Page 46 of The Hijack

“I’m not sure,” I said softly, “It’s just a hunch. She almost led us into a dangerous situation, and now she’s here.”

“She worked with both Clark and Z,” Lukas said. “And she’s been instrumental in Dark Sparrow over the years.”

“But you don’t know her well?” I checked.

“No,” he admitted. “Not well.”

That made two of us. And while we did go to the garage to check out the sound system, we didn’t stay for very long. At least I had shared my concerns with one person so that if anything happened, I would have another person keeping an eye on the prize.

We were halfway back to the house when Lukas received a phone call. He answered calmly enough, but after listening for half a minute, his face turned bright red. He started cursing, sending a string of unconnected four-letter words out into the air. I half expected him to throw his phone against the house. He kicked the porch railing as he shoved his phone back into his pocket.

I didn’t have to ask. He read me in as soon as he calmed down enough to speak. “Linc has gone rogue. He was supposed to be helping my agents get to safety, but that was The Bear saying that he saw Linc killing two operatives.”

I looked away. There wasn’t anything I could do for the men who had lost their lives, and my first thought was of Clark. She’d spent an unknown amount of time alone with the man and he had given us no reason to doubt his loyalty. At the moment, I couldn’t tell who to believe. Was Lukas’s Bear any more reliable than Linc? Any more reliable than Jasmine?

I suddenly found myself holed up with a group of people that I couldn’t trust, and that made me very uneasy. I wanted to get back inside and reconnect with Clark. She needed to know what was going on as soon as possible.

Chapter 23

Clark

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THEO INFORMED ME WHAT Linc was up to. I stood dumbstruck for a long moment, chewing over the last bite of my sandwich. I was on the fence as to whether to trust Linc to begin with. But he had earned that privilege after proving himself in the field. To find out that he was just using me to get closer to Lukas was distressing. Yet I knew I couldn’t blame myself.

Linc had deep ties to both Lukas and Dark Sparrow. That he chose this moment to betray everyone who cared about him wasn’t my doing. It just meant that New Dawn’s reach was deeper than we all suspected.

“If New Dawn was born here,” I said, indicating the four walls that surrounded us, “then there has to be some information.”

“Mr. Abernathy used to have a safe in his smoking room,” Lukas said.

We all trooped through the house to the room our foster father used to use as his private retreat. The house had changed very little since the time we were children. Except for the neglect, everything was basically in the same place it had always been.

We located the safe in the smoking room but found it empty. Of course, Mr. Abernathy wouldn’t have left sensitive materials behind for us to discover. Still, I felt that there must be some hidden cache of documents or records that could provide us with more information. It was just a matter of locating it.

We split up. There were five of us, so we each took a different section of the house. Three of us, me, Z and Lukas had grown up there. Two were new to the mansion, but equally as capable of tossing a room. We searched for an hour before Lukas struck gold.

He was in the master bedroom, and he pried a floorboard loose. Inside was a treasure trove of digital hardware that could be linked up to the computers in the control room. We took a minute to connect all the ports and then sat back to watch the screen explode with windows.

Lukas took a seat at the helm and minimized most of the displays. We concentrated on one at a time, learning more than I ever wanted to know about the New Dawn project. Lukas stopped on one window that displayed a map with multiple coordinates flagged.

“What do you suppose is there?” Theo asked.

“Weapons,” I answered, so sure of my response that I didn’t even need to check. Mr. Abernathy had told us about hidden weapons all across the country. He described a map just like the one we were looking at that would give specific locations of each hidden stockpile. At the time, I thought he meant for them to be used by field operatives who were in need of reinforcements. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“That’s a lot of hidden bunkers,” Theo noted.

“I would estimate at least three hundred guns per location,” I said, feeling uneasy.

“Why so many?” Jasmine asked.

“Mr. Abernathy never did anything halfway,” Lukas replied.

We stared at the map on the screen, doing the math in our heads. We were looking at a hidden collection of more than one hundred thousand weapons, and I didn’t for a minute believe they were all handguns and hunting rifles. There were likely to be tactical assault vehicles in some of the locations, possibly drones and explosives. All the toys Mr. Abernathy had taught us to play with were likely buried in the designated spots across the country. And I didn’t like the sound of that.

“It’s like he was planning for Armageddon,” Z observed.

“Or for a hostile takeover,” I said, feeling a shiver run down my spine.