Chapter 17 - The Trojan HorseMarcus leaned against a concrete pillar in the parking garage, dialing his sister's number on a burner phone he kept in his boot. He put it on speaker.
"Sarah? Sarah, pick up!" Marcus yelled into the receiver.
"Marcus..." his sister's weak voice crackled through the line. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. She came out of nowhere. She had a gun... she hit me. She took the little girl."
Marcus closed his eyes, exhaling a sharp breath of relief that his sister was alive, but the guilt on his face was agonizing. "Are you safe? Are the police there?"
"Paramedics are here. I'm okay," she cried. "But she took Mara."
Owen took the phone. "We'll get her back. I promise you." He ended the call, his face a mask of absolute, chilling calm. The panic was gone, replaced by a cold, calculating fury.
"We don't have a car, we don't have weapons, and we don't know where Elena took her," Marcus said, his voice laced with despair. "If she hands that ledger over to the cartel and leaves the country..."
"She doesn't have the ledger," Owen interrupted quietly.
Marcus froze. "What?"
Owen reached into the lining of his jacket and pulled out a second, identical micro-SD card. "The one I slammed on the boardroom table was a dummy. A clone I made at the motel. It contains the exact same financial data, but with one minor addition."
Owen pulled Marcus’s burner laptop from his backpack, flipping it open on the hood of a parked car.
"Elena is a professional," Owen explained, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "She won't hand the data over to her cartel bosses without verifying it first to ensure her payout. The second she plugged that dummy SD card into a device with a network connection, a hidden executable file ran in the background. A beacon."
A map of the city flashed onto the laptop screen. A blinking red dot was pulsing steadily near the coastline, thirty miles north of the city limits.
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"It's a private charter airfield," Marcus said, a predatory grin returning to his face. "She's trying to fly out of federal jurisdiction. We have less than forty minutes."
Marcus smashed the driver's side window of a sleek black Audi parked nearby. He popped the steering column and hotwired the ignition in under thirty seconds. "Get in. We're going hunting."
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