Chapter 12
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Outside the hospital, Andrea and Hayden stood in the early morning air, taking several deep breaths. They’d gotten some answers, even if not all that they had hoped for.
“How about breakfast?” she asked into the void. “I’m kind of hungry.”
He looked over at her and frowned, then shrugged. “So, you pick a spot where you want to go.”
Andrea really wasn’t hungry, but it seemed to give Hayden something to think about, something to do, which was to care for her. And that seemed to be an area he absolutely excelled at.
She didn’t want to take advantage of it, but it would give him a real chance to regroup, even if just to interrupt his busy mind.
And would give her a chance to consider the pros and cons of calling her father.
It’s not what she wanted to do, not at all.
But it was also a potential answer, and she would take just about any answers they could get right now.
When they pulled into a coffee shop on the other side of town, she sighed. “I’m glad this is here because I was starting to think you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I just wanted to get us a long way from the scene.”
“Yeah, from the safe house-apartment, you mean,” she noted smugly.
He nodded. “Yeah, from the safe house. Just think, now that you’re on the other side of where it all happened, it’s not right in your face either.”
She shrugged. “Fine,” she muttered, “but we could have just gone somewhere close.”
“And then they would have come looking for us near the safe house,” he pointed out. “So, this way, it’s not close.” She smiled, they got out, and he opened the door for her.
As they stepped in, she stopped, looked around. “It’s pretty empty.”
“News flash, it’s probably not even 6:30 a.m. yet.” He looked down at his watch and nodded. “They probably just opened.” She shot him a startled look, and he motioned her to a spot in the back. “Things got off to a fast start today.”
“You’re not kidding,” she muttered, as she headed in, found a spot, and sat down. He quickly asked the waitress for coffee and menus, which she brought immediately. Andrea smiled at her and thanked her for it. The woman just nodded and took off again. “She’s not terribly friendly, is she?”
“She literally just got on shift and was probably hoping nobody would come by for a while, so she had a chance to get set up properly.”
“I didn’t even think about that.” Andrea looked back at the waitress, who was stifling a yawn. “Did you ever work in a restaurant?”
“Sure did. Dishwasher, line cook, all kinds of dead-end jobs,” he shared cheerfully. “They teach you a lot about humanity. They also urge you to do something better with your life, so you don’t end up doing that full-time.”
“Is that when you decided to go into law enforcement and even specialize in this?”
“Nope, I went straight into the navy, which is when I met you, then became a SEAL, and that’s how I ended up here.” She stared at him, and he smiled. “I’m part of a special assignment group right now, so that’s how I ended up doing what I’m doing. And you’re welcome, by the way.”
She stopped, frowned, and then nodded, “Yeah, thank you,” she added belatedly. “I didn’t even get a chance to say that to you before you whisked me away.”
“It just seemed prudent to not hang around when law enforcement showed up. The fewer people who see you, the better for us.”
“Yeah, that’s smart,” she muttered. She looked at the menu, her mind agog over how this whole mess just kept getting bigger and badder. She was frustrated as hell too. “I don’t understand why it’s not over though.”
“It’s not over because we haven’t got the masterminds, the big bosses behind it all.”
“And yet those foot soldiers, as you called them, are all the people I saw,” she argued, talking over the menu.
He nodded. “But that doesn’t mean it was everybody who knew about you though. Those are the big bosses who told the Hulk to confirm you didn’t talk. That doesn’t mean they were asking him to kill you necessarily, but they probably were.”
She nodded. “Isn’t that great?” She rolled her eyes. “That’s all we’re worth to people anymore.”
He smiled. “We can go around and around that conversation forever, and it’ll never get any better,” he pointed out. “So let’s just focus on what we can do, and that’s to figure out where we’ll land from here.”
“You mean, you haven’t got that all figured out yet?” she quipped.
*
Hayden smiled at her and shared, “I’ve got a phone call in to Mason, but I haven’t heard back yet. I’ll contact him before we leave. I just figured this stop for food would give us a chance to regroup.”
“Do you think we’ve been followed?”
