Page 26 of Play the Game

We would be okay. Not yet. Not today and maybe not tomorrow, but soon. We were Sparks and Jensen, Tam and Jason. We would be all right again because we had to be.

CHAPTER 10

Jason

Our eight-person teampacked our bags into two separate black vans and left the HEAT HQ parking lot precisely at seven on the dot. After we installed the monitors, we would move into a large retreat house on the outskirts of town, complete with five acres of privacy and one very tricked-out barn for our temporary mission-control center. But first, there was a four-hour drive. I was in the command van with TJ and Bond.

While he drove and she navigated, I checked and rechecked every bit of technical equipment we’d be installing tonight. I also double- and triple-checked our comms equipment, ensuring we wouldn’t lose touch with our team at any point during tonight’s operation. Tam and Alder, both in the second van with the rest of the team, would also be in the field tonight, and while I never took chances with the team’s safety, this time the stakes felt precariously higher.

We crossed a time zone and arrived at a dark, desolate parking lot in Ann Arbor a few minutes past midnight. Li, driving the second van, pulled in behind us and dropped off Tam and Alder. Then she drove Kessler and Hart to a side street several blocks away, closer to their installation locations. While they installed devices in two separate locations, Li would patrol with her tranq rifle. When they were finished, Li would trek through the woods and arrive near the third location to keep watch there.

That would be the most difficult of the three installations. Tam and Alder would be breaking into a municipal warehouse on the edge of town, where the city stored road work equipment that was used year-round and road salt for the winter months. Due to the number of repair projects underway in July, much of which occurred at night, the facility was rarely deserted. Based on our previous night’s surveillance video and tracking the city’s networks, we’d estimated we had a twelve-to-fifteen-minute window just before one a.m.

While Kessler and Hart finished up their second installation, Tam and Alder were holding position, waiting for their opportunity to get inside the building. When we spotted the night foreman leaving for his middle-of-the-night lunch break, TJ gave the go signal. Monitoring the traffic warehouse, parking lot, traffic cams, and the convenience store where, according to his credit card receipts, he picked up two sandwiches and a Coke every night, I would have eyes on the guy until our agents were well clear of the building.

Using one of our descramblers, Tam and Alder got through the front door, then into the back space of the warehouse with no problem. They were thirty seconds ahead of schedule when they reached the back corner where the mounds of road salt were piled nearly to the twenty-foot ceiling. That was when we spotted—Tam and Alder in person and those of us in the command van through their video feeds—the good, old-fashioned mechanical lock holding closed the chain-link fence around the salt hills.

“Fuck me,” several of us muttered in unison.

“Alternative?” TJ asked.

“No,” Tam and I said at the same time.

We’d both studied the building plans. There was nowhere else even close to as good as the faraway, undisturbed-for-the-summer corner to hide our two-by-two-inch device. The real beauty of the plan was that when the mission was over, I would remotely detonate the little bugger one night when the foreman was picking up his lunch. No one would hear the tiny poof of its destruction or see the cloud of dust that would settle into the nearby salt and be spread on Ann Arbor’s icy roads months from now.

“I’m working on picking the lock,” Tam said, “but it’s a bear. It’s going to take a few minutes. How’s our time?”

I checked the convenience store’s cameras and frowned. We were six minutes into the operation, and the guy already had his sandwiches in hand. “We’re halfway in. T minus six.”

“Goddamnit,” Sparks muttered.

Through Alder’s camera feed, I watched her, her head bent over the lock, lips pursed in concentration.

“Can you cut your way in?” Kessler asked.

Now that she and Hart had completed their installations, they were all in on helping Tam and Alder. God, I loved this team and the way we all looked out for each other. But I knew the answer to the question before TJ answered it.

“There’s no way to reconnect without it being obvious,” TJ said. “We’d leave fingerprints of the op, and someone could get nosy and walk behind the salt mounds.”

“She has to go over the fence,” Hart said.

“She’s right,” Li said. “Sparks, I estimate twelve feet, with another foot of barbed wire at the top. You remember those drills, right?”

I silenced my mic and glared at Li, who was sitting beside me. “That’s risky.”

Li stared at me like I’d grown a second, evil head. “Are you new here? It’s not half as dangerous as other shit we do almost every day.”

“Whoever’s doubting me, I’ve got this,” Tam said. She was already three feet off the ground and climbing fast.

Of course, she had it. I didn’t even know where that insulting worry had come from. It’s like it just appeared on my tongue and popped out of my mouth. Reason number 734 or thereabouts, probably, why anything more than friendship between HEAT agents was not only forbidden, but it was also dangerous.

I turned my mic back on and refocused on bringing them all in safely. “I might be able to buy you a few more minutes.”

Sparks had reached the top of the links. She called to Alder, who threw a black mission vest up to her. The first two throws were too low. A second later, I realized my stalling tactic wasn’t going to work, either.

“He’s paying cash,” I whisper-shouted. “Tonight, of all nights, he’s fucking paying cash!”

“The register system isn’t on a network,” Alder said. “Jensen can’t hack it from his location.”

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