“What do you have for me, Tony?”
“Eighty five percent of the comms are rooted in Miami.” As Tony’s voice came through the line, I stopped myself from doing more reps. Being in the same room with Athena had been good for my sanity but not my cock.
Every time she shifted on the bed, I got hard.
When she put her arms around me, my dick became steel.
She breathed, and I was ready to drill through diamond.
So I’d grown another pair of muscles on my body because of my sexual frustrations. My regular routine now included jacking off twice after getting up in the morning and once before going to bed. Even that couldn’t curb my need for her.
Carpal tunnel would soon become a problem for my left hand.
I just knew it.
“They’re no longer from Colombia?” I asked. Before Athena’s kidnapping over fifty percent of the emails and texts within El Padre’s group were coming in from Colombia. The sudden shift made me uneasy.
“No,” Tony confirmed. “I traced them and they’re from a beachfront property in the metropolis.”
Metropolis? Who the fuck talked like that? Tony did. I didn’t even ask because I had no doubts that he wouldn’t go into a long-ass explanation of why he was using that word. It probably had to do with some comic book character.
“Any new information from the comms?” So far there hasn’t been any new development or new orders from El Padre that we know of. Granted we were definitely blindsided when he’d hired Sven, an outside contractor, to grab Athena from the airport.
“Not much,” Tony answered. “I set up a twenty four hour surveillance on the house, boss. There’s a lot of people coming and going, and they’re all crooks based on the facial recognition.”
Of course they were, but they didn’t remain in jail because of El Padre’s hooks in the local police department.
“Who have you identified?” I doubted that there was anyone of significance. El Padre’s highly valued personnel were everywhere else except that house.
“There are lots of girls who frequent the house, boss. I traced them to a stripclub. The men there definitely need nighttime entertainment. I checked the blueprint for the house and it could house fifty people with lots of room to spare.”
El Padre didn’t own anything less than 10,000 square-feet. The luxury of being a crime lord.
Tony went on, “There’s not much activity in the morning, but the house lights up at 1 AM and there’s a lot of music blaring til around 5:30. I checked why the two houses beside it never filed a police complaint. Apparently they did and a week later, the home owners found their pets shot. From then on, it’s been silence.”
I gritted my teeth, “El Padre’s goons aren’t the pet-loving types.” As a matter of fact, they were born cruel. What they did to humans, they did worse to the non-humans. The blood that ran in their veins didn’t contain a drop of humanity. They were scums of the worst order.
I stretched my legs on the floor, it helped relieve the pain of doing repetitive motions for long periods of time. Lauren had prescribed it as part of my treatment early on after my injuries. “Just continue surveillance, Tony.”
“Okay,” he replied. “You know what’s kinda strange though?”
“What is?” My legs used to cramp a lot, but now that I got into the habit of stretching, they hardly ever did. Time had made them better and so had Lauren’s interventions.
“A few days ago, about a week after Athena’s kidnapping,” Tony said, I heard the trepidation in his voice. “I didn’t tell you because it’s probably nothing.”
“Go ahead, Tony.” Sometimes the nothings were actually somethings.
“The men looked like they were cleaning a lot. Usually after parties, they left all the mess outside. I’m talking about shit everywhere. Bottles, cans, clothes – they’d just left it all outside. By the pool, by the patio, even by the beach. But that day, the men, and I saw a few women, cleaning the place and it’s been spotless ever since.”
“Hmm,” I said, I could hear someone moving in the kitchen. Athena must be up from her nap.
“It’s like they’re preparing for someone to arrive, boss,” Tony surmised. “You know how when an important person’s coming and peeps try to make everything look good?”
“Yeah,” I said. My mom used to clean the house a lot when she knew that dad was coming home. One time Dad surprised her and she got mad at him, for a few minutes, because she wanted a spic-n-span house everytime he arrived. Fun times.
“I haven’t seen anyone arrive,” Tony said in a serious tone. “My drone has been monitoring the place and it’s surrounding areas and I haven’t seen anyone coming in that would make these lowlifes behave, but the partying has significantly decreased and the outside of the house has remained clean.”
“Good observation, Tony.” He didn’t cease to amaze me. He even planted a drone? Who the fuck did that outside of the intelligence community and the fact that the drone hasn’t raised the hackles of the NSA was even more impressive.
“De nada, boss,” Tony spoke in broken Spanish. For a guy who grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, he could barely speak the language. De nada sounded like De-nayda.
My chuckle came through the line, “Don’t even try, Tony.” The few times he spoke in Spanish, I ended up in a laughing fit. Tony had strung up a couple of sentences that translated to a fat goat who fucked a pig in a headless chicken. Where he got that was just astounding to me.
Learning new languages was easy for me. It was a skill I didn’t take for granted. My mother had spoken to me in Swiss German ever since I was a baby. By the time I graduated high school, I was fluent in Spanish and Chinese. I was lucky to have the classes offered at my high school. Italian came easy after I learned Spanish. I’d actually done an online language course while I was in the Navy. It was a skill that came in handy especially during military operations.
I laughed at Tony because he’d told me that he could care less about speaking Spanish like his father, but now he was really regretting that he didn’t have the inclination to learn it especially because the women he’d dated or tried to date thought that men who spoke another language were sexy.
“You’re not gonna up your game in that language, Tony,” I offered my advice because really, he was just setting himself up for failure. It was fun hearing him butcher it though.
“Whatevs boss,” Tony replied, I could almost see his eye roll. It’s probably went as high as his forehead. It reminded me of a certain woman… A woman who never found shame in showing me when I was being ridiculous in her eyes.
The thought of her made my cock hard again.
Shit.
I needed to get a grip on myself.
Athena wasn’t ready for it. She was still recovering and I wasn’t going to push her into anything. Just having her by my side was more than enough.
“Let me know when something pans out, okay?” I told Tony. “We need to know who they’re prepping for. I doubt El Padre will be coming overseas soon.” If he ever set foot in the US, he’d never be able to go back to Colombia. The crimes that he’d been accused of spanned continents and the last thing he’d ever do was breathe American air because it would be the last breath of freedom he’d take before jail.
“Okay.” Tony replied, “How about this, boss? Entiendo.”
He sounded like he was trying to swallow helium, but I couldn’t fault him for trying. “Perfecto amigo, Perfecto.”
He might not know the language of his roots but I knew for sure that I couldn’t do this without him. He was one of the best decisions I’d ever made outside of the SEAL life. I knew that he could command hundreds of thousands for his skills outside of the company I was just starting to build, but he chose to remain employed by me.
He understood when and what kind of intel I needed.
He was perfect for the job.