Hayden

Abandoning my office for eight weeks to float about on the Med seemed counterintuitive. My instincts said I should be back in London, fighting for the Phoenix deal. But my instincts hadn’t been serving me well this last twelve months, and here I was preparing for battle from a superyacht.

I unzipped one of three pieces of luggage I’d brought with me and pulled out a satellite phone. Were people really so lazy and entitled that they had someone unpack for them?

I shook my head at Avery’s suggestion. Ms. Walker, born in Sacramento, working on yachts for seven years, no college degree despite having an excellent SAT score. She’d been one of a few who had passed my brother’s extensive vetting. I knew all of the crew far better than any of them knew me. Avery was attractive, which I hadn’t been expecting. In fact, she was more than attractive. She was beautiful and I’d found myself having to catch my breath when I’d first laid eyes on her. My brother had provided photographs with the dossier on the crew, but I had only skimmed them, not taking in Avery’s beauty. She had an easy smile and was desperate to make me comfortable which was . . . sweet. Amusing. Sexy. Plus she had a nice arse.

But focusing on what Avery Walker might look like naked was not what I was on board the Athena to do.

I punched my brother’s number into the satellite phone he’d had delivered to me this morning at my London flat.

“Hayden. Are you on board?” Landon asked.

The first thing I’d done after the Lombard deal fell through was call my brother. I knew I was in trouble, and in a crisis, my little brother was the only person who could help. Paranoid as ever, he hadn’t even let me finish explaining what had happened before he’d suggested a face-to-face meeting.

“Yep, just got here.”

“How’s the weather?” We’d conceived the idea of me going away to complete the Phoenix acquisition while he and his team figured out who was the leak in Wolf Enterprises. When I’d suggested the yacht, he’d given me a lot of shit about me making up a conspiracy just to have an excuse to charter a yacht.

I shrugged. “It’s the South of France. How do you think the weather is? I’m here to work, not sunbathe.”

“How are the women?”

“Landon, can you focus? I’m not calling to give you a blow-by-blow account of the humidity and how the women look in bikinis.” Landon and I always got into trouble at school. They could never fault our academic record—we were both straight-A students. But we were able to get under the skin of the teachers because of our attitude. We were supremely good at covering up how hard we worked and how much we cared about doing well. So despite Landon acting as if catching my leak was the last thing on his mind, I knew he would be all over it.

An exasperated sigh echoed down the line. “You haven’t got your mobile on you, have you?”

I rolled my eyes. “No. I might not be ex-Special Forces, but I do have the capacity to listen and follow instructions. I left my mobile in the flat, just as you said.” Landon and I had always been close despite our careers—he’d entered the SAS straight out of university to the dismay of our parents while I’d been off trawling the City, looking for a way in, an edge. Despite our differences, right now he was the only person I trusted.

“And you’ve not brought your laptop or tablet or anything?”

“Nothing electronic other than what was in the briefcase you had delivered.”

“Good. So you have a basic phone without web access, some countersurveillance stuff and an airgap computer that’s never been connected to the internet—makes it almost impossible to hack.” Since leaving the SAS, Landon had set up a private security firm.

“Okay, superspy. Don’t you think you might be going a little over the top?” Landon always assumed the worst of everything and everyone, and given that he’d seen the worst of humanity when he’d come face-to-face with the Taliban, I guessed that was his right.

“Trust me, will you? Corporate espionage is the fastest growing part of my business. And there are two reasons for that. First because it’s becoming more and more common. Second because I’m great at what I do. And even though you’re my brother, and bloody irritating, I’m still going to bring my A game.”

I ignored his bluster. I knew he was good. But I wasn’t going to puff up his ego any more than it already was.

“And you’ve taken the mobile devices from everyone on board?”

The crew had not been pleased with my request. “Yes. But I thought we agreed I wasn’t hiding. That I should just act like I’m on holiday.”

“Absolutely. It doesn’t matter if people know you’re on board. We just don’t want people to be able to record you. If crew have their phones on them, they can be hacked and used as listening devices.”

I wasn’t sure anyone would go that far to bury me, but anything was possible when it came to James Cannon. “If you say so.”

“What did you say to people at the office?” he asked.

“I just said I was taking a working holiday. People asked about being able to contact me. I told them Anita would handle it all.” I had hoped I’d out the leaker when I told people and be able to get back to normal, but if I’d spoken to the mole, they’d not made it obvious. Although I’d been running my assistant’s reaction through my brain since I’d told her I’d be leaving. “Anita asked me if everything was okay. In the decade she’s worked for me, she’s never asked me a single personal question.”

“What did you say?”

“Just that everything was fine.” I hated how the situation I was in was making me doubt everyone around me, had me doubting myself and my judgment. I couldn’t wait to get started—buy Phoenix, have Landon find the leak and then get back to life as normal.

“I’ll have her under surveillance so we’ll see if it was genuine concern or not. I’ve got taps on all the phones of your senior team—personal and work. And I’m going to analyze their finances, check out any suspicious deposits. And on your end, I have a team on the ground to see if anyone’s watching you. You’ll need to check for surveillance gear on the yacht. Do you have the RF device?”

I pulled out the countersurveillance sweeper Landon had given me. “Yeah. But no one knows I’ve chartered this yacht—you arranged it, remember?”

“Agreed. Just make sure you do a check where you’re working and sleeping, and don’t take any phone calls anywhere else.”

I blew out a puff of air and locked the bedroom door. “Okay. I’ll do that before I unpack. And you’ll report to me daily on your progress on tracking down the leak?” Even if I did manage to acquire Phoenix, there was no point in resuming business as usual until whoever it was who was selling my corporate secrets was cut out of Wolf Enterprises like a disease.

I could almost hear him rolling his eyes. “I might just keep that information to myself.”

“Okay, whatever.” I twisted the venetian blinds, the room darkened and I picked up the torch Landon had given me along with the RF device.

I depressed the button, creating a beam of light that illuminated the bed.

“Make sure you do the inspection with the torch first. People skip that step but it can pick up things the more sophisticated stuff doesn’t,” Landon said. “You’re checking for the reflection of a camera lens or the blink of a recording device.”

“I’m on it.” I moved through the room with the light, scanning the walls and the ceilings, even the blinds and the pictures.

“And I’ll let you have more as soon as I do.”

“I’m going to check this place for bugs and then get to work.”

“And, you know, take advantage of the fucking yacht you’re on. Only for you could trouble end up looking like a luxury holiday for the rich and famous.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’d rather be back in the City.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Shut up and get to work.” I hung up and threw the phone on the bed as I worked my way around the room.

My pulse steadied when my initial inspection found nothing. I checked the switches and sockets to see if any looked as if they’d been tampered with recently. I moved on to the smoke detector. Nothing. Apparently air fresheners and mobile phone chargers were often a prime place to put surveillance devices but nothing was plugged in where it shouldn’t be.

I changed out of my suit and into a shirt and shorts. It would be the first time I worked a deal in casual clothes, or from a sun lounger, or while being served cold drinks by a woman as beautiful as Avery Walker. None of that mattered. Nothing and no one was going to distract me from saving my business and weeding out my hidden enemies.