As he and Colt slipped out of the server room, he heard Talia and Katrina start to panic over the radio. He was more than a little worried himself. The entire reason he’d been okay with Talia being involved was because the surveillance van had been parked so far away. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been far enough.
“How could they have figured out there’s anyone in the van?” Colt asked as they hurried toward the exit. “Or that you have anything to do with their meeting? Could it be a coincidence that they’re driving around the block multiple times?”
“It could be,” Kyla said in a tone that suggested there was no chance in hell. “If Keller’s people are as good as you guys claim, they might have picked up on all the low energy transmitters we installed to send the audio and video feeds from the building to the van. I’ve shut them all down now, but if they’re smart, they’ll still be able to find us. That’s probably why they’re all driving around in circles trying to triangulate our position from the last recorded signals.”
“We need to get out of here!” Katrina practically screamed.
“No!” Lennox shouted into his mic. “You can’t start the van. If Kyla is right and those SUVs are out circling the neighborhood looking for you, they’ll lock on you the second you turn on your headlights and start to move. Stay where you are.”
Man, he hoped they did as he told them. Who knew what those men would do if they found the van?
“Darwin and Simon, you two are with Colt and me,” Lennox said as he ran. “Wes. Kirk. You two are on extraction duty. If we can’t get them out, we’ll be depending on you to do it.”
With that, he and Colt bolted out of the building, sprinting toward the surveillance van and the three unarmed women inside.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Talia had thought her heart was going to jump out of her chest at the sight of Keller’s men moving back and forth past the server room where Lennox and Colt had been hiding. But her definition of fear was completely redefined when she stared at the video monitors and saw them running out of the building at a sprint. She wasn’t sure what scared her more. That Lennox and Colt were running into danger, or that she, Katrina, and Kyla were the ones they were risking themselves to save.
“I don’t understand why we can’t get the hell out of here?” Katrina whispered, like she thought someone would hear if she spoke too loud.
“Because of them,” Kyla whispered just as softy from where she knelt behind the driver’s seat peeking out the front windshield of the vehicle.
Talia crawled forward across the back of the van with Katrina even as Kyla motioned for them to stay low. Talia understood why when they reached the front seats and peeked over the dash to see the dark SUV slowly creeping down the street toward them. There were four people in the vehicle, checking each car parked on the street like they expected to find someone sitting inside one of them.
“There’s another one coming from behind us. They must have a good idea there was someone running surveillance from this general area,” Kyla whispered, motioning with her head toward the driver’s side mirror.
Talia glanced over and saw two headlights slowly approaching. Her stomach clenched up all over again and her legs started to tingle like they wanted to run away, whether the rest of her body came with them or not.
“What are we going to do?” Katrina asked softly.
Panic no longer filled her friend’s voice. Instead, it seemed like she’d settled down into something almost approaching calm. Talia could only envy her.
“We hang out here and wait for Wes, Lennox and the other guys to arrive and save our butts,” Kyla said, in a tone even calmer than Katrina.
“But the office building is blocks away,” Katrina said. “They’re never going to get here in time to help us.”
“Navy SEALs can run a lot faster than you’d think,” Kyla told them as the vehicle in front of them crept closer. “They’ll get here.”
The SUV approaching from the front was probably about fifty feet away and closing in way faster than it should have been. They probably had ten or fifteen seconds before it reached them. What was the possibility that they’d drive past a van with dark tinted windows when they almost certainly knew they were in the right area already?
Talia didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she started getting dizzy. By then the SUV in front of them was so close she could hear the men inside talking in sharp, urgent tones.
“We’re right on top of them,” one of them said.
“Get down!” Kyla whisper-shouted, throwing herself at Talia and Katrina a fraction of a second before chunks of metal,glass, and plastic video monitors and electronics exploded around them.
Talia lay on the carpeted floor, hands over her head, screaming her head off and trying to understand what was happening. It seemed to take forever for her to realize the men in the SUV were shooting at the van with what must be silenced weapons. Not that their silencers helped. It still sounded like they were trapped inside a drum.
Just when Talia thought there was no way they’d get out of this alive, the van stopped being shredded. Instead, one racket was replaced with another as loud gunfire sounded from the other side of the van. Lennox and the other guys must have arrived. And they were shooting at the bad guys.
She screamed all over again when the side door of the van, the one closest to the curb, was suddenly jerked open, metal screeching on metal and pieces of glass falling everywhere.
Talia would have run, but there was nowhere to go. So, her fight-or-flight instinct defaulted to the first option and she prepared to throw herself at her attackers.
Then she saw Lennox standing there in the open door of the van and her heart started functioning again. Talia still threw herself forward but for a completely different reason now.
Lennox caught her up in his arms but instead of helping her out of the van, he picked her up and shoved her right back in. “Stay here. The other guys will give us cover while I get the three of you the hell out of here.”
