Mac landed the truck right behind the barn, next to those big doors, after flying in high enough to make sure that nobody was outside the main house. Hopefully, they were all cowering in the wine cellar right now and wouldn’t come out until the police arrived.
The clock was ticking, but she’d already known they would be racing failure.
Rob opened the bay doors as she landed and pushed out a cart with two bodies on it.
Mac set the collective neutral and left the generators running as she hopped out.
Tanaka and the first man, Leonard Kim. Both out. Both tied up.
Rob must even stronger than he looked to have lifted the man onto the cart. She grabbed Kim’s feet and helped Rob sling him into the bed while Alicia came outside and got into the passenger side.
A tarp covered both men and got tacked down.
“Now what?” she asked.
Rob just smiled and motioned her to follow, so she did.
Her case, but his firefight. She could work with those rules.
Inside, she found the three mercenaries against a wall. One had a bandage slapped across his stomach. The first one was still out cold. The last one was watching from tired, hooded eyes.
Rob pulled out a knife and cut the awake man’s ankles loose from where they’d been tied.
Rob grabbed him as she watched and pulled the man upright.
“Out the back, but not the truck,” Rob said. “You get clear of everything so I can bring the other two out.”
Amazingly, the man nodded and started walking, his hands still behind his back.
Rob grabbed the other two much more softly than he had Tanaka or Kim and put them onto his cart.
“Where are we taking them?” she asked as she helped.
“Outside where they’re safe from what’s next,” he grinned at her.
Fine, be that way.
She helped and got them on, following Rob as he pushed it across the field to a gate.
Mac opened the gate when he gestured, and Rob and the one walking man got out into the next field.
“Turn around so I can cut you lose,” Rob ordered the man, surprising her, but he complied and Rob freed his hands just like that.
“Your buddy has a pretty good med kit and the cops should be here in about ten minutes from what they told the house staff,” Rob said. “You good?”
“I will be,” the man said, kneeling down to check his comrade. “You should get gone so I don’t see anything.”
“On it,” Rob said, grabbing her hand and pulling her back to the truck. “You get in. I’ll be right back.”
She watched him pull something from his messenger bag as she climbed in next to Alicia and waited.
Rob appeared a moment later from inside the barn, jogging lightly and then getting in. He lit the collective fully back and the engines all the way forward, so it was like being on a carnival ride for a few seconds.
Mac looked back as Rob got just high enough to clear the trees. Just in time to see a fireball erupt out of the barn door.
“What was that?” she called over the noise from open windows.
“Destroying all the evidence,” Rob said with a grin. “By the time the fire department can do anything, the entire interior of the place will be a burning wreck. One of Nigel’s specials.”
“Why?”
“We can’t get all the security footage, but we know it’s not transmitted, so hopefully nobody will know it was us,” Rob said. “I presume you got what you needed?”
“We did,” Alicia spoke up. “Esme warned me that I needed to get everything fast, so I copied the Lonelyman files and left the rest, knowing we had the man himself. What do we do now?"
“There’s a chase vehicle behind us with more information from home,” Mac spoke up. “Hopefully they’ll arrive in the next half day or so, same as news for Tanaka, and we can have some help. We’re taking them both?”
Rob nodded to her.
“Best way to destroy an organization is to remove the top layers suddenly, and then start hunting the rest,” he said. “Thought about sending anonymous copies of some of the data to all the Syndicates, as well as to all the embassies and consulates I can find addresses for, indicating that Lonelyman was really a secret agent for Lincolnshire the whole time, but I’ll let you and Miguel figure that part out later.”
“You don’t care?” Mac asked, a little surprised.
“Not my case,” Rob said, navigating the flying truck like a race car almost, low enough that he had to stick to roads for the most part, but with all the running lights off.
Mac started to say something, but then she remembered that Handsome Rob had to keep some level of isolation from his cases. He’d told her about it when they first met, that conversation on triple lives.
Quadruple, since the two of them had gone far beyond necessary cover on this one, and that would always hang there between them until they dealt with it.
She certainly didn’t want a boyfriend, to say nothing of a boy toy. Rob had been pretty adamant that he normally only slept with women who didn’t have any idea what his real name was or where he worked. And generally dumb ones.
If they really were going to be a team, that was one of the burrs, but she’d find a way.
Assuming he wanted to be on her team, instead of starting his own. But Rob didn’t strike her as another Jorge Royo. No, he was more like Mrs. Jones that way.
Mac wondered if she should convince Jorge to cast her in his next movie in an over-the-hill sex kitten role, just so she could fill that spot Jorge and Roxy did. Public in a way that men and women fantasized about.
It wasn’t like she had any hang-ups about being nude, then or now.
Yes, that might just work.
She lapsed into thought as they raced away.
At one point, Rob suddenly landed in the parking lot of a convenience store in the middle of nowhere, out of sight of the front window, but loud enough that someone probably heard inside.
He pulled out a roll of bills and handed it to Alicia.
“You go in and buy something,” Rob instructed her. “A drink or whatever, so we look like we’re just passing through.”
Mac let her out and watched the woman move tentatively towards the door, growing bolder each step until she turned the corner and vanished.
Rob watched the sky.
“There,” he said, pointing with his face rather than his hands.
Mac watched a flight of vehicles race by in close formation, lights flashing in red and blue as they did.
“Will they fall for it?” she asked.
“Hope so,” Rob shrugged. “Or we’re in a world of trouble.”
“What about those three men back there?”
“Made the one guy a deal,” Rob said. “He behaved, and all three of them survived tonight. He didn’t do anything stupid so all three will probably survive tomorrow, too.”
“He’ll go for that?” Mac asked.
“No reason not to,” Rob turned to her. “You have to be hard in this business, but nothing says you have to be cruel.”
Huh. That was another side of the man she’d never seen. Possibly even imagined.
He was an assassin. Certified and everything, but she supposed that gave him an even better understanding of when to kill.
And when not to.
Alicia returned a few moments later, practically skipping as she walked. Mac slid out of the truck and let her in.
“What did you buy?” Mac asked the woman.
“A local newspaper,” Alicia grinned. “Easy, unmemorable, and I need to watch what I eat in the future so I can get in better shape.”
Mac grinned back.
Yes. Teammates.