“Yes.”
Tristan and Dixon stared at one another. “The broken game?”
“It’s not broken.”
“Didn’t you say that was bad?” He pointed to his palm as she downloaded the game onto his device.
“For fuck’s sake, Tristan, don’t you trust my judgment by now?”
Tristan raised his hands. “Okay, this is obviously not the afternoon to question your authority.”
Lila narrowed her eyes.
“Okay, it’s not the afternoon to engage in sarcasm, either.”
Dixon poked a finger at his notepad. How would she fence it?
“Any family would drool at the chance to study the tracers, even if they only had a day and a half. I suspect she already had a buyer lined up. Two guesses who knew about that deal?”
“Teresa Bailey.”
“Natalie would have made a great deal of money if she’d gotten to the buyer. More than enough to escape her charges, flee to Burgundy, and set herself up for life, that’s for damn sure.”
“How do you know she didn’t get to the buyer?”
“If I had just concluded the deal of a lifetime, I certainly wouldn’t go back to my hideout and eat breakfast, knowing full well my enemies could locate me. I’d keep moving. That’s what made her stupid. She shouldn’t have ingested any of it, but I suppose she didn’t trust her people. Perhaps she worried they’d hold it hostage for a bigger cut once they got back to the hideout.”
“Perhaps she planned on selling Oskar, regardless of whether or not he served as bait. He was worth a great deal of money.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you think the mercs knew her plan?”
“No,” Lila said. “Natalie wasn’t tortured. They just needed her dead so she couldn’t say anything about them under the serum. Following her back to her hideout meant they could take Oskar for free, destroy her electronics, and tie up their loose ends. They probably would have looked a little harder if they’d known the empire’s crown jewels were hidden in the room.”
Lila disconnected Tristan’s palm and dug into Dixon’s trouser pocket, snatching up his palm and connecting it to the spare. “I also found out last night that Ms. Royce was killed in a car wreck two nights ago. The same FPS employee who liked selling the Thomases their precious loose-leaf tea. That’s not a coincidence. It’s how they found Rebecca. They spent time on that house, setting up surveillance, all so they could make a clean getaway with the girl. They couldn’t let anyone find out German mercs had landed inside the country.”
How does the game work?
Lila began the download. “The score indicates distance. The tail indicates direction. If the screen fades to translucence, the tracer is below you. If it becomes opaque, then it’s above.”
“How’d you—”
“The game led me straight to the tracer samples.”
How do the tracers work?
“My lab director took a closer look at the sample,” she said carefully. “Turns out, the tracers are just micro receivers encased in some sort of waterproof coating. ”
“Waterproof coating?”
Though Lila didn’t want to admit just how much her people had learned about the tracers, she couldn’t help but grin as she recalled the director cracking one open. “They’re small, though. You’d think it was just a bit of sediment in your tea or wine, but they’re large enough to feel gritty when you swallow. You might cough a great deal as your body tried to get rid of them on your throat. I don’t know how the empire did it, to be honest. Our smallest receivers are a few millimeters in length. You can still recognize them for what they are, even without a microscope.”
Dixon and Tristan shot one another an amused look. “You’re like a child at Winter Solstice. I’ve never seen you so excited over anything.”
It’s cute.
“Do you understand what this could mean for palms if we figure out how they did it? For everything?”