“D’you know what I love about not having the kids jumping into bed with us in the mornings?” Danny’s voice in the quiet early morning made Hannah jump.
“Shit! You asshole! You nearly gave me heart failure!” She scolded, glancing at her husband over the top of the laptop screen on Tuck’s desk.
Danny was leaning against the doorframe, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand.
“It’s when I wake up in the early morning, with my beautiful wife’s ass pushed into my groin, my hands already cupping her luscious breasts, and I can slide into her warm heat without hardly having to move a muscle. Well… except the important ones!” He continued as though she’d never spoken.
Hannah stared at Danny in shock.
“Thanks for sharing that with us, honey.” Candy’s voice came from the sofa, where she and Tuck were reading the newspaper, just out of Danny’s line of vision. “It’s a tiny bit more information than I need to hear with my morning coffee, but that’s the thing about family time… sometimes you end up sharing more than you want to.”
To Hannah’s disgust, Danny didn’t so much as blush. He simply stuck his head around the corner and grinned.
“Oh, hey guys. Didn’t see you there.” He chuckled. “It’s a good job you spoke up when you did. I was just thinking that my wife was looking so hot in the morning light, it would be fun to take her bent over that desk!”
“DANNY!” Hannah gasped. “When will you ever learn that there are things you say in public, and things you say in private, and sex talk definitely comes under the ‘private’ category!”
“Oh, come on!” Danny rolled his eyes at her. “Do you seriously think that a desk that sturdy hasn’t seen quite a bit of action in its lifetime?”
Danny turned to Tuck and Candy, who, to Hannah’s amazement were both blushing profusely.
“Am I right?” He grinned.
Tuck was the first to recover.
“On the basis that it will incriminate me either way, I’d like to plead the fifth amendment over whether I’d like to plead the fifth amendment.” He responded.
Danny turned to Hannah with a frown.
“Did he just admit it or not?” He asked.
“I think the response was a polite way of saying ‘no comment’, so as you’re running a risk of offending your hosts even more than you might have already, why don’t you zip it, hmm?” Hannah suggested.
Danny shrugged as he walked further into the room.
“Well, in case you missed the point of my earlier statement, all I was suggesting was that next time, you wake me first before sneaking off to be a genius.” He grouched.
“Ok.” Hannah hissed. “Message received and understood.”
Hannah glanced over at Candy, who had recovered from her embarrassment about the desk, and was now grinning at her.
Yeah, this was absolutely typical Danny behaviour, and they’d all come to expect nothing less of him.
“So, watcha doing that has you up and enthralled at… seven-thirty in the morning?” He came around to stand behind the desk and study the screen. “Is that Gregor’s place?”
“Yeah.” Hannah nodded. “That was taken yesterday by the PPD chopper doing a routine sweep.”
“And you were staring at it so hard because…?” Danny sat in Tuck’s chair and pulled Hannah back onto his lap.
“I don’t know.” Hannah admitted. “There’s just something not right about it.”
Danny peered over her shoulder.
“It just looks like a regular property to me. Nothing strange about it.” He shrugged. “Assuming that the car out front is Gregor’s of course.”
Tuck stood up from the sofa and came to stand behind the two of them.
“That looks like the car that he had me picked up in.” He confirmed. “If you look, there’s an identical one parked behind the security lodge.”
“What looks wrong about it?” Candy asked, coming up next to Tuck and slipping her arm around his waist. “Have you compared it with the one Gregor sent us from before he had the running track installed? That might show something.”
Hannah clicked a few keys and then they were looking at the two pictures on side by side screens.
“Apart from where the original picture doesn’t have the track, and where the new one does, I can’t make anything out that’s different. Can anyone else?” Tuck asked.
“Umm, yeah.” Hannah pointed at the screen. “Look at that.”
She pointed at the picture that had been taken the day before, and near one of the walls adjoining the next property, there seemed to be some kind of vehicle.
