“Two men!” Dylan called out.
“Three up front!” Rachel said at the same moment.
Devast hadn’t been lying. He had found them. Trailed them? But they’d been so careful when they’d left the hotel. They’d switched vehicles, left false trails... “How did he do it? How did he track us?” Even if he’d had a trace on the phone call, he shouldn’t have been there so quickly. It took time to triangulate signals and then to actually get an attack force to the right location.
But his team was already here. He didn’t have to wait for a lock on the phone.
Devast shouldn’t have been able to find them.
Unless...
Tina’s eyes widened. The GPS trackers. The trackers implanted in the agents. If he’d accessed the EOD system, then Devast could have found Drew—and through him, Tina—by following those tracking signals.
Rachel was returning fire to their attackers. So was Dylan. Instead of joining the firefight, Drew was trying to pull Tina down the narrow hallway. She dug in her heels, then she ducked when a bullet whipped by her. She fell to the floor and her hands slapped against the hard wood.
Tina looked up. Drew had dropped with her. She met his stare even as a cold knot twisted in her belly. “You said that Devast had hacked into Syd’s system?” Just months before, the EOD computer system had come under attack. Agent intel had been compromised.
They’d thought the leak had been controlled but...
Maybe Syd wasn’t looking in all the right areas.
“If Devast knows you’re with me, he could be tracking you,” she said. Literally, damn it. He could have a direct feed into the small tracking device that she’d implanted in Drew’s back. “If the EOD is compromised,” she said as more bullets flew, “then you’re compromised.” Because Devast had definitely outed his identity. “We have to deactivate the tracker.”
The only way to deactivate it was to cut the tracker out of Drew.
“Not yet. I want him tracking me.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hallway. “First order of business—staying alive.”
Wait! He knew Devast was following his GPS signal? His mocking challenge for Devast to “track” him made chilling sense to her.
Drew led Tina into a back room. The windows were boarded up. As far as exit strategies went, this sure wasn’t looking like a good one to her.
He tossed aside the faded rug that had been spread over the floor.
With the rug gone, Tina easily saw the trapdoor in the floor. “Is that a basement??
?
He hauled up the trapdoor. The hinges groaned. “It’s our escape plan. You didn’t think we’d actually bring you to this place without being sure we could get you out alive?”
The sound of gunfire still thundered from the other rooms. “But what about Rachel and Dylan?”
“They’re coming. They’re just leaving a little something for Devast.” His eyes glittered at her. “We needed to buy some time, so we had to lay the trap.”
What?
“After what he said on the phone back at the hotel, I figured he was tracking me, and I wanted that SOB to follow me here.” His fingers tightened around the door. “Because here, the guy will realize that he can’t just stand back and let his flunkies chase after us.”
Rachel and Dylan burst into the room. “They’re set. Let’s go.”
What was set?
“We’re going to use some of HAVOC’s own techniques against them.” Drew took her hand. “There’s a tunnel under this house. Stick with me. Stay low.”
A tunnel? With dust and mold and— Breathe. In. Out. She had her medicine. This was fine. She could handle a tunnel. She had to. Tina nodded quickly and hurried down with him.
There wasn’t any dust. No mold, either. Just a small, narrow tunnel, maybe three feet tall and three feet wide. She had to crawl, and she did it, double-timing her movements so that she could get out of there as fast as possible.
The sound of their breathing seemed loud in that small space. Rachel was leading the group. Tina was right behind her, with Drew following close. Dylan closed in the back.