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Chapter 30
Munroe and Bradford stepped out of the bar, and Logan followed them, calling for Munroe to wait.
She paused on the street corner until he caught up, and when he reached her, he was breathless and strained, and didn’t bother with niceties.
“Where did they put her?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Munroe said. “I called you guys in as soon as I found out she was gone.
“I haven’t had a chance to start digging yet. But I know who she’s with, and with that I’ll find her.”
“Tell me truthfully,” he said. “No padding, no sparing my feelings, no trying to protect me. How bad is it?”
Munroe blew imaginary strands of hair out of her face, debated against going back inside the bar, where they could sit and she could lay it out for him.
But there really wasn’t any point. She didn’t know enough to do anything more than scare him.
“We’re back at the beginning,” she said. “Not square one exactly— maybe three or four— but at least I have something to work with.
“No padding. We’re dealing with a whole new animal. An animal with teeth. The Chosen have some strange bedfellows for Sponsors.”
Logan began to speak and then stopped, as if he was now finally grasping the situation for what it was.
“What are they? Military? Police? It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Organized crime.”
His lips drew taut, and he didn’t even pretend to be calm. “I can be an extra set of hands,” he said, “another pair of eyes, one more set of feet on the ground. I can help you.”
“No,” Munroe said. She crossed her arms. There would be no discussion, no room for argument, no area for debate. Just no.
“Michael, please,” he said. “Not only am I highly motivated, I’ve done this with you a dozen times. I’m an asset, and you know it— it’s not like I’m some outsider to this game.”
She paused, put her hands on his shoulders, and held him at arm’s length. Stared at him eye to eye.
“You are an asset,” she said. “No question. No doubt. And under any other circumstance we’d be in this together. But not this time. I can’t. It’s too personal to you, and too personal for me.”
She paused, fighting for the words to explain the blade of pain that pierced each time she slept.
“I need you alive,” she said. “I can’t afford to lose you, and even more than that, Logan, I won’t have your blood on my hands.”
She paused again, and then in almost a whisper said, “I can’t.”
She stopped. Cleared her throat and upped the volume. “If you go into this, my attention will turn toward keeping you safe.
“You will distract me, and what I really need right now, more than anything else, is the ability to focus.
“It’s in your best interest, Hannah’s best interest, and my own best interest to keep you as far away from this project as possible.”
Logan took a step back. His face creased with a mixture of frustration and resignation. “Okay,” he said.
And then he turned from her toward Bradford, jabbed an index finger in Bradford’s direction, and said, “If anything happens to her, what she just said goes out the window. I’m the Reserves. You’d better fucking call me in.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Munroe said, and she steered Bradford toward the street before the two alpha dogs could tear into each other.
To go after Hannah meant finding Hannah, and finding Hannah meant the possibility of breaking kneecaps.
The vehicle plates led to home addresses, the home addresses to people, and where people lived, information could be forcibly extracted, although ideally, it would never get to that.
If things went the way of the backup plan, something said within the Haven and picked up by one of the listening devices would point them in the right direction.
But so far, things weren’t ideal and hadn’t exactly gone according to plan.
In the hotel room Munroe headed for the desk. She was in predator mode, hunting and out for blood, and with her back to Bradford she said, “Get some sleep, you’ll need it.”
Her manner was brusque, and after the display of care and emotion she’d given Logan, probably hurtful.
He’d have to deal, and the kinder, gentler moments would have to wait for better times.
Bradford wouldn’t fight her over the suggestion of sleep, not only because she was right but also because at the moment there was nothing further he could do.
At two in the morning his contacts and connections were all in bed, and what she needed was both quiet and time to listen through several days’ worth of data.
Behind her the blankets rustled, followed by the quiet of Bradford’s settling.
He switched off the bedside lamp, and the room was bathed in the computer screen’s ambient glow.
The window of time was narrow, and in these hours of darkness Munroe would— had to— find what she needed. It was either that, or the kneecaps.
She placed the headset over her ears, and in a purity of concentration that only focusing on an assignment could bring, allowed the rest of the world to fade away.
Collectively, pooled over the past two days were twenty-eight hours of voice, split unevenly among the three Havens, a lot to cull through,
but not nearly as much as it would have been had Bradford not already clipped out the extended silences and unintelligible chatter.
The bulk of the recordings came from the Ranch, which was good in that it increased the odds of finding what she wanted, but daunting for the amount of time it would take to locate it.
