Page 31 of Critical Strike

“How long will that take for her to get what she needs?”

“A few hours maybe. Hard to say.” He rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t like the thought of being in one spot for so long, but there was no way around it. “Listen, once she gets what she needs, I need you to get Weston to meet Rick and arrange for us to come in tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Go see him face-to-face. Calling is too dangerous,” Luke warned. “Rick left his office to use a pay phone earlier to call me. He thinks this whole search for Claire smells rotten.”

“That’s because it is. We’ll take care of it. You worry about everything on your end. I’ll contact you in a few hours.”

“Thanks, Brax.” Some of the tension left his shoulders. He could always count on his family to come through.

Hanging up, Luke pulled one of the granola bars he’d picked up at the supermarket from his pocket and went back to the computer lab.

Claire was hunched forward, her face inches from the screen. “Dumb general user interface... So unprofessional...”

“Hey.” He leaned against the wall next to the computer. “Time to eat something.”

Her gaze remained fixed on the computer. “I’m not hungry.”

“You need to keep your energy up. It’s a stressful situation. You’re burning more calories than you realize.”

She extended a hand in his general direction but missed the granola bar by about a foot.

Chuckling, he slipped the bar into her palm. She promptly slapped it on the table next to the keyboard.

“You need to put it in your mouth for the eating thing to work.” He crouched beside her and opened the wrapper. He took her hand off the keyboard and put the granola bar in it.

He stood back up when she gnawed on the snack with one hand still typing. Khan stretched out under the desk, waving a paw in the air. They were both in their zones, with only Luke left with nothing to do.

But he could do what he’d done for Claire even when they were kids—he would look out for her.

Leaving them at the desk, he walked to the other end of the library and back. He constantly kept diligent watch out various windows in between checking on her.

An hour went by.

Then another.

Then another.

By the time five had passed, and it was closer to dawn than sunset, he was starting to feel itchy. They’d been here too long. His instincts were starting to holler at him.

He wanted to give her as much time as possible, but time was running out.

“That’s right...” she mumbled, as wide-awake as she’d been when they stepped into the library. “What do you think of that, Khan?”

He smirked from his perch near the periodicals. She’d been talking to the cat all night, and it made her even cuter.

But then she stiffened and stopped typing, the first time he’d seen her do that all night. “Uh-oh. That’s not good.”

He straightened and in a handful of strides, reached her chair. “What?” The coding stuff on her screen was all but a foreign language to him.

“I had to access the Passage Digital system remotely to be able to do what I need to.”

He nodded, although he wasn’t exactly certain what that meant.

“I knew they would see my intrusion into the system. I set it up so it looked like it was coming from one of the remote offices in Canada—nothing they’d deem too suspicious, just someone working late.”

“What was theuh-ohabout?”

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