“You’re the breacher, Livingstone. You can’t handle the breacher if you have a broken arm,” the HRT team leader replied with practiced patience.

“I could have used the shotgun and no one would have known the difference,” he assured her with a quirked brow and cocky grin.

Maybe it was a defense mechanism or maybe that innate confidence was why he was an HRT operator. The banter lightened the mood for all of two seconds before the next poll went up.

Option 2: Hot Candle Wax. A) Eyes, B) Nipples, C) Mouth.

Yael’s stomach gave a hard lurch.

“Shit,” the man beside her said between clenched teeth.

Alex looked across the desk, clearly reading the appalled expression on her face. “Don’t watch.”

He’d warned her about what she was getting into and she’d thought she’d been prepared, but how did any sane individual prepare themselves for something this monstrous? It was impossible to prepare for the unimaginably cruel. She should know that by now.

Yael swung her monitor with the live feed away so she couldn’t see what Evi1Geni-us was doing to the poor woman—as long as she didn’t look up at the big screen on the wall. There was no way she could concentrate if she watched, not even if she tried to pretend it was a game.

“What’s taking so long?” the man beside her whispered impatiently.

Long? They were making incredible progress. “He’s running a VPN and bouncing off a second proxy server.” Her fingers raced over the keyboard.

“I have a tentative geolocation based on triangulated cellular data of an area near this high school earlier today, but there’s no cell transmitting right now.” Alex pointed to a map he put on another monitor.

Yael didn’t let Alex’s words distract her because proxy servers could be anywhere in the world and they might tell them a different story. She also knew Alex had developed the ability to fake geolocations—be it cellular or computer. They used it when the people they were guarding truly needed to disappear. That software was a closely guarded secret and accessed by only a few trusted employees. However nice her boss was, no one wanted to cross him. But if Alex had managed it, others might too.

She followed the streaming information as closely as she was able. Given the sheer volume, it was impossible for the human brain to keep up, but she’d written a program to assist and the laptop she used to run it on was specially designed to handle massive amounts of data without crashing. She’d built it herself.

“Come on. Come on.” Her new friend spoke between gritted teeth.

“You really need to stop talking,” Yael muttered.

His mouth tightened but the anguish and frustration in his eyes made her regret her words and her loss of focus. She zeroed in on a small piece of code. “Huh.”

“What?” asked Alex, still typing on his laptop.

“He’s using a cheap off-the-shelf VPN.” She clicked open another screen. “Linked to a credit card in the name of Greg Wallander.” She did a quick search. “Card was part of a batch stolen a few days ago.”