“Yes, sir.” He issued commands through a mic, then glanced at Sebastian. “Sir, the lead car is for you. The other car will follow.”
Sebastian turned to walk in the direction of the car. “Ragno, assemble a team of ten additional agents for me from those that are in the D.C. area. Duplicate the effort in Denver, and again on the West Coast. I want teams of at least thirty ready to go anywhere within a minute of when we find out where these bastards are. Alert Denver to mobilize the C130J crew, with medical staff, fully stocked for anything they throw at us, and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Parts unknown at the moment.” He knew with dead certainty that he’d need the equipment that the cargo plane held. Which equipment, in particular? He had no fucking clue.
“Got it,” Ragno said. “Order is issued.”
He had about one hundred yards of muddy field to traverse before reaching the vehicle, where the driver and two agents were waiting to accompany him to the airport. “Ragno, put me back on a private line.”
“Done.”
“Double check. Get Zeus on line, but no one else. No one external, and no one internal. No one at all, but you, me, Zeus.” Dammit, his insides were roiling with the thought that he couldn’t get out of his head.
“Give me a second.” He slow-walked, delaying his time for reaching the other agents and the vehicle so that he could finish his conversation. Snow was accumulating on the ground, and his feet were leaving dark tracks in the soft-white powder. “We’re secure. Zeus is on the line with us.”
“Talk to me,” Zeus said.
“Either this was an inside job or someone who was in our employ recently was giving the perps intel.”
“Interesting theory,” Zeus said.
“Tell us your thoughts,” Ragno said.
“Our fleet of Bell 525’s is relatively new,” he said, sidestepping a puddle of water with a fringe of ice. “They’ve been in use for what, six months?”
“Correct. We took delivery of six at the end of May. The two that are stationed there arrived in June.”
“The stowage compartment. That didn’t exist in the prior helicopters that we used at Last Resort, did it?”
“Only on the exterior.”
“So there was nowhere on the helicopter where two men could hide and then access the interior, while the helicopter was in flight.”
“I’m pulling up the plans now,” Ragno said.
“I was in the old ones more times than I can count,” Zeus answered. “And so were you. You know the answer to that without looking at the plans.”
He slowed his pace. “Our customizations are kept secret, correct?”
“Yes,” Zeus said.
“So how would the perps have known there’d be a hiding place?”
“Wishful thinking?” Ragno said. “I need more before I buy it. Someone with the manufacturer could have leaked our customization.”
“I need more too. They could have had plan A, plan B, and plan C.”
He was almost to the Range Rover, where three sets of ears would be tuned to his every word. He slowed his pace. Black Raven didn’t follow a simple alternating procedure for transport vehicles. They were currently in a two-to-one approach, and it would have taken someone with knowledge of Black Raven’s procedures, and someone watching the helicopter usage for the pattern at the airport, to know which helicopter was going to be the one to pick up Spring. “They knew which helicopter was flying next. They knew our usage pattern. Right?”
Zeus gave a low whistle.
Ragno said, “Well, they wouldn’t have left that to chance, would they?”
“I don’t think anyone in our current ranks would have done this,” he said, sickened by the thought, but having to entertain it. “But we have to look at our own. More than the agents in our current ranks, I’m thinking it could be someone who’s left us. One of our prior agents could have shared inside knowledge.”
Black Raven hired men and women who had honor and integrity. The company was considered the crown jewel of private security contractors. Employment with Black Raven was coveted by many and offered to relatively few, and it wasn’t a temporary stint. It was a career with honor. There were risks, and the job was dangerous, but the agents were highly compensated, and the benefits were the best in the business. No matter the degree of psychological testing that was employed in the hiring process and in training, or the loyalty that the company instilled, the bottom line was that he was dealing with humans, and the almighty dollar was a powerful lure.
“Zeus, any thoughts?” Sebastian asked.
