Page 86 of I Dream of Danger
Well, she wasn’t coming back here. That door was closed forever. She was with Nick, and Nick was part of Haven on Mount Blue. Jon took a few photos for Elle, sent them to the war room, then moved into the bathroom. Sure enough, there it was, on the sink. The sensor that had been in Elle’s arm. The goons who’d trashed her house had simply left it there. It wasn’t going to take them to Elle, it wasn’t going to take them anywhere but her empty bathroom.
He picked it up with tweezers Catherine had given him and studied it, wincing when he saw blood and bits of flesh clinging to the tendrils underneath the chip. That must have hurt like a bitch to pull out.
The chip itself was tiny, a hard composite shell presenting no visible opening. It was a radio transmitter, sure, but presumably it had to have a facility for a physical data dump. He brought the chip close to his goggles, tapped the side, turning them into powerful microscopes and ah! There it was. The tiniest of portals and, yes! He had the fuckers.
He had the thinnest fiber optic thread in existence, and with the help of the tweezers, fit it into the portal and started downloading. The data started appearing immediately on his monitor. First physical data going back three months. covering every aspect of Elle’s body, and then, at the end, a code connecting this tracking sensor with every other. Ten other sensors, for the ten other poor sons of bitches who were in the hands of monsters, including Sophie.
He overlaid the data onto a GPS map and stared at the screen for a full minute, breathing in and breathing out. When he was sure he had his voice under control, he tapped his comms unit and spoke.
“I know where they are.”
Chapter
Thirteen
San Francisco
At 5 a.m., still three hours from daybreak, the helo landed silently on the rooftop of the Arka building, forty stories up. Though it had stopped snowing and the sky had cleared, Nick was sure no one saw them. The only way they could have been detected was if someone on Market Street were looking up at the night sky and saw the stars eclipse for a second. And even then, it could be a passing cloud. A fast passing cloud.
Jon had hovered for just a moment over a rental unit in Cow Hollow, and Mac had rappelled down. He was on his way in a big dark van they had stashed there, and would park around the corner of the front entrance of the tall, slender, white building housing Arka, because they had hopes of finding the live bodies of Elle’s friends somewhere inside that building.
They had no eyes into the building, none. Jon had failed to break into the building’s security, a first. Back at the war room in Haven they’d watched, frustrated, as Jon pounded the keyboard shouting obscenities. To their credit, neither Catherine nor Elle even blinked.
The only thing they had was the building’s schematics, on record in City Hall.
So…the building on Battery Street was impregnable in terms of intel. All they could do was break in and…hope for the best.
Not the smartest infiltration plan they’d ever come up with.
But it was the only one they had. Elle had put herself under. She said she’d be waiting for them at Arka and that she would contact him telepathically. When she said that, Mac and Catherine hadn’t blinked. If Elle couldn’t establish contact, he and Jon were fully prepared to find the prisoners and fight their way out however they could. Mac would join them if necessary.
It wasn’t a suicide mission—it wasn’t. Nick kept telling himself that.
He glanced over at Jon, piloting the helo. This was exactly the kind of mission that would appeal to his sense of the absurd, and he expected to find a half smile on Jon’s face. It wasn’t there. What was there was grim purpose, and that surprised him.
Nick hated going in blind. They all did. The less intel you had, the greater the fuckup potential, in a situation where fuckup was a synonym for messy death. Though Jon had managed to get the schematics of the building, it was missing whole floors. It was illegal—every blueprint lodged with the city’s Building Inspection Service had to be complete as to architecture and infrastructure, but somehow Arka had greased some palms so various floors were blank. It wasn’t even clear if they had electricity. And the building stopped at the ground floor, which both Catherine and Elle said made no sense. So there were subterranean floors, too.
How many?
Who the fuck knew?
Nick’s jaw was so tight his temples hurt, and he realized how much it sucked to go into battle when you had someone you love waiting for you back home. Ghost Ops made a hell of a lot of sense. They’d been screened, carefully chosen, so that no one had anyone waiting back home for them. Not a woman, not a child, not a dog, not even a fucking goldfish, and Nick got that, got it deep in his bones.
Because wanting to come back, wanting fiercely to hold on to whoever was waiting for you after the op, was the surest way to take your mind off the op. And taking your mind off the op was like taking a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.
Fuck.
Operational readiness was a physical attribute, sure. Train, shoot, train some more, shoot some more. Until it was all automatic and you reacted faster than you could think.
But you had to think. You had to plan out your moves in constantly-evolving situations that were never, ever, ever like the pre-op briefing. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Shit happens, and when it does, you adapt.
You had to be wholly one with the op in your head. No thinking of anything else. Forget the fact that he’d left a white-faced Elle behind, doing her damndest—as Catherine was doing with Mac—to be upbeat and brave. Terrified he wasn’t going to come back.
And the shitty thing was—he was terrified, too.
Well, fuck again.
A warrior couldn’t have thoughts like that messing with his head. He had to be down with the mission, and ready to die.
