The wrong person

Max continued to fill Noah in on what he had done and what still needed his approval or needed to be handled in general. When he was done relaying the general matters, he paused a minute before he said with a hesitant tone, "The final thing I wanted to tell you is that James and Andrew are no where to be found. They didn't show up this morning and no matter how hard I tried to contact them, I couldn't reach them in any way. I sent someone to visit them at their respective houses but it seemed like no one was home. So, either they bolted or they pretended not to be home. I certainly have a hard time believing it is just a coincidence but I have not figured out yet if and how they are involved with what happened today."

It was at this moment that Noah realized how Harold's henchman managed to get into the garage without being noticed by anyone. One of them must have been contacted by Olivia or Harold himself and given him access to the garage. Noah couldn't believe it. He wasn't very fond of them and he knew that they weren't too fond of them either. He also knew that they were in contact with Olivia at least, because of the whole situation with the three employees telling Olivia about his location. But somehow he didn't think that they would take matters this far. He didn't want to believe that someone on his team, someone connected to him by blood, would want him dead. Over what? Money? Envy?

The reason Noah assumed they had been involved, is because although their security of the garage wasn't that strong, it wasn't this weak either. Sure, the security measures on the entrance to the garage from the outside of the building is mainly directed at keeping cars and such outside, it still isn't easy for a person without a car to bypass. Or at least not without some proper planning and studying of the system and certainly not without being noticed by anyone. But if you have an inside man giving you access with their own key card, that is when the bypassing of that first layer of defence becomes child's play.

He didn't think that higher security was necessary in that part of the company property as nothing important was there, making there be no reason for someone to want to be there and not make their way further into the building. But his own nephew had proven that he needed to upgrade the security there as well to raise it to the same standard as the rest of the building. That one moment of making assumptions had almost cost him his onw life and that of his best friend. But while this was his initial thought, he also knew that if someone on the inside was helping without any regard for the lives of the other people there, then there was probably no level of security that could have prevented this from happening. No matter how much he wanted to have been to prevent what had happened today, no matter how much he wanted to keep it from happening again, the only real way for him to do that, was to be more diligent in deciding who allowed to be part of his team.

He had been wracking his brain to figure out how Harold's henchman had been able to get inside the garage in such a short time and done all of that, without being noticed or triggering any alarms. He was thinking of all kinds of extra measures he could take to make the garage more secure. But during that thought-process he hadn't thought about there being a traitor of this level on the inside. While the situation and realization in itself sucked, knowing that their security system had not necessarily failed and that the rest of his team was so great, that made everything a little more bearable.

After connecting the dots in his own mind, Noah explained the conclusion he had come to, to Max. "Well I can save you the effort of finding out how they were involved. Hearing you talk like that, I think I have it pretty much figured out. One of them must have given the man, who planted the explosives in our cars, their access card to the garage. That is the only way I can think of that would allow him to enter the garage so easily and without any alarms being triggered. Realizing in how much sh*t they got themselves into, they must have decided to run before we would come looking. As getting caught would certainly guarantee trouble and potentially even jailtime for both of them."

Max's expression turned into a killing glare as he said, "So, the cowards ran with their tails between their legs. I always knew they couldn't be trusted but for them to turn out this despicable, I couldn't have held that for possible. But rest assured that they can run all they want, I will never let them get away." After that, with an unchanging glare, Max asked if he could be excused. "I have nothing further to report. So, If you don't mind and have no further matters for me to handle, I would like to be excused as I have some things of my own I want to take care of."

Noah nodded before he chuckled for a minute from getting to witness this side of Max. It seemed that Andrew and James had made an enemy out of the wrong person. Noah could see the determination in Max's eyes and could tell he was not joking. Since he had witnessed plenty of times before what Max could achieve when he was serious about something, he had very little confidence in the success of the two fugitives in getting away. If he was a betting man, Noah knew who he would put his money on!