36. Savannah
First, I heard a crash. Then a loud pop. Was that gunfire?
“Ben! Ben!!”
He didn’t answer.
“Ben,” I whimpered over and over, but it didn’t help. “Oh, my God, was he shot?”
Ryan sat down at the conference table beside me and gripped my shoulder. Kyle pulled out his phone and contacted emergency services. Lang disappeared and returned with Kat, who was on the phone with Bond in the medical bay, telling her to join us.
“Pasco—” Kat started.
“I have eyes on him. But…” He typed into his computer, and a grainy image of the highway came into view. Three cars were stopped on the shoulder of the road, one of them—the one Ben had borrowed from Kyle—crumpled. Cars whizzed past in the lanes of traffic, oblivious to the wreck.
“Dispatch is sending police and an ambulance,” Kyle reported.
“There he is!” I jumped to my feet to get a better view of the screen. “Someone’s pulling him out of the car.”
“And putting him into theirs,” Ryan said. “Pasco, I’ll call Jensen, see if he’s on the ground yet locally.”
Kyle reported what was happening to the emergency operator and asked for more police to look for the car.
“I’ll contact X and get our extra resources in place,” Kat said. “Wheeler, after you talk to Jensen, track down Mai and get her in here. I don’t want her hearing this from anyone else.”
“Hear what?” I asked. They all seemed to grasp something I was missing.
“Savannah, here, sit.” Lang held my arm and helped me back into my chair.
“What’s happening, Logan? May I call you Logan?”
He nodded. “Of course, you may.” His voice was smooth and soothing, like Bond’s. He glanced at the big screens on the wall where Pasco was projecting different traffic cam images, then turned my chair away from them. “That accident was intentional. He was run off the road so someone could take him.”
“Who? Devlin? Anson?” My mind was slowly processing the overload of information I’d seen and heard. “That’s why there was a gunshot. I think they shot him.”
“Unconfirmed,” Logan said.
My stomach lurched, and the room spun. I pushed back from the table and bent over with my head between my knees. Tossing my cookies now would only distract the team, and they needed to focus on finding Ben.
“It wasn’t a gun,” Pasco said. “Refining the footage, we can see it was an air compression tool used to wedge open the door. That’s how they got him out so fast.”
“Two police units just arrived on scene,” Kyle said. “Do you have the make, model, license number, anything I can give them about the car they took Hayes in?”
“I have all the above,” Pasco said, typing frantically. “Texting it to you. And I have them live on traffic cams. I’ll send you the coordinates. Wheeler, what’s Jensen’s ETA?”
“Fifteen,” Ryan answered.
Bond arrived in the conference room. “Do we know if he was injured?”
“Looked like a head wound,” Logan said.
I shifted to try to see the screen. If I could catch a glimpse of him, maybe I’d be able to tell if he was all right. Another wave of nausea hit me, and I bent over with my head between my knees.
“Bond,” Lang said.
I felt the doctor’s cool hand on my neck. “Savannah, let’s get you into the lounge.”
She took one of my arms, and Wheeler took the other, and they helped me to my feet. In the lounge, they sat me on the sofa and tucked a blanket around me. Ryan sat with me, and Bond headed to the kitchen to get me a drink.
“I’m okay,” I told Ryan. “Ben needs you. Go help them find him.”
“They’ll let me know when I’m needed,” he said.
The front door of the facility burst open. Mai, followed by two other people—more HEAT operatives, I assumed—stormed inside and ran to the conference room. Other than me, she was the person most terrified about losing Ben.
“I should go see her,” I said.
Ryan touched my shoulder to stop me. “The best thing for her will be to get her assignment and start working it.”
The noise level from the conference room rose.
“Something’s happening,” I said.
Ryan jumped to his feet. “Wait here.”
No way in hell. If something had happened, my hiding in another room wasn’t going to fix it, and not knowing whether Ben was safe was much worse than the risk of vomiting up my lunch.
Mai stood open-mouthed, staring at a screen on the wall that showed a livestream.