“It’s always possible,” he replied, with a shrug, casually looking around the place. “I can’t imagine they have any more disposable men on hand at this point. There is Darius, but he’s in a cell now. So who’s left? I think everyone else is dead by now.”
She frowned and nodded. “I did see a little red car,” she muttered. “Did you see it, or was I imagining things?”
“I saw it too, but then it turned off quite a bit back. So I am not sure whether it was switched out for somebody else or had nothing to do with us at all,” he shared, again checking out the restaurant. “While we’re here in a public place, we should be fine. No promises after that.”
She stared at him, turning a bit pale. “That’s horrible.” Then she frowned at him, an odd look on her face. “Do you think Arlene would have kept anything at her house? It would be nice to know that we cut off all the heads of the snake, instead of waiting for the next one to appear.”
“At her house? Probably not,” he suggested, “but I’m wondering if she kept anything at work.”
“Shocker,” she muttered, rolling her eyes, “but that could be accessed by anybody.”
“And yet how many people would have looked on her computer or checked to see if she had logged into a private email or something like that, all from that specific work computer?” he asked. “I mean, how many people know to do that?”
She stared at him and shrugged. “Probably nobody. Even if she had called in the university’s IT people, they would have just come in, fixed the problem, then got out.
They weren’t spies, looking for hidden info.
Plus, I doubt they’re particularly bothered about anything but doing their jobs as quickly as possible,” she shared.
“So, maybe—”
“Is that what you want to do? Go there next?”
“That’s what I was thinking. I figure Interpol is all over her London office. So I don’t know whether the New York City campus would have replaced her yet or erased her files or that sort of thing. I understand she had taken some leave and was supposed to be gone for a time anyway.”
“Yeah, I seem to remember something about that, but I don’t know. Still, she had been with the university for quite some time.”
“And, like waitresses, administrative people get overlooked a lot. I think it’s worth getting Mason involved to see if we can go in and get a look at her work computer.”
“But it’ll all be supersecret university stuff, keeping their students’ information private so as to protect them. So I don’t think the dean would allow anyone access to her computer.”
Hayden smiled, a gleam in his eye. “That could be, and, in that case, maybe we won’t get university access, so we’ll have to see about her home.
Yet I suspect her home of record isn’t where she really lived.
It’ll be someplace else. They would have publicized her home only as a front set up for her. ”
Andrea sat back, sighed, and when the waitress returned, Hayden asked her when it got busy.
“It’s a weekday, so maybe in another twenty minutes or so. Sorry about the wait time. It’s pretty dead this early.”
Hayden smiled and thanked her.
They placed their orders, and, once the waitress was gone, Andrea frowned at Hayden. “Does that matter, when the restaurant gets busy?” she asked him.
“No, it doesn’t matter,” he replied, “except that I want to know what we’re up against and when we can expect to be up against it, instead of being chased from one safe house to the next.”
“Fine, … okay, got it.”
He laughed. “It’s all good, really. It’s all okay. We are safe, we’re here, and, for the moment, we can relax.”
And that’s what they did. They had their breakfast, and he contacted Mason about the request to get into the university.
When he finally got the clearance, he nodded at her. “Okay, now we can leave.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost 7:30. That’s probably an okay time to go to the university, isn’t it?”
“Yes, depending on what your clearance is.”
“We’ll definitely need a security clearance, and you can bet that Mason is working on it.”
She shook her head. “It seems you get to ask Mason for anything you want, and you just get it. He is a miracle worker.”
“No, not at all. We must have a very valid and legitimate reason, asking for something we can pull off. Yet accessing Arlene’s office at the university is fairly minor in the grand scheme of things, particularly when we’re talking national secrets, kidnapping, using the university as a way to target trafficking victims.”
Andrea shrugged. “I’m pretty sure we’ll find people at the university are more than happy to help us out, albeit a little late, but they may jump at the chance to make it right. Yet they didn’t know,” she pointed out, as they drove across town to where the campus was.
He nodded. “I get that. I do. But surely, at some point in time, somebody saw something.”