Chapter Seventy-Four
Phoenix
Three days.
Three fucking days to find her, and only because she stepped into a general store that was on the edge of the King Range National Conservation Area, where a live cam picked her up.
I was watching the footage in the home office that doubled as a safe room when Linc came up behind me.
“Hey.”
“Good morning.” I glanced at the clock on the screens. “It’s early for you.” Once he was out, the kid could sleep for fifteen hours at a stretch. He also wasn’t a morning person. “You sleep okay?”
“Yeah. I mean, yes. I made coffee.” Setting the mug next to me, he looked over my shoulder. “Where’s that? Did you find her?”
“Shelter Cove, California.” I pushed back in my chair, grabbed the mug, and stood. “And yes, I did. Sit.” I took a sip. “You make good coffee.” I usually didn’t drink it, but Linc had been making it for me every morning since Isla had left. So I drank it. He drank water—from the tap.
“You really found her?” Suddenly alert, he took the chair. “Is that a live cam? Is she okay? What do I do?”
“Yes to the first three questions. Use the tracking pad, toggle to the software program on our servers, then rewind the footage to last night.” I’d been teaching him everything I knew about tracking since that first morning, when I’d needed to distract him.
In retrospect, giving a fifteen-year-old the skills to stalk a woman may not have been a sound decision. But Lincoln wasn’t only a teenager.
Over the past three days, I’d learned a lot through subtle questioning.
Most of it gutting.
Mainly, Lincoln had been his mother’s caretaker, which I’d surmised. The details, however, would fucking haunt me the rest of my life. My son had been nurse, cook, house cleaner. He’d tended to his mother through every one of her treatments.
Then there were the grocery runs, doctor appointments, and three trips to the ER.
He’d not only been running all their errands, but he’d been driving his mother everywhere she needed to go.
It wasn’t until she’d become bedridden that she’d had him drive them from their WITSEC location in Texas to his great-grandmother’s in Virginia.
Which Linc had said was a less-than-hospitable arrival.
Not that I hadn’t already surmised as much from my interaction with the old woman.
But that wasn’t the part that was eating at me.
My fifteen-year-old son had driven fourteen hundred miles with his incapacitated mother in the front seat, and his backpack in the trunk, because he’d had the wherewithal to lock up the precious little cash they had.
Cash for gas that just barely got them to Virginia.
Everything else, they’d left behind. Then, a day after they’d gotten to the old woman’s house, my son had sold their car for two thousand and sixty dollars—exactly enough for him to buy a hospital bed from Walmart and have it delivered.
A fifteen-year-old.
I didn’t know if I was angry at his mother for putting him through all that, or grateful she taught him the skills he needed so they could spend those final months together. Probably a combination of both.
I also found out Lincoln had enrolled himself in virtual school when his mother had gotten sick.
He’d made the choice so he could be home for her.
Yes, I’d sacrificed my life for my country, but my son had sacrificed his for his mother.
I was still coming to terms with that level of altruism.
Especially for a man his age, because while still technically a minor, every decision he’d made was that of a man.
I’d never diminish him or his actions by saying otherwise.
His capacity for love alone made him a better man than I was.
I had the skills of an assaulter, strategist, and operator.
I’d spent the past decade eliminating targets by any means necessary.
I’d protected my country from unseen threats.
But Maila was right. I could’ve told her I was alive, but I’d chosen not to.
I’d hidden behind the fact that I’d kept my old cell number active all these years.
I’d told myself my sister knew how to reach me if she truly needed to.
That was my one propitiation to familial honor. The one gateway I’d kept open.
Which, ironically, thankfully, had brought my son to me.
I still hadn’t wrapped my head around that. Or the fact that if I’d contacted Maila, if someone had intercepted the communication, if the cell number had been sacrificed, I wouldn’t have my son with me now.
I’d traded a sister for a son.
My son had lost his mother and gotten me.
None of it was fucking fair.
I swallowed another sip of coffee and a mountain of guilt. “Slow it down. See the tinted-out SUV pulling into the parking lot?”
“Yeah.” Linc toggled the feed to run in real time. “I mean, yes, sir.”
I didn’t correct him on the sir. I had been correcting him on yes versus yeah though.