“What is it?” I asked.
She glanced at me, then put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me closer. “It’s a police vest cam. Those are the men who took Ben. The police are checking their car.”
Two men, presumably the ones who’d taken Ben, were handcuffed and put into separate police cars. Another officer with a powerful flashlight was checking the open trunk.
My skin went cold and clammy, and saliva pooled in my mouth. I fought against my body’s instinct to vomit. “Is he… Where is he?”
“We don’t know.” Mai squeezed my shoulders. “We just know he’s not in the car.”
“We’re going to live together,” I whispered to her.
“What?”
“Ben and I. We’re thinking of buying the condo that’s for sale in your building.”
Mai blinked back tears and pulled me into a full hug. “You will.” She told me. “We’re not losing him today. We need that idiot, and we’ll get him back.”
“There. Right there.” Logan pointed to a different screen, one with video recorded earlier.
The footage was from a camera monitoring a multiple-highway overpass, a knot of roads converging and bridges obscuring the view for several car lengths. The video moved in slow motion. “Watch this group of cars. They go under the overpass with the black sedan, but they emerge before it. And then, several seconds later…” The black sedan appeared on the screen.
“The sedan stopped under that bridge,” Mai said.
“There must have been another car waiting,” Kyle said. “Time stamp says the sedan was under there twelve extra seconds. That’s plenty of time to make the switch.” He glanced at Logan. “Hell, we could have done it in eight.”
“We probably have done it in eight,” Logan answered.
I wondered what that story might be, but I’d never have the security clearance required to hear it. And my stomach probably couldn’t handle it anyway.
“So we need to find a car that seems to emerge from the underpass without having entered it,” Logan said.
“Because it drove in earlier and parked on the side of the road,” Kyle finished for him. He sat down at a computer terminal. “Pasco, I’ll start that search.”
“Thanks,” Pasco said. “Where the hell is Jensen?”
“Aw, someone missed me.” Jensen entered the room, waved to everyone, threw his overcoat onto the back of a chair, and sat down at the computer next to Pasco’s. In seconds, he was online and taking the overflow of tasks from Pasco like they’d done this a thousand times.
A few more agents streamed in. Kat gave each new arrival their assignment, and they went to work without question. A search and rescue was nothing new to them. It gave me hope. If anyone could find Ben, it was the people in that room.
I shrank into the corner, out of the way, and pulled a trash can over beside me in case I needed to hurl. Vomiting or not, I wasn’t leaving the nerve center of the operation to find him.
A few minutes later, Logan joined me and held out a bottle with pale pink liquid in it. “Electrolytes plus something to calm your stomach,” he said. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Thanks.” I took the bottle.
Logan squatted down on his haunches and spoke quietly. “Listen, Savannah, I’m going to tell you something, and if you ever repeat it, I’ll deny it. When I found out X was putting together this group, some kind of elite forces team, I had zero interest. I’d had enough of working with special forces guys to last me the next ten lifetimes. Then I found out she’d signed Hayes. I’ve read his file. The kid is good. Good enough to convince me to come here. He’s the reason I joined this team.”
“You believe in him that much?” I remembered Ben in the parking garage, preparing for yesterday’s outing, being in the zone and so obviously in his element. “Does he know?”
“No. And he never will, right?”
I nodded.
“Good.” Logan patted my shoulder. “Now, your job is to drink that. Ben’s job is to use his skills to stay alive, and we can finish our job, which is to find him.”
As he walked away, I grabbed his arm. “If Devlin is involved with this, there’s one thing I can do.” I pointed to the remaining kompromat files we hadn’t yet read. “His information should be in there. There might be something we can use against Devlin to help Ben.”
“Have at it,” he said. “I’ll ask Kat who we can spare to help you.”
I sat down at the conference table and started sifting through the pile, this time knowing exactly what I needed to find. My stomach settled for the first time in days. Distress wasn’t the only thing making me sick. Helplessness was part of it, too. I needed to know there was something I could do to make a difference. And I’d do whatever it took to bring Ben home.