“Everything okay, baby?” Ellie asked, cringing inwardly at the word baby. He struggled to his feet. She helped him.

“I’ve got, like, vertigo or something,” he said.

“Probably drank a little too much. Let me get you some water.”

She helped him out from behind the bar, holding on to his meaty bicep as he staggered and swayed. Then he dropped to his knees. She let go, and he tumbled sideways, against the floor. She rolled him onto his back so he could breathe better.

He was stone-cold out, but his erection was still standing tall, at full mast.

“Mackenzie? Can you hear me?”

He didn’t answer. She hurried to her purse.

Before venturing out tonight, Ellie had collected a package from a secure drop. The package contained a syringe but no needle. She didn’t need to inject him; she needed him to swallow the syringe’s contents.

Quickly, Ellie shot the silvery liquid down into his throat. McDouche coughed a bit, then swallowed the latest advance in tracking: nanotechnology. Microscopic nanobots, normally used to deliver targeted drugs in the bloodstream, gave off a radio signature that allowed doctors to track their locations inside the body. The nanotechnology was currently being developed to turn people—kids and older parents suffering from dementia—into a walking biological GPS so they could be found in short time.

Currently, the range was limited. Less than a hundred feet. That was Roland’s problem now, not hers. She grabbed her phone and made the call to Anton’s man.

“He’s all yours,” she said when the phone on the other end of the line was picked up.

“Heard a lot of moaning in there,” the humorous voice replied. It belonged to her direct report—Nameless Asian, as Roland referred to him. “Papi show you a good time?”

How the hell did he hear the moaning? The answer broke through her pickled brain: her phone. The phone Anton had given her was bugged. Someone was always listening, always tracking her movements.

“Cameras?” Nameless Asian asked.

“One by the gate, another two near the front door. You want me to see if I can find the security system?”

“No, we’ll take care of it. Go unlock the front door—and kill as many lights as you can.”

“What about the gate? He used his phone to unlock it, and I don’t know the password.”

“We’ll take care of it.”

Ellie got dressed and shut off as many inside lights as she could. The outside lights were a different matter. She found the ones for the front door, but the lights on the front yard were solar powered. She couldn’t do anything about those.

Ten minutes later, while she was drinking a glass of water in the cool silence of the kitchen, she heard the front door open. Three men dressed in black, their faces covered in balaclavas, like they were bank robbers, stepped into the foyer and looked around, studying the layout. The tallest of the trio, a man with Asian-shaped eyes, said to her, “Where is he?”