Best Man for the Job

by Meredith Fletcher

  In the next minute, the men in the black uniforms ran backward up the hall and into the room. The video feed stopped.

  Lazlo turned his attention to Eryn. “Did you see your whale?”

  “Not in that group.”

  “Seems like everybody inside that room came out after all the excitement was over.”

  “The excitement’s still not over. I was just up there. And not everyone got out of that room. I talked to a guy still there.”

  Callan leaned in. “Can you back that up to the time those men first broke into the room?”

  Irritation twisted the man’s features. “Sure I can.”

  “Do it.”

  Lazlo looked as if he was going to refuse on general principle and Callan realized he’d overstepped whatever boundaries Eryn had established. Frustration nipped at Callan. When he gave orders he was used to being obeyed in a heartbeat because lives were on the line.

  Daniel’s life might be on the line now.

  Smiling, Eryn stepped forward and clapped a hand on Lazlo’s shoulder. “Please. Back the footage up. My partner’s a little edgy. He’s new to this.”

  “Yeah, well, he’d better learn to lighten up if he wants to get anything done. You start throwing weight around this city, you better have the weight to throw.” Lazlo glared at Callan.

  With her hand still on the man’s shoulder, Eryn leaned closer, putting her face next to the security guard’s. It was a pure vamp move and Callan knew it. Under the circumstances, her actions were the right play to make, but he still didn’t like it. The woman knew what she was doing, and that in itself was worrisome.

  “Please.”

  Rolling his shoulders like a prizefighter, Lazlo nodded. “Sure. For you. A favor. Maybe you can do me a favor some time.”

  Callan’s dislike for the man grew. Eryn had already promised some kind of comp arrangement. Now Lazlo was pushing for more, trying to make it personal. Callan forced his anger away and focused on what he was trying to achieve. Eyes on the prize, soldier.

  The problem was Eryn McAdams was distracting. Standing behind her, Callan couldn’t help but be aware of her body as she leaned forward to distract Lazlo. Steeling himself and reining in his attention to peripheral matters, Callan watched the screen.

  Everything happened in reverse. The men in the dark uniforms ran backward into the room. A short time after that, they walked slowly out of the room. Along the way they holstered their weapons under the loose folds of the coveralls.

  “Can you find out where those guys came from?” Eryn pointed at the kidnappers.

  “Already tried. Me and Marty searched for them first thing.” Lazlo shrugged. “Guys came out of the elevator in those coveralls.”

  “What elevator?”

  “This one.” Lazlo tapped the keyboard in rapid syncopation.

  A camera view swelled up and filled the screen with the interior of an elevator cage. The doors opened and an arm thrust in with a spray can clutched in a fist. A moment later a green paint mist occluded the camera lens.

  “Guys were smooth.” Lazlo cracked his knuckles. “Hit the camera first thing and blinded us. Whoever they were, they probably dressed in the elevator.” He pulled up another report. “See? Shows the elevator remained stationary for forty-three seconds. We don’t see them again till they stepped off on four. The camera in the elevator and just outside it in the lobby went down about twenty minutes before that.”

  “You didn’t think maybe someone should have checked that out?” Callan couldn’t keep the accusation from his tone.

  Lazlo turned on him. “Sure we did. We sent a report. It’s what we do. We had guys converging on the elevator. They just got there too late. We had to hunt for them. The elevator stopped at every floor and we weren’t sure where they got off. Didn’t know what was going on, so we were spread thin. Back off, buddy. We know what we’re doing here.”

  Callan held back a scathing retort, but just barely. He wanted to point out they’d just allowed him access to their comm control without even knowing who he was during a high-stakes situation.

  “Hey, Ross.” Eryn shifted so she was between Lazlo and Callan. “Do you have any footage of the encounter out in the garage?”

  Suspicion filled Lazlo’s gaze then and took some of the edge off the sexual interest. He was starting to turn wary. “How do you know about that?”

