“You sure he didn’t clock you?”
“I was in the back of the line. He had no idea I was even there. I’m just that good.”
Scott Kincaid thought about this a few seconds, then said, “If he didn’t notice you, it wasn’t because you were good, it was because his head was somewhere else.” Looking at Bennett now, he said, “You get a picture of the kid behind the counter?”
“A picture?”
Lancer sighed. He reached back and took the coffee out of the man’s hand. “Go get another coffee. But don’t come back without a picture of that girl at the register.”
Five minutes later, Lancer’s man was still in the coffee shop when Hightower’s F-150 rolled out of the parking lot; the three men left Bennett behind with orders to text the photo as soon as possible, and they followed the truck at distance out of Noble Park.
The image arrived on Kincaid’s phone a minute later; he sent it via Signal to the Gauntlet team back in D.C. tasked to help him, and then he called in. “We need to find out who this girl is, stat.”
The Gauntlet analyst asked why; Lancer told him that the girl might be family or just someone Hightower knew, but whoever she was, she might be leverage.
Lancer had two more white nationalists on his team, both in a black Bronco with Utah plates, rented the night before when the team arrived. After a call from Kincaid, the two vehicles switched positions on the highway; the Wagoneer dropped back half a mile and the Bronco edged up closer.
They didn’t need to get too close; Bennett had put a tracker in Hightower’s F-150 in the airport garage early the evening before, just minutes before he landed, so they could follow the truck’s movements on Kincaid’s phone. That was what led them to an apartment complex last night, then the bakery this morning, and then, just before ten a.m., to a medical office park.
Here they found the F-150 parked in a busy lot in front of the Boulder Imaging Center.
Both vehicles continued driving around the block, and then they pulled into different entrances of the same parking lot. The Bronco reported to Kincaid that they saw their target enter the imaging center doors.
Once the Wagoneer parked, Todd Voorhies turned to Lancer. “If he’s getting an MRI, then we should do it now.”
“Why?”
“You ever get an MRI?”
“Like a half dozen.”
“So you know. The MRI is a big magnet. You can’t have any metal on you in there. You make this dude out like he’s some kind of badass. Is he gonna be a badass wearing a fucking hospital gown, no gun, no knife? We get in there, hang out in the waiting room, let him go back to the dressing room. We find a back way in, catch him in his underwear before they turn on the MRI. We use knives, keep it quiet.”
Lancer thought about the situation, and he also thought about the kid in the bakery. He wasn’t sure taking Hightower down in a medical office was going to work out, but it was worth a shot, especially since he hadn’t heard back from his Gauntlet support yet about the girl.
Just then, his Signal app notified him he had a call coming through.Snatching the phone off his lap, he said, “Tell me you have something on the girl.”
The person on the other end of the line was not his Gauntlet support lead; it was Mike himself. “Get ready for this. They kicked your request up to me, and I reached out to my guy on the inside. Took him a minute, but he just learned that Zack Hightower had a kid who went into wit-pro twelve years ago. She now lives in Boulder. Name is Andrea Delaney and she works at Cara’s Bakehouse. The image you sent the team matches a picture of her on a website for junior national ranked snowboarders.”
“Oh, shit,” Kincaid said. “Old Hightower is here spying on his biological kid.”
Mike said, “You going to snatch her? Use her to get to him?”
Kincaid looked at the front door of the building on the other side of the parking lot. “Another opportunity has presented itself. We’re going to try this first but use the girl as a backup plan. Either way, I’ll let you know when the job is done.”
“Good. Don’t fuck it up.”
“I don’t fuck up.”
“Says the guy I pulled out of a Cuban prison.”
Kincaid ignored the comment and said, “What do you have for me on the Gray Man?”
Mike hesitated, then said, “Still looking into that. Hope to have something soon.”
“Bullshit. You can get me the identity of somebody in witness protection in under an hour, but you can’t find out anything about the Gray Man?”
Mike said, “We don’t know how our guy has access. Certain data is available to him, other data is not. Like I said, he’s on it, and we’ll let you know if—”
