“Peyton!” he called out. “Where are you?”
He was met with complete silence.
Three mugs lying on the floor caught his attention, creamy coffee staining the carpet around them. A little further away, the coffee table had been shoved slightly out of position. Those were the only signs of struggle, but Noah didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what happened. Moore and the dark-haired man had shown up at the apartment and talked their way in. Peyton had obviously trusted them enough to offer coffee, but then something had gone wrong. Since her laptop was on the table, it was almost a certainty that she’d caught the men trying to make a copy of the book or something like that.
A quick check confirmed that the stains on the floor were already cold and starting to dry. He hadn’t been gone very long, so that meant this had all happened a while ago, maybe shortly after he’d left.
He moved through the rest of apartment quickly, terrified he’d find Peyton on the floor in another room lying in a pool of blood. Moore had struck him as kind of a wimpy guy, but who knew how he’d react if Peyton confronted to him. And the dark-haired guy was a total wild card.
“Peyton!” he called again, running down the hallway, past the smaller bedroom where he had his home office, then into the master bedroom. She wasn’t in either.
The continued silence was deafening.
He paused long enough to open his gun safe and pull out the small frame 9mm Glock he always kept loaded there. He shoved the slim holster inside the waist of his jeans, then he was up and running down the hall.
On the way, he did a check of the bath, kitchen, and coat closest, confirming what he’d already suspected. Peyton wasn’t there. Moore and the unknown dark-haired man must have taken her with him. Noah wasn’t sure why, but it couldn’t be anything good.
A noise at the door made him spin around, the 9mm coming up to center on the person stepping into the apartment. If it wasn’t for his years of SEAL training that always hammered him on the importance of identifying his target before pulling the trigger, he probably would have killed his own teammate.
“Whoa, dude. It’s just us.” Sam held up his hands. “What the hell is going on? Where’s Peyton? And why are you standing in the middle of your apartment with a gun in your hand?”
Noah lowered his weapon as Wes and Lane followed Sam into the apartment, all three of them looking around curiously.
Every instinct Noah had urged at him to run out of the apartment in a mad effort to find Peyton, but he needed to tell his buddies what was going on first. Keeping it brief, Noah told them what he’d learned at the police station that morning. As he filled them in on Moore and his partner, he didn’t miss the looks that passed between his Teammates as he described the dark-haired man who’d apparently supplied the money to hire the kidnappers.
“We just got another intel briefing on Magpie this morning from Woods,” Sam said. “They’ve confirmed the man is somewhere in the western United States and told us what he looks like. That dark-hair guy with Moore fits the description Woods gave us.”
Noah considered that for a moment and realized that it made a lot of sense. Magpie was supposedly under a lot of pressure to come up with an immediate source of funding for terrorist operations. That pressure must have made him get personally involved in the acquisition of the largest source of funding available to him—Peyton’s manuscript.
“Okay, if we think the dark-haired man with Moore is Magpie, how does that help us find Peyton?” Noah wondered aloud. “Why kidnap her if all they wanted was her book?”
He and his Teammates stood there arguing over the possibilities, running the gamut from Peyton already being dead—which Noah refused to consider—to Moore and Magpie taking Peyton alive in order to force her to write the next book in the series—which seemed unfeasible—to Peyton having left on her own to chase after the men who’d taken her book—an idea that seemed even more unlikely.
“Maybe it’s as simple as Moore and Magpie taking Peyton with them as a hostage until they get away,” Sam pointed out.
Noah had to admit that was the most likely scenario. “Okay, assuming they’re interested in getting out of town, the question is, how?”
He was wondering if he should call Dwayne when Wes pulled out his phone. “I may be able to answer that.”
A few seconds later, Noah heard him talking to Kyla, telling her what was happening and asking if she could hack into the security camera that monitored the border crossing points into Mexico, along with those at the ports, bus stations, and airports. It must be nice to have a girlfriend who could hack into anything even remotely electronic in nature. Which is why Navy Intelligence had hired her.
Noah had no idea what Kyla might come up with—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to wait around and see—but Kyla called Wes back two minutes later.
“Scott Moore booked a one-way flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico earlier this morning on Southwest Airlines,” Kyla said when Wes put her on speaker phone. “The flight is scheduled to depart from Terminal 1 at 1:15 PM. There’s no way to check on this Magpie guy until I scan through all the check-in footage, which will take a while.”
Noah glanced at his cell phone to see what time it was. Moore’s plane left in less than three hours. Assuming he arrived early like most people did for international flights, it was possible he was already at the airport.
“Thanks, honey,” Wes said before hanging up. “We owe you big.”
While that was certainly true, Noah’s mind was already a hundred miles away as he focused on how to find Peyton.
“There’s no way in
