38. Savannah
The logistics and tactical operatives, including Mai, dressed in field gear. Kat instructed several agents, led by Bloom, to arrange transport and be on standby.
I and the two agents Lang had assigned to help me sifted through pages and pages of blackmail material. With the three of us speed reading, we first found a page using the first initial D that had details I could tie to Devlin. That gave us Devlin’s tracking number that WCI had assigned him, so we were able to pull every page of kompromat Anson had on him.
By the time Bloom returned to report that all units were ready and on standby, I’d read through approximately 20 percent of Devlin’s confessions. They were all about me. How he watched me, tracked my phone, followed me while I ran errands. Monitored my business email account and text messages. Even spied on me with dates. On one page, he’d scribbled out a signed confession that he sometimes knocked on my condo door, claiming he was just in the neighborhood when he suspected I was having sex. And it started years before we ever dated.
I dropped the papers and pushed back from the table.
Then I stood and paced as the minutes ticked past while Lang, Pasco, Jensen, and Bloom, now that he had returned, led small teams sifting through grainy traffic cam footage. After nearly an hour, they’d identified the vehicle that we now believed had taken him and had tracked it along two different highways, but the gray sedan exited onto a side road, and they lost it in a coverage gap.
They were regrouping when Pasco’s phone rang. The room fell silent. My heart lodged in my throat. Mai grabbed my hand. Pasco was mission control for the operatives on his team, so if they were in distress, he was the man they would call.
“It’s a video call,” Pasco announced. “I’ll leave my camera off.”
So we’d get to see him, know if he was all right. Or maybe his captors wanted him on camera for something awful. I was terrified to look at the screen, but more terrified to look away.
Agents shifted into position, some to trace the call, others to decode any hidden messages. Kat gave the thumbs-up, and Pasco answered.
Ben’s image popped onto the screen. Everyone in the room let out a sigh of relief. I fell against Mai’s shoulder and choked back a sob. But all was not well. There was a gash on his head and so much blood, dripping into his eye, running down his cheek, pooling in the base of his throat.
“Head wounds bleed a lot,” Mai whispered.
I nodded and stood up straighter, trying to be brave. If Mai was calm, I should be calm.
“This is Jack,” Pasco said.
“Hi, Jack,” Ben said.
The agent who was taking call notes on a whiteboard wrote first name usage=distress.
I gripped Mai’s hand.
Bond stepped close to the screen, then borrowed the dry-erase pen from the note taker and wrote possible concussion.
“Jack, I’m here with my friend, Devlin,” Ben said.
It wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a shock.
“I told him Savannah received his note about needing help, so she called together some like-minded friends who want to help Howard.”
“We have a problem.” Ben pulled the phone away from himself, and Devlin came into view, looking grizzled, confused, and downright terrifying. Then Ben shifted the phone, and Devlin’s gun jumped onto the screen.
The whiteboard agent wrote armed kidnapper, Colt AR 15.
Off to the side, Kat was hovering over the agents tasked with tracking the phone’s signal.
“I’m going to show you the problem now,” Ben said.
I saw Lang mouth fuck me, and knew it was going to be very bad, worse than an unhinged man with a large gun.
“Taylor Stewart was here with Howard Anson,” Ben was saying as he rotated the phone, “and they left this.” A metal device with wires and a timer came into view. A bomb. “And the wires run to the door and window, as well.”
Everyone in the room tensed.
“Why would he want us to help Anson, the man who left them with a bomb?” I whispered to Mai. “Does that make any sense?”
“Only to the madman holding the gun,” she whispered back. “Devlin looks like he’s dissociating, losing touch. Ben will do whatever it takes to appease him.”
“Where’s Savannah?” Devlin asked. “Why can’t I see her? Why aren’t they on the screen?”
“They’re in a safe place,” Ben responded immediately. “They can’t get a good signal. But that’s how they’re keeping Savannah safe.”
“I want to hear her voice,” Devlin demanded.
Cold fingers gripped my churning gut. I swallowed hard to push down the bile.
Ben, whose back was to Devlin, widened his eyes and ever so slightly shook his head no. But he didn’t get to make that call because Kat waved me forward, closer to the phone. Instinctively, I grabbed the pages of his confessions and went and stood beside Pasco’s chair.
“Devlin, it’s Savannah.”
He smiled, his toothy grin too wide for his now-narrow face. “Vannah,” he said, using a nickname I never liked, “there you are. I’m glad your friend wasn’t lying.”
Lang motioned to me, and I bent toward him. “We need a 3-D view of the bomb so we can walk Ben through disarming it.”
I stood up and took a steadying breath. I pasted a smile on my face like you’re supposed to do when talking on the phone to sound friendlier. “Dev, we have so much to talk about, but first we have to make sure you’re safe.”
“Are you safe, Vannah?”
“I’m safe. But Dev, there’s a bomb there with you. My friends, Jack and Charlie—you remember Charlie from last night, don’t you?”
Devlin nodded. “Of course, I do. You know I’m great with names. Charlie works with Dan Mellner. Dan is sponsoring him to join WCI.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Jack and Charlie are going to help you disarm the bomb, so we need Ben to walk around it with the phone. Is that okay?”
“Of course, Vannah. Whatever you need.”
As he spoke, Ben slowly circled the table. Jensen captured the image on his screen, and his computer began identifying parts of the device.
“Keeping you and Howard safe is all I care about,” Devlin said.
I furrowed my brow. Somehow, he’d conflated his guru and his stalkee in his mind. But maybe that wasn’t so strange. The common denominator between us was Devlin’s obsession.
“Remember your twenty-fifth birthday?” Devlin asked.
Not really, but if he remembered it, it must have been important to him.
