Red After Dark (Blackwood Security #13) - Elise Noble Page 0,125

how to skulk like that.

Moving carefully, it took us a smidgen over an hour to confirm we were on the right path. Ridley had tried to hide the Toyota under the trees, but he hadn’t done a great job of it. The tail lights gleamed when the clouds let the moon show for a moment. The licence plates had been changed, but the prison guard’s uniform he’d stolen was lying on the back seat. We spiked the tyres just in case he tried to get away, then carried on to the old house. It had been beautiful in its day, two storeys with a small front porch and white siding, but now? It was a house of horrors, all shattered windows and yawning holes in the woodwork. We split into pairs—me with Ana and Black with Pale—and crept to opposite corners. From our positions, we could each see two sides of the house. We watched. Waited. Ten minutes passed, and then twenty. I controlled my breathing. Kept my heartbeat steady.

“Nothing stirring over here,” Black said softly in my ear. We used satellite technology for operations like this, and our headsets linked to each other as well as to Alaric and the team at Blackwood’s headquarters.

“Quiet here too.”

“Pale’s going in for a closer look.”

I switched my scope to thermal and saw his shadowy form melt out of the treeline. It seemed unlikely Ridley would have access to the same technology—jacking a car was one thing, but finding a handy-dandy military-grade scope right after he escaped from jail? Surely not.

Even so, I was tense as Pale approached the building.

Why didn’t we just use thermal imaging to see who was inside, you ask? Because this wasn’t the movies, and that shit didn’t work in real life. Infrared couldn’t see through walls. It couldn’t even see through glass. For that, we’d need a handheld radar system, something like a RANGE-R or a Xaver. Did we have one? Yes. The problem was that they had a limited detection range—twenty metres max, depending on what kind of barrier was between the target and the device—and they worked best if you were right up next to the wall. Pale couldn’t use it, not right away. He couldn’t afford to get distracted so close to potential danger.

“Someone’s been here in the last day or two,” he said, pausing at the corner nearest to me. “There’s flattened vegetation. Syringes too. Could’ve been junkies.”

“Any sign of life?”

“No. I’ll try the radar, but there’s a basement.”

Which we’d have to check out in person. Another quarter-hour passed before we considered it safe to approach, and the only signs of life we’d seen were the aforementioned rats, skittering across the front steps and running up the walls.

We’d drilled through building clearances a thousand times in the kill-house at HQ, and it seemed Pale had a training facility somewhere too. The four of us stacked up outside the front door, a pair on each side. When we went in, two of us would break left, two would break right, and we’d sweep the building, being careful not to cross fields of fire. Our primary goal at that point was to neutralise Ridley.

And we’d have achieved it if he’d been there.

There was evidence of his presence—food wrappers, empty drinks bottles, a sleeping bag—but no sign of the man himself.

Black and Pale materialised through the basement door. While Ana and I had searched upstairs, they’d done downstairs.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Somebody was imprisoned down there, and recently. We found empty jars, water bottles, a copy of today’s Washington Post, and a sweater that looks the right size for Bethany.”

Shit. Had we just missed them? If so, where were they? Ridley hadn’t moved them by car. Not only was the Toyota still there, but we hadn’t seen any fresh tyre tracks and our campsite buddies swore they hadn’t seen another vehicle heading in this direction.

“They must be in the forest,” Ana said, coming to the same conclusion as me.

Black waved a hand at Pale. “After you.”

Picking up a trail was hard enough in daylight, and to this day, I didn’t know how Pale managed to find the spot where our quarry had gone into the woods. He’d just stared at the trees, at the barely penetrable wall of black and grey and said, “There.”

I saw the occasional footprint, half washed away in the mud, but for the most part, I just followed, staying alert for Ridley and careful to leave a ten-metre gap between Pale in front and Ana