  “One of the guys upstairs told me the kidnappers killed someone in the garage.”

  Lazlo shook his head. “That doesn’t have anything to do with your whale. Not unless they took your guy, and you said they didn’t do that.” He glared at her with increasing suspicion. “You want to tell me what you two are really up to?”

  The other guard, Wynn, shifted in his seat and drew Callan’s attention. One of the monitors in front of him showed the action in the hallway as Callan dragged Eryn after him in pursuit of the kidnappers. Dressed in the devil costume, Eryn wasn’t recognizable, but Callan was.

  Wynn’s head jerked around as his hand dropped down to his holstered pistol. He pushed up from the chair.

  Moving quickly, Callan sidestepped and launched a side kick that caught the guard in the side of the face. Wynn flew backward and his pistol sailed out of his hand. The man was unconscious before he rebounded from the wall. Before the guard slumped to the floor, Callan snagged the pistol from the air.

  Spinning, Callan instinctively flicked the safety off the pistol and brought it up before him while Lazlo raised his own sidearm. Inside the small room, their weapons were almost in each other’s faces. A split second before he pulled the trigger, Callan remembered the man in front of him wasn’t an enemy. Shooting him wasn’t an option.

  But he was about to be shot.

  Panicked, not believing how things had just gone insane inside the control room, Eryn lowered herself and drove a shoulder into Lazlo’s meaty side. Adrenaline had fired through her system and her strength was greater than she realized. She managed to lift the man off his feet and knock him back toward his partner. The air went out of him in a loud gasp.

  Lazlo’s pistol boomed inside the control center and nearly deafened Eryn. She never wanted to hear a gun go off again outside of a gun range. Fear spiked in her and she kept expecting to feel Callan’s bullets plow into her back. But she kept her head lowered and bulled into Lazlo, driving him back against the wall and pinning him. Before he could fire again, she jerked the Taser from his equipment belt, rammed it into his leg, broke physical contact with him and triggered the charge just as he started to lunge at her.

  Staggered by fifty thousand volts, Lazlo dropped his weapon and sank to the floor. Recovering only slightly, he immediately reached for his pistol. Callan beat him to it.

  “Facedown on the floor.” Callan’s voice thundered in the enclosed space. “Now.”

  Lazlo complied, moving a little slowly after being his encounter with the Taser.

  Eryn stared at the security guard, then at Callan. She couldn’t believe what she’d just done, because the job she’d worked and trained for was going down the tubes fast. Idiot! You’re an idiot! She didn’t know if she was talking to herself or to Callan.

  But she couldn’t have stood by and let Callan get shot, either. Lazlo would have shot Callan without hesitation. Things were moving too fast, spiraling even more out of control. She cursed. This was insane.

  “You okay?” Callan touched her shoulder gently.

  She resented his concern. She was trained for physical encounters. She wasn’t some babe in the woods. Angry at him and at herself for making things so much worse, she slapped his hand away and resisted the urge to jolt him as well. If she hadn’t been so taken with him she wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get this deeply involved in the situation they faced. Now the train was off the tracks.

  “I’m fine. Don’t touch me.” Lungs burning, she took a deep breath. “He was going to shoot you.”

  “I know.”

  “Or you were going to shoot him.”
/>   “Not a chance. If I was going to, he would have already been dead. You’re fast, but you’re not fast enough to have kept me from shooting him if I’d wanted to.”

  Eryn remembered the fluid way Callan had moved, how he had knocked the other guard out then scooped the flying pistol out of the air. She’d never seen anyone move so fast. He’d chosen not to kill Lazlo. She was sure of that. She took another breath and tried to think.

  That decision not to kill Lazlo had made Callan even more vulnerable to the man. It had also made her respect Callan more. Eryn felt certain the security guard wouldn’t have hesitated about shooting Callan. Lazlo had pulled the trigger as soon as his finger had found it. Only then did she realize they were all lucky no one had gotten hit by a ricochet.

