Page 50 of Play the Game

I climbed out of bed and dug around in my closet for blue jeans and a green T-shirt, knowing Jason loved seeing me in green because he said it brought out the flecks in his eyes. I wanted to look nice, to do something special for him, even if it was a tiny token gesture compared to what he was prepared to do for me. Since he wasn’t there to hear me, I probably wouldn’t jinx anything, so I spoke the words I hadn’t let him say earlier.

“I love you.”

Now we just had to rescue Pasco, locate the bomb, and stop the Carbonados from detonating it. Easy peasy. Then I would be able to say those words again, next time to his face.

PART5

THE SAVE-THE-CITY JOB

CHAPTER 19

Tamela

I’d only beenable to sleep a couple of hours. Penn would arrive this afternoon, and the team would be ready to go tonight. Our biggest problem as a team was that we still had no idea where the Carbonados had taken Pasco, and even if we got a lock on his whereabouts early in the day, we would have to scramble to travel to his location. But we would move heaven and earth to have him in our care by daybreak tomorrow because we needed any and all information he could provide to help us find the dirty bomb.

The biggest problem for me was that we would have to go into yet another Carbonados building blind, which meant another on-the-ground reconnaissance operation. Unlike last Tuesday’s competition, we would be showing up as uninvited guests, and the thugs guarding the doors would gladly shoot to kill us. Getting in would fall to tactical. We would rely on Kessler and Li’s firepower throughout the operation, and Hart would be filling in the building map as I transmitted the information to her so she and TJ would have a bird’s-eye view of our progress. But finding Pasco and ensuring we had a clear path to extract him would fall to me.

So, yeah, a good, full four hours of sleep was not going to happen.

I joined the skeleton crew in the barn. I grabbed a cup of coffee from the large carafe we’d filled, emptied, and refilled multiple times throughout the night and settled at one end of the conference table with the fully fleshed-out blueprints I’d made from my observations of the Ann Arbor warehouse. It was really for show, as I had created and memorized a mental blueprint of the building as soon as I’d been inside the space Tuesday. Jensen, Alder, and I had worked together to figure out the most likely schematics of the wiring and cabling. But in the end, I’d be walking into tonight’s operation as blind as the rest of the team and hoping to recognize touchpoints, based on the Ann Arbor model, that would make mapping that building faster.

About an hour after I’d arrived, Alder quietly spoke. “Guys, I have him.”

At first, I had no idea what she was talking about. Kessler seemed to catch on first.

“Pasco?”

Alder nodded as she tapped numbers into her numeric keyboard. “To a...”—she tapped a few more times, although where she was getting her numbers, I did not know—“ninety-three point two percent probability.”

The four of us cheered together. I felt lighter than I had since Saturday morning, before the glow of the previous night had worn off.

“I’m calling TJ.” Bond had her phone in her hand.

“I can wake everyone else,” Kessler offered.

“Given Pasco’s location, you should let them sleep,” Alder said. “It will be just over an hour by plane, then a twenty-minute drive.”

I did the calculations in my head. While the distance created a radius out from our center point, one location on that circle made the most sense. “Chicago.”

“Specifically, the building where Penn’s ribs got broken,” Alder confirmed.

Bond finished her phone call. “TJ will have a charter plane on standby at the Ann Arbor Municipal Airport,” she told us.

I opened a laptop, my mind already racing ahead to modifying our general plan with the new specifics. “I’ll determine the best time to breach the building, work backward from there, and build in some slack.”

“And I’ll lock in on the electronics inside the building so if anyone at all leaves, we’ll be tracking them,” Alder said.

“That leaves us,” Kessler said to Bond. “I can’t work on updating the tactical plan until Sparks finishes updating logistics.”

“Then you and I will make breakfast,” Bond told her. “I think we’ve all earned it.”

“Can we watch them move around the building, too?” I asked Alder as Bond and Kessler left.

“We can!” Her excitement indicated she was following my thought process. “Now that Jensen’s taken us in their back door, we can see everything happening inside there, electronically speaking. That will be useful for making sure they don’t have Pasco hack any more systems before we get to him.”

“Once we’ve compiled enough data, I can start building a blueprint of rooms, hallways, entrances, and exits.” Already, I’d pulled up a map of the surrounding area. “And while we’re waiting for that, I’ll arrange for HEAT agents to pick us up at O’Hare with fully stocked vans and figure out where we’ll park and...” I trailed off as the two of us dove into our own tasks.

“Don’t stop,” Penn said from the doorway.

---