“Mr. Tywin Vallin,” the delicate female voice purred. My face automatically morphed into a frown. How the hell had she gotten my number? Patrena was the only woman I wanted calling me.
“Yeah, who the fuck’s asking,” I snapped, irritated at the world and certain I wouldn’t be right again until I saw Patrena.
“This is Denise,” she replied, demanding my attention and making my blood stop flowing through my veins when her voice resonated in my head.
When you received a call from Denise, you listened because she was like the press secretary for the man in charge of our whole organization. The few other times I had received a call from Denise was when a workshop was being called.
Workshop was a non-negotiable request in our organization and a way of keeping the enterprise running smoothly and trouble free. When one was called, you attend it no matter what was going on in your life. Turning down a workshop was as good as putting an organization-wide hit out on yourself.
Not now please. Not now,I prayed. The last thing I needed was to be called in for a workshop.
“I’m not calling you for workshop,” she informed like she’d been tuned in to my prayer. “However, we will be sending you help as we have a vested interest in making sure things go smoothly with your rescue mission.”
What the holy fuck?
The “we” she was referring to was the heads of our organization. It meant that “the power” or “powers that be” were throwing in their hats in our attempt to rescue Patrena and that worried the fuck out of me. I knew the syndicate kept eyes on us from time to time, but how the hell did they know what was going on and why the hell were they interested?
“I’ll call you back later, Mr. Vallin. The team will be on standby and awaiting your instructions on how to proceed when the time comes,” she stated before hanging up.
I stared at my phone in my hand before letting my eyes fall close on a deep inhale. Shit had just been turned up a level hotter than hell itself. Arjen and Khane along with my father had taught me syndicate ethics and there was no way of getting around an order that came straight from the top.
Denise spoke for the head of our organization, Bishop. Therefore, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he was why we would receive additional support. Bishop was like a god, but on an organizational level. You never saw him, but you sensed him. You never heard him, but you knew his words. He knew your moves before you made them. He could touch you, any time, any place, and anywhere without lifting a finger.
I dialed Arjen.
“What’s up, T?” He answered on the first ring like it wasn’t two in the morning.
“Houston, we have a fucking problem. I just received a call from Denise.”
“Shit,” he muttered, before a stream of more unintelligible words followed. “If you have to go soon, Khane and I will handle things or die trying. You know that.”
“I know. But, Denise wasn’t calling in a workshop.”
“What? Why else would she call?”
“She informed me that they are sending us backup for this mission.”
“What the fuck?” he questioned, sounding about as stunned as I felt.
The fact that me and Rhi had just called up the calvary and informed our best guys that there would even be a mission was the kicker.
“I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but the syndicate only sends backup when they know more than what they are willing to say or have a vested interest. If they are sending backup, it means they want Patrena and that can’t be a good thing.”
“Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see if this lead pans out first. We’ll deal with the syndicate,” he said and there was an edge to his tone that I couldn’t decode.
Being the head of the Vallin family had served Arjen well. He knew how to play the organizational politics game so well, that through the years he had learned the art of skirting syndicate rules that would have otherwise gotten members at his level and their families killed. This only offered up a new question. Was my cousin’s manipulation power in the organization enough to keep Patrena safe if the syndicate wanted to harm her?
Patrena
Although drugged and woozy most days, it didn’t stop me from executing my next escape attempt. My distorted count was telling me I had been here at least eight to twelve days.
“Her mother was a genius,” the taller of the men stated. I still didn’t know any of their names.
“We can’t leave those chips exposed for longer than a few hours or they are useless. I haven’t figured out what types of material those flecks are made out of so I sent a couple of samples to the lab,” the shorter man added.
Their constant picking and poking at me had finally led them to the accidental discovery of their lifetime. The tattoo on my back turned out to be what they had been searching for the whole time. What they had discovered was as much a surprise for me as it had been for them. It was also the only thing keeping me alive at this point.
After they had started cutting into various parts of my body, they had found something embedded deeply under the ink of my tattoo. Apparently, my mother had found a way to transfer her case files into the tiny chips that appeared as nothing more than flecks of paint camouflaged by the black ink of my tattoo. And although I hated to agree with the asshole, he was right. My mother was a genius.
They were currently cutting and testing small pieces of my tattoo, putting it under a microscope and finding that the flecks were digitally readable chips. Their problem, the process of converting and reading the chips would be a time-consuming one. They would have to decrypt and piece together the hundreds of tiny flecks of case files which would take serious time. And they found out rather quickly that if any one fleck were left exposed to air for too long, the chip would degrade to the point where it was no longer readable.
They had called in three of their top computer gurus whose jobs were to decrypt the data before the chips became unreadable, and thankfully, the process was a slow and delicate one that left them picking apart tiny pieces from my tattoo at a time.
I couldn’t read the codes flashing on the computer screens, but given that they had been working for hours and had decrypted only a half-page of data was a good sign. It meant the process could take weeks and the idea gave me hope that Tywin or the ladies would find me. Was this another one in a line of techniques my mother had considered in preserving my life?