I am afraid. Raziq will kill me. Of that I am certain. If I am lucky, I will see Mateen again. Hold him. Tell him how much I love him. But I have only been lucky once in my life. And that is when I met you. I fear it is too much to hope fate will smile upon me a second time.
I believe you will save Mateen. I believe you will not stop until he is free. I take comfort in that.
I wish we had more time. I wish for so many things. Dinners and movies. Strolls along the riverbank. Kisses and touches and everything that comes after. But you will laugh when I tell you I also wish to sit with you in the rain, shivering, while we watch Mateen play soccer.
I hope when I am gone, you will not disappear from his life completely. He needs you. I would never ask you to love him. But if I am right, you already do.
You showed me I could be brave. That I could be strong. But you also showed me I could be weak, and someone else would shoulder the burden for a time.
I could not say any of these things to you face to face. I wanted to. But I did not know how. Please forgive me.
I love you.
Lisette
Tears cool on my cheeks. My battered heart aches. I didn’t know what love was until I met her. Now, I’m terrified I’ll fail, and I’ll never be able to tell her that I didn’t save her. She saved herself. But that’s not all.
She also saved me.
* * *
“Heads up.”Austin raps on the bedroom door. “The thermal scans are coming in now.”
I scramble up, then remember Griff can’t hear the man knocking. Kicking his boot, I wait for him to look at me. “It’s time.”
He fumbles for his glasses. “Fuck. Go. I’m right behind you.”
Not going to argue with the man. I need to know what we’re dealing with. If Lisette is there. If she’s still alive.
Austin has all our tablets propped up on the stained kitchen counter. The red blobs don’t look like people at all, given that the camera is three miles up. But with each passing second, the images change. Small details emerge. Arms and legs. Subtle differences in size.
“It’ll be another ten minutes before we have the full picture,” Zephyr says, her voice spilling from a tiny speaker on one of the tablets. “But I count twenty-two distinct heat signatures.”
I zero in on the smallest one. “Mateen’s on the first floor. One other man in the room, two in the hall. Want to bet that’s Raziq next to him?”
“Two women,” Austin says. “One in the kitchen, and the other on the second floor. That’s got to be Lisette.”
The urge to touch the screen—to touchher—is almost too much. “The rest of the men are spread throughout the house and grounds. Looks like six on patrol, one on the roof.”
“What I wouldn’t give for McCabe’s tactics guy right about now.” Austin rubs the back of his neck, his gaze pinned to the center tablet. “Sampson’s a fucking genius at infil and exfil. It’s going to be damn near impossible to get the drop on these assholes.”
“Harder than that, boss,” Zephyr says. “Check out the wide shot.”
The image shifts, the house shrinking to a square in the center surrounded by a hundred small, round dots. “What the fuck are those?” I ask.
She pauses for so long, the answer can’t be good.
“Zephyr?”
“Those are land mines.”
* * *
Half an hour later,we’re no closer to a plan. The AWAC’s cameras gave us a hell of a lot more than just thermals.
We have rough specs on every room, and from the dead zones directly behind them, the front and back doors are likely reinforced.
“Top speed on any piece of shit motorcycle we could find around here is one-fifty, but I wouldn’t trust them not to fall apart at half that. Plus, we’d have to double-up, so a hundred? They’d have us in their sights the moment we crested that hill.”
