Chapter 78

Chapter 78

“Of course I have,” the other party said with a sly grin, “but…”

Brian’s eyes narrowed with irritation at the words.

The guy was notoriously shady, never playing by the rules. It seemed he was planning to exploit FireWing’s reputation to gouge Brian for a hefty sum.

But Brian didn’t play that game. He didn’t like anyone strong–arming him.

Without letting the man finish, Brian reached out and pressed the ground floor button on the elevator.

As the door on the ground floor reopened, Brian didn’t wait for the man’s pleas, stepping out briskly. He had no taste for these tiresome verbal chess matches. Anyone who had dealt with him knew that.

“Mr. Howard! Look at this!” Reid called out just as Brian approached the revolving doors. handing over his phone.

Frowning, Brian stared at the blinking red dot on Reid’s screen.

Natalie, who had been missing for a full day and night, had resurfaced.

According to the tracker, she was then mere blocks away from them.

But Natalie’s plane ticket was to a city hundreds of miles away, yet here she was, in town.

Her level of caution and counter–surveillance was odd.

Before Natalie had joined the crew, Brian had taken advantage of her sleeping to implant a stealth tracking bug in her phone. Once her phone was on, he could pinpoint her exact location. As Brian took the phone, the building shuddered slightly.

Seconds later, a series of muffled, deafening explosions erupted from below them.

At the flea market, Natalie snapped her laptop shut, pulled the SIM card from her phone, wiped down her equipment to clear any fingerprints, and stood up. Casually, she tossed the still–warm laptop into a nearby dumpster.

When she reached the curb, ten minutes had passed.

“Where did you go?” Uriah asked out of curiosity as Natalie climbed back into the car right on time.

“Just picked up a little something,” Natalie replied with a smile, showing him a Tetris handheld game. “Nina has been hounding me for it.”

As she said that, she pulled a charging cable from her bag to juice up her phone, planning to download some classic pixelated games on the road to load onto Nina’s new game toy.

Chapter 78

However, an alarm blared from the speakers when her phone connected to the car.

Uriah glanced back at her with a teasing look. “Even the best hackers get hit sometimes, Got a virus on your phone you didn’t notice?”

Natalie frowned and quickly scrolled through the background processes on her phone, spotting an unknown program pathway.

She scrutinized the code and realized it was a sophisticated stealth tracker, something she hadn’t encountered before.

Someone had managed to plant it on her phone without her noticing, and that someone was skilled.

“Who did this?” She frowned, looking towards Uriah for answers, “Did King mess with my phone before I returned?”

“He’s always respected your privacy, never into that stuff. You know that,” Uriah shook his head. “You’ve been outsmarted by someone else.”

It was true that Natalie usually used King as her guinea pig for coding experiments, and he always indulged her whims.

If not King, then who?

“I’ll look into it later. I’ll create a reverse–tracking program to find out who it is,” Natalie murmured, promptly turning off her phone to prevent further tracking.

After finishing their conversation, Uriah noticed some traffic ahead and casually flipped the radio to a traffic news station.