Chapter 17 - The Phantom Protector
|
On the velvet sofa, three-year-old Lily stirred at the sound of our voices, rubbing her eyes with her small fist and sitting up sleepily under the cashmere blanket.
"Barnaby?" she mumbled, looking around the cushion until she spotted me holding her rabbit by the lamp.
I quickly tucked the tiny metal transponder and the rice paper into my palm, pressed the seam of the rabbit back together, and walked over to kneel beside the sofa, handing Barnaby back into her arms.
"Here he is, sweetheart," I said softly, watching her hug the plush toy back to her chest. "Lily, can you tell Mr. Marcus one more thing before you go back to sleep? The nice maintenance man who brought Barnaby back to your door downstairs before dinner... what did he tell you?"
Lily yawned, resting her chin on top of the rabbit’s head.
"He gave me a butterscotch candy just like yours," Lily said sleepily. "And he said Barnaby was playing a game upstairs. He said if I hid behind the big white laundry basket by the sleepy bottles when the chime rang, I would see the shiny lady hide a black box under your chair—and if I told you 'The man said it had your name inside,' you would buy Barnaby a real pony."
Rosa gasped aloud, her hand flying to her mouth as she looked from her daughter to me.
"Someone sent my baby up there on purpose?" Rosa whispered in horror.
"No one was ever going to hurt Lily, Rosa," I said quietly, though my mind was racing at a thousand miles an hour. "Whoever that man in the hallway was, he knew that Julian and Viktor Kael had my security cameras looped and my bodyguards watched at 6:30 PM. If a stranger had tried to call my phone or walk into that dining room to warn me about the poisoned champagne, Julian would have intercepted the warning and triggered the backup plan immediately. The only person on earth who could walk right past sixty billionaires, two mercenaries, and Diana Caldwell without raising an alarm until she was already tugging my sleeve... was a three-year-old child looking for her rabbit."
May you like
And more importantly: the person who had coached Lily in the downstairs hallway at 6:15 PM already knew before Diana even went into the wine cellar that the black plastic package contained a hard drive with my name etched inside it.
"Cole," I said, standing up and walking swiftly toward the door of my study, "take two men down to the fourth-floor staff corridor and pull the local analog hard drive from the freight elevator service camera between 6:00 and 6:20 PM. And tell Elena to meet me at the air-gapped terminal right now."