“I agree with you,” Zeus said. “I’ll work with Ragno on establishing parameters for an internal assessment. Top priority, though, is the people who’ve left our employment and ascertaining whether any had knowledge of procedures at Last Resort.”
Sebastian’s heart thudded as he reached the SUV. “Agreed. Because we want to know where they’ve gone. Maybe cross-referencing to the profiles you’re assembling on Root, Young, BY Laboratories, Whittaker, and Senator McCollum will ultimately give us something.”
He glanced at the three agents who were standing at attention, outside the lead vehicle, waiting on him. Their eyes reflected the somberness of the weather and the events of the day. After the agents introduced themselves, he said, “The reality of losing our own is never easy. Welcome to the team that’s going to find the people who did this.”
The three pairs of eyes reflected his own grim feelings, showing that they were each fantasizing that they would be the one to make the perpetrators pay. Black Raven agents were not killing machines. Not usually. Today, if that’s what was needed to do the job, he was going to authorize it wholeheartedly.
He stepped into the car, automatically touching the button for pushing the seat back and glancing in the rear seat to see how much legroom the agent who was behind him needed. The agent gave him a nod. “Sir, you’re fine.”
Another agent said, “We knew to put the shortest agent behind you.”
Sebastian chuckled as the SUV pulled away, focused for a second on where they were heading, and the day became grayer as he wondered what in the hell he was going to say to Skye. “Ragno?”
“We’ve lost twenty seven agents in the last calendar year, thirty two in the calendar year before that. That’s the easy part,” she said. “When they leave, they don’t typically provide a road map of where they’re going. It’s going to take some work.”
Over the mic he heard Zeus and Ragno discussing the best method of formulating searches before Zeus broke the connection. Ragno was quiet for a second. Without the click-clack of her typing as she sent instructions to her team, he wouldn’t have known that she was there. It was too much silence for him. “Mic me to the teams.”
Voices flooded the mic and he felt comfortable again. As he shifted in the seat, he felt an out-of-place lump in his jacket pocket and reached for it. His hand froze as he touched the bag of jellybeans that Spring had given him. The day was only going to get harder.
I’m going to find you, sweetheart. Bank on it.
Starting now, he thought, as the airport came into view.
Once in the hangar, he stepped out of the SUV and walked, without hesitation, to the jet. Embrace the suck, he told himself. Be a man, and own up to it. He’d embraced more crap that he would have ever imagined fitting into a life. Seeing Skye right now was the last thing he wanted to do. Witnessing the hurt in Skye’s eyes when he owned up to losing Spring? Unimaginable.
He climbed the ladder, feeling like it was the final leg of Everest and his tank was out of oxygen. Every single fucking job until that moment had been easy. Nights strung together in war zones without sleep, holding onto weapons for so long they became an extension of his hands, the edginess of knowing that one mistake would be fatal, picking up body parts after an explosion. Those things came with the job. Having to console Skye, having to tell her he was sorry for underestimating the capabilities of the enemy? Unfathomable.
Raven One’s eng
ines were humming. The door closed behind him and the agents who’d come with him. One of the agents who had remained with her was in the doorway that separated the two cabins. He gave Sebastian a nod, his eyes grim. She was in the rear cabin, on the couch, shoes off, legs up, and head down on her knees.
He bent to his knees as the plane started rolling.
“Skye.”
She looked at him with eyes that were devoid of hope. He reached for her, but she moved away and kept her hands clasped together in front of her knees. “Don’t touch me.”
Sorry wasn’t going to cut it. Not for him, and especially not for her. As the jet lifted off the ground, he said, “I’m going to find her. You need to believe that.”
She drew a deep breath, her eyes heavy with misery. “I believed you when you said we were safe. Then you promised you’d bring her back.”
Her words stole his breath, as effectively as a bullet piercing a lung.
“Negotiate with them,” she said, standing. “Tell them that they can have me in exchange for her. Please,” she said, drawing a deep breath as she fought for control. “Tell them. Figure out what they want me to pay for her freedom. I’ll give them my last dollar.”
