She took one of my arms, and Wheeler took the other, and they helped me to my feet. In the lounge, they sat me on the sofa and tucked a blanket around me. Ryan sat with me, and Bond headed to the kitchen to get me a drink.
“I’m okay,” I told Ryan. “Ben needs you. Go help them find him.”
“They’ll let me know when I’m needed,” he said.
The front door of the facility burst open. Mai, followed by two other people—more HEAT operatives, I assumed—stormed inside and ran to the conference room. Other than me, she was the person most terrified about losing Ben.
“I should go see her,” I said.
Ryan touched my shoulder to stop me. “The best thing for her will be to get her assignment and start working it.”
The noise level from the conference room rose.
“Something’s happening,” I said.
Ryan jumped to his feet. “Wait here.”
No way in hell. If something had happened, my hiding in another room wasn’t going to fix it, and not knowing whether Ben was safe was much worse than the risk of vomiting up my lunch.
Mai stood open-mouthed, staring at a screen on the wall that showed a livestream.
“What is it?” I asked.
She glanced at me, then put her arm around my shouldersand hugged me closer. “It’s a police vest cam. Those are the men who took Ben. The police are checking their car.”
Two men, presumably the ones who’d taken Ben, were handcuffed and put into separate police cars. Another officer with a powerful flashlight was checking the open trunk.
My skin went cold and clammy, and saliva pooled in my mouth. I fought against my body’s instinct to vomit. “Is he… Where is he?”
“We don’t know.” Mai squeezed my shoulders. “We just know he’s not in the car.”
“We’re going to live together,” I whispered to her.
“What?”
“Ben and I. We’re thinking of buying the condo that’s for sale in your building.”
Mai blinked back tears and pulled me into a full hug. “You will.” She told me. “We’re not losing him today. We need that idiot, and we’ll get him back.”
“There. Right there.” Logan pointed to a different screen, one with video recorded earlier.
The footage was from a camera monitoring a multiple-highway overpass, a knot of roads converging and bridges obscuring the view for several car lengths. The video moved in slow motion. “Watch this group of cars. They go under the overpass with the black sedan, but they emerge before it. And then, several seconds later…” The black sedan appeared on the screen.
“The sedan stopped under that bridge,” Mai said.
“There must have been another car waiting,” Kyle said. “Time stamp says the sedan was under there twelve extra seconds. That’s plenty of time to make the switch.” He glanced at Logan. “Hell, we could have done it in eight.”
“We probablyhavedone it in eight,” Logan answered.
I wondered what that story might be, but I’d never have the security clearance required to hear it. And my stomach probably couldn’t handle it anyway.
“So we need to find a car that seems to emerge from the underpass without having entered it,” Logan said.
“Because it drove in earlier and parked on the side of the road,” Kyle finished for him. He sat down at a computer terminal. “Pasco, I’ll start that search.”
“Thanks,” Pasco said. “Where the hell is Jensen?”
“Aw, someone missed me.” Jensen entered the room, waved to everyone, threw his overcoat onto the back of a chair, and sat down at the computer next to Pasco’s. In seconds, he was online and taking the overflow of tasks from Pasco like they’d done this a thousand times.
