“Do I get to see Chris?” Might as well go for broke and ask, right?
“You do not. I need your answer so we can move you immediately. You’ll stay in the city, but no one will know where you land. It’ll be your job to stay under the radar. We can only protect you so much since you wouldn’t be fully in witness protection.”
My decision is a reflex. “When do we leave?”
“Right now.” He stands up, motioning for me to go out the door before he leads me out the back to a blacked-out SUV.
The drive is so long that I end up falling asleep wondering if I made the right choice because I have a feeling my whole life is about to change.
Part 2
Chapter 19
Adam
Six months later …
“I’ve got something,” I tell my team as I walk through the front door of our offices.
“Thank God. We’re running on fumes over here.” Juliette sighs.
I stop in front of Lex Collins’s desk. He’s the only one who knows where Claire is because he’s the WITSEC man on our team. He’s told me she’s not technically in the program, but I can’t find her. “Where is she?”
“Man, I can’t tell you. Woody’s orders.”
“If you call me Woody one more time, I’ll kick you off the team for good,” Kellen Woodcroft, our sometimes-terrifying leader, says as he comes out of his office.
“Shit. Didn’t know you were here.” Lex has the decency to look embarrassed.
“Why all the secrecy, Woodcroft?” I ask our boss.
“Because you wouldn’t keep it in your pants long enough for us to figure out just how far this operation goes up the ladder.”
“I’m not a fucking teenager. Jesus. She could help us!” I counter.
“She already is,” Lex grumbles.
“What?” I spin around to face him.
“She’s been giving us names. Verifying identities,” Juliette says as she types on her computer.
“You have her working for us now?”
“Man, calm down. This is why they won’t tell you shit.” Clint Sinclair, or Sin as we call him, says from his desk. He’s our Internal Operations guy, which means he mostly does the tracking of suspects, but he knows a little bit about everything to help out anywhere.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Is the whole team conspiring against me?”
As I throw my hands up in the air, Harvey Stone walks in with Starbuck, the Belgian Malinois that’s our team’s mascot. Stone does tactical operations with Starbuck for our little team. We’re an eclectic bunch. “I mean, I gave Claire my copy of Battlestar Galactica to watch. She wanted to know where I got the Starbuck name from.” Stone shrugs like this new information isn’t going to send me into an absolutely vile mood.
Ever since shit went down with Oscar, I’ve been losing my mind. Once Juliette took Claire, she disappeared without a trace, and she’s all I’ve thought about since.
“So what do you have, drama queen?” Woodcroft asks as he sits at my desk.
“You really aren’t going to tell me where she is? It’s been six months,” I plead.
“Not right now I’m not. And if you try to withhold information from the team again in order to find her location, you’ll never know where she ends up.”
Properly chastised, I slump against the wall. “Lorentz wasn’t the only heavy hitter,” I mumble.
