Chapter 16
WHAT HE CARRIES
Kaden
I come back to the world on a concrete floor.
The first thing I register is the smell of gas and then blood.
I feel the cold of an industrial space at four in the morning.
The second thing I register is that she is gone.
I get to my feet, but the room turns so I sit back down.
I get to my feet again. My side is wet with blood. The graze.
The bleeding has slowed but not stopped.
Marcus is here but I don’t remember him arriving.
"How long have I been down?"
"Forty minutes."
"How long since they took her?"
"Thirty. Maybe thirty-five minutes. We listened on the phone that she left open.”
They cut the cameras, but we have video of a single black SUV that left this lot at three forty-seven heading northwest.
We are tracking it."
"To where?
"Working it."
"Marcus."
He looks at me. He has seen me in many conditions.
He has never seen me in this one.
"They won’t kill her in transit," he says. "Whitfield does not want her dead in a way that becomes a body and a disposal problem.
He wants her not testifying.
There is a window."
"How long?"
"A small one. Not days."
"Then we go now."
"Lange."
"Don't."
"Sit down."
"Marcus."
"Sit down."
I sit down. The room is still moving.
He looks at the graze. Lifts my shirt. Looks again.
"It's clean," he says. "We can field dress and then we move. But you sit while I do it."
He gets the kit and works fast.
We worked together for Twelve years.
He has dressed three wounds on me before tonight, none of them with this expression on his face.
"What?"
"Don't talk."
"What?
"You said her name three times while you were under," he says. He doesn't look up. "That is not the operator. That is the man. The man does not run an extraction. The operator runs the extraction. Do we have a problem?"
I look at him.
"No," I say.
"Lange?"
"No, sir. We do not have a problem."
He looks at me for a long second.
"Good. Because we have an address."
How did we get the intel?
Our guys in Alpha Security Group were able to follow cameras to a general area.
Then they investigated off-book interest in Whitfield real estate. There is a property forty minutes northwest
It’s private and listed under three shells.
Whitfield's name does not appear on any document but the names of holding companies linked to him do.
"The SUV's last visual is on the access road for one of those properties.
I stand up. The room holds.
"Truck."
"Mine. Yours is on the camera."
We go.
The property sits behind a gate at the end of a private drive.
The stone columns are lit but the rest of the lights are low.
It’s the kind of place that does not advertise itself.
Marcus kills the headlights two miles out and drives on the running lights.
A few hundred feet out he stops. We go on foot.
He has brought two men.
Alpha, both of them. Both quiet. Both carrying what they need to carry.
The four of us approach from the east tree line.
The house is set back from the gate.
It’s a two-story with the lower floor lit on the north side.
There is a man on the front porch with a rifle.
But he’s relaxed, the complacent posture of a man at hour two of a shift that has not gone sideways yet.
Marcus signals. The two Alpha men split off to the south side. Marcus and I take the north.
I find her in the second window.
I do not see her. I see the shape of a room with the lights on and the angle of a chair and one of her hands resting on the arm of it.
Her hand. I know that hand. The shape of the wrist.
The ring she wears on the middle finger that she has worn since the cabin.
She is sitting up.
Sitting up means she is conscious.
Conscious means we have a window.
I signal Marcus and he signals back. The two Alpha men confirm.
The man on the porch is the first target.
I take him in under five seconds and he does not make a sound.
Marcus takes the door.
What follows is forty-three seconds of work best not describe in detail.
There is a total of four men inside. There were five. The fifth one comes down the stairs while I am working the third one and Marcus takes him on the landing.
The Alpha men take the south side, where there are two more, I hadn’t seen.
When it is done, I am standing in the doorway of the room where I saw her hand.
She is in the chair. Her hands are zip-tied to the arms. Her face is bruised on the left side, the eye starting to swell, but her eyes are open and her eyes find me before I have crossed the threshold.
She does not say my name.
She does not say anything.
She just looks at me.
The man in the room with her is the man who was on the other side of the door at the east site.
The voice that was patient. He has a weapon in his hand. He has not raised it.
He is looking at me. Reading me.
He sees the compass.
The collar of my shirt has pulled open. The compass tattoo is visible. He is looking at it the way a man looks at something he recognizes.
"Reyes," he says.
I do not move.
"You were on Harrow," he says. "I was peripheral. I knew Miguel. I trained him."
His weapon is still in his hand.
"I did not know who Whitfield was," he says. Quietly. To me. "When I took the job tonight. I know now. I figured it out while she was sitting in that chair."
He sets the weapon on the table.
He steps back from her.
"She is yours," he says. "I am leaving through the back."
He walks past me.
I do not move until he is past me. Then I cross the room to her.
I cut the zip ties with the knife from my belt.
Her hands are cold and her wrists are raw where she has worked them.
I do not say anything.
I kneel in front of the chair and put my hands on her face, carefully, avoiding the bruised side.
I look at her pupils. They are equal. Reactive. The eye that is swelling will be fine.
"Concussion?"
"No. It was just a lap. He didn't want to leave marks.
"Other injuries?"
"Wrists raw but otherwise no."
"Gas exposure?"
"I lost consciousness for under a minute. Headache. Nothing systemic."
I have her wrists in my hands now. I look at them.
"I am so sorry," I say.
"Kaden, it’s not your fault, you saved me."
"I should not have left the front."
"You were shot."
"I should not have been in front of the table. I should have been in front of the door. I missed a man. I missed the third man and the canister."
"Kaden."
I look at her.
She looks back at me. Her unbruised eye is steady. Her bruised eye is steady too, under the swelling.
"You came," she says.
"Yes."
She puts her hand on my chest. The same place. Over the compass. Her hand is cold.
I put mine over hers.
We both breathe, together.
Marcus is in the doorway.
He’s quiet. Letting us have the moment, but not for long.
"Lange. We need to move."
I look at her.
"Can you walk?"
"I can walk."
I help her up. Her legs hold. She holds my arm.
We walk out of that house together.
I keep my body between her and the open doorways.
The night is cold. Marcus has brought the truck around to the front drive.
The two Alpha men are at the gate.
The man who let her go is, somewhere, walking northeast through the trees and will not be on any list of mine.
Torres called the federal warrant in eleven minutes ago.
Federal vehicles are six minutes out.
We sit in the truck with the heat on while we wait.
She is almost in my lap, and I let her stay there, my arms around her. Her head against my chest, over the compass.
Her breathing slow.
"I called Marcus," she says. Quietly.
"He told me."
"I told him to tell you something."
"He didn't."
"He said I'd tell you myself."
"Tell me."
She lifts her head.
"I figured out what to ask for," she says. “What I want when this is over.”
I look at her.
"What?"
"All of it," she says. "I want all of it. I want to watch you do pull ups on the porch. I want the cabin, and you to make my coffee in the morning. I also want the Tuesday dinners with Dana and my work at the hospital. I want all of it. With you."
I look at her with a smile.
I do not say anything.
Then I lean down and I kiss her forehead. The unbruised side. Carefully.
"All of it?” I ask to be sure.
"All of it," she repeats softly.
We sit in the truck and wait for the federal vehicles.
She stays in my lap.
I do not let go.