Page 68 of Rogue Voice

Suddenly, the door opened. Bea’s heart soared, until she recognized Agent Roberts. He was still wearing the same elegant suit. The white shirt peeking out from under the jacket was perfectly pressed, making her wonder if he’d found the time to change. There were two bulges on either side of his hips. The gun and the stun gun.

If she could get her hands on one of those?—

What would you do? You’ve never held a gun before.You have no idea how they work.

Roberts seemed to have no difficulty reading Emiliano. “Come on, Emiliano. We don’t have time for this now. Half of Interpol is out looking for you, and the other half is out looking for her.”

“Keeping them away is your job, Roberts, isn’t it? It’s a job you’re being paid handsomely to do if I remember correctly.”

Roberts scoffed. “I’m doing my best here, Emiliano, but I’m not a miracle worker. I told you to stay in Colombia. I told you it wasn’t the right time to come here.”

“I’m not leaving without her. I will deliver her to Oscar Aguilar and save my reputation.”

“Fine. You can trust me, Emiliano. Didn’t I bring her to you, like I said I would?”

“You did,” Emiliano acknowledged.

Roberts nodded. “Then listen to me. We need to get you out of here and into the harbor. You’re going to go home, using the same channel your drugs use to get in.”

The same channel.A container.Roberts was planning on smuggling them out in a container.No.She couldn’t—wouldn’t—go back to Colombia. If it came to it, she would rather take her chances in the water.

32

Rogue

“You didn’t get any sleep,” Griffin observed.

Rogue didn’t bother replying as he made his way straight to the coffee pot. He’d tried to sleep. He’d fucking tried. But the thought that Bea might, even now, be in Emiliano’s clutches again, was more than he could bear.

He’d managed to trace the car, a black SUV that had left the garage around the time of Bea’s disappearance, all the way along the canal, to the east of the city. He’d hacked into every camera, public or private, that he could find, following that damned car. Thorne had seen what he was doing and turned a blind eye.

Smart man.

Then Rogue had lost the car. One moment it’d been there, the next it’d been gone. It’d been Griffin who’d pointed out theobvious. There was only one reason they would be heading east. The Antwerp harbor.

There was a still shot on the office wall of the car as it exited the garage, the sun unfortunately striking the glass in such a way as to obscure the identity of the driver. In the back of the car, he thought he could just about make out Bea’s shape, pressed against the side window. Alive.Or at least, she’d been alive when she was taken out of the building.

“Let’s go back to what we know,” Griffin said, his voice eerily calm. “We know Beatriz Cruz was taken against her will.”

Rogue seethed. There’d never been any doubt in his mind.

“Calm down, Rogue,” Thorne said quietly behind him. Rogue hadn’t even heard him walk in. He looked like he’d aged a decade in the last eighteen hours.

“How’s Dark? Did you see him?” Rogue asked, knowing Thorne had spent the night in the hospital.

“The swelling in his brain wasn’t going down. The doctors have placed him in an induced coma. Slate stayed back with him.”

“Fuck.” That wasn’t good news. For Dark, or for Bea. Their best bet to know what had really happened was for Dark to wake up and tell them what he remembered. Which still hadn’t happened—and wouldn’t happen, if he was in an induced coma.

“Slate will call us the moment there’s any change,” Thorne said. He pointed at the photograph on the wall. “For now, we work the case ourselves.”

“Unless there was someone hiding in the back, there was only one man in the car,” Griffin observed. “Caucasian, if we look at his hands.”

“One man who managed to overpower Dark,” Rogue observed.

Griffin rubbed his jaw. It was the first time Rogue saw his friend with more than a five-o'clock shadow, but then, none ofthem had wanted to waste time going back to the hotel the night before, so they’d simply taken over the office space the Chimera Force had rented in the outskirts of town. They’d each taken over one of the smaller offices, grabbing what sleep they could on the couch.

Thorne looked at the map on the wall in front of them. “The harbor is the obvious landmark running to the east of town, but we’ll get Ash to look into other possibilities and split up to investigate.”

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