She started with the two hours from Haven Three, the smallest and nearest, with only one channel open for audio.
She expected to find little there, and wanting to eliminate this chunk before moving on to the rest,
Munroe set the software to allow for listening at a distorted high-speed, closed her eyes, and ran it.
The recordings were an aural version of voyeurism, peeping into the lives of those exposed, and the momentary snapshots, as they filled the hour, confirmed what she’d supposed.
There was nothing of value. Of the remaining twenty-six hours, eight were from Haven One, and like those she’d just scanned, she expected nothing and set them aside.
Munroe paused before the machine and took the headset off, feeling comfort in the darkness of the room and in the rhythm of Bradford’s sleep.
She waited, listening, falling into the cocoon of silence, willing her mind to emptiness, and then turned again to the headset and the voices.
The hours from the Ranch were divided among six channels, one for each of the listening devices placed by either herself or Bradford.
She started with what would have seemed the most obvious, the device on the stairwell, listening to gibberish and group talk,
picking out snippets in Spanish and English and the occasional stray conversation in Finnish or German.
Time passed. She moved to the girls’ room, to the living room, and finally on an urge to clear the smallest channel, found the first clue.
In a fitting form of irony, it came from the bug Bradford had planted in the electric socket of the boys’ bathroom.
The voices of the visitors filled the headset— their words, more than tone or accent, had given notice to the change in speakers,
and the difference was enough for Munroe to recognize what she had. She reset the software, slowing to normal speed.
The conversation from the hallway, picked up but not perfectly clear, was a discussion of Hannah,
what appeared to be a restated agreement to take the girl and a guardian away for an indefinite period,
but there was no indication as to where, and nothing more was said about it.
The only other piece to go on, a hint of what would come next, happened in the moments when Munroe had left the kitchen.
The talk between Morningstar and Hannah was of packing, of a stay, and no answer to Hannah’s question of how long.
They hadn’t discussed the why, but then, for Hannah, that was probably never much of a question.
Munroe set the headset on the desk and for the first time noticed the change of light in the room.
Small rays creeping past the curtains announced that day had come. She turned. Bradford lay on the bed, arms behind his head, watching her.
“How long have you been awake?” she said.
“Half an hour.”
“Hungry?”
“Starved.”
They took breakfast at a café down the street, coffee and croissants with the sun coming in off the window, and the warmth comfortable and drowsy.
“How good is your guy?” Munroe said.
“Guys,” Bradford said. “Plural.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve worked together on anything big, but if the past is any indication, they’re solid.”
“Connected?”
“I expect so.”
“I’ve got a lead on Hannah,” she said. “Not much, but something.
“If it was me, I could work with it, but I don’t have the time to entrench and do it myself. If your guys are worth anything, it’ll be faster to go through them.”
“What did you find?”
“Hotels.”
“Hotels?” he said.
She nodded. “Hotels. Bed-and-breakfasts. Inns. Youth hostels. Anything of that nature within the boundaries of the city.”
“It’s a wide net.”
She shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. They might own one, they might own three dozen.
“It’s still a smaller net than the entire city. I’d like to put out a line, see if we can draw a bead on anything in particular.”
“There shouldn’t be a problem to throwing it out there.”
“How fast till we get something back?”
“That I don’t know,” he said. “But I can push. What about you, are you going back to the Ranch?”
“I need to sleep,” she said. “I can feel myself slipping, losing my edge.
“If what we’re going up against is even half as bad as you say it is, I need to be at full capacity.
“I can dose enough to take myself out for eight hours— and it’ll free you to work without worrying about me.”
He cringed.
“I haven’t medicated for over a week, Miles, one day isn’t going to make me an addict.
“It’s either that or you lose a day of work and take the risk of me trying to kill you again.”
“The risk I can handle.”
“Go work,” she said. “I’ll sleep.”
He didn’t say anything, and so she stood.
They returned to the hotel in silence, and once in the room, she moved to the bag that lay slumped against the foot of her bed.
As much as Bradford would have wanted to dump the bottles in her absence, he wouldn’t have.
She unzipped it and rummaged through the contents, knowing they’d still be there.
She grabbed a bottle and broke the seal. Tipped the liquid into her mouth and then, matching his stare and with a hint of defiance, wiped the trace of syrup off the corner of her lip. “One day,” she said.
The potion was a sweet seduction as it trickled down her throat.
