Page 72 of Stalked

He kissed her forehead. “Tomorrow it will be.”

But Steve knew that even the most well-thought-out plans, the no-holes plans, could sometimes fail.

* * *

THENEXTMORNINGall the Omega Sector employees were back at the café. They opened the restaurant at 7:00 a.m. as if they had been doing it for years.

Derek was in the back again as a cook. Jon was in the command room, but it was a van parked around the corner rather than at Omega. He would be calling the shots today, having the bird’s-eye view of everything.

Steve had a different role to play: concerned lover.

It didn’t require much acting on his part.

Steve would arrive at 7:45 a.m. Rosalyn would come in at 7:55 a.m., say something briefly to him, then excuse herself to go to the restroom.

From there, she would be taken out the back door and directly to Omega HQ. Steve categorically refused to risk her life by having her in the middle of a sting operation.

And the operation was huge. Not only were the dozen employees and customers in the restaurant Omega agents, but there were SWAT agents all around the building, and most of the people outside were theirs too. The lady walking the dog. The jogger a few blocks over whose route happened to go by the café a few times.

Others. All watching the café. Anyone who entered would be tagged: faces captured on camera, fingerprints collected and filed. Anyone who could possibly be the Watcher—so any male under the age of sixty—would be followed and/or tracked.

Steve had decided to use the Watcher’s own means against him. Lillian was still playing the waitress. Her petite form belied the fact that she could kill a person in a dozen ways with her tiny bare hands. She would make sure that anyone who could possibly be the Watcher got a transmitter put on him.

It was a complex operation, but complex was what Omega did.

And it was showtime.

He parked his car, trying to make this all as normal as possible, and walked in the front entrance. Lillian greeted him with a perky “Good morning” and told him to sit wherever he wanted to.

He chose the booth near the corner and sat with his back to the wall so he could see the door. Just like he would do in any given restaurant. At least he didn’t have to pretend that he wasn’t law enforcement.

The place was relatively empty outside the people working for Omega. There was an older couple at one table and a young mother with her toddler at one of the booths. They would all be checked out but none of them were viable suspects.

The building had been thoroughly swept for explosives—at this point Steve didn’t put it past the Watcher to just take out the whole place. They’d also been sure to search the closets and attics and crawl spaces. After what happened earlier this year—a psychopath deciding to reside in an agent’s attic until the time was right for a kidnapping—they’d all learned their lesson.

Now all Steve could do was wait and watch. And pray that nothing tipped off the Watcher. It wouldn’t take much.

Five minutes later a man came in, their first real possible suspect. He was tall, sort of bulky, wearing business attire. Jon’s voice came on in Steve’s ear.

“We’ve got him. Got a good shot of his face. Running it now to see if he shows up in any of our facial-recognition software.”

“He’s got a briefcase,” Steve murmured behind his hand.

“Roger that.”

A briefcase could carry explosives or a weapon.

“Infrared on the briefcase suggests no explosives,” Aidan Killock, SWAT’s explosives expert, said through the earpiece. He was in a different van outside.

The man was getting a coffee and muffin to go.

“Tag him anyway, Lillian.”

He saw her nod briefly before she came around the counter and stood before the man.

“Here,” she said, reaching up and messing with the back of his collar. “That was folded up a little, but now it’s perfect.”

“Thank you.” The man seemed relieved and flattered to have received such attention from someone with Lillian’s looks.

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