“Luke, what if we’re already too late?” I say, still staring at the photograph.
“They are going to find them, okay?” Luke says, his voice as strong as his grip on my shoulders. “They are going to bring them home and you are going to get to say you’re sorry and whatever else you want to say to her.”
I love you. You’re my hero, my mind whispers. I dig my teeth into my bottom lip and nod.
“Reagan? It’s time,” Sam’s echoed voice calls from the foyer. My body buzzes and the adrenaline returns. I fill my lungs with new air and quickly wipe both cheeks with the back of my hands. Black Angels don’t cry. Black Angels fight. And I’m going to fight.
“Come on. Let’s go,” I say, handing Luke Mom’s and Dad’s go-bags. He walks out the door as I grab the sterling silver picture frame off the nightstand and shove it into my bag. I throw the straps over my shoulder, take one last look around my room, shut off the lights, and silently say good-bye to my life on Landon Lane.
TWENTY
“We are five miles out from the airport, five miles out, copy?” A voice, mangled by static, comes through one of the speakers in the safe house’s situation room.
“Copy. We’ve got you,” Sam says into the microphone on the steel weapons table turned makeshift desk. The basement of the safe house looks a lot like ours on Landon Lane. Same weapons room, shooting range, and panic room. But instead of a martial arts studio filled with mats, dummies, and punching bags, the room here is packed with enormous monitors, microphones, computers, and other intel equipment that helps us communicate with CORE and Black Angels in the field.
“We still think they’re going to that private airfield in Kentucky?” I ask, my hot hands grasping onto Sam’s cool metal chair. I’m watching over her left shoulder as the SUV’s thermal camera travels down a dark two-lane road. As the SUV rounds the curve, a truck passes in the opposite direction, its heat transmitting infrared energy that’s converted into an electronic signal. The haunting black-and-white images that show up on our monitors have so much detail, I can tell the driver’s smoking.
“The analysts at CORE seem pretty confident that’s where they’re going,” Sam says, pulling up the airport’s coordinates on her laptop. “There’s a private plane waiting there and when we ran the tail number, it came back as being registered to some bullshit corporation in South America that we know doesn’t exist. Has Torres’s fingerprints all over it.”
I look up at the other six monitors. Two Black Angels are already stationed at the airport, waiting to intercept the kidnappers and rescue my parents. The thermal cameras attached to their helmets show their movements as they position themselves out of sight near a private hangar, but still in view of the Gulfstream. Looks like a G650. The most expensive one on the market and probably paid for in money covered in blood and cocaine.
“Three miles out, three miles out,” the scratchy voice blares again through the speakers in the monitor.
“Copy,” reply the two men in the field.
“Do we still have eyes in the sky on Torres’s SUV?” Sam says, pressing the talk button in her microphone with one hand and hitting a crackling monitor with the other. “We keep losing the feed.”
“Yeah, we’re on them, Sam,” says the Black Angel pilot.
“Is everybody ready on the ground?” Cooper asks, standing behind Sam’s right shoulder. “This is still a civilian airport, so we need to be really careful.”
“I’m keenly aware, Cooper,” Sam replies, annoyed, never taking her eyes off the screens.
“Why haven’t we cleared out the airport?” I ask, arching my eyebrows at Cooper. “There’s no way these guys are going to just lie on the ground during a take-down. We need to disarm them before they even know we’re there.”
“We would clear out the airport but someone inside might tip off Torres,” Sam replies, switching on another monitor screen. “We cannot take that chance.”
“Then clear it two minutes before the car gets there,” I reply, my eyes fixated on the monitor that travels along the two-lane, wooded road, my parents just a mile in front of them in the darkness. “That way, no one has time to warn Torres or his guys on the ground.”
“There’s no way we can clear an entire civilian airport in two minutes,” Cooper answers, his voice smug, like I don’t know what I’m talking about. “We’ve got to do it this way.”
“This is a huge mistake,” I say, my voice tightening with every word. “There’s no way they’re going down without some type of gun battle, which means injured Black Angels on the ground. My parents included.”
“Reagan, we have taken down Torres’s guys before,” Sam answers, clacking away at her keyboard. “If we rush them, we think they’ll go down peacefully.”