“We did find something,” Jean-Luc says, piggybacking on Pierre’s comments in order to keep the room from exploding. “The barista isn’t as squeaky clean as she’d like us to think. She’s got ties to the new Résistance-Fer that we find very interesting. At first glance the ties look obscure, but when we started pulling on the thread, it started to unravel.”
“So what are we talking here?” I ask. “She came forward and tried to blame a different militia group because she wanted to throw the scent off of RF? But you weren’t even looking at RF, were you?”
“We had looked at them, but there was nothing to connect them to Prince Garrett at all—especially since they tend to be a more moderate group, on the whole, than DPL.”
“When they’re not kidnapping the crown prince.”
Jean-Luc nods at me. “Precisely.”
“So, what’s the next step?” my father demands. “The RF has safe houses all over the country. How do we find him without tipping them off and forcing their hand with regards to the crown prince?”
It’s a solid question, one that I want an answer to, as well. My gut says raid them all at once so they don’t see us coming, but what if he’s being held somewhere else and the raids trigger his execution?
It’s a huge risk.
“Investigation,” Pierre says simply. “From the moment we discovered her ties to the RF, we’ve been examining RF assets.”
He flicks on the projector. “We’ve narrowed it down to five places we think he’s being hidden, but none of them are safe houses. All of them are remote access, off the grid and very hard to run reconnaissance on.”
“Is that what you want to do?” I demand. “Run reconnaissance? How long will that take?”
“A couple of weeks,” Sebastian says.
“A couple of weeks? Are you kidding me? You think you know who has my brother—the Crown Prince of Wildemar—and you want to wait two weeks before going after him? Are you kidding me?”
“We’ll move as quickly as we can—”
“Like you have so far?” I shove back from the table, walk over to the corner where a pitcher of water and some glasses have been set up. I don’t want anything to drink but I can’t sit still any longer, not when they’re discussing my brother’s life with no more urgency than they would a chess game.
“We need to know what we’re going into,” Pierre jumps into the conversation. “What the farm-compounds look like, where our best chances of finding him are—”
“You can do that with satellites and a couple government experts. Shit, I could probably do it with Google Earth. Then, put five teams together and raid them all at the same time.” I pour myself a glass of water that I don’t want.
“And if we do that and he isn’t in one of those five spots?” my father says to me. “They’ll rabbit with him, and then we’ll never find him.”
“Am I the only one who’s noticed that they’ve already rabbited with him?” I answer. “We haven’t gotten any demands. No group has claimed responsibility for having him. No video has s
hown up on the internet of him being tortured or spilling state secrets. He’s already gone.”
“Right now, we’re certain he’s still in the country—” Pierre begins.
“And he still will be, even if we raid these places. If they haven’t smuggled him out by now, they aren’t going to. How would they even go about it with the heightened security we would implement in the airports, train stations and along our borders and coast?”
“We don’t want to push too hard,” Jean-Luc tells me. “If we provoke them, things could go really badly.”
“More badly than they already are?” I walk back to the table, slide into my seat. “What proof do we have that he’s even alive at this point?”
“That’s enough, Kian,” my father says, his voice slicing the air like a whip.
“It’s obviously not enough. Because if it was, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about waiting two more weeks to actually do something to get Garrett back. We’ve been cautious for three months and it’s gotten us absolutely nowhere. If he isn’t already dead, then he’s probably dying. And if that’s the case, every second counts.”
“And if we raid these compounds, risking the lives of dozens of Wildemarian soldiers, and he isn’t there? What do we do then?”
“We round up everyone who is there and we interrogate them until one of them tells us where he is. If these are five of the most important, most secure places owned by the RF, somebody there knows where he is. I have absolute confidence that our intelligence agencies can get the information if they’re given the chance.”
“And if they see us coming and kill Garrett out of spite?” my father asks. “What then?”
“If they kill him out of spite, then they were going to kill him all along. Which means that every second he spends a prisoner of the RF, he’s one second closer to death. We need to get him out!”