Page 78 of Honorable Sins

"Throw me your keys," I bark at the owner of the car.

He tosses them to me and I catch them midflight, spinning to slam into the driver’s seat. Calculating which stop on the yellow line I can reach before the train does, I peal into the light traffic on the LIE. It's too far away, but I'm not risking missing the train by shooting for a station I can't reach before the train does.

Taking advantage of the zero-to-sixty in four seconds, I fly by the slower moving traffic and weave between cars with near death precision.

"I have the text stream on my app cloning your phone," Kara says to me.

Of course she has my phone cloned on an app. That’s Kara. Ready for any contingency that can use her tech skills. Does she have my lieutenant’s phones cloned too? Does she have Fitz's?

"Fitz left through the exit near 69th," Conor says. "Alone."

No one asks what happened to Brice. When he’s found we’ll know. We don’t have time for externals right now.

"Miceli says he’ll have men in place in ten minutes. Salvatore’s club is close to one of the stops, he’s going with a group of his men," Kara says, her voice devoid of emotion.

She can’t afford to feel right now. Our son’s life depends on us keeping cool heads.

"What happened to our eyes on O’Grady and Duffy?"

"They’re still under surveillance by Wraith’s team," Rory says. "I just checked their locations. Both are at home."

Plausible deniability about the attempted hit on Wraith and Áine. It won’t save them if they knew about it and we will find out if they did.

But if it’s not either of them and we know where Kenneth is, who in the bleedin' hell is trying to get to me through my son?

"It could be Kenneth, using an intermediary," Kara says, reading my mind. "He managed to set up the hit on Wraith and Áine without us knowing."

"I have men headed to the first stop," Rory says. "But I don’t know if they’ll make it before the train does. I’m closer to the second stop. I’m taking a team with me."

"Good."

But the first stop is still the most dangerous. Even if the men headed there are close by, the train isn’t encumbered by traffic between stops. Not like a car. And a man on foot would have to be within a block or two to get down to the subway platform before the train.

I tell them which stop I’m heading toward.

"I’m in the subway security feed. I have eyes on the platform and the exits," Kara says. "Fitz’s tracker has him at the Forest Hills station."

"Get eyes on him," I tell my wife, my tone harsh.

"He's on the platform waiting for the train," she says a few seconds later. "He’s alone."

Relief melts a little of the ice in my gut, but not much. There's too much that can happen between now and when I reach him.

A minute later she says, "He's on the yellow train. It's not an express."

My feckin' smart son. Going to the station furthest from Manhattan, taking the local train and giving us the best chance at reaching him.

Unless his would-be kidnapper is tailing him, he'll have no way of knowing which train our son got on or what station he was at. Bad planning not to tell him which station to use. Or someone not familiar with New York.

"Brice is with me. We’re on our way to the Grand Ave stop," Conor says.

"Your feckin’ chisler got me with Guardian and then knocked me flat on my ass. He stole my phone and locked me in the locker room," Brice says on Conor's phone, his voice hoarse. "Where is he?"

Conor must fill him in because the rest of us remain silent as we listen for updates from Kara.

Anger wars with pride at my son’s resourcefulness.

No one Brice didn’t trust implicitly could have gotten close enough to use even the spray developed by Miceli’s lab effectively against my lieutenant. My son used that trust against his uncle.