––––––––
“That’s it?” Drew asked. He stormed around the conference room. “That’s all we have? A victim with no valuable information and a blown-to-hell laptop?”
Tate unzipped his tactical vest and pulled it over his shoulders. “That’s it.”
“So in our first mission, we lost the hardware we were after, the men who could lead us to Smith, and my best goddamn friend?”
“Yeah.” Briggs slumped into a seat in front of Drew. “They worked us over.”
“You don’t even realize what just happened here.” Drew continued pacing. “Smith has Ash.”
“We realize that,” Huxx said. He stood in the corner, arms crossed over his chest. “Believe me. We know we got our asses kicked today. But we didn’t greenlight that stupid op. We’re lucky that mob didn’t tear us to pieces.”
“You have no idea.” Drew stopped and pointed at him. “Ash was the last piece we had in a chess game you didn’t even know we were playing. Without him, we’re all screwed.”
“What do you mean?” Bree asked. She wiped her sweaty brow with the back of her hand.
They’d barely escaped the city. Bree had fled down to the bottom of the parking garage and ran back to the SUV. The crowd wasn’t as thick back there, but it had filled in significantly since they’d arrived. A couple of men had attempted to grab her, but she’d fought them off with a few motions of her rifle and one really solid throat chop.
Shea had moved the vehicle onto the side of the street, the engine idling as he waited for her to jump in. He’d watched the crowd following her in the rearview mirror as she slid into the backseat.
“We’re going to meet the rest of the team halfway.” Jack had driven them down a few side streets, and then stopped in the middle of an intersection.
Tate had relayed their locations as he, Huxx, and Briggs ran from the rioters. They popped out from behind a barbershop and leapt into the SUV.
They’d quickly abandoned the area while Nelson reestablished a connection with their surveillance drone. After scouring a several block radius around the parking lot where they’d lost Benson, they couldn’t come up with any sign of him.
The police had arrived in full force, a battery of shield-carrying cops slowly forcing the crowd away from the apartment building. When they discovered three of their own laying lifelessly in the parking lot, things went from bad to worse.
Helicopters flew overhead.
Shots were fired.
The number of protestors swelled. A legion of cops fought back. More people died.
Nelson ordered his team home, knowing there was nothing else they could do amidst the chaos. The ride back to Aberdeen Proving Ground had been a silent one. Bree didn’t know about the men around her, but she couldn’t help but mull over the craziness of what they’d just done. Could things within the government truly be so corrupt and insane that a small, clandestine outfit was forced to send an untrained team into the nation’s capitol?
It all seemed like a bad dream.
And on top of it all, they’d lost a teammate. While it was true they didn’t really know Benson, and actually believed him to be a con artist, they’d still gone into battle with him. None of them ever wanted to leave a man behind.
Christie Tolbert had popped up at a local police station shortly thereafter, hysterical but otherwise unhurt. Under orders from Nelson, she was removed to an undisclosed location until everything blew over. She’d been questioned, but she didn’t know anything of significance about the men trying to kill her or the hardware they’d recovered.
“We’re an agency operating entirely in the shadows using the only known telepath in the world. And we lost him. Without Asher, there is no reason for us to exist. We’ll be lucky if they don’t disappear all of us.” Drew’s entire head had turned a light red. “For your sake, we need to get him back.”
“Bullshit.” Tate pounded his fist off the large, rectangular table in the middle of the room. “We didn’t make the decision to send us down there armed to the teeth and dressed like terrorists. And Benson split off from the rest of us—not the other way around. None of us asked for this. You came to us, remember?”
“That doesn’t matter anymore.” Drew stopped pacing and put his hands on his hips as he inspected the floor. “Look, I know this isn’t your fault. We were put in an impossible situation. All of us.”
He looked at a television mounted in the corner of the room. Images of the riots flashed across it, hysterical headlines plastered on the bottom half of the screen. The dead officers had sent everything into an uproar.
The appearance of a handful of armed people dressed in all black had blasted the situation into the stratosphere. The talking heads on all the news stations were working overtime as they attempted to tie all the events of the morning together.
“We have to get him back. Smith’s men must have him. He would have contacted us by now if he could.” Drew paused, turning his attention back to them. His voice cracked when he spoke again. “God only knows what they’re doing to him right now.”