a hospital ASAP to have their stomach pumped. One survived a car wreck but is a paraplegic, one is in a coma on a ventilator, a couple have gone back to their lives without any lasting visible trauma once the doctors were able to repair the damage.”
“No, Max said they wouldn’t be able to fight that until the drug was completely out of their system. So, how did they do that?”
“I have a theory about that, but I need to do some more investigating before I’ll know if I’m right or not.”
“What kind of theory?” He clicked. “Never mind. I’m in. Just got to wait for the messages to load.” Within seconds, they were on the screen in front of him. He scanned through them, then gave a sigh of disgust. “Well, we know why she snuck away and took off like she did.” He got on the phone and made a call to get someone to the address in the text, then hung up and leaned back.
Heather frowned. “Why aren’t you going?”
“She won’t be there.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no way they’d text the address they wanted her to go to.” He shook his head. “It was just a way to get her out of the building.”
But the security footage had shown her heading out of the building and getting into the dark sedan. He called Annie. “Hey,” he said when she answered. “What do you have on the sedan?”
“Using the traffic cameras, it looks like they went east, but then they fell off the grid. Same with her phone. I was able to track it to a tower in the area about the same time they disappeared from traffic. They turned off on a side road, unfortunately.”
“Right.” He closed his eyes a moment while he thought. “Get agents out there where they disappeared and just start searching. This is a kidnapping and we’ve got a good lead in the direction they went. Let’s go give this everything we’ve got and see if we can find her. Oh, and contact the field office’s SWAT and have them on standby to take the lead if we wind up needing them to do so.”
“On it.” Annie hung up and Caden turned back to Heather. He handed her the laptop and she snapped it shut and tucked it under her arm.
“I’m going to make a few more calls and I should have your answer about the drug and how to quickly dilute the effects of it. Stay tuned, but please find Sarah and Gavin.”
Caden nodded, noting the worry in her blue eyes and the pinched mouth. She was scared for her friends. He understood. He was terrified.
Sarah climbed out of the driver’s side and stood for a moment to gather her nerves. While well aware of the woman behind her with the weapon, Sarah was also painfully aware of one other thing.
“Where’s Gavin’s truck?”
“In a parking garage about thirty minutes from here.”
Sarah drew in a shuddering breath. So, there would be no tracking Gavin via his truck. And now she’d handed herself over to the monsters responsible for Dustin’s death—and who knew how many others.
For the first time since leaving the hospital, real fear swept in and nearly paralyzed her.
The gun at the base of her spine pushed her forward. Help wasn’t on the way. She’d truly thought they’d beat her and her captor to the location. She was thrown, mentally and emotionally. With her mind processing her new predicament and recalculating the plan, she decided she had two goals.
Find Gavin and her father and stay alive while doing so.
“Go. Inside.”
“I know this place,” she murmured. “Why do I know this place? Marshbanks Labs.”
“You can think later. Get inside.”
Sarah figured she could get the gun away from the woman with a few well-placed self-defense moves she’d learned in the service—and from two well-meaning brothers who wanted her to be able to take care of herself—but if she managed to do that without getting shot, how would she go about finding Gavin and the general?
Tamping down the desperate need to get away from her captor and the desire to find the men, she bit her lip and let Donna direct her to the glass doors. The woman punched in the code and the doors slid open.
Sarah stepped inside the air-conditioned lobby and stood still, listening, watching—and praying that Donna knew how to use the weapon and wouldn’t accidentally pull the trigger. “What now?”
“Walk.”
“Where are my father and Gavin?”
“You’ll see them soon enough.”
Sarah allowed the woman to