15. Adrian
FIFTEEN
“Could you have picked a more rundown motel?” Gabe griped the moment he and Zach stepped through the door. “If I were hunting someone down, this would be the first place I’d check. Jesus.”
I snorted and looked at Zach. “Has he been a peach the whole ride here?”
Zach gave me a flat look. “Just about, yeah. He didn’t want to leave Charlotte and Savannah, as if leaving Marissa and Lacy was super fun for me.”
“Yeah, but your daughter is nine, so you could at least explain to Lacy why you were going. Savannah just kept demanding to come with me.” I wasn’t sure how eloquent a sixteen-month-old baby could be, but whatever she’d said had clearly been hard for Gabe to resist.
“Oh, I’m glad Elias didn’t do that,” Nataliya piped in, drawing all of our attention. She looked sheepish. “I don’t think I would have been able to get in the car.”
Gabe’s expression warmed. “See? Nat gets it.”
I wrinkled my nose. Nat. It didn’t suit her at all. “Nataliya,” I corrected.
Gabe blinked. “Oh, sorry.” He looked at Nataliya. “I apologize if that was rude.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine,” she assured him, smiling far too kindly. “I haven’t been able to use my own name in a long time, so a nickname certainly doesn’t bother me.”
I tried not to scowl. It was the most she’d said since the day before, and Gabe had gotten a smile. Ever since Sam called about Elias, she’d been distant, quiet, and sad with her expression defaulting to a frown. Not that I could blame her—I was worried about him even after only knowing him for a handful of days, so it wasn’t hard to imagine how helpless she must feel right now—but we’d called this morning, and Elias had bounced back just fine. He was chipper over the phone, and Sam promised that he had slept well and wolfed down his breakfast. But still, Nataliya hadn’t relaxed.
“What happened with the FBI agent?” I asked, interrupting them. “Did he ever come back?”
“He watched the house for a bit,” Zach said, “but he didn’t speak to us.”
“We saw him on the phone with someone before he left for good,” Gabe jumped in, bad mood momentarily forgotten. “Whoever was on the other line must have been pissed because he actually looked scared.”
“Hayes is getting desperate,” I said, thinking of the attack at Nate’s rental in Tupelo. It was a clear escalation from the men who’d tried to snatch Nataliya from the diner. They hadn’t been looking to hurt her then, but the ones who came after us in Mississippi had been packed for violence.
“But why now?” Nataliya asked, finally addressing me directly. “What’s changed?”
“From Anton’s messages, he’s paranoid,” I said. “It makes sense that he wants to tie up anything that feels like a loose end, and we’re being very persistent in not letting ourselves get tied up.”
She let out an aggravated sigh. “I want this over with,” she said.
I couldn’t agree more. “Let’s get down to business then,” I said.
“Are you out of your mind?” I demanded, arms crossed over my chest. “You want to go in there alone!?”
Adrian mimicked my movement, crossing his arms as well. “We need to do some recon before we attempt to hack into anything.” I gestured at the building schematic we had spread across the bed. “This is all well and good, but we won’t actually know what we’re getting into until we see it. We need a sense of where they have cameras, where they have guards in fixed stations, where they have guards on patrol, how often those patrols pass a given point—and about a dozen other things that floorplans on their own can’t tell us.”
Take a breath, I told myself. It wouldn’t help anything to swear at him. At least, I doubted it would. Adrian could be a stubborn man, nearly as stubborn as me. “Why does doing recon mean going alone?” I asked. “Didn’t I tell you not to put yourself in front of guns anymore?”
Gabe snickered, and Adrian glared at him. “What are you laughing at?” he demanded.
“Sorry, man,” he said, holding up his hands.
“But she’s got you dead to rights,” Zach added.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Gabe shared a look with Zach. “You’ve always been the type to lead from the front,” he said, “and that’s definitely not a bad thing, but?—”
“But it means you’ve always taken the brunt of the damage,” Zach went on for him. “Like, somehow, you getting hurt is more acceptable than that happening to anyone else.”
Adrian looked confused. “You think I have some kind of death wish?” he asked, defensive. “I don’t.”
“We don’t think you’re suicidal, Adrian,” Zach assured, but to me, he didn’t sound entirely certain. “You’re just…reckless sometimes.”
“You have families,” Adrian said. “You have people who will miss you.”
His words struck me straight in the chest. “So, what?” I asked, sounding far angrier than I wanted to, “Do you not see yourself as important? Don’t you realize that your teammates would be devastated to lose you?” I gestured to the room around us. “Look at what you’re all doing for Cuddy and Roger. Would you rather they be doing this for you?”
Adrian was angry. That was perfectly clear on his face. “Nobody should have died on that mission,” he all but spat at me. “Someone fucked over my team, and someone we cared about died. Someone you cared about died. That’s why I’m doing this, not because I’m reckless or suicidal.”
“Okay,” I conceded. “Okay, I get it, but could you listen to your team? Please? They don’t want you going in alone.”
“She’s right, Adrian,” Gabe said. “I agree that we need to do some recon, but we know that it’ll be dangerous. Hayes isn’t afraid to tell his guys to strike out with everything they’ve got. We need to be careful.”
I saw the moment Adrian gave in, and I relaxed. At least he’ll listen to his team, I thought. Even if he won’t listen to me. “So, should we all be a part of the recon?” I asked.
