“No. I will.” He had the second key for her car always with him. Stupidly, it made him feel closer to her when she was away at school.
A few minutes down the road, they pulled over again at the point where her phone was still pinging. The highway’s shoulder and wayside spilled down a steep slope and into open rangeland. None of the earth looked disturbed. There were no tire marks, but also no footprints to indicate an improvised explosive had been set or the way to her phone was otherwise booby-trapped.
He and Angel used their phones to find hers. Kelan picked it up with a plastic bag he brought from the car. He wanted to activate her screen and see the last few calls she’d made, but Greer would need to process it for fingerprints first. Besides, they had her call logs.
Cars from the road whizzed by in waves of noise. Kelan stood in the hot evening wind on the tinder-dry hillside. Had Fiona been followed all the way from their condo? Had there been other people waiting for her in different spots along her route up to the team headquarters to ensure they caught her in their net? If she was followed, had she known it?
Shit, the fear she must have felt—must still be feeling.
Angel put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find her.”
He shook his head and asked, “Why Fiona? Why not me or you or any of the other guys?”
Angel considered his question. “Most likely she was the easiest target. They could snag her a fair distance from Blade’s, giving them time to get away with her.”
*
Kelan marched into Blade’s, leaving Fiona’s vehicle in the garage for Max and Greer to process. Angel left the SUV parked out front for quick access should a lead present itself.
The women were gathered in the hallway. Their anxious faces stopped him and Angel. “Is there any news?” Mandy asked.
“No.”
“Kelan, we’re so sorry,” Ivy said as she slipped a hand around Mandy’s waist, both of them watching him with big, worried eyes.
He clenched his jaw, tamping down his emotions as he nodded. He looked from Mandy and Ivy to everyone else. Hope, Remi, and Eden. The Jacksons. The kids, Zavi and Casey. The team’s family had grown. That his Fiona had been taken was a wound in his soul. But the truth was that he would have felt the same if they’d lost any of their dependents.
He went down the hallway, heading for the elevator to the weapons room. He heard Angel telling the group to stay on the property for the next few days until they knew what they were dealing with.
Kelan waited for Angel, then they both went down to the bunker. Max and Greer paused in their work, looking up at him as he entered the ops room. Their calm, intent expressions told him what he needed to know: there was no new information on Fiona or her abductors.
Kelan handed Fiona’s phone to Max and tossed Greer the memory card from her dash cam, glad no one wasted words on empty hopes for Fiona’s welfare. “Tell me what we know,” he quietly ordered as he entered the conference room.
“There’s no new chatter. No ransom calls. Nada from Jafaar,” Kit said.
Greer pulled up the video from Fiona’s car. “Here it is.”
Kelan’s heart banged with fear and hope as he waited for the images to open on the big smart screen. Angel dimmed the lights. Greer forwarded the recording to the end, bypassing the footage of Fiona leaving the parking garage and heading out of town. They could go through that portion later.
Kelan’s hands clenched as he watched Fiona’s abduction. As they’d seen from the tracks, two vans had sandwiched her Acadia, forcing her off the road and onto the wayside. She tried to get her car free of the others, but she was squeezed between them. Her abductors, three of them, were dressed head to toe in black long-sleeved tees and jeans, with black baseball caps. One had a gun. The camera didn’t get a look at their faces.
Their vehicles were missing license plates. Another white van was stopped on the other side of the road. Fiona’s SUV bounced, probably when one of her captors broke her window. There was some kind of off-camera struggle, then her vehicle went still. Her captors must have carried her across the road at that point. The cameras only picked up a little of their movement before two of the three men returned to their vans and drove off. She wasn’t with the men who returned to the two vans.
The whole event took less than ninety seconds.
As soon as it was over, the room scrambled to action. Greer restarted the video from the beginning, looking for evidence that those vans might have been captured on traffic cams anywhere along Fiona’s journey from Fort Collins. Blade checked with State Patrol to see if anyone had been stopped for missing license plates or other erratic behavior. Angel and Val called up highway cams along the route Fiona took.
Kelan walked into the weapons room and unlocked one of the long-gun cabinets. He took out an M16 and set it on the center island. From the handgun cabinet, he retrieved two Berettas. He selected a KA-BAR and its holster from the knife drawer, paused, then also took an ankle-holstered KA-BAR.
Images of Fiona flashed through his mind—her unruly cap of dark blond curls, which were so goddamned soft, and blue eyes the color of forget-me-nots.
“What are you doing?” Kit asked.
Kelan blinked those thoughts away—along with the barbs they held—and rubbed the heel of his palm against his heart, where they still stuck. He didn’t look up.
“Preparing for the war I’m bringing to whoever has Fiona.”
“You know you’re not a lone wolf, right?”
Kelan did look up at that, meeting Kit’s hard eyes. “You know it’s not your heart in the hands of our enemies, right?”
“She’s one of us, Kelan. She is my heart.”
Kelan spread a cleaning mat on the island, then began disassembling the M16. “I’m going to kill them.” He looked at Kit from beneath his brows. “Every fucking last one of them.”
Kit shook his head. “Ah, no. You’ll stay in formation and take the orders you’re given, like everyone else on the team, feel me?”