Chapter 17

Seventeen

Louisiana.

I fucking hated Louisiana. My nose started running the second we deplaned in Shreveport. It was like I was allergic to the air. The route would have taken twelve to fourteen hours to reach via vehicle. McQuade had another plan.

He knew a guy.

Honestly, I didn’t ask for more information. It would probably have added heartburn to my allergies. Remington spared me a look when McQuade drove us to a private airport. The small plane didn’t look sturdy enough to take a hard draft of air, but McQuade just strode away from his SUV and tossed his bags inside.

No one was there to greet or challenge us.

“You certified to fly a plane?” Don’t ask me why I had to utter that aloud. Surely, he was. Or he would have had a pilot meet us. A pilot was another witness, another person who could be turned or conversely, turn us in. Not something I wanted to keep one eye over my shoulder on while we were tracking down Patch.

Fallon.

Her real name was Fallon. It was such a soft, almost lyrical name. Elegant.

McQuade didn’t say a word until he was in the pilot’s seat. “You staying on board if I say no?” He was already flicking switches after putting a set of headphones on.

Remington stowed our bags as I stared at McQuade. The man was just fucking with me. Right?

“He’s a mercenary. He undoubtedly has many undocumented skills.” Remington’s crisp accent didn’t make that option sound like an improvement.

Undocumented could also mean unproven.

“Just don’t crash before we find her,” I’d suggested before pulling the door closed and securing it. This part I was at least familiar with.

“So crashing afterward is fine?” McQuade smirked. “Good to know. Buckle up.” He was already talking to someone on the headset and ignoring us. Did I want to sit up there and see what he was doing or sit back here and pretend?

Remington settled into a seat and pulled the cross straps on. I mirrored the action. Then Remington kicked a pack over to me. I eyed it, then him.

“Parachute,” he said, a faint smile on his face as the plane began to accelerate.

Everyone was a funny guy.

A little over two hours later, we were touching down at another airport outside of Shreveport. My allergies were incensed, but I ignored them as I checked the maps for the coordinates of our destination.

The facility, if any, didn’t show up anywhere except in one old, time-stamped map from about ten years earlier. It had the look of some kind of factory, but there was nothing registering it anywhere.

As of now, it didn’t exist.

“Black site,” McQuade said over his shoulder as I briefed them. “We have as much as we’re going to get. This is going to be an on the fly operation. Locke, you’re going in with me. Remington, you’re on overwatch.”

“I’m also the exit plan,” Remington stated.

“Once we have Patch, we’re going to extract on the run. You are definitely the exit plan, we’ll need you to bar the door once we’re out.” McQuade had barely glanced at the photos I’d been able to find. “Everything we know about the facility says it’s located right at the edge of a swamp. Our exit strategy needs to involve not going through it. Particularly if we don’t know Patch’s condition.”

“No arguments here. I don’t like stagnant water or alligators.” Most of my jobs didn’t involve getting physical with others, or worrying about being shot. I liked the mental exercise and the challenge of overcoming the obstacles in my path without alerting anyone or anything.

This was not going to be the same.

“Your primary job will be getting us past security. If I have to shoot our way out, I’m fine with it.” McQuade sounded more like he was discussing meal plans for after the theater than a raid. “I don’t want to alert them on the way in. If they have orders to kill her rather than letting her escape, I don’t want them to have the heads up.”

Made sense.

“I’ll bring my gear,” I said. “It also means you might have to be patient. If we can snag someone on the way in who has a security card I can slice, that would be better.”

Without more information on what waited inside there, I wouldn’t know the challenges until we hit them. Didn’t mean I couldn’t get past them—just meant it might take a little more creativity than my usual methods.

“Understood,” McQuade said. Then there was nothing to do but drive.

This kind of operation should have at least three months to plan. Ideally, we could map all the security routes, and the layers. We’d know the schedule. I’d have access to internal cameras, or at least get cameras on it so I could see the comings and goings.

We were going to try and pull off what in the best of circumstances should take months in minutes? Hours?

I went over a mental checklist of what I had in my bags. Better to identify missing pieces before I needed them. The focus couldn’t distract me from the one truly troubling part of this operation.

We had no idea what Patch looked like. Her voice? Yes, I knew exactly what she sounded like and what her voice did to me. But I had no description. No age. No hair or eye color. I suspected Caucasian but that was just bias on my part. Picturing the woman that went with that voice.