Adrian shook his head, barely looking in my direction. “Absolutely not,” he said, practically biting out the words. “Until we have a plan to get you near the Hayes headquarters safely, you’re not going.”
“But—”
He looked at me, face flat. “You’re brilliant with a computer,” he said, “but you were never a SEAL.”
Aggravation boiled in my gut. “I think I’ve done just fine against Hayes’s men so far.”
“They weren’t trying to kill you then,” he argued. “Now, I wouldn’t be so sure, so you’ll stay here until I say so. End of discussion.”
I bristled…but a small, niggling part of me knew he was right. I wasn’t trained like he and his team were. In all actuality, I would be a liability on site, useless until I was behind a computer. But, still, I didn’t like being brushed off. Asshole, I thought.
“You and I should go,” Gabe suggested, looking at Adrian. “That agent spoke to Zach, and they obviously know what Nat looks like.”
“They know what he looks like too,” I pointed out.
Adrian’s jaw clenched. “I’m going,” he said, using that same unquestionable tone. I took a breath in through my nose and let it out through my mouth.
“So…you and Nataliya, huh?” Gabe asked ten minutes after we left the motel.
I resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of my nose. “Don’t start.”
Gabe chuckled. “Well, that answers that.” I could feel his eyes on the side of my face, but I refused to acknowledge him. “What were you thinking?” he asked. I drove on in silence. “Adrian.”
I groaned. “What?”
“Talk to me.”
I had forgotten what it was like to be around my former teammates. They knew me better than anyone in the world, which came with the downside that they could read me like a book. “I like her,” I said. “I like her kid.”
“But—?”
“But what?” Gabe gave me an unimpressed look, and I considered throwing him from the moving car. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with me and her, but it doesn’t matter. When all of this is said and done, we’ll go our separate ways.”
“Why does it have to be that way? Maybe she’ll want to stay if you give her enough of a reason.”
I laughed, but the sound was weary. “When has anyone ever stuck around, Gabe?”
He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “You’re not a SEAL anymore. You don’t have to travel all the time, never putting down roots and always throwing yourself into dangerous situations. Once this is over, you could give it up.”
Give it up? The thought had never occurred to me. The only reason I left the SEALs was that I knew I wouldn’t be able to figure out what happened to Cuddy while I was still in the service. There would never be any time, and I wouldn’t have the resources. Being an FBI agent put me closer to where I needed to be.
But if I wasn’t a SEAL, and if I wasn’t throwing myself into investigations like this, what else was I good for? I hadn’t known anything else since I was eighteen.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Let’s just stay on task, all right?”
Gabe sighed, but he didn’t argue, and the rest of the drive into Atlanta was devoid of conversation. The GPS led us right to the business complex that housed the Hayes Group. It was an innocuous building, all shiny glass surfaces and sharp angles. Interesting and ominous all at once.
We found a public parking lot nearby, and we both donned baseball caps and sunglasses. It might be a cliché kind of disguise, but it matched the people milling around, so we weren’t entirely out of place. A quick, but thorough, walk around the building left us with the knowledge of the doors—the large front entrance, a smaller employees’ entrance, and the back door for deliveries—and the security at each.
Gabe noted the cameras as well. They had each corner under noticeable surveillance, and I would put money on there being hidden cameras. “You think we can risk walking into the lobby?” Gabe asked. “Scope it out?”
I considered it, but eventually shook my head. “I don’t think so; I don’t want them to see us today and get suspicious when we stroll in tomorrow. We’ll have to go off the pictures from their website and whatever we can find on social media”—maybe we’d get lucky and someone would have posted pictures from a Christmas party or something—“and match it up as best we can to the blueprint back at the motel.”
Gabe nodded. “Then I think we’re done here.” We meandered back to the car, nonchalant as possible. When we got there, he “accidentally” let his phone slip out of his hand and under the car so we had an excuse for him to duck under it and make sure no one had added a tracker while we’d been away. It wasn’t super likely in a public lot in the middle of the day, but stranger things had happened, and we didn’t lose anything by being cautious. I’d been checking the car every time we took it out, just in case. “Maybe take the long way back?” he suggested as I climbed behind the wheel. “We can be on the lookout for anyone following us.”
I agreed, and we quickly mapped out a route that would take a little more than an hour, but it would give us ample time to see if we’d been tracked.
When we were sure that there was no one, we headed for the motel. Zach already had the Hayes Group’s website up so we could get an idea of what we would be walking into. Nataliya was in the bathroom; I could hear her on the phone.
“Elias?” I asked, gesturing.
Zach nodded. “It’s a little early, but he wanted to tell her about testing today.”
“Everything okay?”
“They aren’t screaming,” Zach said. “If that’s what you want to know.”
That didn’t mean anything…but her voice was soft and measured from the bathroom. No pleading or soothing, like the night before, so that had to be good. Right?
When she came out, there was a little smile on her face. “Elias did better today,” she said when she saw me. “He got through all of the testing without crying, and he told me that he wasn’t in much pain.”
I felt the smile grow on my face. “That’s great.” Some weight lifted from my shoulders, and it struck me how much I had been worried for the kid. I barely even knew him. Why did I care that much?
But the look on Nataliya’s face, soft and happy, made my heart race…and by the expression on Gabe and Zach’s face, they could tell. “Let’s talk strategy,” I said, forcing the fluttering away as forcefully as possible. “I want to get this over and done with.”