He picked up the coffee pot, handed her the mug she was using, and grabbed her hand. “Let’s go find the warehouse.”
Brody pulled open the door and walked with one hand holding hers and the other supporting the coffee pot. The looks and snickers they garnered as they made their way to Jonah didn’t go unnoticed. Passing Marlaina in the hall had been awkward, but Lydia didn’t care. She knew she wasn’t hitting on Brody. He was her friend, and Marlaina was just going to have to get used to seeing them together.
Jonah nodded in their direction as they entered the command post. Briggs stood in the room giving Jaime a look of death, and Jaime just smiled back. The heat those two were generating was enough to fry all of the electrical equipment in the room without any help from Lydia.
“Did you pull the files?” Brody asked Jonah.
Jonah nodded toward the conference room. “They’re in there, ready for Lydia to look through when she’s up to it.”
Lydia glanced up at Brody with a questioning look.
“I thought we’d start with warehouses in the surrounding area and work our way out from there.” Brody shrugged. “Unless you happened to have noticed the address… That would save us a lot of time.”
Lydia started walking toward the conference room. “That would have been too easy.”
“Then it seems like we’re in for a long afternoon.”
Jaime and Briggs followed behind them and took seats at the table. Brody sat next to Lydia and poured her another fresh cup of coffee before he finally put the pot in the middle of the table. “What do you remember? What are we looking for?” Brody asked.
Jaime rolled her eyes at Brody. “Lydia shut your eyes and try to remember your dream. Tell us what you see, imagine you were there.”
Lydia closed her eyes and tried to remember her vision. Rick’s face entered her subconscious. “All I see is Rick.”
“Imagine that he’s somewhere safe and keep trying.”
Lydia took several deep breaths in and out. “It was a metal warehouse, and there were armed guards.”
“Did you have to go through a fence? Take a step back from advancing on the warehouse. Look around and tell me what you see.”
Lydia imagined the warehouse in front of her, and her need to move toward it almost consumed her. She had to make herself stop in her mind. She turned in place. “There are trees everywhere.”
Lydia turned in her vision. “They’re oak trees. I can’t see any road from where I am.” Lydia paused and glanced back toward the compound. “There’s a twelve-foot fence topped with barbwire in front of me. Brody is using something I can’t see to cut through it.”
“Walk over to Brody and go beyond the fence and tell me what you see.”
“We’re hiding. We’re behind some type of thick brush.”
“What does the building look like? Tell me what the men look like.”
Lydia lifted her head above the brush. “It’s an old silver-colored metal building. I can see rust on the roof.” Lydia opened her eyes. “I don’t see how this can help. We already knew the color of the building.”
Brody patted her arm. “You did good. We now know we aren’t looking for a warehouse in a residential area, and we know that there is a fence we’re going to have to get through. So that’s going to help.”
Jaime pushed a stack of papers down toward the other end of the table. “All of these are residential, so we can ignore them.”
Lydia shrugged. “Didn’t the general already have intel on where he was holed up?”
Briggs grabbed a stack of papers in front of them and started thumbing through them. “The intel wasn’t any good. We already converged on the erroneous warehouse the bad information provided while you were healing.” Briggs glared at Jaime. “Since I was such a distraction, I went with them.”
Briggs tossed a few of the papers toward the discarded pile. “We should be able to work through these in no time.”
Two pots of coffee later and a glass of orange juice, thanks to Jamie, they’d narrowed it down to two warehouses in the next town. They looked identical; it could have been either one of them.
The door to the conference room opened as Lydia glanced around the table and asked. “What do we do now?”
The general walked in. “You do nothing.”
Lydia pushed from her chair. “You can’t possibly be asking me to sit this one out.” Lydia pointed to the pictures of the two warehouses. “Rick is in one of those, and we need to go get him.”
The general crossed his arms over his chest. “This is bigger than Rick. We need to do this the right way so Floyd doesn’t escape.”
The air around her stirred to life. A few of the discarded papers lifted from the table. Lydia could feel her blood pressure rising, the rapid beating of her heart. If the general thought she was just going to wait around, he had another thing coming. She wasn’t.