Read A Deadly Web for Free Online Page B

went.
    Nothing.
    Not a single sign that anyone but she had been here.
    She stood in her bedroom for several minutes, looking around. Nothing disturbed. The bed as she’d left it, duvet smooth, pillows neatly decorative. The book she’d been reading earlier in the evening on one nightstand, along with the usual nightstand clutter.
    Lamp. A bottle of water. A clock radio that also served as a sound machine providing assorted soothing noises. A box of tissues. And on the other nightstand, another lamp, a stack of books she wanted to read, her cell phone plugged into its charger.
    Her cell phone.
    Tasha walked around the bed, eyeing the phone. She had to charge the thing every single night, all night, and even then it virtually always went dead at some point during the day. It didn’t matter what kind of cell phone, what brand, what service provider, how much or how little she used it. They all died on her within a matter of hours.
    The fact that it was here, in this day and age when so many people were practically attached by umbilical cords to their cell phones, would be evidence to some that she had not just gone out somewhere, but had fled the condo in haste.
    To some. Maybe to those men who had come for her?
    She hesitated a moment, then leaned down and rather gingerly touched the screen so it would light up. Then she pressed her thumb to the screen, using yet another layer of the security that had become such a big part of her life. Anyone who had her very unlisted number could call the phone, leave a message or text, but once there it was locked in her phone until she unlocked it. Without her thumbprint, the phone offered only a lighted screen with a box in the center, a box blank until it read her thumbprint. Then only she could access information contained in the elegant little device, numbers, contacts, even the number of the phone itself and the apps she used.
    The home screen came up, just as it always did. Showing her the time, the date. Call and text icons. Message icon. Menu and browser icons. Icons for the apps she used most often.
    Tasha checked to make sure that the last call made wasthe one she had made. Checked to make sure there weren’t voice mail or text messages waiting for her.
    There was one text message, chillingly simple.
Dead.
     
    —
    “He did what?” Duran looked up from the file he’d been studying, his coldly handsome face not showing nearly the displeasure his normally calm voice betrayed.
    “Left a text on her phone.” Alastair kept his own voice calm, his own face expressionless. It hadn’t, after all, been his fuck-up.
    “A text.”
    “Yes. Just one word.
Dead.
”
    “She has a secure phone.”
    “Yes, sir. Fingerprint activated. Her print, of course.”
    “Which Graves bypassed.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And did he say what possessed him to do something so idiotic?”
    “He said he thought the idea of tonight’s mission was to rattle her. You had told them she wouldn’t be in the condo, that you were sure she’d sense they were coming and would get out before they could get in. So the idea, or part of it, was to let her see the team getting in and out so easily, see them apparently bypass all the expensive security of her building, her condo, even her cell phone, let her be rattled by them. Threaten her sense of being safe. Graves thought the text would help accomplish that objective.”
    Gently, Duran responded, “And did he explain why he felt the need to think for himself?”
    “No, sir.”
    Duran leaned back in his chair. “When we’re done here, send him to me.”
    “Yes, sir.” Alastair was very glad it hadn’t been his fuck-up.
    “She was gone, as expected.” It wasn’t really a question.
    “Yes. We had the real-time security video, of course; she slipped out of the condo and waited in the stairwell, hardly more than a minute before the team arrived on the third floor. The stairwell the team wasn’t using, obviously.”
    “Even though that stairwell was