Page 12 of Remade

My name, my address, my phone number, Ma’s address, Alex’s school information… Luckily, nothing about Kat and her family.

Either way, this was why this second crew had to go too. Partly why, anyway. I mean, we couldn’t fucking have them running a drug route in our backyard. But they’d probably had access to the information in Vince’s house too. And I had every reason to think so, considering the man who was behind Vince’s murder was down in that bunker. It wasn’t a theory. We hadtraced his phone here, thanks to the evidence we’d collected from the others. He was here.

After setting aside my M4, I tore off the top of my ration and ignored the heater. Leighton had stayed back to talk to Quinn and Finlay, and I looked away from them. I’d deal with that shitshow later. Instead, I asked Hudson to come over as I prepared my food.

We had more time to kill before it got dark, but there was nothing I could do except double-check my strategy and ask for status updates. Shira had been sending down more people all day, then calling some back, so I wasn’t entirely sure how many heads we were at this point.

“Your face is gonna get stuck with that scowl.” Hudson squatted down in front of me and smirked into his coffee mug.

“Unless you give me good news,” I said. “What’s the latest?”

“Hyatt brought half the drones down to recharge,” he replied. “Last heat signature reading came back with nothing. Zero movement around the bunker. The Feds arrived at the first safehouse, and it won’t be long before they get to Vince’s place.”

That was good. There was always that moment of unease between the time I left a location in shambles and the next group arrived, whether they were Hillcroft people ready to clean or a government agency ready to gather evidence for a bogus case and claim credit.

I’d never cared about credit—Hillcroft rarely received it. I just wanted to make sure they did a good job of covering up the truth, and I generally didn’t trust anyone on the government payroll.

At least we never left behind what was important. Tech and whatnot. We sent that straight to our own guys, and they were currently working on two laptops and four phones from the first safehouse. We’d had junior operators going back and forth all day.

The one silver lining about running an op so close to home.

It was a first for me. I hadn’t handled a domestic case since my early years, when I’d been part of a security detail in Texas. Now I was literally an hour away from home, which would hopefully be safe again after tonight.

“Any movement in Qatar?” I asked. They were nine hours ahead of us and should be asleep by now.

That was where Karl Hahn was living his best life with his business partner Omar Said and their closest confidants. Of course, with vacation homes across Germany, in Dubai, the Caribbean, somewhere in the Golden Triangle, Tokyo, Malta, and Belize. Coincidentally, they also had corporations in those areas.

“Nothin’ outta the ordinary,” Hudson answered. “Hahn’s wife bought a horse for twenty mil, as one does, and the big boss spent the day with a mistress.”

I snorted and used my own spoon to stir the food.

“More importantly, no phone or online activity outside the normal,” he confirmed. “Squeezy’s monitoring their right-hand men and the step below too. All this shit flies under their radar. It’s pocket change.”

We already knew that. I nodded absently and glanced over at Leighton.

I’d learned just yesterday from Ryan that Squeezy’s real name was Willow Quinn, and she was his and Darius’s baby sister.

Reese had made it sound like she merely knew the Quinns in some capacity. She’d worked with them, he’d said. Then again, nobody said more than necessary in our line of work.

Emerson hadn’t even mentioned anything to Ryan and Darius. He’d recruited Squeezy from right under their noses.

“Your recruit’s handling things well,” Hudson noted.

I scowled at him. “He’s a soldier.”

If fighting bad guys in trenches was all we did, we wouldn’t need to put our recruits through one year’s training before hiring them. Christ. Two months was evidently long enough for a grunt to sharpen his Army knowledge and become infantry once more. It didn’t fucking mean anything.

One conversation with the kid, and it was glaringly obvious that he was naïve beyond words. He didn’t know how the world worked. He couldn’t predict things the way an operator needed to. He had so much history to memorize, so many mind-sets to adopt, and so much strategy to learn.

“You’re riding his ass pretty hard, pal,” Hudson told me pointedly. “I didn’t say he was a fine operator. But for a twentysomething-year-old with two months of training, he’s doing fucking great.”

I dropped my scowl to my food and started shoveling cold chicken stew with rice into my mouth.

Glorious.

Coach had given me a similar speech already.

Iwasriding Leighton hard, because he was fucking different. He had the potential to become one of our best, all while… There was something so innocently sweet about him that I feared he’d overestimate his capabilities in a moment he had no backup to rely on.

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