The Rescue(95)

“I haven’t heard from the pilot. I expect them on station in a few minutes. I’ll let you know the second they check in with me.”

“Copy,” she said. “Looks like we have some time. Murphy and Stack dragged three full carts out of Natural Foods. They haven’t even started to load their car.”

“Small miracles,” said Reeves, ending the call.

“Should we alert the tactical section? Sounds like this could go sideways on us in a hurry,” said Kincaid.

He shook his head. “No. Vale knows what she’s doing, and we’ll have aerial support in a few minutes. This is a standoff surveillance situation. Nothing more than that.”

“What if this Spec Ops–level team drives right up to Decker’s hideout and massacres everyone? Right in front of that surveillance bird.”

Reeves ran his hand over his shaved head. “I have no idea. All we can do at this point is hope they have more discreet plans that give us a chance to locate their base of operations. We can surround the place and force a hostage rescue.”

“Or you can call off the aircraft,” said Kincaid, glancing at him. “And the ground surveillance. This was never our fight.”

He considered Kincaid’s suggestion, running all of the angles. Calling off the surveillance operation would effectively cut the cord between Decker and Reeves’s division, insulating him from whatever happened next—but it didn’t feel right. Gunther Ross had no reason to be tracking Decker or Mackenzie unless Reeves’s instinct was right, and Ross was connected to the unseen part of the iceberg floating just beneath the surface of the Steele kidnapping.

“No. We have to see where this leads,” said Reeves. “Something’s not right about Gunther Ross. This might be our only chance to sniff that out.”

“I was kind of hoping you’d say that,” said Kincaid.

Reeves started to respond, but the satellite phone cut him off. JANA was on station and ready for tasking.





CHAPTER FIFTY

Reeves jammed the satellite phone against his ear, listening intently to the information passed by JANA’S sensor operator. JANA was the call sign for the heavily modified Cessna 182 circling high above the Hollywood Hills, one of two nearly identical aircraft flown by the FBI over the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. To the untrained and unmagnified eye, JANA resembled any other private aircraft flying the busy paths from airport to airport in Southern California, but to the federal agents below, she was a skyborne treasure.

Equipped with steerable, fuselage-mounted high-resolution cameras capable of recording night vision and thermal imagery, JANA could lock on to a vehicle and automatically track it under any conditions. Flying between four to six thousand feet above the ground, and fitted with a noise-reducing exhaust muffler, JANA attracted little attention from the ground while on patrol. Reeves and Kincaid had yet to spot the aircraft, which had tracked both Murphy’s sedan and Gunther’s white Range Rover through the Hollywood Hills with pinpoint precision.

“Primary target turned left on Mulholland,” said the operator onboard JANA.

Reeves turned to Kincaid, whispering rapidly. “Murphy turned left onto Mulholland.”

Kincaid repeated his statement over the radio for Special Agent Vale, who was a quarter of a mile ahead of them on Beverly Glen Boulevard. Traffic heading into the hills was steady, putting several vehicles between Vale and the Range Rover, which effectively reduced the chance of counterdetection by Gunther to zero. When traffic thinned out, he’d pull Vale out of sight. With JANA circling high above, there was no need to take any risks.

“Secondary target turned left on Mulholland. Four-car separation from primary target,” said JANA. “I think the black SUV directly behind the secondary target is connected. They ran a red light at the intersection to stay in position behind your secondary target.”

“I concur,” said Reeves. “We suspected more than one tail.”

“Copy that. Redesignating targets in order. Targets one, two, and three,” said the operator. “Be advised. Traffic is significantly lighter on Mulholland than Beverly Glen, and thins out even more to the east.”

“Understand,” said Reeves before covering the satellite-phone mouthpiece to talk to Kincaid. “They identified a second tail, and traffic is light on Mulholland,” he said. “Gunther’s people are gonna stick out.”

“Maybe they don’t care,” said Kincaid.

The two-lane road wound uphill, past gated estates with sweeping views of the San Fernando Valley and surrounding hillsides. Mackenzie had either rented a house in the Hollywood Hills or had somehow managed to bury a real estate purchase using a shell corporation they hadn’t linked to her. His bet was on the rental. Reeves had learned from two decades of investigative work that hidden assets rarely stayed hidden for long. Mackenzie would know this, too.

“Targets two and three have pulled off Mulholland onto a small dirt parking lot labeled THE NARROWS OVERLOOK on my screen overlay,” said JANA.

“I know it,” said Reeves. “It’s a photo stop. One of the few stretches of Mulholland where you can see the valley and LA at the same time.”

“Roger. Adding that to the system notes.”

“I doubt they stopped to take pictures.”

“That’s probably a fair assessment. Occupants of both vehicles have dismounted.”