Sometimes I forgot that Lyn used to be a police officer and now worked for the FBI. I was used to his brain, not his brawn.
“What happened?” I asked. I had a fair idea, considering the three guys we’d taken down outside, but I needed more information.
“Two cars breached the front gate. The house was already on lockdown, but Brant wanted us in the panic rooms just in case.”
“Do you know if they breached the house?” I asked, even as I walked over to the monitors mounted on the wall. I grabbed the keyboard and brought everything online. The monitors flickered to life, instantly showing me different viewpoints from inside and outside the house.
“They hadn’t when we came in here,” Skip said as he walked over to join me.
I glanced at him when I heard the tension in his voice. “David was fine the last time I saw him.”
Skip sent me a weak smile. “Sometimes the waiting is really hard.”
Oh, I was aware.
“Patty and his guys showed up to help, and Carlos sent a bunch of his guys. They’ll be fine.” And they’d hopefully bring my mother back to me.
I returned my attention to the monitors, scrutinizing each section of video feed to find where the danger was. I found two more men circling the outside of the manor, but that was it. “Has anyone seen Brant or Lyn?”
I couldn’t find them on the surveillance.
“Brant was supposed to be manning security in the security office,” Uncle Jerry stated. “And Lyn was in the study the last time I saw him.”
I tapped a few buttons on the keyboard to bring up the study surveillance, but all I got was black and white blur. “The surveillance in the study is down.”
And that was very bad.
I pulled out my gun and checked the magazine just to make sure. I’d done it before when I loaded it, but Sal had drilled into me to always be prepared.
“Angelo, raid the armory and get what you need to gear up.”
Uncle Jerry’s eyebrows lifted as he stared between the two of us. “You’re giving him a gun?”
I snorted. “Angelo probably knows how to use a gun better than you do.” I knew I couldn’t give his secret away. Very few of us knew of his connections to the government. “You do remember who his brother is, don’t you?”
Jerry grunted but didn’t say anything.
I looked through a few other streaming surveillance videos, trying to place where everyone was. Everything was coming back clear except for the study. Everyone had also been accounted for except for Brant and Lyn, who I assumed were in the study. I just didn’t know who else might be in there with them.
“I don’t suppose anyone wants to swing on a rope?”
Yeah, I got a lot of disbelieving looks for that one, but I remember when Wu came through the study window after swinging down from the second floor on a rope. It had distracted people enough to let Sal and the others get the upper hand.
“Okay, I need a couple of you to go downstairs to the kitchen and make some noise, just enough to get whoever is in the study to come out. Marcus and I will go downstairs and try and sneak into the study. The moment you hear someone coming, get to the kitchen panic room. Dmitri, you’ll need to lead that since you know the code to get in.”
This was a really stupid idea, but it was the only one I had.
Chapter Eighteen
Lany
I followed Marcus down the narrow staircase built inside the panic room connecting the upstairs to the downstairs. Angelo and Dmitri were right behind us. When we reached the first floor, they left through the security door and headed for the kitchen. Marcus pulled the door almost all of the way closed and then listened at the opening.
I swallowed tightly, the tension in the air so thick it was hard to breathe. What we were doing was epically stupid because we were technically not trained for this.
Well, I wasn’t trained for this.
Marcus suddenly held his finger to his lips and pulled the door closed just a little bit more. I swallowed hard again and then moved up behind him. The footsteps outside the door were almost silent, but I’d been living in this mansion for a long time. I knew every creak it made. Someone was definitely walking down the hallway.
