The intel about the client meeting. The “vulnerable moment” they thought they were exploiting. The perfect setup that had seemed too good to verify more thoroughly.
Manufactured. All of it. Manufactured.
“It was a trap.” The words came out hollow, disconnected from the chaos around them. “Randall planted the intel. He wanted us here. This whole thing was designed to?—”
He stopped. Looked at the bodies visible in the rubble. Randall’s men. Randall had sacrificed his own people to spring this trap, had determined those losses to be acceptable because none of it mattered except one thing.
Getting Morgan.
“Randall has her.” Lincoln’s chest constricted. “Bear—the exit. I sent her toward the exit. He would have had people waiting to grab her. Randall has Morgan.”
He reached for his phone without thinking. Dead. The screen was shattered, the casing cracked, the device nothing but expensive debris. His tablet—he patted his tactical vest,found the pocket empty, spotted the remains of it half-buried in rubble three feet away. Destroyed.
The jamming was still active, or maybe his comms were simply broken, but it didn’t matter. He had nothing. No data feeds. No building monitors. No way to see beyond the smoke in front of his face or track movement through the structure or find where they’d taken her.
He was blind.
Okay. Work the problem.
Lincoln closed his eyes, trying to visualize the building schematics again. Randall would need an extraction route. Based on the blast pattern and structural damage, the south corridor was compromised, which meant he’d move north or west. If Lincoln could calculate the probable?—
But he couldn’t see the real-time damage without his tablet. Couldn’t overlay thermal imaging to track the fire’s spread. Couldn’t access the building’s security feeds to confirm which corridors were still passable.
Query the building’s security feeds.Shit. Also no access.
He shifted approaches. Morgan’s phone. If he could ping her GPS signature, triangulate her position relative to cell towers?—
Track her phone’s GPS signature.Fuck. No equipment.
His tablet was destroyed. His phone was dead. He had no way to run the trace, no way to?—
Model Randall’s probable routes based on structural damage patterns.
Lincoln could do that manually. He had the schematics memorized. If he assumed the blast originated from the east corridor and propagated through the older wooden supports, then the load-bearing walls in sections C and D would be compromised, which meant Randall’s viable exits were?—
The ceiling groaned overhead. A crack spider-webbed across the concrete above him, and Lincoln realized he had no idea if his assumptions were correct.
He was guessing. Extrapolating from incomplete data. Any conclusion he drew could be wrong, and if he was wrong, he’d go the wrong direction and Morgan would?—
The panic didn’t come all at once. It came in pieces. Each failed solution. Each closed door. His mind kept reaching for resources that weren’t there, kept trying to run calculations on hardware that had been destroyed, and every time it came up empty, the pressure in his chest ratcheted tighter.
Morgan was gone. Randall had her. And Lincoln couldn’t solve this problem the way he’d always solved every problem because he didn’t have his tech, didn’t have his systems, didn’t have anything except a body that had always been secondary to the mind it carried around.
He couldn’t think.
Couldn’t calculate.
He was fucking useless. Couldn’t?—
Bear grabbed him. His good hand on Lincoln’s shoulder, grip like iron, getting directly in his face despite his own injuries.
“Hey.” Bear’s voice was rough but steady. “Look at me, cuz. Linc. Look at me.”
“I can’t—” Lincoln’s voice cracked. “I’m useless. I don’t have anything. No data, no systems, no way to find her. I can’t do this without?—”
“Shut up and listen.” Bear shook him once, hard enough to rattle his teeth. “You are a lot fucking more than just a genius behind a screen. I know that for a damned fact. You grew up with us. You trained with us. Every combat drill, every weapons session—you were there. Allyour training as an adult has been for a reason. Your brain isn’t your only weapon.”
“I can’t?—”