  Calmly, Callan took his captured pistol off full cock and tucked it at his back behind his waistband without even thinking about it. The move was totally automatic. He seemed to stand taller, more certain of himself, and she knew that he’d been somehow incomplete without a weapon in his hand. His attention was focused solely on Eryn. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Callan studied the walls of the room. “Soundproofed, do you think?”

  Eryn took a shuddering breath and forced herself to examine the room. The gunshot was loud, though even a soundproofed room might not keep all of the noise inside. “Yes, but you’re not going to be able to keep the sound of that shot from being overheard. Somebody’s probably already calling it in.”

  With cool detachment, Callan studied the monitors. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s headed back this way. I don’t hear anyone checking in on these guys over the radio.”

  “You will.”

  “If we do, we’ll deal with it then.”

  “We?” Eryn couldn’t believe it. “All of a sudden it’s we?”

  He shifted his attention to her. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “Unless you want to walk away from this.”

  Eryn looked at him so calm and collected and resented him even more in that moment. Her career, maybe her life, was sliding right down the toilet as the clock ticked, and he just stood there looking at her. “This isn’t something you can just walk away from. These guys know my name. They know where I work.” Even saying that aloud undermined her confidence.

  “I forced you to do this. That’s all you have to say.”

  For a moment, Eryn seized on that. Maybe she had an out. It would be her word against Lazlo and his partner that she was coerced. The rationalization would probably work for the assault charges. She would need a good attorney, and her job at CS Sec would more than likely slide right down the tubes.

  She met his gaze and shook her head. “I’m not going to do that.”

  Callan held her gaze, then nodded.

  The nod irritated Eryn. She didn’t know what he meant by it. If he thought she’d somehow ascended to his level, he could—

  “Can you get me a copy of that footage?”

  It took Eryn a moment to realize he’d asked her a question, and a moment more to understand what that inquiry was about. “What?”

  “The abduction sequence. I need a copy.” He hesitated. “We need a copy.”

  “Why?” Even as she asked that, though, Eryn was already sliding into Lazlo’s seat. She’d liked the sound of that we.

  Callan didn’t bother to talk. He knew she was working on the data retrieval. He kept his attention on the monitors. “If we’re found out, we’ll have to move.”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong.” Guiltily, Eryn looked at the unconscious man and Lazlo weakly trying to get to his feet. “Maybe there’s a problem with the assault, but these guys overreacted.”

  “Yeah.” Callan looked around the room and focused on a first-aid kit hanging on the wall. “Not really worried about the assault charges.” He crossed to the kit and opened it.

  “You should be worried. Lawyers here in Vegas are blood-thirsty.” Eryn brought up the menus and cycled through them.

  “Are you going to be able to make a copy of that footage?” Callan removed a thick, wide roll of surgical tape from the kit. He also took out a large pressure bandage.

  “Yes. No problem. The system is like ones I’ve trained on.”

  Returning to Lazlo, Callan gazed down at the man. “Roll over. Onto your stomach.”

  “What are you going to do?” Lazlo’s words were slurred and his eyes weren’t tracking correctly. Eryn felt bad about that.

  Callan reached down, caught the man by the collar and yanked him up like he would a reluctant child. Then he dropped him onto the floor on his stomach. Before Lazlo could respond, Callan placed a knee in the middle of the man’s back and caught one of his arms. The tape shrilled as he unrolled it to bind Lazlo’s hands behind his back.

  “Hey! Stop! You can’t do this!”

  While he was talking, Callan shoved the pressure bandage partially into his mouth. Lazlo’s words became garbled and much softer. He squealed in fear and outrage. Callan wound more tape around the pressure bandage and the guard’s head, making big loops and pulling them tight.

  Eryn watched all the action from the corner of her eye, but she stayed at work at the keyboard. She’d located the video file and hoped the time/date stamp was accurate.

  “Are you about done?” Callan returned to the computer workstation.

