“WHERE THE HELL DID you find this?” Meg’s mouth was wide open when I brought the map to her. When James and I returned home, I’d decided to wait until morning to share our findings with her because I’d been too tired to think. But now seemed like a good time.

“It was with the papers that contain the keyword for decoding that message we intercepted,” I said, and glanced at James, who was quiet next to me. If I mentioned the safe to Meg, she’d want to take a look at it, and right now we needed to keep this as quiet as possible, at least until we figured out what it was. If we really had a traitor among us, then I had to be very careful and not let the Desaltis know that we had this in our possession.

“Where does it lead? I’m not familiar with any of this,” she said after a few moments.

“We don’t know. We were hoping you could help us figure that out. Upload the map to one of your systems and compare it with the map of our city.”

“We?” Her eyebrows shot up and her gaze flitted from James to me.

“Yes,” I said curtly, because I wasn’t about to discuss James with her, and especially not with him present.

“So this leads to some kind of a drug?” She waved with the map. “At least it says so.”

“Yeah, that part is probably correct. Unless it’s weapons or something else Desmond was smuggling.”

She cocked her head at James.

“I don’t know anything,” he said.

“Huh.” She squinted at him, but then leaned back in her chair and placed the map in her scanner. “I’ll see what I can find. But is this why the Desaltis are hiring people to steal our shipments? Because they think we might already have this?”

That was definitely one of the possibilities. “Maybe. I don’t know, but whatever it is, we need to get to it before they do.”

“If it’s pure coke...” She whistled. “Or a new drug. That could change the whole market. Any ideas as to when Desmond hid this map? If the Ezzatis had some kind of special product, why didn’t they distribute it? Why hide it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they were waiting for the perfect moment. Or maybe there were still some things they needed to set up before they distributed it, and then I messed up their plans to...” My eyes flickered to James.

“Yeah, I get it,” Meg said. “James, why don’t you take these and decode that message? It might be what we need to figure out what the Desaltis and their partners are up to.” She handed him the papers with the keywords that we’d brought with us.

“I can do that.” He took the papers and went for his desk.