Page 80 of The B-Team

“What are you calling her?” Katrina asked, a soft smile on her face.

“Gwendolyn Anne Ford-Talbot Carter,” Harvard said with pride. “Now hurry up and get this server stuff done so you can come to the hospital and meet our daughter.”

“But don’t hurry too fast,” Rachel said. “I arranged for my hairdresser to pop in this morning, and we’re moving into our suite before lunch too. It’s about time.”

“Got it.” Katrina laughed. “Come after you get your hair done.”

“She’s still a work in progress,” Harvard muttered.

“I heard that,” Rachel said. “Katrina, make sure you search for the minister’s nickname too. It might be saved under that.”

Katrina sat up straight. “He has a nickname?”

“Of course. It’s a rite of passage for every public schoolboy. His is Humpty Dumpty. Apparently, he had a reputation for bouncing back from whatever befell him in school. The upper class does enjoy keeping their ridiculous childhood nicknames long into adulthood, so you may well find it.”

“What was your nickname, Rachel?” Katrina asked with a smile as she took notes.

“None of your business,” Rachel said haughtily before the line went dead.

“I can’t believe Rachel’s a mother,” Katrina said with wonder.

Ryan ran a hand over his jaw, feeling day-old stubble and wishing he could shave. His hair never grew in like other guys’. It came in patches. “I can’t believe she hasn’t already eaten the baby. I’ll call the rest of the team and tell them what to look for.”

“And we’ll start hunting through the files.” Katrina tapped the piece of paper on which she’d made the note. “Something about this nickname rings a bell… I’ll figure it out.”

With that, she signaled to Ryan that she needed the computer.

It was Katrina who found the file. Labeled “fairy tale endings that didn’t go as planned,” it contained a lifetime’s worth of information from a London madam called Carla, one of Lake’s connections. Carla, who’d run a brothel, The Enchanted Wood, in Soho for many years, had tried to recruit Megan at one point. When she retired a year earlier, she passed every secret she’d gathered to Lake for safekeeping, something she’d mentioned to several clients. Which was how the minister had known where to find his dirty little secrets.

As far as they could tell, Carla was on some no-name tropical island enjoying her retirement and had no idea of the trouble her information had caused. Ryan hoped she was happy. After reading about all the pompous, entitled assholes she’d called clients, he figured the poor woman deserved some peace.

“It was his nickname,” Katrina explained. “It made me think about nursery rhymes, which led to fairy tales, and hey presto—there he was! Tucked away in the brothel files, along with all his dirty little secrets.”

“You did good,” Ryan told her, meaning every word. “And you made sense of Elle’s filing system. For that alone, you get champagne.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “You buying?”

“I think this round should be on the owners.” He thought about it. “And there should be food included too.”

Katrina laughed as she downloaded the file before permanently deleting it from their server, so that the hacker couldn’t stumble across it before they were done. They then sent it to the team at Julia’s house, to be printed out and passed on to Lake’s lawyers.

“You got it?” Ryan asked Rochelle over speakerphone.

“We’re printing it off now.” Rochelle’s tone was icy. “Once we have a hard copy, I’ll take it to Ms. Patel myself. After that, it’s up to Lake what he does with the information.”

“Whatever he does, he’d better do it fast,” Katrina reminded her boss. “There’s still someone wandering around in our files, and we either need to stop him or go ahead and wipe the server like we planned.”

“Don’t worry,” Rochelle said evenly. “I don’t think Lake will take his time sorting this out. I’ll check in with you later.” The line went dead.

“Have you noticed,” Ryan said, “that nobody says goodbye anymore? It’s like we’ve given up on being polite. I miss the good old days. People had manners; they thought about others. They were more civilized times.”

“Hey, Mr. Manners?” Rodrigo called from the tiny kitchen area. “Did you eat all the chips?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lake Benson sat in the interview room of the Chelsea custody suite with his lawyer, Ms. Patel, waiting for his old army colleague to turn up to interrogate him. Garry was dragging his heels, making Lake wait in a power move as pathetic as the man himself. The tactic had no effect on Lake, who’d had patience drummed into him during his time in the SAS. The longer he was forced to wait, the more honed Lake’s rage became. That was something else he’d learned in Special Forces—anger could be pressed down and refined until it became a sharpened blade that could be used with precision to take out the enemy.

And Garrison Fitzwater and his family were very much Lake’s enemies.