  “Yes. I’ve isolated the minutes we want. Just gotta transfer them. You’re talking uncompressed video and audio files. They’re big.” If she hadn’t been in the habit of carrying a large capacity thumb drive on her key ring to transfer video files from her casework, she’d never have had the memory to store what she was taking. As it was, the files made a tight fit on the drive.

  Something buzzed in Callan’s pocket. He took out his cell and gazed at it. Then he frowned and put the phone away. For the first time that night he looked vulnerable, less certain of himself. Eryn almost felt sorry for him. Callan was a guy used to being in control.

  “Problem?”

  Callan took a breath. “My sister.”

  “You’re not going to talk to her?”

  “No. This isn’t the time. I don’t have anything for her.”

  “What are you supposed to have?”

  “An idea of where to find Daniel.” He frowned and stared relentlessly at the computer screen. His stiff, closed body language told her that any discussion on that topic wasn’t going to be tolerated.

  The marker showing the download progress moved slowly toward completion, but it was moving.

  “Lazlo, I need you to make a connect to the garage team. I can’t raise them from where I’m at.”

  Eryn scanned the monitors, looking for the speaker.

  “Here.” Callan tapped the second screen in the middle with a forefinger.

  On the screen, a man in his late forties stared up expectantly at the camera. A mustache framed his upper lip and he looked tired. “Lazlo?” He peered more intently at the camera.

  A frigid chill doused Eryn. She didn’t know how close the nearest team was, but she was certain they wouldn’t be far. She was only minutes away from getting busted. She forced herself to swallow…and to breathe.

  Impatiently, the mustached man pointed at one of the nearby guards. “Hallaway, you’re with me.” Together, the two men headed out of the room and vanished from the camera’s point of view. A moment later, the radio crackled again. “Anybody got eyes on the comm center?”

  “We’re running out of time.” Callan sounded calm.

  “I know. There’s no way to hurry this up.” Frustrated, Eryn watched the download progress. The bar had almost filled.

  “Take it. Let’s go.”

  Eryn shook her head. “No.”

  Callan reached for the thumb drive and she blocked the effort by grabbing his wrist. “Don’t. You take that out now, before it has a chance to finish, that video file isn’t going to do you any good. It’ll fragment and be corrupted. You won’t be able to get anything off it except a fe
w scattered artifacts, like pieces of a puzzle.”

  The corded muscle pressed against her palm held solid for a moment, then relaxed. She knew if he’d wanted to, he could have broken her grip. Of course, then she’d have had to resort to more drastic measures. She hadn’t risked her job just to walk away empty-handed. He pulled his arm back and she regretted losing the feel of him.

  “I’ll stay until it finishes. You go.”

  “No.” Eryn wasn’t going to be told what to do. Not by him. Despite the danger she was in, her thoughts lingered on the warmth and strength of his flesh against hers. “You don’t know how to eject the thumb drive properly.”

  “You just unplug it.”

  She gazed at him and shook her head, wondering where he’d been and how he’d possibly gotten so far out of touch with technology. “No, that’s not how you do it. You could get the same fragmentation.”

  Drawing in a deep breath in disgust, Callan glanced back at the computer monitor and ran a hand through his short-cropped hair.

  “If you can’t manage a computer, how do you expect to get your future brother-in-law back?” Eryn tapped the keys to safely eject the thumb drive.

  “Did those guys back there look like geeks to you?”

  Eryn didn’t reply. There was no need to. She had no problem remembering how afraid she’d been when the man had grabbed her and talked about taking her with them. The men were hard, dangerous. A lot like Callan. He was right: he was definitely in his element with those men.

  But he was going to have to find them before he could do anything. He glanced at his pocket again and she guessed that Jenny was calling her big brother once more. Callan checked the phone and looked unhappy.

  Eryn took the thumb drive from the USB port. “We’re done here. Let’s go.” She got up and headed for the door and Callan matched her stride for stride.

  Chapter 6

  In the hallway, Callan took her by the elbow and pulled her to the right.