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I bristled…but a small, niggling part of me knew he was right. I wasn’t trained like he and his team were. In all actuality, I would be a liability on site, useless until I was behind a computer. But, still, I didn’t like being brushed off. Asshole, I thought.
“You and I should go,” Gabe suggested, looking at Adrian. “That agent spoke to Zach, and they obviously know what Nat looks like.”
“They know what he looks like too,” I pointed out.
Adrian’s jaw clenched. “I’m going,” he said, using that same unquestionable tone. I took a breath in through my nose and let it out through my mouth.
Adrian
“So…you and Nataliya, huh?” Gabe asked ten minutes after we left the motel.
I resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of my nose. “Don’t start.”
Gabe chuckled. “Well, that answers that.” I could feel his eyes on the side of my face, but I refused to acknowledge him. “What were you thinking?” he asked. I drove on in silence. “Adrian.”
I groaned. “What?”
“Talk to me.”
I had forgotten what it was like to be around my former teammates. They knew me better than anyone in the world, which came with the downside that they could read me like a book. “I like her,” I said. “I like her kid.”
“But—?”
“But what?” Gabe gave me an unimpressed look, and I considered throwing him from the moving car. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with me and her, but it doesn’t matter. When all of this is said and done, we’ll go our separate ways.”
“Why does it have to be that way? Maybe she’ll want to stay if you give her enough of a reason.”
I laughed, but the sound was weary. “When has anyone ever stuck around, Gabe?”
He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “You’re not a SEAL anymore. You don’t have to travel all the time, never putting down roots and always throwing yourself into dangerous situations. Once this is over, you could give it up.”
Give it up? The thought had never occurred to me. The only reason I left the SEALs was that I knew I wouldn’t be able to figure out what happened to Cuddy while I was still in the service. There would never be any time, and I wouldn’t have the resources. Being an FBI agent put me closer to where I needed to be.
But if I wasn’t a SEAL, and if I wasn’t throwing myself into investigations like this, what else was I good for? I hadn’t known anything else since I was eighteen.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Let’s just stay on task, all right?”
Gabe sighed, but he didn’t argue, and the rest of the drive into Atlanta was devoid of conversation. The GPS led us right to the business complex that housed the Hayes Group. It was an innocuous building, all shiny glass surfaces and sharp angles. Interesting and ominous all at once.
We found a public parking lot nearby, and we both donned baseball caps and sunglasses. It might be a cliché kind of disguise, but it matched the people milling around, so we weren’t entirely out of place. A quick, but thorough, walk around the building left us with the knowledge of the doors—the large front entrance, a smaller employees’ entrance, and the back door for deliveries—and the security at each.
Gabe noted the cameras as well. They had each corner under noticeable surveillance, and I would put money on there being hidden cameras. “You think we can risk walking into the lobby?” Gabe asked. “Scope it out?”
I considered it, but eventually shook my head. “I don’t think so; I don’t want them to see us today and get suspicious when we stroll in tomorrow. We’ll have to go off the pictures from their website and whatever we can find on social media”—maybe we’d get lucky and someone would have posted pictures from a Christmas party or something—“and match it up as best we can to the blueprint back at the motel.”
Gabe nodded. “Then I think we’re done here.” We meandered back to the car, nonchalant as possible. When we got there, he “accidentally” let his phone slip out of his hand and under the car so we had an excuse for him to duck under it and make sure no one had added a tracker while we’d been away. It wasn’t super likely in a public lot in the middle of the day, but stranger things had happened, and we didn’t lose anything by being cautious. I’d been checking the car every time we took it out, just in case. “Maybe take the long way back?” he suggested as I climbed behind the wheel. “We can be on the lookout for anyone following us.”
I agreed, and we quickly mapped out a route that would take a little more than an hour, but it would give us ample time to see if we’d been tracked.
When we were sure that there was no one, we headed for the motel. Zach already had the Hayes Group’s website up so we could get an idea of what we would be walking into. Nataliya was in the bathroom; I could hear her on the phone.
“Elias?” I asked, gesturing.
Zach nodded. “It’s a little early, but he wanted to tell her about testing today.”
“Everything okay?”
“They aren’t screaming,” Zach said. “If that’s what you want to know.”
