Clint sucked air in through his teeth in that sound people made when they knew somebody was speaking an unwelcome truth.“I hate people,” he said bleakly, which told Joey that all the political bullshit he didn’t pay attention to was the shit that put gray hairs on his boss’s head.“But,” Harding continued on an exhale, “it does explain why I can’t get Connie Deavers on the phone.”Their FBI liaison should have been open to Harding’s call twenty-four seven—unless she’d been told to dodge his number.
“We knew we were on our own anyway,” Tal said grimly.“If we send a full invasion force into Stevie Carlyle’s compound, complete with news coverage, we will piss off a whole lot of people, only some of them Stevie Carlyle’s.No, Clint—the whole team is, uhm….”She gave Joey an apologetic glance, and it took him a minute to realize that he was the only person in the room who could say it.
“Off the reservation,” he finished dryly and wished Gideon was there, because he would find the whole thing inappropriately funny.
I’ll tell him when we get him back,Joey thought, and it was the first bit of hope he had.
“So it’s just us,” Harding said.“Fair.Pearson, you and Tal search air traffic for independent flights going to Massachusetts.Joey, I can get us air transpo, but we need to know exactly where we’re going.We’ve got one shot.If we can’t stop Stevie from lifting off, we’ve got to come up with a plan for invading his territory, and that’s not going to be easy.You need to walk us through his property—”
“Compound,” Joey said, wanting his friends to know what was doing.“There’s security everywhere, except….”He smiled a little.
“What?”Garcia asked.Well, Garcia was wily and little, like Joey.He knew how to avoid danger as opposed to clobbering it head-on.
“There’s a mountain lion on my father’s property,” he said.“And a den.And he’s got a gamekeeper who hates him and killed the feed for a half-mile around it so nobody thinks it’s a cool thing to go blow the mountain lion away from a thousand fucking yards.”
“So a blind spot in the security,” Harding said, impressed.“Excellent.”As usual during a briefing, he had his tablet out and had connected it to the large screens.Front and center was an arial shot of the entire compound, humbled by the perspective of a drone flying three hundred yards above the trees.
“Uhm, Chief?”Manny Swan said hesitantly.“Did you not hear the first part of what he said?”
Harding glanced up.“The gamekeeper who hates Carlyle’s father?Why, can we use him?”
Swan was a handsome Black man with a square jaw, tightly shorn hair, and teakwood dark skin.His resting expression was something Gideon had described as “watchfully amused,” so to have him cock his head and actuallygoggleat Harding was unexpected.
“What?”Harding asked, yanked out of his game face by Swan’s borderline freakout.
“Did anybody else hear him saymountain lion?”
“I did,” Doba said unexpectedly, raising his hand.“I heard him say that.”
Pearson and Natalia turned their heads.“This is a problem?”they asked.
Garcia and Crosby—syncing together like twins—both waggled their hands.“Pretend… like just for a second,” Crosby said, sounding unbearably earnest, “that some of us are strictly city cats and are possibly afraid of things with teeth and claws.Not that weareafraid, but… you know.In case we were.”
Joey stared at them all, a part of him tempted to fly out of the room in a temper, furious at the stupidity of his colleagues.
Unbidden came those early days of him in the unit, when Gideon and Harding, and then Talia and Pearson and even Crosby and Kylie all would spend time with him, showing him things they’d learned in their wide and varied experience and he had not.
He wasn’t sure where the smile came from.It must have been a gift from Gideon, given to him in one of those long-ago Saturday classes, a reward for the good question, or the surprise observation.It was his turn to give it back.
“Yes,” he said, his quiet chuckle an echo of Gideon’s raspy, dry amusement.“Yes, I did say mountain lion.Yes, he can bring down a full-grown deer.No, he’s not going to bring downusunless we get between his mates and their cubs or get too close to his den.We can go in the back way, but….”He frowned.“Not all of us.”He glanced at Harding.“The cameras aren’t down the whole way.I did a lot of dancing to sneak in last time, and there’s no guarantee Stevie didn’t figure out how I got in.We should make surewecan still see the mountain lion sometime after Christmas, to make sure Stevie didn’t fix the hole in his security, and it should be me and maybe two other people sneaking in the back—”
“While me and the rest of us make a whole lot of noise at the front,” Harding said before setting the tablet down and tapping furiously on it.“And that will make it easier to sneak you into town, Joey.”
“Why are we sneaking him into town?”Crosby asked.“I mean, isn’t the point of snatching Gideon to get Joey to come get him?Wouldn’t we want Stevie Carlyle to think he succeeded?”
“To buy him time,” Harding muttered, still tapping.“If we show up all bells and whistles in the front, andmakeStevie ask to see Carlyle, Joey and whoever he brings with him have time to infiltrate the compound and find Gideon.What wedon’twant is for Gideon to have a knife to his throat while we debate whether or not to send Joey to his father in a demented game of Red Rover.That’s a great way to get Gideon’s throat cut and Joey shot.What we want is for Joey and company to sneak Gideon out so the rest of us can invade like Iwo-fucking-Jima, you think?”
“You don’t think we’ll catch him before he’s out of town?”Garcia asked.
Clint opened his mouth to answer, but Joey beat him to it.
“I think their plane had lift-off before any of us had our weapons,” he said.“This was planned.I had to go to my apartment to get my suit—they must have seen me leave with the garment bag.It’s….”He wanted to roll his eyes at his own vanity.“It’s from a pricey store, not casual clothes.Whether they tracked me to Gid’s after that or caught us in a net, they knew—theyknewwe weren’t ready for tactical.Theyknewwe were down to drop pieces, if that.My dad’s a lot of things—asshole, psycho, mobster, blackmailer—but you know what he’s not?”
“A fuckin’ moron,” Pearson supplied.“We did our homework this last month, Joey.We know what we’re up against.”She gave a tinkling little pixie laugh that was even more terrifying because she was wearing her specially fitted vest and had pulled her hair back into its no-nonsense plait.“In fact, whether we get backup from the FBI or not, I suspect your father just made his first tactical mistake since he took you away from your grandfather.”
Joey blinked at her.“How so?”
In the next heartbeat of silence, he could hear the curiosity of most of the unit, and it was Harding who answered.
