“I’m sorry, Garrett,” Cam said, one hand raised.“It’s a distancing mechanism we’re taught, same as you probably were in the Marines.And I need it more than most.”
Garrett lowered his fist, listening intently.
“I’ve been where you are, except my sister didn’t come home.That’s why I do this.”Cam gestured around the room and out at the bullpen.“So don’t think for one second I don’t know how you feel.How badly you want to find Lette.I don’t intend to let what happened to my sister happen to yours and Nic’s.”
Short of a promise to bring her home—he tried not to make those—but a promise to do everything he could to make that happen.
Garrett’s tension eased a measure, somewhat reassured, and he let Nic guide him into the empty chair beside Lauren.
Nic knelt in front of him, a hand on his knee.“Lette’s no good to Vaughn seriously injured or dead,” he said softly, visibly swallowing hard around the last word.“He knows the stakes here too.That the whole force of the FBI and DOJ will be behind us.”
Lauren bumped Garrett’s shoulder with hers.“And he did love your mother.The spikes in his readout, his torn-to-shred cuticles, other cues...”Of course the trained analyst had been paying particular attention.“I think a part of him maybe still does.He won’t hurt Lette.”
Garrett took a deep breath and relaxed back in the chair.“Okay, so what next, then?Do we wait for the ransom demand?”
“No,” Cam said, leaning against the wall next to the glass.“We do recon on this location in Morgan Hill.Confirm she’s there.And if she is, we have a tactical game plan ready for extraction.”
Garrett shot right back out of the chair.“I want in.”
Nic was having none of it, stepping into Garrett’s space, attempting to loom over the shorter man.“So you can become another hostage?Hell no.”
Garrett was having none of Nic’s answer or his attempts at intimidation.He might have been shorter, but he outweighed Nic by a good thirty pounds, if not more.“I’m a fucking major in the Marine Corps.”
“Which is why you need to stay with Victoria.”
“So all the hostages are in one place for him to take?”
Cam would have laughed if he wasn’t so worried about the two shredding each other in a fight.And if Garrett didn’t have a very good point.“He’s right, Dominic.”
Blue eyes glowered at him.
Cam shrugged.“A compromise.Garrett, you can join the recon team, but if they’re there, and I make the call to go in, you stay back.That way all three hostages and the levers on you”—he gestured at Nic—“remain separated.”
“I can live with that,” Garrett said.
The door opened just as Nic asserted, “I’m going with you too.”
“’Fraid not, Price.”AD Moore’s charming smile was absent, his face hard and severe.Not someone Cam would want to cross when he was this obviously angry.“Deputy AG is on the phone for you.We’ve got a problem.”
Moore paused outside Aidan’s office, hand on the doorknob.“Bowers is on the line too, making the case against you.”
“I figured as much.”
“He’s also making the case that the entire Vaughn matter be dropped.”
Nic stepped closer, then noticing they were drawing curious looks from the bullpen, led Moore into Cam’s office and shut the door behind them.
Aidan’s raised voice echoed from his office at the other end of the conference room between them.Nic needed to get in there, defend himself and the case to Bowers and the Deputy AG, but if he couldn’t convince Moore first, he was in deeper shit than he realized.
“Of course Bowers wants the case dropped.You’re up to speed.You know what he stands to lose if Vaughn goes down and he gets exposed.”
“And you have just as much, if not more, to lose, Price, if you’re making the wrong call.And the rest of us will lose too if you’re gone from the US Attorney’s Office when this is over.”
Nic felt like he’d been slapped.“You think he’ll convince Jack.”
“I think I worked hard to build this case for longer than you’ve even known about it, sacrificed parts of my life for it, and I don’t want to see all that go to waste.”
Nic wondered if maybe it wasn’t only the lack of seasons that had caused Moore’s ex-wife to leave him for the East Coast.“El?—”
