The Rescue(29)
“This is like a Cold War cartoon. I’m not that old.”
She smiled, starting to turn her head to say something but stopping before any words formed—like she had thought better of it. She put the car in gear and drove them out of the lot, turning south on Airport Drive. A few blocks away, she cut a U-turn and brought them back to the business park, where she eased the car into the parking lot across the street from the strip mall housing Ares Aviation. They settled into the least obvious spot possible, keeping a clear view of the company’s entrance and adjacent lot.
“Want to take bets on how long?” she said.
“I don’t have any money.”
“I wasn’t serious.”
He shrugged. “Everyone bets on everything in prison.”
“Cigarettes. Gum. Commissary credits.”
“You’ve watched Shawshank Redemption one too many times,” said Decker. “Ramen noodles. Stamps. Condoms filled with drug-free urine. Condoms for other reasons.”
“Yuck. Sorry I brought it up,” she said. “So. What did you bet on?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Not really,” she said unconvincingly.
Several seconds passed before he answered.
“I bet on my own life. After the second serious attempt to kill me in prison, I was a long-shot bet,” said Decker. “Six failed attempts later, I owned most of the ramen noodles in my cellblock and nobody would bet against me.”
“That’s pretty grim.”
“Not if you like ramen noodles.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Gunther trudged uphill, the sand giving way under his boots with every step. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with a hand and grumbled. A few hundred yards of sunbaked desert still stood between them and the site of the doomed raid. Ironically, one of Decker’s assault teams had taken the same path to the house on that fateful day. He’d watched them snake through the hills on the drone operator’s thermal imaging feed, patiently waiting for all of the teams to disappear into the house—before triggering the blast that would consume them.
He’d chosen the same approach because it would give them an opportunity to scan the property for any other interested parties. If Supervisory Special Agent Reeves was sharp enough to discover Decker’s prison trick on his own, he had to assume the FBI agent would visit the Hemet location at some point, looking for Penkin. From one of the boulder-strewn rises south of the house, Gunther would decide whether it was safe to proceed.
The last thing he needed right now was a run-in with the FBI. He could talk his way out of it, especially with Senator Steele’s get-out-of-jail-free card, but it would undoubtedly put him on Reeves’s shit list. The agent wasn’t a big fan of freelancers. Gunther preferred to save his free pass for a much stickier situation.
He stopped and turned to Jay, who trailed him by several feet. “Not too much farther.”
“You keep saying that,” said Jay, continuing to climb the hill.
“It’s the safest approach.”
Jay stopped next to him, setting his small olive-drab backpack on the ground. He dug through the main pouch, removing two perspiring bottles of Evian.
“Water?”
“Sure,” said Gunther.
They drank greedily for a few seconds, each of them draining at least half of the bottle. Before they set off again, Jay scanned the nearly empty landscape around them.
“How the hell did Decker find this place? Seriously. I don’t think I could drive us back out here without your help.”
“Aegis hired Decker for several difficult human-recovery cases. He’d developed a vast human intelligence network across the world. He knew everything there was to know about the various human-trafficking networks and organized kidnapping rings.”
“Yeah. But how the hell did he find someone out here?”
“Steele was high profile, so he figured she’d either be ransomed back or sold. When she wasn’t ransomed, he assumed she had been sold off. A fifteen-year-old girl would be sold into the sex-trafficking industry, so he focused his efforts there. It took a little while, but he got a hit from a rescue house contact in San Bernardino. A thirteen-year-old had escaped one of the Bratva truck stop operations and reported being held at a house in a quiet, isolated area in the desert. She described a girl at the house that matched Meghan Steele’s description. She also said the girl appeared to be part of the operation. The Russians didn’t sexually abuse her like the others, and she didn’t try to run away.”
“Stockholm syndrome?” said Jay.
“Right. They assumed she had been there awhile based on that. The girl also reported frequent aircraft passes. Big aircraft. Decker started searching rural areas near any airports that landed commercial airliners. Took them three weeks, but they found it. None of this was in the file?” said Gunther.
“The file was pretty thin.”
“Intentionally thin,” said Gunther. “This was a colossal screwup for Aegis. My screwup.”
“It wasn’t your—Aegis’s fault.”
“Not intentionally,” said Gunther, repeating the lie. “But we tipped them off when we approached Penkin to negotiate Meghan Steele’s release. He played us long enough to set a trap that would vaporize most of the evidence and send a brutal message to anyone that crossed the Bratva.”