Which means Peri is still free, but his elation quickly reverted to worry. How long would she wait? An hour? The trailer was only a short walk from the dealership.
“Out,” Allen demanded as the trailer shifted when two more men tried to come in, and they retreated. “You.” Allen handed one of the remaining three agents Silas’s phone and wallet. “Go thank the mall security. Tell them we have our suspects and we’ll be out of their hair in five minutes.” Brow creased in pain, he turned to the remaining agents. “You two go find the car and make sure it gets here in five minutes!” he shouted. “Not ten. Not six. Five!”
They headed for the open door, and Allen clicked open his radio. “I’m in the construction trailer on the south end,” he said sourly. “Give me a forty-foot perimeter around it. Now.”
Eyes fixed on Silas, he pulled his handgun from the holster and set it on the desk, sighing in relief. Still the agents hesitated, and Allen waved at them, shooing them out. “Go on,” he demanded. “He’s cuffed and tied to a five-hundred-pound cabinet.”
Slowly they retreated, talking even as they shut the door behind them.
“You slimy son of a bitch,” Silas intoned, not liking the changes in his old friend.
“Shut up,” Allen said as he turned off his radio.
“How could you do that to her?” Silas whispered, leaning as far forward as he could. He’d almost blown it when Allen had walked into Opti’s med building, posing as her anchor. He might look the part, with his lanky, athletic body, but Allen’s defrag techniques weren’t good enough. How he’d worked himself so high in Opti’s ranks so fast was more than suspicious.
“I said”—Allen set his phone where Silas could see the live, hijacked mall security video focused on the trailer—“shut up a moment.”
Silas was silent, his pulse throbbing against the new scrape on his face, and they watched the men surrounding the trailer fall back to a comfortable forty feet. The changes in Allen went deeper than the bandages. There was a little more maturity across the shoulders, and his black curls were cut shorter. Pain had made his long face even longer, but he was as fit and scar-marked as ever. The safety glasses were the same black plastic. Silas knew he used them to keep women away—birth-control frames, he called them. Not that Allen didn’t like women, but he treated them like his next big hill to be conquered—at his preference.
“Seriously, are you okay?” Allen said, shoulders slumping to show how much he hurt. Clearly he was avoiding the pain meds, a reasonable precaution seeing as they interfered with the ability to recognize drafts. “They didn’t hit you too hard, eh?”
Wet and filthy from the parking lot, Silas eyed Allen, gaze lingering on his Opti pin. “You are … a son of a bitch.”
Allen’s expression hardened. “We have five minutes. You want to spend it telling me how much of an ass I am, or do you want to figure out how we can fix this?”
“I was there,” Silas said flatly, anger growing. “Ready to extract her. She had everything we needed to end this, and you scrub her? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Allen looked out the grimy window. “Maybe because you drove Matt’s van into the Detroit River?”
“Don’t get cute with me, you little pissant.”
“I scrubbed her to save her life,” Allen reiterated, his attention coming back to him, but Silas thought there was far too much guilt in it. “You were already in transit before it happened. There was no way to tell you. And there’s still a chance to end this. Fran wants you to cut her loose, and I agree. She needs to come back to Opti to finish it.”
“You scrubbed her because you finally had her with you!” Silas accused, satisfied he was right when Allen flushed.
“I had to.” Allen slid from the desk. “Good God, Silas. She was dying. Dying in my arms and wouldn’t draft. Bill knows she is an alliance sleeper agent. He’s probably known since day one. If I had taken less than three years, they would have suspected me.”
Maybe. Silas eased back as he recalled how low the odds had been when they’d started this five years ago. “Bill doesn’t know who she is,” he muttered.
“He does.” Allen carefully stretched his damaged knee. “That’s why Jack kept scrubbing her to keep her oblivious and productive.”
“Like you,” Silas said bitterly.
“Not like me.” Allen frowned, eyes drifting to nothing. “The idiot shot her to get her to draft, and with her intuition—”
“She never would have accepted him, scrub or not.” Silas’s focus blurred, his shoulders aching from being pulled back too tightly. Peri was a pain in the ass, demanding and particular, but he trusted her intuition more than most people’s facts, and there was no one he’d rather have watching his back in a tight spot. Even now.
His eyes flicked up to Allen. Especially now.