I push my way through the restaurant until I get to the back. I find the office and see the monitors on the desk in the corner. I start to go through the tapes, rewinding to earlier tonight. I stop when I see a woman being shoved into a van. I rewind it further until I see her coming out of the restaurant. She’s alone, head down, walking to her car. I see the men before she does, and my whole body goes taut. Bear and John have joined me in the tiny office, and we’re all holding our breath as the scene before us unfolds. I grip the chair as we watch the men push her into the van and drive off. There’s no license plate on the van, no distinguishing marks on the men, nothing.
I hit rewind to watch it again. I’m missing something. I know I am.
We watch again, and I pause it, zooming in on the maskless man behind Brook. All three of us gasp at the same time. Christian Rodriguez. He’s the right-hand man of Alvin Bendetty. The man we put in prison three years ago for kidnapping a US senator.
My phone rings, and it’s Aiden. “Walker, that profile was a fake. I’ve traced it back to Christian Rodriguez.”
“I know. We’re watching him on the surveillance camera here. He has Brook. I want an APB put out for the white van. Have you had any luck tracing her phone?”
“It’s shut off, but I’m working on it.”
I grunt into the phone. “Work faster,” I tell him.
I pull the box from the wall and put it under my arm. “Let’s roll,” I tell the guys. We walk through the restaurant and out the front door. I don’t know what happened with John and the restaurant manager, but he doesn’t even try to stop us.
5
Brook
We drove for what seems like hours but I know was probably a half hour or so. The van was eerily silent. I could only hear the three men breathing, but they didn’t say much of anything. At one point, the smell of a cigar was strong, even through the cloth covering my head, and I started to cough.
“Roll down the window. Nobody wants to smell that,” one of the men said.
Other than that, nothing was said.
We traveled up a hill; I could tell by the way my body could not lean forward and the way I was tilted back. The terrain was not good, letting me know we did in fact go off road. And once we stopped, I had to walk a long way on uneven terrain. And now, here I am. Still clothed and covered.
“Take her mask off.”
“But—” someone starts, and the same man yells at him, “I said take it off.”
Someone trots toward me, and they take the mask off.
I blink at the light. Immediately I take everything in. There’s a man on a computer across the room. One man is smoking a cigar in the corner, and the other is standing next to me, looking at me formidably and as if he’s ready to do the bidding of whatever the other two tell him to do.
“Brook. May I call you Brook?” the man with the cigar asks.
I glare at him.
He laughs, and I know he’s enjoying this, the sick fuck. “Fine, I’ll talk. You listen. I know that you are Walker’s right-hand man, uh, woman. I also know that he has security codes that you can access. Codes that will get me into the world’s largest database of, well, let’s just say people I need to access. I want those codes.”
I don’t even blink; I just continue to glare at him. I knew when I hired on with Walker and the Ghost team that they were important and that they had enemies. I knew this could be a possibility one day, but I’ll be honest, I never thought it’d happen to me.
The man is getting frustrated with me. I’m sure he thinks because I’m a woman, I’m just going to give in and tell him what he wants to know. Well, I’m not.
He squats down in front of me and pushes the hair off my face. Instantly, I feel a rush of bile rise in my throat, but I push it down, not wanting to show any weakness because that’s what he wants. “Tell me the codes.”
I shake my head, side to side, slowly.
He starts to laugh, and the other two do the same. I’m caught off guard when his fist comes up and hits me across the cheek. I fall backward, and the other man sits me back up. He rips the tape off my mouth. They want to hear me scream. They think I’m going to tell them, but I’m not.
“I hear you’re important to Walker.”
I shake my head and wince at the movement. My head is pounding, and my vision is blurry, so I mutter, “I’m not. I actually quit today.”