Chapter 35
Arthur
“Jesus fucking Christ!” The wind shoved at me as I hauled myself up the second switchback. I had one hand on the wooden railing, but my knee had been protesting from the first step. “I should have been back in the cave three minutes ago. Gwen’s in there by herself.”
“So I’ll grab the drone,” Lance said in my ear.
“I need you on fucking overwatch, Lance.” Below, tourists explored the beach without a care in the world beyond when the tide would come in.
Above me, the fog had swallowed the bridge and most of the headland.
And somewhere in between, our eyes in the sky sat in a bush. “How did the damn thing go down?”
“It’s too small for this wind,” Tristan snapped. “We need better equipment than this.”
“I told you, we should have called in Bedivere,” said Galahad, referring to yet another of our Legacy teammates who’d ghosted me about the new company. “He’s actually trained for this shit. He could have flown it in a little gust.”
“Fuck you,” said Tristan. “I said I can handle this.”
“Everyone, calm down. I’ve got it.” I gritted my teeth against the pain radiating through every inch of my body.
I’d had a solid plan. Exit the cave, confirm the net was quiet, get back to Gwen.
Instead, I’d been greeted by the news that our tiny bird was grounded.
I flipped to the video feed on our group call and pointed it in front of me. “Talk me to it, Tristan.”
“Off the path on your eleven o’clock. In the bushes. About twenty feet in.”
I stepped off the boards into the brush, wet fronds soaking my jeans to the shin.
The quadcopter lay nose-down, its rotors tangled in branches and one skid pointing at the sky.
I worked it free and turned it over. One prop had a slight bend, but the camera gimbal, by some miracle, was intact.
I showed Tristan the damage. “Can you still fly her?”
“Of course I can.”
I held the drone out. The rotors spun up. She bobbled on my hand, lifted off, dipped hard toward the cliff face, caught herself, and finally climbed.
“See?” Tristan said. “I told you I can—”
“I’ve got a boat,” said Lance.
Everyone on the call went quiet.
“Small RIB coming out from the seaward side, just inside the fog line. Six aboard.” He exhaled once. “One of them’s struggling. Yellow jacket, Arthur. She’s wearing a fucking yellow jacket.”
The jacket I’d dug out of my mother’s closet because Gwen’s coat was in her luggage in France.
No!
“They’re in the fog now. I lost them,” Lance said.
I ran.
I took the stairs three at a time, the railing the only reason I stayed vertical. “Where’s the drone? Lance, talk Tristan onto that boat. We need eyes.”
“Working on it,” Tristan said. “She’s slow in this wind.”
I launched from the last flight and sand grabbed my shoes. I almost pitched sideways before the boulders at the entrance. The temperature dropped, salt and trapped water hit the back of my throat, and the waves gave a muffled boom somewhere beyond the rock. “Gwen!”
A couple flattened themselves against the cave wall as I passed.
“Gwen!” I braced myself against the sides of the cave, bouncing off them as I splashed through puddles and fought for footing on the rocks. But I couldn’t slow down.
She was in here. She had to be in here. It had to be someone else in a yellow jacket.
“Gwen!” I slipped, landed hard on my good knee, and scrambled upright.
I’d told Gwen I’d be back in five minutes. But the goddamn drone turned it into fifteen. Fifteen fucking minutes!
I ran past the ledge where I’d set the sword case. Empty.
Past the flat section she’d been gridding when I kissed her and walked out. A flashlight sat on the cave floor, its beam thrown across wet slate.
I kept running. Kept slipping. Kept splashing in the pools. The cave narrowed, then widened. Dim daylight grew ahead until I came out the seaward mouth onto rocks the tide was reclaiming.
“—copy? Arthur, do you read me?”
Waves slapped across the lower shelves. No boat. No engine. No sign she’d ever been here. Fog sat on the water thirty feet out, a wall with nothing behind it.
Gone.
She was gone.
“I read you.” My throat tried to close around the rest. “They got her.”
“Excuse me?” A woman edged out from behind an outcropping, soaked to the waist, arms wrapped around herself. She flinched when I turned on her. “Were you with that woman? Brown hair, yellow jacket?”
“Yes.” I put out a hand and pulled her up onto the drier rocks. “Did you see what happened?”
“There were five of them in the boat.” Canadian accent, her teeth chattering around it. “Three came inside. They had a mean look about them, so I hid back here. They carried her out. Her and a black case.” She swallowed. “I already called the police. Gave them descriptions.”
Lance, Tristan, and Galahad were talking on their end, but none of the words were the ones I wanted to hear. None of them had Gwen’s location.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through old photos. Task Force Legacy. The range day in Mazar-i-Sharif. The group shot in Balkh, sixteen men in front of a Humvee. I found Rick in the back row, zoomed in, and turned the screen toward her. “Was he one of them?”
She studied the photo. “He was the one with the case. He was smiling.”
Of course he fucking was.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. How was I going to find her? What was going to happen to her? I squeezed my eyes shut and forced out the words to my team: “It was Rick.”
