Vas shrugs. “I’m just saying,” he advises with a smartass smile. “Kavanaugh won’t be too happy that you’re destroying his things.”
I groan. Running a hand down my face, I stand from my chair and slowly begin to clean up the mess I made. “Fucking stuck here,” I mumble. “No idea where my wife is. There’s a mole somewhere in our operation. Whole place reeks of piss beer.”
“That’s Corona you’re thinking of.” Liam’s voice drifts in behind Vas. “We serve Guinness. Big difference. Not that I expect you to understand such finer tastes when all you drink is that swill you call vodka.”
“It’s not swill.”
“Tastes like water,” Liam counters. “Stale water, in fact.”
“Says the man whose beer curdles when you drink it,” I sneer. “And who always stinks like cabbage.”
“And you smell so much better?”
“Anything is better than cabbage.”
“You reek of desperation.” The leprechaun sniffs. “That’s definitely worse than cabbage.”
“That’s the pot calling the pan, don’t you think?”
“Kettle.” The Irish asshat smirks. “It’s the pot calling the kettle.”
I shoot him a confused look. “What? That makes no sense. Pots and pans go together. Why a kettle?”
Liam thinks about that for a moment before he shrugs. “Have no idea,” he admits nonchalantly. “Now, if we’re done, my hacker and yours have something for us.” He looks down at the mess I created in his spare office. “Unless you’d like to continue with your Neanderthal temper tantrum, that is.”
I growl when he turns his back and strides from the room. “Neanderthal,” I hiss. “I’ll show you a fucking Neanderthal, you fucking leprechaun. Choke you on your goddamn lucky charms.”
Vas barks a laugh as we exit the room, following my wife’s father. Since the collapse of the Dashkov building, he has graciously allowed us to take over one of the empty floors in the building above his bar. Most of my men have been assigned to the compound to continue training and preparing our people for war, but it is too far away from the city for me to set up shop at.
Kavanaugh has his own similar setup in the basement that rivals ours back at the bunker. It is more rustic than what I am used to, but it does the job, and that is what matters.
Mark sits at one of the operation stations next to a blonde girl whose hair is tied up in space buns. She is wearing bright red flare pants and an orange tank top. Her face is covered in a layer of heavy makeup of bright rainbow colors. Bridget, I believe, is her name.
She is the Kavanaugh family’s hacker, with a resume that leaves most speechless. Ivy League graduate. Valedictorian. Bridget Jones is a mechanical and technological prodigy, and yet she is down here in the basement of a bar, working for a crime syndicate.
“Where are we at with finding my daughter?” Liam questions the pair as he stalks through the door. Neither hacker turns to look at him, their hands busy flying across their keyboards, eyes scanning the brightly lit monitors in front of them.
“Her tracker just became active,” Mark announces.
“Why weren’t we able to get a reading until now?” I ask. “Or at least track where she’s been?” The tracker should have the capability to store Ava’s route inside of the mainframe, giving us her GPS footprint.
“The tracker wasn’t activated,” Bridget explains. “Your wife probably never had a chance to activate it before she was takenfrom the scene. She probably tried to activate it sometime later, after we had already tried, but there was something blocking it. A jammer of some sort, most likely.”
“Why can we see it now?” I wonder.
“We think that wherever she’s being held has a similar setup to the Ward stables,” Mark comments. “The jammer only worked below the surface of the barn. Just in case someone came snooping around. Cops would be more suspicious if they suddenly couldn’t make a radio or cell phone call.”
“Where is she now?” Liam steps forward, peering at the screens.
Mark points at a large piece of green land near a small town called Kangley. Houses out there are few and far between. “Here.”
“We believe she’s still there,” Bridget sniffs, “but her tracker cut out again about five minutes ago.”
“Is that land registered to anyone?” Kavanaugh asks tersely. His eyes are narrowed at the screen, jaw tight. Does he recognize that area?
“Um…” Mark inputs the address into the federal database. “Yeah. It is registered to a Dearbhla O’Malley, but according to record, she died several years ago in a car crash.”
“Who inherited it?” I ask. Mark scrolls through the documents, trying to source a name.