Ice Cold by Cherry Adair

report the bombing, the time and duration of the call, then stuck his comm back into his pocket. “You good?”
    “I am.” She turned back to her computer, an extension of herself, and started keying in data to authenticate the call and trace its origins, similar to last night’s procedure when she was trying to find Savage.
    While the men discussed the call, she started backtracking, searching for confirmation or anything that would authenticate the PRA’s claim that they were responsible for bombing the bank.
    “I don’t give a shit what they claim. The PRA had nothing to do with this.” Sam Poole was in his early, very early, twenties and looked about nineteen, with a smooth baby face, silky blond hair, and intense brown eyes. He paced. Back and forth. To the door and back to the table. From the table to the door. Just watching him, wore her out. He was like a thrashing live wire.
    “While they like bombs just fine, they’re more inclined to go for smaller targets—post offices, small government offices. They’re small dogs, their claim isn’t realistic. They probably like the idea of people thinking they have a big bark, but they don’t have the contacts for this amount of bite.”
    “Agreed.” Roan made a twirling motion with one finger and pointed to a chair, but Poole kept moving. Honey caught the look that passed between Banks and Navarro. Pool would be gone in an hour, she thought, amused, or one of the two men would sit on him until he learned to center himself and cool down. This was just the beginning of discovery for the op. If the kid were already hot under the collar, the team would consider him a liability.
    “The call to Downing Street came from a public phone outside a pub in Donegal,” she announced, taking advantage of a few moments of silence. “ Could be the local PRA group, but I’m digging deep—Hot damn. No, not the pay phone at the pub. The call was rerouted from…” Honey tapped out a sequence of numbers to keep tracking the call, and at the same time overlaid a map of the area so she could see where she was. “A one-thousand-square-foot farmhouse in Saint Amans Sout, in the south of France.” She glanced up, meeting Navarro’s eyes. “Place has been on the market for two weeks.”
    “Not PRA, then. No surprise.” Navarro turned to Oliver Reed “Olly, don’t you have a contact inside the London cell? See what they have to say about someone claiming to be them.”
    “They’ll be fucking delighted that someone else is enabling them to get more street cred without their having to lift a finger or spend a penny.” Oliver Reid pushed out of the chair as he took his comm out, walking to the other side of the room where it was quieter. Honey wondered how he’d gotten the layers of shiny scar tissue on both wrists. The big man made no effort to cover them, but the location and the obvious severity spoke of hours of torture. He was also missing the tip of his middle finger on his right hand.
    “How’s the scrutiny of the computer logs going?” Navarro asked her.
    Aren’t you fortunate that I can juggle ninety-nine things at once? She went out of one screen and into another. “The bits and pieces I’m looking for aren’t physical, just minute data variances. Not as easy as picking up items with tweezers. Do you think the explosions have something to do with the transactions logs I’m reviewing?”
    “No solid connection, just trying to put the pieces together to see if there’s a connection.”
    Honey added a different code to what she had and scanned the numbers dancing like fireflies across the screen before she spoke again. “Or eliminate it. Taking out bank systems redundancy, it would be easier—not easy, but easi er —to move money out of personal or corporate accounts and harder to track with systems out of sync on the mirror site.”
    She turned to look at the group as a whole. “Easier than getting into a vault and hauling around that much cash.