Chapter 2
PEYTON—TEN YEARS LATER
It was pitch-black out, clouds covering the light from the moon. Crickets were chirping, and a breeze swept through, ruffling the trees.
We couldn’t have asked for a better night for the op.
“Drones up,” I said into my headset as I activated three drones and flew them high in the sky, stopping them once they were hovering over the mansion.
Three of the four screens lit up, giving me the night vision view with heat blobs that represented people in and around the mansion. The fourth screen showed a man watching TV in a penthouse an hour away.
Hunched over my keyboard, I wished I had more room in this van to move. The only thing I disliked about these missions was how condensed my workstation was.
Five heat blobs show up on screen, exactly where they were supposed to be.
My knee bounced. Hands suspended over the keyboard, I waited to hit the keys to hijack the mansion’s security cameras.
The eight blank screens on the other side of my desk came to life with a single press of a key, giving me real time footage of what the security guards on this massive estate were seeing.
The switch happened so fast, the people watching would have no way of knowing that it was a recording from yesterday.
They were blind, and they had no idea. Amused at their incompetence, I huffed a laugh. It made my job easier.
I turned on my mic. “All clear. Wife in primary bedroom, one child in small bedroom in the east wing. Retraction on my count. Three. Two. One.” I started the timer.
We’d studied the schematics of the entire twenty-acre estate, gotten intel from the security team about how often the guards changed positions, and accessed the closed-circuit security feeds.
The only piece left was confirmation of where our targets were for extraction, which I’d just provided.
We had three minutes and four seconds to secure both the woman and the child, then get them out of the house and through the woods to the waiting car.
As though they had one mind, all five heat blobs moved at the same time.
I kept my eyes locked on the feeds from inside the house, watching for anything that shouldn’t be there.
The fact that he had cameras not only monitoring the public areas of the house but also all the bedrooms, including the main bedroom where his wife lay sleeping, played to our advantage.
He used those cameras to watch his wife, to make sure she was where he wanted, when he wanted.
It made me want to lock him up and leave him for weeks, teasing him with food and water just out of reach.
I wished we could wipe his miserable existence off the face of the earth, but he was too high profile.
I kept one eye on the man in the penthouse.
Lyle Lowenstein, the scumbag husband who was responsible for our mission here tonight.
He didn’t hire us, but if it weren’t for his frequent and vicious abuse, we wouldn’t have needed to extract his wife and child.
His money and power granted him immunity.
Mrs. Lowenstein had finally summoned the fortitude to file a complaint, only to watch the evidence disappear and the report get buried.
It had taken me less than an hour to dig up three complaints. A deeper search yielded five more. Eight times she’d found enough courage to seek help. Eight times she’d been failed by the people who were supposed to protect her and her child.
It made my blood boil.
If it wasn’t for the private forum I’d created for social workers, so many more lives would’ve been lost. They needed a place to safely vent their frustrations over the bureaucratic red tape, and I needed a way to find the people who slipped through the cracks.
Some situations didn’t call for an extraction and we were able to help without ever leaving HQ. Sometimes more extreme measures had to be taken.
This wasn’t our first rescue mission, nor would it be our last.
The infrared bobs showed exactly where Izzy, Chris, Tyler, Adrienne, and Jessen were on the property.
A guard turned the corner and headed toward the wife’s room.
I checked the timer, even though I didn’t need it to know that he was early.
He wasn’t supposed to be there for another five minutes.
According to our intel, the guards checked to make sure she was still in her room at every shift change.
The numbers on the clock climbed, screaming at me that we had thirty seconds left before we moved to plan B.
“Position one, beware, guard early.”
“You gotta be kidding me, man,” Izzy muttered.
“Nope, hang on.” Literally.
“Not much of a choice.” Her voice was strained, and I didn’t need to check the drone feeds to know she was holding onto the tiny ledge of the balcony outside the primary bedroom.
My eyes flicked to the feed of the kid’s room, which was on the other side of the second floor. The guards never entered that room, but we were about to wake up a five-year-old and sneak him out his window and into the woods. There was a better than decent chance he’d scream and alert the guards.
“Go.” I barked the order more harshly than I intended. If there was one thing I hated, it was when our meticulously planned missions got shot to hell.
Static came through my headphones. “Targets A and B, secure.”
Another life saved from a dangerous situation. But getting them out of the house was only step one in the process. There was still a lot to be done—relocation, new identities, finding them the resources to start the healing process.
At least we were giving them the opportunity to live, a chance so many others didn’t get.
The timer went off, and I let go of the breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding as my team moved through the woods. My drones hovered over the area, allowing me to ensure no surprises popped up.
“Not every mission is going to go off without a hitch,” Betty, our boss, said.
“I know. That’s why I had us create plans B through D,” I shot back.
“I’m just saying. If you let go of that perfectionist mindset, you wouldn’t stress out so much when something doesn’t go right and you have to pivot.” Betty leaned back in her chair, not that there was much room in the van. I was surprised that all my equipment fit, let alone an additional chair.
Betty pointed at one of the screens, redirecting my focus to where it belonged. I typed out the code to switch the camera feeds back to normal. “Mind your business,” I said, with no heat behind the words. I loved Betty. She was more like an aunt than a boss.
She was Uncle Wolf’s best friend and she’d pretty much always been a fixture in my life. I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t approached Ghost Unit with job offers for all of us.
I looked over at her. Eyes closed, head tipped back, her short hair hanging over the back of the chair. Next to Aunt Jeannie and Scarlette, she was my favorite woman on the planet. She’d brought me home, given my family a place to go.
“It’s hard to mind my own when you ladies want to play superhero for free all the time. Someone has to keep you levelheaded and me in the green,” she said, opening a granola bar.
“Whatever. We do paid work too.” I rolled my eyes. We’d made her so much money since she hired us two years ago that she could’ve retired and bought a vacation home in Maui. Betty wasn’t that type though.
“I’m aware. It just pisses me off more because you bring in too much dough for me to complain about the rest.” She huffed. “Savannah told me I had to be nice since we can finally go on that trip to Bora Bora she’s been begging me for.”
I rolled my eyes but stayed focused on the monitors.
My favorite part of the entire mission was coming up.
The guards would go to check on the woman and find her missing, along with the kid.
And after they’d searched every nook and cranny of the ostentatious twenty acres, they’d get the joy of calling their boss and telling him his wife and child had disappeared.
I loved watching them squirm. We just needed to prepare for how the husband handled it.
Would he go to the police, or would he hire his own investigators to find her?
Probably the latter; Lyle had more money than he could spend in three lifetimes.
But our team had zero concerns that he’d find his human punching bags.
They spent less time searching than I would have thought. Less than ten minutes after they discovered their snafu, the guards dialed their boss. Filled with glee, I watched Lyle throw a temper tantrum like a two-year-old who was told he couldn’t have any ice cream.