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“Kansas,” said Bradan sadly. From the way he stared out across the wheat fields, the place held memories for him, and not good ones.
A white pick-up bounced down the dirt road and skidded to a stop in front of us, with Danny at the wheel. We piled into the crew cab and Bradan jumped into the cargo bed. The pickup shot forward and we blasted down the dirt road for a few hundred feet before slowing again. Cal stood up from where he’d been lying, hidden in the middle of a wheat field. He bounded towards us with that long, loping run of his, jumped in the cargo bed with Bradan and we accelerated away. I grunted as the rough ride threw us around, my cracked ribs throbbing.
JD twisted around from the passenger seat to look at me. “I owe you an apology.” He looked at Tanya. “You, too. I’m sorry.”
I could hear in his voice how much he was hurting. I reached out and squeezed his shoulder, nodding and Tanya gave him a nod, too. I looked around at all of them and suddenly it felt like I could breathe properly for the first time since we’d run from them at the motel. We were back as a team.
Gabriel leaned forward. “You said something about a terrorist attack?” he prompted.
JD’s face turned grim. “How do we stop this thing?”
56
TANYA
Colton told the team the whole story, in detail, and this time they listened. I looked around at them. I’d managed to pick up all of their names, now. JD, Danny, Cal, Bradan, Gabriel...a weird, mismatched bunch of guys but, from the way they’d got me out of that CIA facility, very good at what they did. From the time they’d first kicked down my door in New York, they’d been the enemy. Working together was an abrupt shift, even for me. I wasn’t sure I trusted them. Wasn’t sure I wanted to trust them. It had taken me this long to get used to being a duo instead of being out there on my own. I wasn’t ready for a whole…family.
Then my gaze returned to Colton and I felt myself unknot inside. He trusted them, so I could trust them. As long as the two of us were together, everything would be okay.
I caught myself and scowled inwardly. I’m getting soft.
Colton finished his story and I filled the team in on my hunt for Maravic. When I’d finished, everyone went quiet, thinking. The problem was, we still had no idea where the terrorist attack would be, only that it was happening today. And we still couldn’t go to the authorities, it was our word against Steward’s, and the team had just broken about a billion laws breaking into a CIA facility.
I was at a loss and so was everyone else. The team looked helplessly at each other.
But then something happened. One by one, they all turned to one man: Gabriel, the one with the soft black curls. He had brown eyes, too, but where Colton’s burned and made me think of the heat deep beneath the earth, Gabriel’s glittered, putting me in mind of some frighteningly quick calculating machine made of whirring, meshing cogs. He stared back at us in silence for a moment, considering it all, and then said, “We’re looking at this all wrong.” He looked at me. “Maravic isn’t an extremist, right? He won’t want to die in the attack.”
I nodded. “He’ll want to walk off with his money.”
“Right, but you don’t carry out a terrorist attack on US soil and just walk away. Even with the economy gone, you better believe Uncle Sam is going to scour the planet looking for whoever killed its people. They will find him…”
He left it hanging for us. I got there first. “Unless he can pin it on someone else,” I said.
Colton spoke up. “When we were listening to Maravic at the garage, he said something about picking up their friends from New Jersey. You think they could be the fall guys?”
JD pulled out his phone and called Calahan, putting it on speaker. Calahan answered after just a few rings but just growled, “Wait!” We could hear him marching through an office and then the sounds of a street outside. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked. “I just got an APB for your whole team! You broke into some CIA place?!”
“Yeah,” said JD, rubbing his stubble. “It’s been a busy day.”
“JD, I have to put the phone down. If they know I talked to you, I’ll lose my job.”
“Wait!” said JD quickly. “What’s happening in New Jersey?”
There was a pause and I could imagine Calahan’s brow furrowing. “How did you know about that? That hasn’t gone outside the FBI yet!”
“What’s happening?” pressed JD.
Calahan went quiet for a moment, considering. Then he gave a long-suffering sigh. “I’m only telling you this because it sounds like you might know something,” he said. “We were keeping an eye on this Islamic group. Four guys, early twenties. They were doing a lot of talking on social media which was why we were watching them, but they had no serious connections and we were pretty sure they weren’t going to actually do anything. Then this morning, all four of them suddenly dropped off the radar and now we can’t find them. My office is going crazy.”
