Page 106 of Talk to Me

“Me neither,” McQuade said, exhaling. “This is a risk. We can still call this off and do it another way.”

“I thought you agreed with me that they wanted me alive, so they wouldn’t go for the headshot?”

Sweat slid down between my shoulder blades and it took serious concentration to not start panting. I curled my fingers into my palms. The anxiety was there when they were the ones on the ground and I was at the keyboard.

This was a whole new level.

“I said it wasn’t in their interests to shoot you,” McQuade muttered. “I don’t want them to get stupid abruptly.”

“You’re going to be fine,” Remy said, the steadiness in his gaze stabilizing me. “You have us. We have a plan. We have three separate extraction routes planned. If necessary, we can come up with more on the fly.”

“We got this,” Locke added. This was my plan, but they were comforting me.

“Should we go over it one more time?”

McQuade grinned at me over his shoulder and Remy covered my hand with his and I clasped his gratefully. I wasn’t the only one who needed comfort.

“Okay, we’re meeting…”

Chapter

Thirty-Four

REMINGTON

Every plan, no matter how precise and well-researched, had an inherent flaw. They could go wrong. Plans, most often, relied on people. Though we’d gone over the plan repeatedly both before and on the way to Detroit, I couldn’t shake the niggling feeling of something going wrong.

Patch was an invaluable resource behind the computer. There was no other operator I wanted backing me. Putting her out in the field, even at her own insistence, set off every internal alarm I possessed. Yes, we’d covered nearly all angles except for every other person who would be present.

Tiffin and Patch were not “linked” online anywhere, but what exactly did that offer us? The faux promise of security and anonymity? The minute he identified her, her anonymity would be gone.

Truth be told, her anonymity had been stripped the moment her captors had taken her. They dropped me off first so I could check for the best perch. I had a couple of ideas based on the maps.

Online mapping and satellite coverage was great, but they could also be out of date. It was always better to case the physical location with time to adjust. We didn’t have time, at least not the time I wanted.

“No good sight lines,” I commented into the phone. The line was open to the vehicle. “I’ll have to be on the ground with her.”

Not one hundred percent true. There was one sight line. The clock tower itself. The problem with it, though, was she would be out of sight while at the base and if they deviated from course by even a meter, there was a solid chance I’d lose them.

This was not an acceptable margin of error.

“Understood,” McQuade said. “We’re coming around to drop her off. South side.”

“Copy.”

The sun played peekaboo with the clouds. The weather had called for partly cloudy, but I didn’t think anyone had actually informed the weather itself. The clouds were thicker and darker. They carried the promise of rain and something chillier.

So far, the only thing going according to our intel was the moderate size of the crowd coming and going from the outdoor mall. Wind swept through, bringing a slash of icier temps with it.

I caught sight of Patch the moment she slipped out of the car. McQuade didn’t exit with her. He wouldn’t. They’d pull forward to another set of cameras and let him get out there before Locke went to park.

Maybe one of us should stay with the car.

“I have her,” I said. There was a distinct crackle on the line that had me adding, “umbrella and I was going to pick up lunch. Thoughts on dining out?”

As codes went, it wasn’t sophisticated.

“Not really hungry,” Locke said. “But she might have picked up something already. So check with her first.”