Like the room they’d just passed through, a huge stone fireplace covered the entire north wall. But the couches had been traded for a glossy mahogany desk, and the walls were lined with bookshelves full of paperbacks, hardbacks, and racks of magazines.
A slender laptop sat on the desk, its screen up. Eric headed for it, walking around the desk to get a better view. An irregular red dot hung in the center of a screen surrounded by latitude and longitude lines.
“Where are they?” Eric asked. To him, the latitude and longitude lines meant nothing.
Link circled the desk from the opposite direction and leaned over the laptop. Two keystrokes later and a map of Whatcom County in Washington State popped up. Eric cocked his head, studying the red dot that was dead center on a section of the map identified as Whatcom Falls.
Purcell said that he’d been instructed to wait at a park until Amy Chastain called with specific instructions to their rendezvous site. While the directive had infuriated the fed, it had had the opposite effect on Eric. Pure relief had coursed through him during Purcell’s tirade. The caution evident in the instructions was pure Mackenzie. He was sure of it. The paranoid demand was standard operating procedure for the interfering bastard. Which meant that not only was Amy Chastain with those damnable SEALs, but they were aiding in the retrieval of her boys.
Exactly as he’d predicted.
What a bloody relief.
Once Amy had picked up her children, they’d be able to track them back to the SEALs’ lair and neutralize the whole lot of them.
“Whatcom Falls,” Eric murmured, fishing his cell phone from his trouser pocket.
“It’s a park. The map indicates it has restrooms. I imagine this would be vital considering he’s escorting two children and may have a lengthy wait.”
Eric nodded in agreement and punched in the number to his contractor’s burner phone. One ring and a voice answered.
“Yes?” A faint European inflection glossed the cold question.
Eric frowned slightly. He’d been working the accent over in his mind for months now, but still hadn’t placed it, something that annoyed him considerably. But considering the parameters placed on their arrangement, questions weren’t welcomed. On either side.
“Your unit is mobilized?” Eric asked.
“We’re scrambled,” the icy voice confirmed. “Awaiting coordinates.”
As were they all. “Excellent. I’ll contact you with the coordinates once the units are moving.”
“We’ll need enough lead time for team one to take up positions before team two moves in with the fireworks.”
“Understood,” Eric said before ending the call.
It was too bloody bad Remburg’s second in command hadn’t possessed their newest contractor’s common sense. If the bastard had surrounded the Sierra Nevada cabin before sending the helicopter in, Mackenzie and his men would be awaiting burial right now.
“Problem?” Link asked, pulling the thickly padded leather chair back from the desk and taking a seat.
“No.” Eric turned back to the laptop screen. “You’re certain this thing has the range to track the distance we need?”
While the technology had tracked Robert Biesel from Seattle to the Sierra Nevadas with no problem, the distance had only been nine hundred miles. What if Mackenzie and his crew had holed up somewhere thousands of miles away this time? He couldn’t afford to lose that signal.
“During the testing phase, a gray whale was tagged in Mexico and tracked all the way to the Bering Sea, a twelve-thousand-mile trek. The researchers never left their lab on Kauai, yet the data rolled in clear as day.” He glanced up with a shrug. “The latest rounds of testing indicated the range is likely much greater than twelve thousand miles. Closer to twenty-three thousand.” He paused a beat, held Eric’s gaze, only to frown slightly and look down. “We’ll find them.” He sounded almost regretful.
Eric let the hint of remorse slide. Link was as complicit as the rest of them. They were long past the point of second-guessing.
The minutes ticked by so slowly it felt like time was sliding backward. A quarter of an hour into their endless, all-but-silent wait, Eric dragged one of the thickly padded armchairs facing the south window up to the desk and settled back to wait in comfort. Link mixed them cocktails. And then a second round.
An hour and twenty minutes after his arrival, the laptop beeped. The screen flickered, and the red dot began to inch across the map of Whatcom County. Both he and Link leaned in for a closer look, watching the red dot scroll across the screen.
“They appear to be heading away from all major roa—” The shrill ring of Eric’s burner phone cut Link off.
Eric thumbed the green OK button and lifted the phone. “Yes?”
“They’re in the air,” Clay Purcell said into his ear.
“The air?”
“The bastards showed up with a helicopter.”
Interesting. “Is it a Bell Huey 205?”
Which had been the helicopter the bastards had disabled the tracker on and absconded with after the Sierra Nevada incident.