I shake my head. “Technology advances so fast these days. On the field we carried what we could on missions in our rucksacks. Something that large would’ve slowed us down. We had our night vision goggles, MREs, guns, ammo, medical supplies, water… everything we needed to survive. If anything, the guys with the gizmos and gadgets were maybe a few miles away every now and then, but mostly, we were on our own.”
Aleksi doesn’t reply, just swallows and gives a barely-there nod. He then starts moving his thumbs and I can hear the whirring of the drone from where I’m sitting behind the wheel. I grab his phone to see what he’s seeing through infrared and press the screen record button so we can go over it later with the others. Nothing really, a few foxes, maybe. The small numbers on the side show he’s about twenty feet in the air and climbing steadily above a few naked trees, and finally, the beginning of the estate. Its long, sprawling front lawn and the roundabout driveway with a fountain in the center that’s currently off. It looks fucking normal.
“Here we go,” he whispers, then switches the camera to thermal imaging as he climbs higher. “Got one suit standing in the front.”
He goes off to list a few more, then flies over the large home until he’s in the back. He goes forward and backwards, scanning every inch. There are more men in the back, setting things up on the snowy ground, moving about the property until they move further back into the tree line about fifty yards away. Evergreens that still have their full bearings, sitting high and mighty, clouds over them, hiding them. Every now and then we see more and more warm bodies dispersed throughout, placing things. I count about twenty different people.
My stomach drops through my ass. “They’re setting up some kind of animal traps.”
The tension in the car builds, and so does the silence. The trees keep going and going andgoing. Nothing but yards and yards of it. He moves higher up, going to the end of the property where there's a stone fence sitting about twelve feet high. Even if Maksim jumped and was able to reach the end… shit. He wouldn’t make it. There’s something that glitters on top of it.
“Switch the camera to infrared and drop as low as you can.”
Forty seconds later we both let out awhoosh.
“That’s fuckingglass.”
I shake my head. “I’ve only seen shit like that in second and third-world prisons.”
“I’m going back up.” He does, and scans the rest of the yard. “Wait. Are you seeing this?”
I nod. Four men go into what looks like a large tool shed big enough to house small machinery and don’t come back out. Four more go in. “That’s our entry point.”
“Not with that fucking wall.”
He’s right. It’s not like we can just knock on the front door. We’d have to storm the fucking manor. I have to fight the urge to look at Sabrina’s dot again, but it all feels fucking heavy.
I am the unconquerable.
“How many guys do we have?”
“Thirty. Fourteen more coming in tomorrow night.”
“We don’t know how many total they have staffed inside.”
With a curse, Aleksi flies the drone out of the area and gets back out of the car to land it. I stop screen recording the thing as soon as it lands. He puts the drone in the backseat, hops into the passenger side, and I drive us off, not turning on the headlights until we’re a few miles from Winters’ Manor. Neither of us says a word.
Once inside the manor, we climb the stairs back to the library. I check on Sabrina to see her little dot pacing back and forth. God, what the fuck is going on in there? Is she okay? I’m sure Kane made sure she’s comfortable, but I know her mind. I know her psyche is probably snapping being so close to Maks and not knowing how to get to him.
Don’t break, baby…
With a frustrated groan, Aleksi parks his ass in the chair he’s claimed as his. His elbows go to his knees, and he drops his head into his hands. “I need to get into their camera feed…” He sits up and leans back, eyes on the ceiling. Suddenly he leans forward. “Oh shit.” He whips his phone out and pushes a number, then brings it up to his ear. “Hey, Franny, sorry to wake you. Yeah, could you come here? I think I have a plan… No, I’ll call Rossi and Bianchi… thanks.” He hangs up quickly but doesn’t put his phone away, doing as he said he would.
“What do you have?”
He holds up his finger and calls Rossi, then Bianchi, and then Maverick. Then he connects his phone with the computer. One by one they come into the library, grim looks on their faces from being woken up at four AM. He calls us over and we’re all standing behind him. We go over everything we saw, and I pull up the screen recording from Aleksi’s phone onto the monitor so it’s clear for them, pausing every now and then to fast forward, getting to the important parts, including the traps and the “shed.”
Franny looks even more annoyed. “And why did you need me?”
“You have a company here, don’t you?Sullivan’s.”
A smile spreads across her face, and she begins nodding. Then she explains to both Maverick and me, “They specialize in security cameras. But we have access to all of the feeds. I usually use it for major corporations run by questionable CEOs so my husband can use the footage as extortion if need be in the US. But over here, it’s just known as home security for more…highbrowcustomers known asIronclad. We don’t have to use it as much, but it’s good to have just in case for instances like this.”
“A place that big, how long would it take for you to reroute their cameras?” I ask.
“Not long. The only thing that may take a bit longer is implementing my software. It goes in like a virus, letting us find any type of ware that coincides with having extra feeds more people don’t have access to. You say there’s a facility underground, which means the only people that may have access to that are the owner of the home and the people sitting behind the monitors. Last year we found a sex trafficking ring in New Mexico by accident,” she informs with a discontent hum. “I can go in and install all of it myself.”
“Absolutely not.” We hear from the doorway, seeing Angelo, her husband, standing there.
