See Chapter 1 for disclaimers.
Author's note: This morning's offering was very short, so have some more now :) A little less talk and a lot more action for the next little while! (well, relatively speaking...)
It had been five years since Sophie had used that particular number in her contacts list. She scrolled down to it as her husband paced frantically behind her, muttering imprecations and threatening hellfire and damnation.
"We can't handle this by ourselves, Nate," she said, pushing the button to connect the call. "I'm calling Eliot."
From the corner of her eye, Sophie saw Nate halt abruptly and then come to stand next to her. She listened to the phone ring at the other end, the hand not holding the phone stroking the ears of a small stuffed rabbit.
"Yeah," the voice that answered was rough with just-woken-up gravel, but so familiar that the five years since she had last heard it seemed to contract into as many days with that one word.
"Eliot?" And now her voice was shaking, the calm she had maintained in the face of Nate's panic flying out the window, and tears spilling down her face.
"Sophie?" Eliot sounded wide awake now. "What's wrong?"
"They took our daughter," Sophie said.
"Who did, Sophie?" he asked. "When?"
But Sophie was crying in earnest now, unable to answer.
"Sophie?" Eliot called to her. "Sophie, is Nate there? Can you put me on speakerphone, sweetheart?"
Sophie pulled the phone away from her ear and found the button to switch it to speakerphone.
"We're both here, Eliot," she managed, shakily.
"Okay," Eliot said. "Tell me what you know."
Between the two of them, Nate and Sophie told him about the events of the morning. How they had got their daughter out of bed, and dressed, and fed, and into her booster seat in the back of Sophie's car on her way to kindergarten. How the car had been rear-ended at an intersection, and both Sophie and their daughter had been pulled out by masked men; a cloth had been forced over Sophie's mouth and nose, and she lost consciousness. When she came to some minutes later, she was still next her car – a concerned passing jogger bending over her, and no sign of her daughter except the stuffed rabbit she had been talking to in the backseat lying on the floor behind the passenger seat. The woman had wanted to call 911 for paramedics but Sophie had convinced her she just needed to call Nate for a ride home. She hadn't been thinking entirely clearly at the time, but she didn't think getting the police involved was a good idea. Instead, they had gone home and called Eliot.
Eliot quizzed Sophie about anything she could remember from the attack – sounds, smells, technique – and both of them about jobs they might have taken on recently that could have led to someone seeking this kind of revenge, or insurance against their interference. They gave him everything they could, but it wasn't much.
"Okay," Eliot said. "Look, I'm going to get Hardison checking the traffic cams and things to see if he can identify and track the car that hit you, and we'll check out those names you gave me. All three of us are going to head your way; we should be there in a few hours. Did Hardison install the software you'd need to track a ransom call if it comes before we get there?"
"I think so," Nate said.
"I'll tell him to call you and walk you through it again," Eliot said. "When they do call, ask for proof of life but see if you can delay anything else until we get there, okay?"
"Yes," Nate said.
"We'll be there soon," Eliot reiterated. "We'll get her back."
Eliot called Parker and Hardison as soon as he got off the phone with Nate and Sophie. Hardison got to work immediately, while Parker and Eliot packed and made their travel arrangements to New York. Hardison didn't get much on the vehicle or the men that had attacked Sophie, but the jogger who stopped to help her raised red flags when he ran her photo through facial recognition.
They were already at the airport, boarding a chartered jet to New York.
"Guys," he said. "This isn't about anything Nate and Sophie have been doing. They're just a way of getting to us."
Eliot shot him a murderous glare. Hardison could almost hear the "Dammit, Hardison" and "I told y'all to stop visiting them" that would have been thrown out a couple of years ago.
"What do you mean?" Parker asked.
"The woman who waited with Sophie is Janine Spears. She works as 'fixer' or 'cleaner' for one of the biotech companies involved in that job we were just wrapping up. The story hasn't hit the press yet, so my guess is that the ransom they demand is the evidence we stole that they had both confiscated that research data showing the adverse effect of genetically modified foods on human health, and that they had continued producing and marketing these foods after they were made aware of those safety concerns."
"But that would undo everything we did," Parker objected.
"That's kind of their point, Parker," Eliot growled. "But how did they know to go through Nate and Sophie to get to us?"
"Well, I can't be sure this is the connection," Hardison said, " but one of their VPs worked for VerdAgra back when we exposed the whole wheat blight scam after Parker broke in to help Archie, and worked for Latimer for a while...It's possible they either recognised us or made a guess based on the similarity between the objectives that time and this one...Maybe we've become too predictable."
"Is this our fault?" Parker asked, a little tremulously. "For going to visit Nate and Sophie and calling them all the time and stuff, I mean."
From Hardison's studied silence it was apparent he was wondering something similar. Eliot couldn't afford to have them tying themselves up in knots right now, though.
"I don't know Parker," he said. "Not necessarily. Hardison, did you find anything that might tell us where they're likely to be keeping the kid?"
Hardison shook his head.
"Nothing yet," he said. "I think I've got everything set up so that I'll be able to keep looking once we're in the air, though."
Eliot nodded. He checked his phone once more for any new messages from Nate or Sophie, then leant back in his seat, trying to relax, as the plane taxied out on to the runway. There wasn't anything more he could do right now, and it could be a very long couple of days once they got to New York.
