Chapter 8 #2
Sensing the same, Nic stepped closer, hunching slightly to bring him eye level with Percy.
“You’re the key to this, Mr. Hunter.” Calm and soothing, the same way he’d handled Abby the other day.
Getting his witness, his CI—what have you—to do what he needed.
“All of us”—Nic gestured around the room—“are here to back you up.”
Head down, Percy stared past his wobbling knees to his shoes. “I don’t even want to be in this.” A partial lie. He’d accepted the first job, had wanted it and the sizable payoff. He was a B she was afraid. Nic’s gaze didn’t stray even as he toggled off his comm and said to Cam, “Move the teams in now.”
Cam inched his hand over, brushing the back of Nic’s where it had curled around the counter’s edge again. “Teams, we have eyes on the target. Treat Monroe as a hostage, nonhostile. Approach quiet.”
Those long fingers relaxed, twining with his, until Bowers’s voice came over the comm. “Hold.”
“What the fuck?” Nic said at the same time Cam demanded, “Bowers, stand down.”
“We need someone on the inside,” Bowers replied. His argument from earlier today rearing its head. So much for that rope he’d given them. He wouldn’t let them hang themselves. He’d hang them himself.
And Nic was having none of it. “I promised Percy this was over for him tonight. Once he put himself on the line for us.”
“Change of plans. DOJ wants the person at the top. Percy will have to roll with it.”
“Wait, what?” Percy said, and Cam’s eyes whipped back to the screen.
Becca had heard it too, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Who are you talking to?”
The view on-screen tilted, and Lauren cursed. “Percy! Stop touching your glasses.”
Whatever Percy’s reaction, probably a swift jerk of his hand down, gave him—gave them—away. Becca bolted to her feet, dragging Abby with her.
Bowers’s plan was shot. And his last-minute change had possibly also shot the entire plan if Cam didn’t act fast.
“Teams converge!” he ordered. “Go, go, go!”
But they weren’t close enough yet. Becca twisted, yanking Abby in front of her and pressing a knife to her throat. Their CI used as a shield.
Nic was out the door before Cam could get out a Wait! He cursed, then ordered his teams to hold.
“Who sent you?” Becca demanded of Percy.
“You did,” Percy improvised. “Gave me this location.”
Becca hustled backward, hauling Abby with her. “I think I’ll be demanding a refund.”
“Who’s got a clean shot?” Cam asked.
“Command, Beta, clean shot from the west side.”
“Take it,” Cam said. “Disarm only,” he added in deference to Bowers.
They needed to question Becca, not kill her.
But a half second later, he shouted, “Hold!” before his sniper got off a shot.
At the corner of his screen, Nic had barreled out from behind a building, gun drawn.
He was headed straight for Becca and Abby, whose attention was drawn the other direction by Percy.
Nic had a better angle on the situation, and Cam didn’t want him caught in the crossfire.
No one, however, counted on the car that suddenly revved. That flashed on its high beams, blinding Nic in the middle of the street and, pedal to the metal, aimed right for him.
“Dominic, watch out!” Cam hollered.
But it was too late.
The car caught Nic mid-stride, tossing him over the hood like a rag doll.
Cam couldn’t tell if it was his scream or the screech of Nic’s comm that rattled his ears more. He ripped the device from his ear and hauled ass for the door.
Mel stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “Run the op, Agent Byrne.”
Every one of his cells screamed a different objective. “I need to get to Nic.”
“You need to tell your agents which way is up.”
“What the hell is going on?” Bowers hollered behind them, steps thundering down the stairs.
Mel snatched the comm from his hand, tucking it in her ear. “I’m headed down.”
A sheathed knife hurtling through the air, tossed by Danny perfectly into Mel’s outstretched hand, snapped Cam out of his panic-induced haze. “We’re on it,” he answered Bowers, then to Mel, “Go to him.”
She nodded and disappeared out the door while Cam ignored a glowering Bowers and hustled back into the kitchen.
Lauren tossed him another comm, and he shoved it in his ear, fighting to get his focus back, to look at all the screens when all he wanted to do was watch the screen that showed Nic lying motionless in the street. “Teams report.”
Grinding metal was his answer.
Lauren’s fingers flew across the keyboard of the far-right computer, and a second later, a street-level view appeared on-screen. A second crash of metal and the car that had hit Nic rammed through two police cruisers on its way out of the oval.
Orders were called down the line to pursue, but the two most able to give chase were out of commission.
Cam whipped his gaze to the center computer, to a sideways view of the park, Percy’s glasses on the ground. Percy was in the frame, writhing on the ground with his hands over a bloody nose. Nowhere in the limited view did Cam see any sign of Becca or Abby. “Where are our suspects?”
“They disappeared into one of the south side buildings,” an agent on the ground reported.
“Fan out,” Cam ordered. “Search them all.”
“Lost your suspects again, did you?” Bowers said from the other side of the kitchen bar.
Cam bit back the No thanks to you on the tip of his tongue. There’d be a time for arguing later, and he’d prefer to do so with Nic—
“Agent down!” Mel’s voice came over the line. “We need medical stat.”
Cam finally let himself look at the third screen. Then immediately wished he hadn’t.
He’d needed eyes on the scene, and now he needed some way to erase what he’d seen. Because the sight of Mel crouched next to Nic’s unconscious body, lying crumpled in the middle of the street, was going to haunt him forever.