.

So I start to do my thing.

The plane taxis to the runway. Take-off is easy, and so is most of the flight.

I wish the same could be said for the hacking.

I’m able to get into every major telecommunication company’s satellite system, but none of them are running any sort of Atlantic Ocean uplinks – at least, not where Grant’s plane is.

Next I try Russian satellites, Chinese satellites, European Union satellites. I don’t need to speak Russian or Chinese, since I don’t need to read emails or web pages. What I’m hacking is called machine code, which is the most basic of all computer languages, and it’s universal.

But I still turn up nothing.

“Jesus, I forgot how good you are,” Mailin whispers as he watches me work.

I smile grimly. “Coming from an FBI agent, that’s damning me with great praise.”

“I’m not FBI right now,” he whispers. “I’m your friend.”

I look at him, and my eyes fill with tears.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “I can’t tell you how much that means.”

He nods, and we get back to work.

Since I’m not getting anywhere, I go back to basics and devise a program to tally the satellites capable of running an uplink right now. All in all, there’s supposedly 2271 functioning ones orbiting the Earth. About 1200 of those are Russian, and another 650 belong to the U.S.

But the thing is, all those satellites are scattered across the globe. There are only maybe 300 U.S. satellites in range above us now; the other 350 are on the other side of the world, where their signals are blocked by the Earth itself, so they’re off the list. Of those 300, two thirds are too far out of range to be much use. And of the remaining 100, most of them are satellites I’ve already tried, or military –  

“Shit,” I whisper.

“What?” Mailin asks.

“Hold on,” I say.

Once I’ve hacked inside a satellite, I can’t actually see
what’s
being sent or received – the data is all encrypted – but I can tell
where
the data stream is going and where it’s coming from.

It takes me thirty minutes, but I find the right satellite. It’s uplinked to the exact spot over the Atlantic Ocean where Grant’s jet is flying right now.

The satellite?

U.S. Military.

More specifically, I can tell where the communications are coming from.

A server farm in Utah.

“Holy fucking shit,” Mailin whispers. “It’s the NSA.”

So.

Yeah.

My choices are to do nothing and hope for the best… or try to hack the most sophisticated intelligence network on earth.

From a plane with a slow-as-molasses internet uplink.

But the only other option is to gamble everything – and I mean
everything
– on whether Grant is on that plane or not.

I freeze with my fingers over the keyboard.

Mailin stares at me. “You’re not actually considering trying to hack the NSA, are you?!”

“I’m thinking about it,” I murmur, my heart racing.

“That’s INSANE. Look, we can radio to Washington, maybe get somebody higher up to look into it – ”

“The NSA’ll deny it. Besides, they’ll want to know how we know, which will blow our cover and tip Epicurus off.”

“You have a better plan?” he asks sardonically.

“If I can hack into the plane, I could confirm he’s there,” I argue, though I’m trying to convince myself more than I am Mailin.

“That’s a Mt. Everest-sized ‘If.’”

“I can do it,” I protest, though somewhat feebly.

“We’re on a plane with limited uplink speed, Eve. You trying to hack the NSA from here is like going up against the Incredible Hulk with a peashooter.”

“
I can do it,
” I insist, though it’s my fear for Grant that’s talking, not my reason.

“Okay. Say you do, and you somehow manage to avoid letting them know we’re chasing them and ruin the one advantage we have. If there aren’t any cameras onboard, how can you tell he’s on the plane? You can’t.”

“There are probably cameras…” I say, even more feebly.

“Okay, say there are. What then?”

“I could infiltrate the plane’s controls. I could write a program to take over the flight system – ”

“And what, force them down over the Atlantic? What do you want to do, save Grant by killing him?”

“No – I could trigger some minor emergency once they cleared the Atlantic that would force them to land – ”

“If
you
can take it over, then Epicurus can, too. You think he’d let Grant and an entire plane full of mercenaries be captured? Or do you think he’d just crash it so nobody would ever find out who he is?”

“He wants Grant alive.”

“Yeah, so he can
kill
him. And if Epicurus crashes the plane, he gets what he wants, plus he doesn’t blow his cover. What do you think he’s going to do?”

Mailin is right.

No matter what I do it’s maximum risk, with the worst possible odds, for very little reward.

It all hinges on whether Epicurus is so arrogant to think that he’s completely and irrevocably won, and whether he’s foolhardy enough to have let down every single one of his defenses.