His eyes widened. “Then you know too much.”
“I know enough to ask a question.” I kept my voice calm and reasonable. “Do you really want to be the one who pulls that trigger? Because once you do, there’s no going back. You’re not a soldier. You’re not a killer. You’re just a kid who’s in way over his head.”
“Shut up.”
“Put down the gun. Walk away. Pretend you never saw me. No one needs to know.”
His hand was shaking badly now.
The pistol wavered between my chest and my face.
He looked like he was trying to work up the courage to shoot, trying to convince himself it was necessary.
In another few seconds, he’d either pull the trigger or break.
I didn’t give him the chance.
I moved, but not toward him—toward the ground.
I dropped and rolled, ignoring the explosion of pain in my shoulder, putting the nearest stack of pallets between us.
A shot cracked through the air, wild, hitting concrete somewhere to my left.
I was running before the echo faded.
Behind me, the kid was shouting.
He was calling for backup and raising the alarm.
I didn’t look back, sprinting through the darkness, weaving between containers and vaulting a fence. My breath tore at my lungs. My shoulder blazed with pain.
“Shots fired,” I called through the radio. “Repeat, I’m taking fire.”
The radio crackled in my ear: “Condor, report!”
I gasped. “Heading for extraction. One hostile in pursuit, possibly more.”
“Can you make it?”
Good question. No, great question.
“Ask me in five minutes.”
Breaking free of the cover of crates, I ran.
31
Will
We’d been in position for forty minutes. Danny sat behind the wheel with the engine off. The car was tucked into an alley with a clear sightline to the facility’s main gate. I sat in the back seat, camera braced against the doorframe, using the shadows of the alley to mask the lens. Eddie was somewhere in the darkness closer to the fence, watching approaches we couldn’t see from the car.
Nothing moved.
The station hummed, its transformers buzzing, but the grounds remained empty.
There were no trucks, no men, no sabotage.
“Maybe they’re hitting a different target first,” Danny said quietly.