“I can’t do that.” For a million reasons, and one being that the perpetrators hadn’t indicated they were interested in bargaining. The perps had exactly what they wanted. An almost complete set of backup and, with Spring, great leverage on Barrows. Plus, if everything that Skye had said was true, the perps now had the missing code, because Spring knew it. His blood ran cold with that thought. He hoped to God that they didn’t know what they had.
Luminous gray-green eyes, shiny with fatigue and fear, studied him. “Do you have any fucking clue as to where they’ve taken her?” She took a deep breath. “Please tell me that you have some idea of who these people might be, and where she is?”
Death would have been easier than being honest with Skye. But she was being brave, she had asked a damn good question, and she deserved an honest answer.
“Not yet.”
She held her hand over her mouth in a silent scream before turning fast, running across the rear cabin, gripping the door of the bathroom and throwing it open. She moved so fast he had no idea what she was doing, until she was on her knees, dry-heaving into the toilet. She hadn’t eaten a damn thing that he knew of, and he knew she didn’t have anything to vomit. But her body was demanding that she break down, and even though her strong-willed brain had no intention of showing weakness, she couldn’t stop this reflex. He went into the bathroom with her, knelt next to her, and massaged her back until the spasms stopped.
After, he lifted her from the floor, eased her to the couch, and wiped her face with a cold, damp washcloth. He handed her a bottle of water, which he was relieved that she took. The coward’s way out would have been for him to sit in the forward compartment, under the guise of giving her space. Instead, he looked to the agent who was stationed in the doorway between the two cabins. “Get me the sat phone.”
Normally he didn’t bother with the satellite phone while in flight, figuring his flight time gave Ragno a break, in which she could digest some of the tremendous volumes of information that her team collected. On this flight, though, he needed to communicate with Ragno.
He took off his jacket, and laid it on the seat in which he’d sat earlier, when the only thing that had been on his mind had been sex. When the jacket hit the leather seat, the bag of jellybeans that Spring had given him fell out of the interior pocket and thudded onto the carpeted floor. Earlier in the day, he’d eaten his way through half of the candy, but the bag still held at least sixty-six.
Or some other increment of three.
His gut twisted at the sight of the opaque jellybeans. As he bent to pick up the bag, his mind played a trick with a flash of denim-blue eyes, shining bright with the light of her innocent smile, and the words that she’d last spoken to him drifted through his thoughts. ‘‘I’ll save some cupcakes for you. Yours will be the best.”
In response, he had failed her. Miserably.
The heartache that came with the memory was the kind of suck he could never embrace. It tore his insides apart, immobilizing him, so that he had to drop to one knee as he reached for the bag. The despair that he felt at the thought of the sweet, innocence that was Spring being subjected to the same evil that he’d seen at the safe house overwhelmed him for a long second. He’d never felt so ineffective in his life, and for this moment of failure, he had an audience of one. One was too many. She lifted her head off of her knees and was watching him with a glance of despair and fear that matched what was racing through him. As he held her gaze, she studied him, the look of compassion in her eyes telling him that she was reading him as effectively as anyone had ever done.
Shake it off, he told himself. He touched the bag, gently picked it up, placing the jellybeans into his pants pocket as he stood. Putting the emotions on the backburner.
Easier said than done, and now that his emotions were involved, the tailspin he’d been in for the last four days was uncontrollable. He fought hard to keep his face calm, as his agent returned to the cabin and handed him the sat phone. Maybe he needed to sit in the forward cabin. Emotional ineffectiveness wasn’t going to find Spring. As he took a step forward, Skye said, “Please stay with me.”
