The Billionaire's Redemption (The Billionaire's Kiss, Book Five): (A Billionaire Alpha Romance) by Olivia Thorne Page B

THAT . ”
    The wheels in my head start turning. “Did you happen to have any sort of tracking devices on the paintings?”
    “What? Why would I do that?”
    “Oh, I don’t know – in case they got stolen?”
    He gives me a wry look. “If somebody found them in the first place, I wouldn’t worry about them being stolen. I’d worry about my reputation getting trashed and having to go on the run – kind of like I am now.”
    “So you didn’t use any kind of tracking?” I ask, disappointed.
    “You saw them. Did you notice any cell phone-sized gadgets attached to them?”
    “Cell phones do a thousand other things than GPS, dumbass,” I snap. “That’s why they’re so big. You could have used transmitters the size of a pill and glued them to the insides of the frames.”
    He looks at me, dumbfounded. “Really?”
    “Yes, really – as long as they had a power source to keep them charged. And if you had, then I could have tracked the transmitter anywhere in the world – including back to Epicurus’s home base.”
    “…shit…”
    “In fact,” I say, thinking aloud, “it might not be a bad idea for us to wear some GPS tracking devices…”
    “What?! Why?!”
    “Well, for one thing, we’d be able to keep track of each other. If one of us was wounded or kidnapped – ”
    “Fuck no,” Grant says, his knee-jerk reaction at high alert.
    “I agree,” JP says. “Fuck no.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because then Epicurus could find us!” Grant says, as though it’s obvious.
    “What?! No. That’s not how GPS works. You’d have to know the specific ID of the transmitters to track them. Otherwise you’d never know they were there. Except, you know, unless you physically searched and found them.”
    “But the government can track cell phones.”
    “Completely different. That’s computer devices that have to be connected to a network to – ”
    “NO,” Grant says.
    “But I could make it uncrackable – ”
    “Forget it.”
    I sigh.
    All great ideas are always initially rejected out of hand.

24
    After my sudden, glorious discovery of a clue, it’s almost immediately proved worthless. There’s no way to use the knowledge about the missing paintings, and nothing else in the police report is useful.
    At least the spaghetti is delicious. JP may be a slob in the housekeeping department, but he’s a damn fine cook.
    Things thaw out a bit as the wine begins to flow. There’s some reminiscing about the past, some jokes, even a little bit of speculation on how we can find Epicurus.
    Throughout, Dominique is pissy and refuses to speak. Which is A-OK by me.
    As the meal is wrapping up, JP gets a phone call. He talks in French a little, but mostly he just listens. When he hangs up, he looks the most depressed I’ve seen him since Grant walked in this morning and dragooned him into helping us.
    “Who was that?” Grant asks.
    “ Mon ami de la police . ”
    “Why the long face? Did he not have any info?”
    “Au contraire. He had a great deal to tell me.”
    According to the mole, the police were tipped off last night by Interpol, who knew that a private jet with ‘international fugitives’ would be landing in France. Apparently Mike had had to provide a flight plan upon entering French airspace so as not to get shot down by the military. (After 9/11, national governments take things like unidentified airplanes very seriously.) Once the flight plan was filed, it was a simple matter of scrambling officers to intercept us at the landing field.
    “Why did the cops get involved?” I asked. “Why didn’t Interpol show up?”
    “Contrary to what you see in movies, Interpol’s just an organization where a bunch of different countries’ law enforcement agencies share information with each other,” Grant explains. “The U.S. and Europe don’t want some kind of super law enforcement agency that can override their jurisdictions, so Interpol doesn’t have any agents capable of making arrests. All they