Which was probably fucked, if I dissected the act from the way I’d been raised.
The kid was technically a high school senior with the number of credits he had.
Last night, he’d admitted he’d planned to take off from his great-grandmother’s when he turned sixteen because he’d be finished with school by then.
When I’d asked where he’d planned on going, he’d been vague.
It’d taken less than a second to figure out he’d been hoping I’d have replied to his texts by then.
It’d been another gut punch. And a dose of reality.
Who the hell was I to correct the slang of a fifteen-year-old high school senior?
I didn’t have a credible excuse, but I was doing it anyway.
“Watch the passenger side,” I ordered as the SUV idled in the parking spot.
We were both silent as we watched Isla exit the vehicle and walk into the store.
Then Lincoln started tapping his foot as he waited for her to come back out. I fixated on the fact that she was wearing my sweatshirt.
I put us both out of our misery. “Speed up the footage again. Stop when you see the store door swing open.”
He wordlessly followed my instructions.
Thirteen minutes after she entered the store, Isla walked out with two grocery bags, got back into the vehicle, and the SUV pulled out of the lot. No driver was visible in any of the footage.
My son glanced up at me. “Where is she now?”
“Same town, in a remote cabin.” I’d tracked the property record through her mother’s side of the family.
“You’re sure?” Lincoln asked, his foot tapping paused.
Same as I had over the past few days, I took note of how his uncertainty and the hesitation in his speech patterns disappeared when he was mission focused. In this case, focused on finding Isla, which was another thing I hadn’t fully anticipated.
I hadn’t considered the depth of impact of watching the two of them bond.
I didn’t anticipate them becoming a unit independent of me.
But they had.
They’d merged into an entity I could never provide for my son.
For that reason alone, I wanted my little intruse back, even if she didn’t want me.
I’d take her mad, absorb her distrust, and sacrifice my needs just to get her back.
I hadn’t lied to her. She didn’t need to be a substitute for anyone.
No one would replace Lincoln’s mother, and Isla was her own damn hurricane of personality.
That was the woman my son had bonded with, and goddamn it, I didn’t want him to lose anything else in his life. Not if I could help it.
I read my son in on the rest. “I’m assuming she headed to the cabin after the general store, but I don’t have confirmation. Nor do I have confirmation she’s still in the area.”
“How do we find out? Can we try calling her again?” Lincoln rewound the footage, then leaned closer to the screen.
“I’ve been trying.” Over a dozen times a day. “Her cell is still off.” Now that I’d downloaded the intel, I had to wait for him to ask—if he was going to ask. What happened next had to be as much his decision as mine.
My son glanced up. Then he asked the right question. “You found me. Why can’t you find her?”
“I can.” I waited.
It took less than a second. “Then why aren’t we going to her?”
I checked in. “Is that what you want to do?”
Lincoln looked at me like I’d lost my damn mind. “Don’t you?”
“Without question.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
“We’re not.” I tipped my chin toward our monitors.
“Fastest way to get to her is by air.” Reaching over him, I quickly typed one-handed and brought up the program Paragon Operations used to track our fleet.
“These are the planes at our disposal.” I stood back up to my full height.
“You can see all the specs for each one. Any with a green date in the maintenance column are cleared to fly. Which plane are we taking?”
My son glanced up. “You’re asking me?”
No. I was teaching him. “Yes.”
He nodded. “Okay. Um….” He turned back to the computer and briefly typed. “It’s over three thousand miles between here and Shelter Cove.”
“When piloting, exact distances matter.”
“Oh, ah, yeah. I mean, okay. So, like, which airport would we be going to?”
“You tell me.”
He typed again. “Shelter Cove has its own airport. It says… public, non-towered, and VFR?” He glanced back at me. “Can we land there?”
“Yes. Check runway length, hours of operation, and parking restrictions. Then compare the parameters with our planes.”
“Okay.” He turned back to the screen. For the next three minutes, he carefully read the specs and toggled twice to the airport’s website. “Um, it’s kind of a short runway.”
With even shorter hours of operation. “It is.” But if we left now, with the time difference, we’d stick a landing before sundown, Pacific Standard Time.
“I, ah, think we only have one option?”
We did. “Which one?”
“The Embraer Phenom 300E?”