It all still sucked. Yet her soft voice, those few words, instantly made him feel like he wasn’t losing control of the most precarious situation in which he’d ever been. He sat on the couch, next to Skye. She stayed in her self-protective, knees-up huddle, but when she placed her forehead back on her knees she leaned against him. She slid her arm across his waist as if she needed to hold onto something solid to anchor herself. Fear came off her in waves, but she was hanging tough. God he admired her. Her strength, her ability to hold it together, her understanding that there was, for the moment, absolutely nothing she could do but trust that he’d come through.
Sebastian took a moment to inhale the clean, sweet fragrance of her hair, enough of a jolt to reinforce his determination. To find her sister, to figure out what the fuck her father was up to, and to get through this entire clusterfuck without further collateral damage.
He lifted the sat phone to his ear and wrapped his free arm around her, drawing her closer. Her hand fisted into his shirt, and he felt her hot breath against his chest, right over his heart. “Ragno,” he said, holding the phone to the ear that was closest to Skye so that she could hear Ragno’s side of the conversation as well. “Talk to me.”
Ragno drew a deep breath. “Too damned busy weaving all these threads of research together like a silkworm.”
“Anything sticking yet?” His only hope of finding Spring lay in the profiles that Ragno’s team was generating. He hoped like hell that there’d be some sort of intersect, some clue that would tell him where to look. And fast.
“Not yet,” she said, “but the cocoon’s growing. Are you really going to march into Senator McCollum’s office, with Barrows’ cataclysm scenario being your only roadmap?”
Yeah. With nothing more than his certainty that at least Skye believed her father, even if he wasn't so damn sure. “Absolutely,” he said, allowing none of his skepticism to shade his voice. He was rewarded when Skye squeezed her arm more tightly across his waist, as some of the tension left her body. “I don’t have the luxury of time on this one.” He looked forward to seeing the senator’s face when he told him he was acting on instructions from Richard Barrows, and that he had to see the President of the United States.
Where was that going to get him? No fucking clue. All he knew was that the tailspin had picked up speed, and just as he had followed his gut when it told him he needed to talk to Skye and Spring in person, his gut was telling him the same thing with McCollum.
Gut instinct aside, he needed a few facts. Something. Anything. “You’re now working with developing profiles on Barrows, Root, Young, BY Laboratories, Whittaker, our former Black Raven agents, and checking for interse
ctions, and any link to Senator McCollum, right?”
“Yes," Ragno told him evenly, without reminding him that she knew her job and was the best at what she did, and didn't need reminders from him. “Pieces and parts, integrating more data than five freaking super computers. No one in my department is getting so much as a pee break until we figure this out.”
“Something’s going to break soon,” he said, offering encouragement, though not at all sure there would be a connection.
“Aside from our bladders?” she muttered under her breath, the click-clack of her typing not pausing. “It’s a challenge, and we’re all up for it. Right now we’re hacking our way through the universe, and we’re being damn careful not to leave footprints. This takes time, Sebastian.”
“I know.”
“When you get your hands on Barrows or his backup, please deliver straight to me. If Shadow Technology actually does what the man claims, my job would be a hell of a lot easier. Black Raven would rule the universe.”
“Duly noted,” he said, “just talk to me. Tell me what you find, as you find it.”
He glanced into Skye’s eyes, absorbing her pain and misery and pairing it with his own. He touched his lips to her forehead. “We’ll have a safe house for you in D.C.”
“Sebastian?” Ragno asked.
“Talking to Skye now.”
“Gotcha,” Ragno answered.
“I know you’d prefer to not be away from the search and rescue mission,” he said to Skye, “but I need you to cooperate and go to the safe house without argument. You’ll know what I know, as I know it. I promise. Any important developments.”
Skye shook her head, drawing a deep breath as she readied herself to argue with him, but he didn’t give her the opportunity to respond.
“I need to know that you’re safe. Otherwise,” he swallowed, not wanting to admit it to himself, much less to her, but knowing that anything less than total honesty wouldn’t work. “I won’t be able to function. Please don’t argue with me on this. Please.”
Shadows (Black Raven Book 1) Page 37
