Tempest - Kris Michaels Page 0,82

what? He was wide awake now. He leaned forward and clarified, "Pilar?"

"Yes. Regina had sent an email inquiring what Two and Three’s opinion was to her suggestion they eliminate her."

Rage coursed through his body. He ground his teeth together. "Killing her own daughter? Mother of the fucking year."

"Here's the thing, we aren't positive Pilar is Regina's daughter."

"Clarify." He wasn't in the mood to play guessing games.

"There is no record of birth for a Pilar Grantham."

"She's attended school and college." He frowned at his handlers.

"True and she has a birth certificate, but it isn't real. It wasn't created in Florida, although it is an excellent copy of a Florida birth certificate."

"So..."

"So we believe Pilar was probably given to Regina to raise."

"She was supposed to be the first female President of the United States," he said almost to himself.

"A project. Not a child."

"Good God." He breathed the words. "I need to access a secure connection."

"Here." Fury handed him the tablet he'd been holding.

He tapped in the website and waited for it to populate. He typed in the sixteen-digit number he'd assigned her. A map of the world populated, and he waited as the red dot which was supposed to pinpoint her location blinked, and the globe behind it spun. Finally, it greyed out. 'No information available.'

"Shit." He erased the numbers and repeated the sequence, gaining the same result. "The trackers aren't working."

Fury stood. "Let's take this to Jewell. If there is a way to track her, she'll know it."

The men barged into the comms room. Fury plopped down the tablet in front of Jewell. "Can you find where a tracker in this program was before it stopped working?"

The woman's fingers froze, and she glanced at the tablet. The pencil held crossways between her teeth dropped, and she caught it without looking. "What do you mean? Like a history?"

"Yes." Tempest confirmed.

She leaned forward again and started typing. The tracking program appeared on one of her monitors.

"The code?"

Tempest rattled off the sixteen digits, and she pounded them into the keyboard. "Okay, yeah. This isn't a constant monitor situation, but each tracker has a ping process. It allows the program to find the tracker in a nominal amount of time." The screen turned into a fast moving scroll of numbers as the woman typed. A printer spit a list of numbers.

She highlighted the code on the screen and opened another program, entering the coordinates into the database. "Longitude and latitude of the phone's tracker movements since its activation. It looks like about three days ago. Here is a virtual track of her movement."

"Fuck." He watched the red dots move from the port of Palm Beach to Del Ray Beach. From Del Ray it moved north and west. There were no stops between Del Ray and its location in the Florida Panhandle.

"Are they taking her to the same place we found you? The phone is moving north." Anubis leaned in and stared at the red dot.

"No, the place they took me was a place to die. For most of my tenure, they kept me in a different facility. I only knew the address they were going to transfer me to because the guards thought I was unconscious, and they were giving directions to the man they were bringing in to make me talk. They discussed the plans they had for me, how it would take months for me to die. My death in Atlanta was their fun for having to put up with me for years." That conversation had marked the end of his resilience. That's when he'd given up. He was going to die, and he’d longed for it. Then Pilar was pushed into his cell and... "I was moved the day Pilar was taken from my cell. I was weak, but the trip took hours."

Jewell gasped softly. "You heard them plan your death."

He nodded. "I didn't have much longer."

"How did you answer the dead drop and let Thanatos know where you were?"

"Pilar." Fury answered for him. "She was the one who wrote the message."

He held the assassin's eyes. "Yes."

"Now her mother has her in the same place."

He nodded.

"Wait, what is this? She has another tracker?" The woman started typing, her fingers a blur across the keyboard.

"Yes. A ring."

Jewell nodded and continued typing.

Bengal put a hand on her shoulder startling her. "Babe, what are you doing?"

"Pinging Pilar's second tracker, the ring, and verifying it against Regina's cell phone number. We have the information. I have a Federal warrant. I'm completely legal. Unique for me, but