But even that was reaching.

After what seemed an interminable amount of time, we finally arrived at the facility. It was worse in person than what I’d been able to see on the map. It still looked a lot like an abandoned factory. There was nothing coming out of the smokestacks.

A mosquito stabbed at my neck and I slapped it even as I studied the drive leading up to the place. “Three points on that road that can be choked.”

“Four,” Remington corrected. Like me, he had binoculars up and studying. We’d parked two miles back and hiked in, skirting the edge of the swamp. Getting her out that way if she was wounded would be more than problematic.

I switched my study to the vehicles in the lot. Anything I could hot-wire fast? An old beater would be ideal. Anything pre-90”s would be a great start. The chances of Patch being uninjured after what? Ten? Twelve days of captivity? They were slim.

Very slim.

“Can you handle this?” McQuade asked as he thrust a Glock-19 at me. I didn’t comment, just checked the weapon, the magazine, then secured it in a holster located on the bullet proof vest he’d thrust at me when we got out of the car.

Sweat trickled down my back, even as the rough humidity left my face sticky and uncomfortable. The grip on the Glock wouldn’t slide out of my hand. That was something, I supposed.

“Not a lot of good sight lines here,” Remington said as unruffled now as he’d been since I walked in on him at Patch’s place. “I’ll set up in the grass, twenty meters east. It’s taller there. Better cover.”

Probably had snakes too. Another mosquito took a bite out of me and I slapped it dead too. Mosquitos. Dragonflies. Midges. Ticks. Alligators. Snakes.

It was a fucking paradise.

The heat of late afternoon sun added to the scalding, armpit temperatures.

“We’re not moving until dark,” McQuade said, raising a pair of his own binoculars. “Get comfortable.”

Right. Because hunkered down in the weeds near brackish water while being consumed by bugs was comfortable. I kept my comments to myself, however, while keeping an eye on the facility.

“Mr. McQuade,” I said, keeping my voice down and my eyes trained ahead. “You have a strange idea of comfortable.”

For his part, McQuade snorted. “You’re not bleeding and no one is shooting at you. It could be worse.”

“You’re not comforting either,” I mentioned, tilting my head from one side to the other. The crack of vertebrae releasing tension helped. Some.

“I doubt you want him comforting you.” The clipped intonation from Remington’s accent gave the words an air of formality that his faint smirk decried. Fucking Brits always sounded elegant even when they were telling you to fuck off.

Biting my tongue was not my favorite activity. First, it fucking hurt. Second, it was boring. Staring at the building I tried to picture the security, the layers, and the locks. The sting of a mosquito biting me again earned another slap.

Why didn’t the little bastards bite Cool Duck McQuade and Remington, Brit Remington?

“You should consume more garlic,” McQuade said. “You eat too much damn sugar.”

“Well, I have to maintain my sweet personality somehow.” The quip flowed easily. I could spend months stalking the right information to acquire a piece or casing an installation in order to get inside.

“Well, you might want to try something else,” Remington suggested. “Your diet is atrocious.”

“Everyone is a critic,” I muttered. I dug out the small pack of gum mashed in my pocket. The wintergreen cold released from my first bite was a violent contrast to the mugginess.

“You don’t like quiet much,” McQuade commented, never taking his gaze off the building. “Do you?”

“Civilian,” Remington stated as if it were the answer to everything. That snagged McQuade’s attention and the pair shared a look of commiseration.

“Kiss my ass, Lord Rochester of the Household Cavalry Blues and Royals. Not all of us signed up for the honor guard.”

Okay, probably a bit snappier than it needed to be, but Remington merely smiled. McQuade’s snort of laughter rubbed me the wrong way.

“What are you laughing at? You could have been Delta Force until you received an ‘other than honorable’ discharge.” Which beat the hell out of Dishonorable Discharge. Course, I only knew the bare facts.

“You trying to swipe right on me, Locke?” McQuade’s tone remained unruffled.

“Nope. Just letting you know, I do my homework.”

“So do I,” Remington commented, the clipped British accent in no way disguising his humor. “You don’t care that we’re military, you just want to see how we’ll respond to disdain for the profession.”

“Were,” I corrected him. Neither was on active duty of any kind. McQuade may go into every kind of hellhole he could find, but he wouldn’t be doing it on Uncle Sam’s dime. As for the good Lord Rochester, he wasn’t in it for Queen—or King for that matter—and country anymore.

