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We packed up the van with all the equipment we thought we could use, and plenty more, for just in case. I tried several times to convince Frey to stay here with Kat and Holly, using bullying, guilt, and every other tactic under the sun, all to no avail. Jed tried just as hard. We might as well not have bothered. It was like talking to the wind.
We got on the road and sped down the mountain highway. It took a tense and mostly silent hour and twenty to get to the coordinates of Helmsworth. We stopped about a mile away, and sat in the back of the van watching as Amos and Darius piloted two of Jed and Shane’s designs, small Ready Line mini-drones, into the abandoned facility. The drones were as small as they could possibly be while still bearing their full load of cutting-edge sensors.
Shane’s focus had always been combat robotics. He liked keeping his human personnel safer, so robot recon was his obsession. We had many of his ground-breaking designs in our arsenal.
The drones showed us a desolate, completely abandoned facility. No cars parked nearby except for a rusted-out wreck with no tires, vines twined around its axels.
The Drakes piloted the drones up and through the broken windowpanes that had allowed us to identify Helmsworth. They drifted and into the big, dim, cavernous warehouse space. There wasn’t much to be seen. Shane was not there, of course, but the mechanism bolted to the metal beam to which his chain had been fastened was still there. The bucket we had seen in the video was also still there, knocked over. In the middle of the room was an old desk chair.
A telephone with a shattered screen lay on it.
We ran the drones around and around the interior. The sensors caught no discernible explosives, chemicals, toxins, though their range was limited because of their size. We saw no signs of people. The motion detectors on the drone saw nothing moving. The place seemed utterly abandoned.
“Those assholes don’t have Shane,” Amos said grimly. “If they did, they would have been making us jump long ago.”
“Wex Boer told me his team was attacked, and that Shane was taken from him,” Freya said. “Taken by a competitor, but he never said the name. He said he had no idea where Shane was, for what it’s worth. He could have been lying, but why would he? Maybe this video was shot before Shane was re-stolen from them.”
Wex Boer had been an ex-colleague in the Army Rangers, and with his own group of mercenaries, he had also been an occasional business partner of Shane’s. Until Boer sold him out, with Nicole’s help, and arranged for the total destruction of Shane and Jed’s security company, Ready Line, along with the murder of their other colleagues, and Shane’s abduction. Nicole’s outfit had tried to pin the blame onto Jed, and stage his accidental death from a car accident, as well.
They had failed on both counts. In large part because of Freya.
“If these assholes don’t have him, who the fuck does?” Jed mused. “And why aren’t they making demands of us?”
The painfully obvious answer to that question burned in the air, but no one articulated it. Shane had to be dead, after all this time, after the abuse we had seen on that screen. I kept trying to swallow it, but it just wouldn’t go down.
And Kat’s crack about us behaving like kittens chasing a laser pointer…that analogy was bothering me more every second that passed.
“Let’s go in,” I said brusquely. “In and out. Film it, so we can analyze the video later, but let’s not hang around here a second longer than we have to.”
We made our way silently into the complex. No need for the bolt-cutters. Large sections of the rusty chain-link fence were down already, so we tramped right over them. We crept alongside buildings, darted swiftly across the open spaces, and approached what looked like a side entrance.
Someone had blocked it open with a brick. Some time ago, from the quantity of leaves and pine needles from the nearby trees that had blown inside.
I pushed the door wider and stepped inside, smelling mold, rot. Water damage stained the walls, cobwebs decked the corners. A cockroach scuttled into a crack in the floor as we walked in. The place was profoundly silent, until that silence was broken by the earsplitting roar of a plane taking off from the nearby airport—then silence again.
I saw no surveillance equipment, but that meant nothing, as it could be so easily hidden. It was safe to assume they were watching us as we did this. A flesh-creeping thought.
We moved through the place as silently as ghosts. Huge chambers where scaffolding reached the ceiling, some rolls of wire still piled on the bottom shelves. The wind whistled and moaned around the roof.
Then we walked into the huge, empty room that we all recognized from the video. We looked up to see the guide mechanism bolted to the beam on the ceiling.
The chair in the middle of the room happened to be eerily lit up by a sharp, distinct ray of light that slanted through the broken window. It was like a spotlight. I walked toward the chair, boots crunching in the dry leaves and grit that had blown through the open panes of glass. The rest of them followed me, Amos and Remy both wearing headgear with cameras that filmed everything, leaving their hands free.
We all stared down at the cell phone that lay inexplicably on the chair. It had a white winter camo cover.
“Oh, fuck me,” Jed said softly.
“What?” I demanded. “What do you see?”
“That’s Shane’s phone,” Jed said. “His private phone. The one he used only for family. I recognize that cover.”
Freya reached for it.
“Don’t,” I said sharply. “Do not touch anything, Frey!”
She shook her head and picked it up. “I have to see.”
She hit the button. Amazingly, the thing turned on. We saw the image appear behind the shattered screen. An old photo of Holly jumping rope and laughing. Her hair was in the air, lit up by sunshine.