“Um…” I shuffled through the pages of his confessions and found a reference. “We had lunch with our staff. There were only four of us at that time. We went to the little Mediterranean restaurant you liked so much.”
“We did, but you’re the one who liked it so much,” he said.
I hadn’t, actually, but Devlin probably hadn’t noticed. He was too busy constructing fantasy me to notice the real me.
“And the Christmas gift I gave you after we broke up. I gave you such a special gift, even though you broke my heart.”
We’d broken up last January, which meant he was talking about a gift he’d given me four months ago. My mind was drawing a blank. I shuffled through the papers, but if the reference was there, I couldn’t find it.
“Savannah, where are you?” Devlin glared over Ben’s shoulder.
Shit. An image popped into my head. “It was one of those special cups that reminds you to drink water.”
Devlin beamed. “See? See how much I care? How much I want to keep you healthy?”
Several things happened at once. As Jensen and Pasco conferred over the bomb information, Lang gave me the wrap signal. They needed to talk Ben through disarming the device. Out of the corner of my eye, the GPS tracker raised his hand. He had a lock on Ben’s location. Wordlessly, Kat gave out commands, and the operatives headed for the door.
And I’d be damned if they’d go to Ben without me.
“Dev, I know you worry about my health,” I said. “Remember my sensitive stomach when I’m stressed?”
“Of course. I brought you those holistic acid reducers.”
“Yes.” I didn’t remember that, either. “But Dev, this situation with Anson has me so upset.” I faked gurgling sounds. “I have to…”
“Vannah, yes, I understand. We’ll talk when you get back.”
I ran for the door like I would if I were really bolting for the ladies’ room. I caught up with Mai and Kat.
“No!” they said at the same time without breaking stride.
“You saw him,” I said. “He’s unhinged. If someone needs to talk him down, who will have the best chance of getting through to him?”
“We have a hostage negotiator on standby,” Kat said. “She’s the best.”
We headed out the back door and into the parking lot.
“Not for Devlin.”
We’d reached one of several vans where operatives were loading in. I held up the pages and looked from Kat to Mai. “They’re all about me. Every confession. Every page. Every line.” I blinked back tears. “Ben’s life is on the line because of Devlin’s obsession, and that’s me.”
Kat groaned as she shoved me into the van. “Mai will get you into a flak jacket and helmet on the way to the bird, and you’ll stay as far back as possible when we’re on scene.”
I opened my mouth to thank her, but she held up her hand.
“Not one more word,” Kat said through clenched teeth.
Which is why I didn’t ask anyone what she meant by the bird.
The bird was a helicopter.A large, Army green, military-style chopper. Except, I learned from Wheeler, no one calls them choppers anymore. I did not feel confident about my stomach’s ability to handle both Ben’s hostage situation and the bird, but I kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t be left behind in the field where we’d made the rendezvous.
We loaded into the bird with Ryan and Kyle right behind the pilot, Kat and Bond in the next row, and Mai and I in the back. In our earpieces, we could hear the phone call between Ben and Pasco, peppered occasionally by Devlin’s questions about my health. Pasco deftly deflected and promised that Devlin and I would have a nice, long chat soon.
My fury had dissipated during the course of our bizarre conversation, and now all I felt for Devlin was deep concern. He’d had issues long before joining Anson’s cult. The mind control and abuse he’d encountered there had broken him. Everyone has a breaking point, Ben had told me. And when Devlin had hit his, he’d gone from disturbed to dangerous.
Howard Anson had so much to pay for. I hoped he would rot in prison.
On the phone call, Jensen said something that got picked up by the phone’s mic. We all tensed.
Pasco said, “This is another friend who’s helping us. He wants to protect Anson, too.”
“And Savannah?” Devlin asked.
“Our friend’s name is Jason,” Pasco said, “and he’s a friend of Savannah’s. Just like all of us.”
“All right,” Devlin muttered.
“Hi, Jason,” Ben said. “Devlin, that’s Jason. The man, the myth, the legend.”
“Is he all right?” Bloom asked.
“I think he’s drunk,” Mai said.
“He’s concussed,” Bond corrected her.
My stomach lurched. The buffeting of the helicopter in the wind was one thing, but picturing Ben the way he’d looked on the big screen, bleeding, disoriented, with a bomb in front of him and Devlin wielding a gun behind him was too much.
Bond reached into her medical kit, pulled out a blue container, and handed it to me. “Emesis bag.” She held out her hand. “Earpiece.”
I shook my head. The thought of being cut off from the only contact I had with Ben was unbearable.
“Savannah, as the medical officer on this operation, I can ground this flight. I promise you, we’ll tell you anything you need to know, but the more upset you get, the more of a medical emergency we might have, so I need your earpiece.”
I pulled it out and handed it to her. She had a job to do, and my anxiety stomach was making it harder, so neither of us had a choice. At least the distraction of our exchange had quelled my urge to vomit.
“Kat, how far out are we from the location?” Bond asked.
“Twenty minutes.”
Bond leaned over to Mai. “Do you have authorization to take the shot?”
“It just came through from X,” she said. “If we can’t talk Devlin down…” She glanced at me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I understand. Anything to keep Ben alive.”
Kat and Mai exchanged a look, and then Kat and Bond faced forward and leaned closer to Bloom and Wheeler.
Mai scooted over beside me. “Savannah, there’s something you need to know. Things could go wrong.”
I knew where she was going with this, and I didn’t want to hear it. I shook my head.
“Savannah, it could happen. Everyone on this team will do everything humanly possible to save my brother.” She held my hand. “But you have to promise me, if anyone yells ‘down,’ you hit the ground, cover your head, and do not move until one of us comes to get you. Do you understand?”
I hesitated.
“Do you understand?” Mai repeated. “Say it out loud.”
“I understand,” I said.
Then I leaned over the emesis bag and lost my lunch.