Lance exhaled hard through his nose. One breath. “Get up here.”
“Tristan.” I stepped past the woman onto the highest rock, as though a few more feet would fix this. “Tell me you’ve found her.”
“We’re searching, Arthur.”
I leaned down to the Canadian woman, likely in shock from hiding in a little outcropping half-full of water. “The police will want to talk to you when they get here. You should head up the stairs to meet them.”
“She caught me, you know. Inside? I nearly fell, and she caught my hand.” The woman blinked hard, a few tears falling. “She seemed like a good person.”
She is. It stayed on the tip of my tongue. If I said it out loud, the other tense was standing right behind it. Is. She is a good person. “I’ll find her.”
Tristan and Galahad muttered on their end, about altitudes and search grids. They had to find her. They had to.
And when they did, I had to be ready. I moved more slowly back through the cave. I’d been reckless when I ran, and was lucky I hadn’t rolled an ankle and put myself out of commission. I had to remain operational. I had no other option, and a twisted fucking ankle would make everything worse.
Past the narrowing. Past her section of wall. I grabbed her flashlight and shoved it into my jacket pocket, and beside where it had fallen, wedged between two rocks, lay a small DSLR camera.
I hit the power button. The screen lit on her last photo. Her flashlight beam swept across a circle carved into the rock, with a cross cutting through it and wavy channels beneath. The symbol. Fifty feet of it.
She’d found it. She’d actually found it. She’d been standing in front of the biggest discovery of her life when Rick came for her. Had they hurt her? Had I let them—
Move, you worthless piece of shit! Move!
I moved. Rocks, pools, boulders. My ribs and knees screamed their complaints. Background noise.
Your father would have had men at both openings.
My father never would have brought her here, because my father wouldn’t say yes just because a woman asked him to and he wanted to make her happy.
My signal reconnected seconds after I cleared the cave, and I caught Lance mid-sentence: “—has contacts who can pull harbor cameras, maybe—”
“I have her camera.” I hit the stairs. “She found it, Lance. The symbol.”
“Copy. What about the woman you were talking to?”
“She saw it all and called the police. We need to be gone before they arrive, or we’ll be stuck here answering questions.”
I’d been on the stairs when they took her. Retrieving equipment. I’d kept my overwatch posted, handled the logistics myself, and gotten my eyes back in the sky. Every mission I’d ever been on said I made the right call. But the right call had still landed her on a boat going who knew where.
You’re so fucking cocky, Penn. Thought you were across the Channel before Rick and his cronies knew you were here.
I’d underestimated the risk. Hadn’t planned long enough. Should have brought more backup.
‘The most dangerous thing a man can do,’ my father had told me once, ‘is let someone else become the reason he makes decisions.’
I’d been, what, sixteen at the time? I was sitting in a leather chair across from his desk in our Miami condo, waiting for a call to end.
He’d hung up and said it without preamble, as though continuing a conversation we’d been having.
I’d thought he was talking about business partners.
He was probably talking about my mother or one of his faux-friends.
You should have listened to him.
If I had, I wouldn’t have brought Gwen here.
Fuck.
When I crested the top of the staircase, Lance fell in beside me, binoculars around his neck. He gave me one pat on the shoulder, and we sped up to a jog. The parking lot was a twenty-minute walk, and I didn’t know how many minutes Gwen had.
“I’m here,” Merlin said over my earpiece. “Sit rep?”
“Thermal contact,” Tristan said over the line. Thank fuck. “RIB running northeast along the cliffs. Six signatures, one small. I’m in the fog, but I’ve got them.”
One small. Gwen, alive, warm enough to glow on a screen. Maybe? Hopefully?
“Get closer,” I huffed out. “Once we confirm it’s them, pull back and track them.”
“Battery may not last,” said Tristan.
“I don’t care!” I roared. “Just get—”
“I see her,” said Tristan. “She’s—”
“Flash!” Galahad’s shout cut Tristan off. “Muzzle flash off the boat.”
My knee buckled, pitching me forward, but Lance caught my arm before I hit the ground. I stopped, holding my hands out, searching for balance in a world that was tipping upside down. “What’s going on!”
Had they shot her? Was Gwen—
I couldn’t—
Wouldn’t—
“Feed’s dead,” said Tristan. “It was Rick. He shot the drone.”
“What about Gwen!” I yelled, clamping a hand over the flimsy earpiece. “Is she—”
“The gun was for the drone, not her,” said Galahad. “She looked fine.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, took a deep breath, and sprinted for the car. My battered body fought every step. I pushed harder.
Rick was armed, and maybe the others were, too.
And he had Gwen.
Had she screamed for me when he came? Was she screaming now?
Goddamnit, Gwen, tell them about the email. Tell them about the dead man’s switch. Give them a reason to keep you breathing.
What were we going to do? Where could we start? What could the team do?
“Hopkins!” I blurted. “That motherfucker is behind all of this! He’s going to tell us where she is.”
Or he was fucking dead.