He answers on the first ring, and I slip the phone in a side cargo pocket. “I’ve got Bebe here. Are you ready?”
“Just logged on.”
I can hear Bebe clacking away on her keyboard, and after just a few keystrokes, she says, “Okay… I’m in. Give me a minute.”
By in, she means she’s located the Wi-Fi signal from the warehouse that I latched onto with my laptop. Bebe, from where she sits in Pittsburgh, is now making her way into their Wi-Fi, freezing firewalls and creating secret passageways.
At least that’s what I imagine she’s doing. I know whatever she does, she’s going to take control of any security system they have in place.
“Security system has an alarm that’s not activated, although I can see by the history, it’s set whenever the warehouse is closed up. There are several cameras not working, but there are currently sixteen active cameras, and I’m sending their feed to your laptop now.”
I bend closer to the laptop, and the screen flickers before grids appear, four across and four down, each with a different camera feed. Most are of the first floor, filled with rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with munitions. There’s a camera on the loading dock, one at the back door, and one that appears to be inside an office supposedly used by Mejia, although it’s unoccupied.
Inside the warehouse itself, I see four more armed guards patrolling with semiautomatic rifles.
And there, in a large room with a conference table sits Mejia and four men who are clearly gang members by the way they’re dressed as compared to his uniformed forces. They’re laughing at something Mejia says, and I wonder if they’ve already had a go at Greer. It makes me sick to my stomach to think they have.
My eyes roam back over the feeds, and I zero in on one of a narrow hallway that only shows its length. I can’t tell if it’s got rooms to the left or right, but a guard moves in and out of frame as he marches back and forth.
Perhaps guarding another room or a cell?
Could Greer be in there?
I take one last lingering look over the feeds, and finally say into my mobile hookup with Dozer and Bebe, “That hallway. That’s where she has to be.”
“I’m looking at the building plans,” Bebe says. I have the same plans on my computer, but I don’t want to exit from the camera feeds, so I rely on her. After a few seconds, she says, “Yes… I don’t see any other place she’d be other than that hallway or Mejia’s office. His office is on the main level, but that room where he’s at now—I think it’s in the basement as well.”
“Please tell me the door on the west side is the best way in,” I plead with her as she peruses the plans on her computer. “There’s only one guard there, and that will be my easiest point of entry.”
I could go in guns blazing through the front, use explosives and create a catastrophe, but I’d rather go in stealth.
“There’s a stairwell about twenty feet from that door,” Bebe says, and I sigh in relief.
“Do you have control over the lights?” I ask.
Bebe snorts. “Please… do you think I’m an amateur?”
No, I know she’s not. She’s the best. “Give me five minutes to make it back to the north side of the property. I’m going to cut through the chain-link and take out that guard. I’ll tell you when to cut the lights.”
“Got it,” she replies, and I can hear her fingers once again tapping her keyboard.
“Good luck, brother,” Dozer says. “We’ll be listening the entire time and will do what we can on our end.”
“Thanks, man,” I reply and close the laptop. I’m not going to need it.
I rearrange what I need in my backpack, recheck my pistol, and sling the bow and quiver over my shoulder. I nab the night vision goggles and pull them down to hang around my neck for later use.
It’s go time.
CHAPTER 4
Greer
It wasn’t the sound of heavy-booted feet coming down the hallway that caused my heart to hammer in fear. It was the look of sympathy the guard leveled my way before he turned and walked in the opposite direction. If one of Mejia’s trusted guards feels sorry for what is coming, whatever’s coming is going to be bad.
Time’s up.
Mejia is going to get his information one way or the other.
At least that’s his confident theory.
As for how I feel about the matter, there’s no way I’m going to give up the location of the intel I stole. I’m never going to give Mejia the satisfaction of taking it back, especially if I lose my life over this.
I try to console myself with the fact that the USB drive could still be found by my compatriots. The drive has a built-in tracker that will start pinging within forty-eight hours. I might be dead, but the information will make it into the appropriate hands, and Mejia will be taken down. It will be my revenge from the grave for what they are about to do to me.