“Hannah, that isn’t even Gregor’s land.” Danny pointed out. “That’s the separating wall, and whatever that thing might be is on his neighbour’s property. It’s not even on Gregor’s side.”
“But it’s not on the other picture.” Hannah pointed out. “And it’s a long way from the house, so why would they park a vehicle all the way up there? It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe it’s an earth-mover, and they’re about to have some work done in the garden?” Tuck suggested. “There are a few large trees in the vicinity. Perhaps they’re going to have one of them felled?”
Hannah glanced at Tuck like he was going nuts.
“Does that seriously look like an earth mover to you?” She scoffed.
She pulled another laptop up in front of her and started to tap away, quickly accessing several websites looking for suitable satellites in the area.
“Hannah, did you just hack into the International Space Station server?” Hannah could hear the change in Tuck’s breathing.
“No!” She laughed. “Well, kinda! It’s not the ISS main server, but one they share with a few other parts of the agency programme.”
She turned and smiled at Tuck reassuringly.
“And I didn’t have to hack it.” She chuckled. “It doesn’t look good when all the US government and security agency servers get hacked all the time. It’s bad for their reputation.”
“So, how did you get in so fast?” Candy marvelled.
“They gave me my own login credentials and passwords.” Hannah shrugged. “That way it’s easier and quicker for me, and they can be sure I’m not doing things I shouldn’t be doing.”
“Don’t you still do stuff that maybe you shouldn’t be doing?” Danny looked at his wife suspiciously. “You haven’t gone completely legit, have you?”
“Of course not.” She laughed. “But if I’m doing something I don’t want them to see, I just hack in, like in the old days, and wipe everything clean before I leave. I only use my credentials for the ‘who gives a shit?’ stuff.”
Hannah clicked a few more keys and the screen split into a dozen smaller ones.
“Oh, come on!” She groaned. “One of you has got to be facing the right way!”
She flicked through each screen before she found something she recognised.
“Hah! Got you buster!” She smiled at Danny. “They’ve got one staring at DC! It won’t take me a minute to realign it to look at Philly.”
It actually took three minutes to move the satellite to where Hannah wanted it, but nobody was complaining about the delay.
When she eventually got it into the right position, the co-ordinates pointing it straight at Gregor’s house, she started to alter the zoom, taking it right down to almost street level.
A few more clicks, and they were staring at what looked like the top of a Humvee or armoured vehicle.
“That’s a strange thing to have in the middle of your garden.” Candy frowned, getting as close to the screen as she could. “And why are there people dotted around the garden?”
“Landscaping seems a bit far-fetched, wouldn’t you say?” Danny offered.
“What’s that?” Tuck pointed to a spot next to the neighbour’s house. A second vehicle seemed to be on the move, but instead of heading down the driveway, it was going up and over the lawn.
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this, guys.” Hannah whispered. “What if those are Lucky’s men, and they’re about to attack, straight through the adjoining wall?”
As they watched, a third vehicle started to move away from the house.
“Shit!” Tuck breathed. “This is about to go down!”
“They’re not going to have enough men!” Danny jumped from the seat, almost sending Hannah sprawling across the desk. “We need weapons and bodies.”
“Charlie’s in the kitchen with Joel. Get him, then get Marcus.” Tuck instructed Danny. “I’ll grab all the weapons we need. Hannah, get onto the Feds and the PPD. Let them know what we suspect is about to happen. Then call Brandon. We need every willing volunteer we can get.”
“What about me?” Candy asked, not making any assumptions as to where her husband would want her.
“I need you to stay here with Hannah.” Tuck growled. “This isn’t me being a chauvinist pig, sweetheart, but Hannah’s gonna be feeding us information to launch a counter-assault. She’s going to need someone to help keep in touch with the various groups as they move in. We don’t want any blue on blue incidents.”
Candy nodded and turned to Hannah.
“What first?”