God, I wish we hadn’t argued.
I wish we’d had a nicer conversation before he left.
I wish I knew he was safe.
I wish?—
“Got it!” Manny, one of the youngest Gerard family interns, sits in front of a massive computer screen. “Got it!”
We all pause. Silence reigns in the room while we all look at him.
“The drone! I found the security drone from that location.”
Thayer’s gone stone silent, stiff as a board.
“Let’s see it,” he says. He shakes his head. “This is usually Lyam’s field of expertise.”
Manny pans out on his screen. The date’s clearly written across the top of the screen. It’s the same day he left.
The screen blossoms into bright light and it takes me a minute to realize we’re functioning as eyes for the overhead drone. From this bird’s eye view, we can see the density of the buildings, the general layout of our urban area. The traffic looks like little play cars, and the Louvre from this distance looks tiny. Vibrant green spaces mark the parks, the tinge of blue the River Seine. But as we draw nearer, I can see crowds of people.
“Look,” Manny says. “This guy here gives a signal. Then after he signals, they turn on him.”
I shake my head from side to side. “It was a setup. A total setup, wasn’t it? You can tell just by looking at that… It wasn’t like someone just saw him and got upset. Between the footage from the drone and this clip I found online, this isn’t the way things go. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, there are like fifty people attacking him? They were planted.”
“Agreed,” Thayer says. “It would be the easiest method in the world, right? Get people afraid of us, then blow the whistle. Have them think that they’re in danger because the bad guys are here. Make the actual bad guys innocuous enough that the others there don’t send a guard after him. Then, attack. Yeah, it makes sense.”
My heart races. I want Lyam safe. The first time they had him, he was a bargaining chip, but now… “Zoom in,” I tell Manny.
I stand and cover my mouth when I see two men bring Lyam to the ground. One sticks something in his neck. A second puts a bag over his head, and a third helps carry him away. I blink, staring, waiting for them to emerge from the crowd so we can see where they went.
They don’t.
“They didn’t leave,” I tell Thayer. “How come they didn’t leave?”
He scratches his chin and shakes his head. He’s got Fabien on the line. “What the fuck does that mean, they didn’t leave?”
Thayer frowns.
“Maybe we should check out that area at another time? Let’s go to two days ago, six a.m., same spot.”
Thayer eyes me curiously.
“Good thinking,” Thayer says approvingly. “Very good job.”
His praise sounds hollow compared to Lyam’s, but I give him a wan smile.
Manny’s fingers fly over the keys as he zooms in further, a few days earlier.
“Aha! There, look!” Right in that location is a manhole cover. “Let’s find out what that leads to.”
Minutes later we have an underground map of the tunnels.
I reach out and stroke Princess. She makes me feel closer to Lyam.
Thayer’s eyes go dark. He shakes his head. “Well, look at that. The tunnels lead straight to the Capitol.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
