“See?” Mike said. “There’s at least sixty thousand square feet there. How thefuckyou think you’re going to find them? By following bread crumbs?”
Sam and Mike stared at the screen. Sam sure as fuck hoped Mike was taking it all in, because he wasn’t. A high keening sound rattled in Sam’s head, the sound of panic. He had the classic symptoms. His heart raced, his palms were sweaty, he could barely focus his thoughts, he didn’t have a sense of his own body, only of imminent danger to his woman.
This wasn’t helping Nicole.
He leaned his head back against the headrest, pressing against it hard, and wiped his mind, concentrating on his breathing, trying to repress the very clear, spotlit image he had of Nicole being hurt that made his heart trip-hammer.
Breathing slowing, heartbeat slowing…
“Welcome back,” Mike said quietly.
Sam opened his eyes and just like that, hewasback. Capable and cool, the operator he’d always been.
Panic would get Nicole killed. She was already in serious danger. He was the only thing that stood between Nicole and death. If he didn’t get himself under control, she was fucked, and he would lose her.
Sam leaned forward. “How many points of entry?”
Mike looked at him intently for a second, eyes bright blue even in the low glow of the monitor, then nodded. “Seven,” he said. His finger pinpointed the doors into the building. “Plus what could only be a big loading bay here.”
Sam turned it over in his head. “They won’t be using the loading bay. Those suckers have huge doors that take forever to open even if you find the control panel. They’ll go in through one of the side doors. They’re on some kind of timeline. Whatever it is they’re doing, it has to be quick.”
Mike nodded. “Makes sense. And I don’t think they’d go far into the building, so we’re looking at perimeter rooms.”
Sam nodded. “Here. And here.” He tapped two doors on the blueprint, on either side of the front loading bay.
If the fuckers were at all rational, that’s where they’d be. They had no idea that anyone could be tracking them. Entering into the huge maze of the warehouse made no sense.
“Jesus, I wish we had a Predator with thermal imaging,” Harry sighed into the earpiece.
Fuck yeah. An aerial image showing where warm bodies were.
“Don’t have a Predator,” Mike said, reaching behind him for his backpack. “But while Sam was freaking, I was thinking.” He hauled a camera-like machine with binoculars into the front seat.
A goddamn handheld thermal imager! And Mike was right—he’d been thinking while Sam was freaking. “I have a thermal imager,” Mike said into the mike, for Harry’s benefit.
“Sam should kiss you on the mouth for that,” Harry said.
“Ewww,” Sam and Mike replied in unison.
Mike smiled evilly. “But Iwilltake that kiss from Nicole once we get her out.”
“Over my dead body,” Sam growled.
“Make sure it isn’t over anyone’s dead body, except for the bad guys,” Harry replied over their earpieces. “Now go get them. And afterward, Nicole has to kiss me, too.”
They werein some kind of abandoned industrial building, but Nicole had no idea where. They could have been on the back side of the moon for all she knew.
When the car veered into one of the empty compounds, big gate standing open, her heart sank. The driver got out, growleddon’t move, pulled out a big black gun and kept it pointed at her. He could see her perfectly, since the headlights bounced off the steel walls of the building, lighting up the inside of the car. Nicole could barely see the man, and followed what he was doing by sound rather than sight.
The two big steel gates were pulled closed, a chain run through the handles and a padlock on the chain.
She was locked in.
The man came to her side of the car, opened the door and pulled her out roughly, pushing her ahead of him.
They walked around the right-hand corner, the man prodding her painfully in the back with the gun. Along the side wall was a door, ajar, visible in the backwash of the headlights around the corner. The man pushed hard with the gun. The doorway loomed, empty and black and forbidding.
It was like walking to her doom. They’d driven for ten minutes without seeing a light, without seeing another car or another human being. There was no one around to call for help, no way to signal, no way to call. She and her father were as abandoned as this building.