Not nearly as strong or as addictive as hydrocodone or morphine, the codeine still did the trick.
The warmth of the opiate was a heady relief from pressure and pain and responsibility, a relief from feeling anything at all, a rush, not unlike adrenaline, coursing in the opposite direction toward repose.
Had Bradford any idea how strongly Munroe fought the desire to live in a perpetual state of this bliss, he would have tried to fight her, perhaps even attempt to remove the bottles by force.
And that would have been a mistake. But he hadn’t. And she’d drunk.
And now on the bed with a smile on her face, she closed her eyes and descended into the ecstasy of oblivion.
When she woke, it was to Bradford’s touch on her shoulder. Perhaps more than a touch. Maybe he’d been shaking her for a while.
Awareness came slowly through a haze, and even if she’d wanted to react, her only response was to smile a drunken smile.
She rolled on her back, still smiling, still stupid. She laughed at the look of concern on his face, ran her finger along his cheek, and said, “How’s it going?”
“I think I might have what you’re looking for,” he said.
She nodded, pressed her lips together to suppress the internal laughter.
“Maybe I should get you some coffee,” he said, “and a heavy meal.”
“I’ll be fine, just needs to wear off. How long has it been?”
“Five hours.”
“It’s a big dose I took,” she said. She closed her eyes and resisted the urge to drift back into the web of darkness.
“Give me what you’ve got. I’m not functioning at a hundred percent, but the brain is still working, even if my lack of sense of humor is impaired.”
In the wake of his silence, she soughed at her joke, and then she laughed.
Bradford sighed. “Okay,” he said. “The Cárcan family does have an interest in a number of hotels around the city, most of them are midsize, one step up from the Budget Inn–type places.
“But those are all owned by companies and partnerships, nothing privately held, everything out in the open and legal.
“Except for three smaller places that belong to one of the sons— a little side project of his, you could say.”
Munroe scratched the back of her neck, her eyes still closed. “Sounds like a good starting place,” she said.
“We’ll need to get some form of surveillance set up on each— some way to find out if that’s the right direction— if she’s there in one of those.”
“Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ve got some ideas. I’ll let you know what we’ve got to work with.”
It was dark when Munroe pulled out of the haze. She’d been asleep and was then awake. Just like that. Light off, light on.
Bradford was still gone and his phone was missing. She assumed it was with him. She reached for her watch. Seven o’clock.
Doing the math, she figured it had been around three when he’d woken her. He’d been gone four hours. A little long for a drive-by.
She stepped from the bed to the shower, turned the water fully cold, and the shock against her skin was an unpleasant return to the land of the living that took away with it the final effects of the bottle.
There was still no sign of Bradford when she came back to the room.
She dressed for recon, pulling on pieces that belonged to the night and the dark alleys.
They felt good, like a second skin, the stuff you wore when scaling walls, walking ledges, and sliding into tight spaces, nothing like the upscale feminine clothes of the last few days.
And still no sign of Bradford. She didn’t need him in order to make the next move.
The information he’d gleaned during her hours asleep had been left on the desk, his notes clearly legible and obviously intended for her benefit as much as for his.
She could set out to gather her own intel and at worst double on Bradford’s effort,
but it was uncomfortable not knowing where he was or what he’d been doing since he’d left.
Munroe stood in front of the mirror, face-to-face, eye-to-eye with herself, as she plotted through the events to come.
One way or another, Hannah was hers. Recon or no, Bradford or not, alone or together, she was going after the girl,
and if she returned to the Ranch, she wouldn’t be going as a guest.
From a pocket in her overnight bag Munroe pulled out one of the several purchases from her shopping spree.
She unwound the cord. Snapped the plastic guard into place and switched on the buzzer.
Head over the sink, she sheared off the last remnants of femininity, and years of practice left a young man with a military buzz cut looking back at her. He wore an evil smile.
She cleaned the mess and packed away the machine, and still no Bradford.
Munroe trusted his judgment, his survival instinct, assumed that when he said the Cárcan family was not to be trifled with that the warning applied to himself as much as it did to her.
He would be careful. She checked her watch. It was late by what he’d told her, still early by the city’s standards.
Munroe sighed and returned to the desk. As odd as it was to allow another her role, she would let Bradford work.
If he wasn’t back by early morning, she’d try to raise him on the phone, and if she couldn’t contact him then, she would go alone.
In the meantime, there were the last of the audio tracks.
