Chapter Ten: Lucien POV
1038 Words
The interior alarm means one thing: breach.
Not over the wall, through a door. Someone opened something from the inside.
I am moving before the alarm finishes its first cycle, already running the probability in my head, which door, which access point, who is on duty, where the vulnerability is. Faye is beside me, not behind me, keeping pace with the kind of instinct that doesn't ask for permission. Under other circumstances I would deal with this. Right now I need everyone moving.
"East maintenance door," Reth says, appearing from the corridor. "Level access."
Level access means a key card. Which means this is not a perimeter breach, it is a sanctioned entry through a door that should not have been sanctioned tonight.
"Who has level access besides the inner circle?" I ask, moving.
Reth's jaw tightens. "It was issued last month. I cleared it." A pause. "Orvin."
Orvin. Twenty two years old, joined eighteen months ago, clean record, sponsored by someone I trusted. I run the thread backward in my head and I find where it connects to Reves and I feel the specific, cold anger of a miscalculation.
The maintenance corridor is dark when we reach it, the overhead strip lights killed remotely, which means someone with system access prepared this. I go from memory: thirty feet, left turn, the maintenance door is at the end. Emergency lighting only, low amber, casting everything in shapes.
Three of them in the corridor.
Not bikers. Suits..... Anton Reves's men, the kind he sends when he wants the operation to look clean. Professional retrieval. They came for something specific.
They came for her.
I handle the first two quickly, because the corridor is narrow and narrow corridors favor aggression over strategy and I have fifteen years of practice in both. The third is smarter, he goes for distance, puts his back to the maintenance door, and he has something in his hand.
Not a weapon.
A phone. Active call. He is relaying position.
"She's here," he says into the phone, looking past me at Faye.
I cross the distance in two steps and I take the phone and I end the call and I end the problem in the same motion, and the corridor is quiet.
I turn.
Faye is standing in the emergency amber light with her back against the wall, breathing controlled, eyes moving, cataloguing, assessing, running the same post contact analysis I am running. Not panicking. Not frozen.
"The call went through," she says. "He has our position."
"I know."
"For how long do we have?"
"Here? Ten minutes." I look at her. "The east room is compromised. They know the layout now."
She processes this and I watch her arrive at the same place I have already arrived. Staying put is no longer the calculation that makes sense. The compound is still mine, the leak is manageable, the breach is contained but tonight changed the variable I had been managing for two weeks.
The drive," she says.
"Where is it?"
"My pocket."
I look at her, in the amber light of the maintenance corridor, with the sound of my people reestablishing control in the distance, and I make a decision I have been approaching for fourteen days from multiple directions.
"Come with me," I say.
"Where?"
"Secondary location," I say. "Outside the compound. I have three safe houses in the region. They don't know about them."
She looks at me for a moment.
"And the drive?" she says.
"We deal with it there." I pause. "Together."
The word lands between us with a weight I intended and a weight I didn't, and she feels both of them, I can see her feel them, and she looks away for a moment with the expression I have learned to read as recalibrating.
"Okay," she says. "Let's go."
We move to the secure vehicle bay. Reth meeting us at the corner, already with keys, already having read the situation. Faye climbs into the passenger seat without being told, which is not nothing, and I take the wheel, and we move through the secondary gate into the night with the compound alarm still sounding behind us.
She is quiet for several miles.
Then she says: "I was going to say stay."
I keep my eyes on the road.
"When you asked what I wanted to do," she says. "About the drive. About leaving." She looks at the window. "I was going to say stay."
The road is dark ahead of us. Thirty miles to the nearest safehouse. Anton Reves recalibrating somewhere with a confirmed location and a blown operation and the specific, dangerous anger of a man who does not accept the word no.
"I know," I say.
"You couldn't have known," she says.
I say nothing.
She turns to look at me. "How did you know?"
I keep my eyes forward. The headlights cut through the dark. Behind us, the compound's lights are visible on the horizon.
I have been a great many things in fifteen years. Careful, always. Controlled, almost always. Patient, as a matter of professional discipline.
I have not been this, before. Whatever this is that has been building for fourteen days in maps and coffee and the specific quality of attention I have been paying to a woman who does not look away.
"You climbed back in the window," I say finally.
She is quiet.
"The first night," I say. "You climbed back in."
Silence for a long moment.
"That was practical," she says.
"Yes," I say. "It was."
We drive through the dark, and she says nothing more, and I say nothing more, and the road unreels ahead of us in the headlights.
And then her phone, the burner, the Maya Cole phone lights up with a message from a number I don't recognize.
She reads it.
She goes very still.
"Lucien," she says.
The quality of her voice makes me look at her.
She turns the phone toward me. On the screen, a single message from an unknown number... two words and a photo attached.
The two words are: Found you.
The photo is of us. In this car. On this road.
Taken from somewhere ahead of us.
I hit the brakes.
- Writer
