“I think they’ve been watching us for a while,” I say and stare at the ground.
“It looks like they’ve been monitoring you guys for the last month,” Cooper trumpets from the other side of the room. “Since your parents locked up Torres’s brother. How did you know that?”
“I saw the man who tried to take the girl at school last week dressed as a janitor and watching me. I tried to run after him but he disappeared. I saw the gray van near our street a couple times, but I told myself it was nothing. I thought I was just being paranoid.”
“Your first rule as a trainee is to trust your instincts,” Sam says, her voice growing tight. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I thought my mind was just playing tricks on me again,” I answer and shake my head. “You know it’s happened before. I’ve been wrong before.”
“You should have told your parents,” Cooper replies.
“I know I should have,” I say, my voice hard and defensive. I swallow the lump that is rising in my throat. “Because maybe if I did, I wouldn’t have had to hear my mother scream my name as they threw a brick through the back door and dragged her away.”
“Jesus Christ,” Luke replies softly. He shakes his head slowly. “Mac, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t call me that. You don’t even know my name,” I snap. The moment the words escape my lips I regret them. Luke’s face tightens from the sting. I love it when he calls me Mac. But now, it just feels like a lie.
Luke’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard at something in his throat. He nods. “Okay. I won’t. What’s your real name?”
“Reagan Elizabeth Hillis,” I say. It sounds so foreign to me, like I’m talking about somebody else, a childhood friend or distant relative, someone only in my memory.
“Okay, Reagan Elizabeth Hillis,” Luke repeats the name. It sounds warmer in his voice than my own. Luke turns to Sam. “So what’s next?”
“Intel analysts at headquarters have been tracking them,” Sam says, holding up her phone. “They are trigger happy right now, waiting for us to pounce on them, so we’re going to hang back. Let them think they’ve evaded us so that when we do make contact they’re caught off guard. We think they’re heading to a private airport somewhere in southern Ohio or Kentucky. We’ve got crews already on their way. And headquarters has already intercepted a message from Torres with his demands.”
“What are they?” I ask. The numbness is starting to wear off. I can feel my heart beating like a hummingbird in my chest again and the feeling in my arms and legs is starting to come back.
Sam looks at me and shakes her head.
“You don’t need to know the details, Reagan,” she says and looks away, hoping I won’t ask any more questions. She continues talking to Luke. “We’re assembling a team to intercept them at the airport and we’re hoping that we—”
“Why won’t you tell me?” I interrupt her. Sam pretends like she hasn’t heard me and continues talking to Luke, refusing to look at me.
“—have enough information to find them,” Sam continues, her voice steady. “We believe Torres is moving them—”
“Tell me!” I raise my voice, my tone startling Sam.
Sam finally looks back at me. She tightens the grasp of her gun. She looks down at the ground and then up at me.
“Please,” I beg. “No more secrets. I need to know.”
“Torres wants you, okay?” Sam says, throwing her hands up in the air with equal parts fear and frustration. “That’s why they tried to grab you at school. The plan was to take you back to your house and kill you in front of your parents, but they grabbed the wrong girl and now everything has changed.”
“Why do they want me?” I ask, but as soon as the question rolls off my heavy tongue, the pieces of Torres’s psychotic puzzle snap horrifically into place. “Because of what happened to Torres’s son?”
Sam and Cooper stare blankly at me, afraid to confirm my suspicion.
“An eye for an eye, right?” I say, my voice shrinking into a whisper.
“Much worse. He’d probably beat you. Torture you for days. Kill you and then kill your parents too,” Sam explains, the words getting tangled in her throat. “I’ve been intercepting and analyzing data from this guy since I was at the National Security Agency. Over the last seventeen years, he’s been responsible for over two hundred and fifty deaths. Pulled the trigger or twisted the knife in half of those. He is a merciless, psychotic serial killer and whether it was our guns or not, his son is dead and he won’t stop until somebody pays.”
My lungs stop working midway through my last breath. Luke’s hand reaches out for me, his fingertips lingering on my forearm. As he presses down, I can feel that my clothing is damp with sweat.
“We should have made you guys leave after the mission,” Cooper says and shakes his head. “But we thought we had a few days to track Torres and his team. See if you guys were in real danger.”