“Were, are,” McQuade said. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is we all do our jobs tonight. That we get Patch back.”

“And after?” Because mercenaries and assassins didn’t usually stick around after a job.

Then again, neither did thieves. Right now, there wasn’t anywhere else I wanted to be.

“Let’s get her back first,” Remington said. “Deal with the problems, get her secure, then we see.”

Or not, I would suppose. Once we had Patch in the clear, there was no reason for us to work together. Probably better to keep it that way.

“You good with that?” McQuade asked, sparing me a look.

“Yes. I want her back.” I slapped another goddamn mosquito. “I’d also like to not catch malaria.”

That earned me a huff of laughter from both of them. Then we went quiet and watched. The quiet grated. Because I wanted to move. I wanted to throw caution to the wind and get in there. Break in and steal her back…

I didn’t want to compromise her though. Our odds were better after dark.

Didn’t make waiting any easier.

Not much coming and going for the next couple of hours. As sundown crept closer, a handful of people left the facility. Not many, but a few.

A couple in suits. Nearly everyone else looked more like a lab rat or tech.

They’d climb in their cars, the vehicles would start, and they’d keep doors open or windows for a couple of hot minutes to let the sweltering air out while their air conditioning kicked in.

Then they would leave.

All in all, by the time the sun had painted the western sky a burnt reddish-orange, and highlighted the scattered clouds in shadows, of the forty some-odd vehicles in the lot, about twenty-five were still there.

“I’m moving,” Remington said. “Comms in, but keep them off for now until you’re on your way out.”

“Copy,” McQuade answered. I ignored them both. I got not using comms until we were in the clear or needed clearance. They didn’t need me to respond.

Sweat soaked my shirt and I swore I was going to have swamp ass for days. There was no way anyone would miss smelling us if we tried to stay out of sight. Lowering the binoculars, I glanced to where Remington had vanished.

The growing darkness and the ruffling of the grass in the breeze betrayed nothing.

“Get ready to move,” McQuade said in a low voice that barely seemed to achieve whisper. “You stay on on my six until we’re at the doors. You’ll open them, but I go through first. Clear?”

“Clear.” No sense in provoking him.

Anticipation sent a chill licking through my veins. I was ready to get in there and get her out. The day of sitting out here in the swelter while we watched had left a profound itch under my skin.

I pulled my pack on, then the crossbody bag with a wide variety of tools. I didn’t know what I would need until I needed it.

When the last drops of reddish-orange were barely a line on the horizon, McQuade tapped my arm. “Let’s go.” He moved like a phantom, but also on a straight trajectory. I’d half-expected lights to turn on in the lot.

They didn’t.

Security feature? Malfunction? Didn’t matter. It was to our benefit.

I hoped, unless they were motion sensor triggered.

Clasping McQuade’s shoulder, I stopped his forward momentum. As he dropped to a crouch, I went with him. I leaned close and mouthed the words more than vocalized them. “Possible motion sensors on the outdoor lights.”

Why else have them installed?

McQuade tapped two fingers against my hand. A short-hand version of Morse code.

Understood.

I let go of his shoulder and when he rose, I was right behind him. We took a circuitous route around the lot toward the entrance we’d marked. The whole afternoon, we’d only seen one way in and out

Not ideal, but it would have to do.

It also gave Remington one spot to mark and clear if necessary.

McQuade was good, I’d give him that. We didn’t trigger a single light. Motion sensors or not, we made it all the way to within five yards of the entrance. We were going to have no choice but to pass by one of the lights.

Only instead of continuing forward, McQuade paused and there was a pop of sound. Then another. Then a third. Glass cracked and then came down in a shower of fragments where the pieces bounced against the cracked black pavement. Bullet resistant glass on the lights?

Definitely not an ordinary facility.

He waited another minute then we were on the move again. We passed right by the pole and no lights came on. Hard to turn on when the bulbs were shattered.

All right, I could admit it. McQuade had some talent.

Not that I planned to ever tell him that.

At the door, he gripped the handle and gave it a tug. It was a standard exterior door. No special security. No visible cameras.

That gave me a bad feeling. Still, the interior room at least had something resembling air conditioning, a much heavier door with a keypad and retinal scanner.

Right.

Time to go to work.