By the time they landed, Hardison had identified a couple of properties the company or some of its more corrupt senior leaders owned that he thought might be used for these sorts of purposes. Throughout the flight, though, Eliot felt something niggling at the back of his brain about their theory. It just didn't really make sense. Even if they gave back all the files they had stolen, it was surely obvious that they could have copies stashed elsewhere or already passed on to other people. In which case, what had the company really achieved? Was the idea that kidnapping and holding their friends' child hostage should be sufficient demonstration of could be done in retaliation if the Leverage crew interfered any further? Maybe, but it seemed like a long shot. Unless the point was simply to delay the public release of the information? Give the major stockholders and executives a chance to sell out and possibly leave the country before the stock price plummeted and official investigations started? That seemed to make a little more sense...which meant that, if there was anyway to do it without adding to the danger for Nate and Sophie's daughter, Eliot needed to derail the kidnappers' timeline to prevent the main culprits within the biotech company from getting away scot-free and with enormous profits.
When they reached Nate and Sophie's house, there still hadn't been a ransom demand and Eliot started to give a little more credence to his delay theory. An hour of continued silence later, he shared it with Hardison and had him check for any stock market activity that would support it. There was nothing blatant, pointing to long, draw-out delay tactics if Eliot was right, trying to maximise the game for all its key players, but some of the day's stock sales – if traced back through the torturous trails of shell companies and subsidiaries to their actual owners – did seem to have been made by some of the key players in the scam they had uncovered.
Nobody was keen on the idea of leaving a five-year-old girl wherever they were holding her for as long as it would take for that scenario to play out – or of letting the people they had worked so hard to take down get away with everything after all.
"So how do we find her without a ransom call?" Hardison wondered aloud.
"Did any of those buildings you were looking at have security cameras? Maybe we could find footage of her being taken in," Eliot suggested.
Hardison shook his head.
"Two of them have cameras," he said. "But I already checked. Nothing useful."
"What about the kid, herself?" Eliot asked next. "Is she trackable?"
"Only if kids these days come with some kind of GPS locator or built in internet connection," Hardison said. "When are you going to get that what I track are the devices, not the people carrying them?"
Eliot scowled.
"No, wait," Parker spoke up. "That's it. Track her devices."
"Parker," Sophie said, "she's five. She doesn't have 'devices'."
"Yes, she does," Parker insisted. "Remember I went shopping with you for all her 'starting school' stuff? All day, both you and Nate kept commenting on the things on the list the school gave you that you couldn't believe kids needed for kindergarten...one of those things was a tablet computer, remember? Would she have that with her?"
"I don't know," Sophie said slowly. "I put it in her backpack last night...Nate, did we look in the car for her backpack?"
"I'll go and check," Nate said, hurrying out to the garage, obviously grateful to have something that felt useful to do. He was back in less than a minute. "It isn't in the car," he said.
"Do you have the serial number or anything for her tablet?" Hardison asked.
"Yes," Nate was striding towards the den where he had his computer set up. "I have a list for all our phones and computers, I'll email it to you."
They all waited in breathless silence while Nate's computer booted up and he searched for his spreadsheet of information about their electronic devices and associated warrantees and insurance plans. He sent it to Hardison, the row for the relevant device highlighted. Hardison plugged the information into his tracking program, and almost instantly a new blip appeared on the map. In Kansas.
"They took her to Kansas?!" Sophie exclaimed, in disbelief. "Why?"
"Looks like," Eliot said, leaning over Hardison's shoulder. "Hardison, what can you show me on that location?"
Hardison pulled up what he could in terms of satellite and street views, and property records, but it wasn't much.
Eliot grunted, straightening up from his scrutiny of the laptop screen.
"Think you could get me blueprints?" he asked.
"I'll try," Hardison told him.
"Send them to my phone," Eliot told him.
"You going to Kansas?" Hardison asked.
Eliot nodded.
"I'm coming, too," Parker said.
"No," Eliot told her.
"You need me," she argued. "Getting in and out of places is what I do best."
"I know," Eliot said. "But we don't know for sure that anything except the tablet computer is in Kansas. Both of us being in the wrong place if it turns out she's not there would be stupid."
Parker still looked sceptical.
"She doesn't know you," she said. "She'll be scared."
"That's true," Eliot looked over at Nate and Sophie. "Do you guys have a safeword I should use so that she knows she can trust me."
Nate and Sophie exchanged looks.
"Yes," Nate said. "She's supposed to ask you who you are...the correct response is that you're the cavalry."
Eliot scrutinised them for a moment.
"The cavalry, huh?" he asked.
Sophie nodded.
"It was what you told Parker to tell General Flores back in San Lorenzo," she explained. "We liked it."
Eliot nodded, then turned back to Hardison.
"What's the quickest way for me to get to Kansas?" he asked.
"I already got you on the next flight," Hardison told him. "You just need to get to the airport in the next forty minutes."
"Okay," Eliot headed for the hallway, where they had left all their gear, and grabbed his bag. "I'll call you when I get there."
He stopped at the front door, turning back to where the other four stood clustered together. His eyes scanned all of them, but lingered on Sophie.
"What's her name?" he asked.
"Stephanie," she told him: the three most precious syllables in her vocabulary for the last five years.
Eliot nodded.
"See you soon," he said, and slipped out the door.