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“Shut the fuck up, Mick. We’re not interested,” Remy said curtly. “Let’s go to Portland.”
“Wait.” Mick held up his hand. “We can’t just up and leave—”
“Watch me,” Remy retorted.
“Really. Listen,” Mick pleaded. “She’ll have specific instructions for Ethan. She’ll expect him to follow them exactly, in real time, and if he doesn’t, she’ll punish Holly and make you watch. Trust me, I know. She does not bluff. On the contrary. She gets off on it. We have to at least seem compliant. Both of us do.”
“Don’t ask me to trust you,” I said. “You were pretty fucking compliant, Mick.”
Mick let out a slow breath, lifting his hands. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, I was. I hate myself for it. I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything I can to fix this.”
“Let me tell you how this works,” I said. “If we pull off a miracle, and Holly and Kat all live through this, you can leave. Go as far away on this earth as it is possible to go. I never want to see or hear from you again. But if anyone I care about gets hurt, then nothing can save you. I will hunt you down, and I will tear you to pieces.”
Mick gave me a jerky nod. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m willing to die, if it comes to that. Grateful, even.”
“I don’t give a fuck if you’re willing or grateful,” I told him.
Mick nodded. “So, back to being compliant. When she calls, she’s going to order you to go straight to her. Alone and unarmed. What are you going to do?”
I shrugged. “I’ll go,” I said. “What the fuck else can I do?”
Freya made a sound under her breath. “Oh, God, Ethan.”
“You’re a fine one to talk,” I told her. “You pulled the exact same stunt yourself when they got Jed. I don’t want to hear a single fucking word about it out of you.”
“Aside from that,” Amos said. “You and Mick have to look compliant, but the rest of us don’t, right? That is, if Mick is telling the truth.”
“I am telling the truth,” Mick said, through his teeth.
Amos’s eyebrows tilted up. “If he’s telling the truth about the surveillance situation,” he repeated, his voice stony. “…then she doesn’t have eyes on us at the moment. Darius and Remy and I could go on down to Portland right now, and start gathering intel on Braithwaite. There’s no time to lose.”
“It’s safest to assume Nicole monitors our outside gate,” I said.
“Then we’ll go out the tunnel,” Amos said. He turned to Mick. “Unless you told Nicole about the tunnel, of course.”
“Of course not,” Mick muttered.
The tunnel was an escape hatch I’d designed when I built the place. It was a short tunnel blasted through the rock that led from the garage to a longer, hidden natural passage through the thick woods. It opened out onto an old logging road a couple of miles away that connected with the highway farther on. If they didn’t use headlights, no one would ever see them leave.
“Sounds great,” I said. “Thanks. Make it happen. Please.”
“Okay. Darius and Remy and I will blast out of here right now. We’ll set up shop as close to Braithwaite as possible. Send in a fleet of micro-drones, check the place out, start getting hard intel right now. Preferably before she reels you in. Keep us posted as to what she says and does.”
I nodded, grateful for their loyalty and their competence. “Excellent.”
“Then let’s load up and go.” Amos got to his feet, and Remy and Darius followed suit. They hesitated, near the door, looking uncomfortable.
“Good luck,” Darius said.
“Watch yourself,” Remy said.
I nodded. After the Drakes filed out, the room took on a suffocating, breathless silence, like we were all waiting for an ax to fall. In a way, we were.
I made an inpatient gesture at Mick. “So? What are you waiting for? Give it all to us. Blow by blow. Every interaction you ever had with her.”
For the next couple of hours, we grilled Mick mercilessly, and combed through every data point he could give us. The trackers, five of the six, were still clustered in the Braithwaite facility. One wandered off for a while, but soon came back. Maybe someone going out to fill a vehicle with gas, or going to pick up take-out.
We studied satellite photos of the place, we hacked blueprints, we searched out sales records. It had been bought by a shell company, and there wasn’t either the time or the headspace tonight to do the kind of nitpicky forensic accounting work necessary to track down who owned what. Chances were, they’d covered their tracks well, in any case.
