Wade's War, page 13
“Wouldn’t it,” she agreed, “but the chances of that happening anytime soon aren’t that great.”
There wasn’t a whole lot Wade could say to that, so he just nodded and kept on eating. He was on his second sandwich and hungrily eyeing the rest of the French bread.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Did you happen to pick up any peanut butter?”
She got up and walked over to the bags on the counter and pulled out two jars.
“Perfect,” he stated. “I gather Tasha told you about that.”
“Yeah, you seem to have this thing about peanut butter.”
“It helps me regenerate quickly.” Wade laughed.
She watched as he took two big slabs off the French bread and quickly smothered them in butter and peanut butter. When he started eating them, almost as rapidly as he had the sandwiches before, she stared. “Do you need more food?” she asked. “Because, if that’s the case, I can cook something.” But then she stopped, looked around. “Or not? We don’t really have much in the way of facilities to do any real cooking here, do we?”
“No need to cook on my account,” Wade replied. “We’ll be fine. I just need to tank up again.”
Sophia nodded, not entirely convinced that she was getting the whole story from him. But, when she looked over at the others, they were already deep in thought, and she figured nobody would explain things. At least not yet. She looked over at Tasha, who was busy on the computer again, so Sophia joined her there. “And he always eats like this, right?” she asked Tasha. “So there’s no reason to worry?”
Tasha immediately nodded. “No need to worry. Peanut butter is always his go-to food, especially when we’re short on options.”
“Right, so no steak barbecues anytime soon.”
“Nope, none, nada.” Tasha laughed. “Let go of your dreams of having anything fancy for a while.”
“It doesn’t really matter.” Sophia shrugged. “As long as there’s enough food that we’re not starving and that we can keep their energy up.”
“Exactly.”
And, with that, Wade, who’d been listening in, reached for an apple and said to Tasha, “Send me the satellite feed of when Sophia went for the groceries, please.” Tasha did so without question, but Sophia looked at him and frowned. “I might recognize them,” he explained easily.
Sophia wasn’t sure that she believed him, but then, as she thought about it, it was exactly what she would be doing if their roles were reversed. When he put down the peanut butter jar the next time, she asked, “Are you good with that video now?”
“Looks like they were just a couple punk kids.”
“Well, older than that by a few years and ones with an agenda, but they weren’t pros.”
“Next time they’re likely to be that much more aggressive,” he noted.
“Agreed, but hopefully by then, we’ll be dealing with a completely different scenario. And, with any luck, I won’t be alone.”
He frowned, then nodded. “Let’s hope so.”
“And remember. This is the job I’m doing too. You can’t just protect me because you want to.”
“Of course I can. But you won’t really allow me to.” And, with that, he got up and walked over to join the men. Really no point in arguing about it. He was still confused and tired, but they needed a plan. Wade looked at Damon. “Did you track down those two punks?”
“Yeah, I did,” Damon stated. “They both live in a halfway house on Kirkland Avenue.”
“Let’s go have a talk with them,” Wade suggested.
Damon agreed, then looked over at Terk. “You need to stay and recharge.”
“Absolutely I do,” Terk agreed, without argument. “And you guys need to not do anything stupid.”
“Well, they’re the ones who started it.” Wade’s temper rose at the reminder.
But both men looked at him and shook their heads. “Absolutely no way will this come to blows,” Terk ordered. “You need to keep your emotions out of it. We need intel, not trouble.”
“I’ll get it out of my head,” Wade replied, “when some semblance of normalcy returns. In the meantime, they’re on my shit list.” And, with that, he turned and walked out, not waiting for Damon.
Chapter 10
“Heads-up,” Tasha said to Sophia, as the men disappeared.
“What’s up?”
“They’re going out to talk to those young guys who hassled you on your way home with the food,” she explained. “Terk will go on his Energizer Bunny shift, and we’re to track the men on satellite.” Tasha immediately opened up the satellite feed and watched as the two men headed out.
“So it’s just me who had to keep hiding and parking a long way away?” Sophia asked in disbelief.
“Not necessarily,” Tasha stated. “What you don’t realize is that these guys also have the ability to shield themselves to a certain extent.”
“Yeah, I don’t know any of this stuff.” Sophia reached up a hand to rub at her temple. “But, as long as you guys think you’ve got it covered, then fine.”
“We haven’t got anything covered,” Tasha admitted. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have been taken down like we were. But we’re getting to the bottom of it.”
“Says you,” Sophia huffed. “I think we’ve just landed in chaos and a whole lot more confusion instead of answers.”
“Well, I really hope you’re wrong,” Tasha admitted, “but you know what? We’ve all been stuck on this one, and none of us is really sure what’s happening, so we’ll figure it out. That’s the bottom line. We don’t know now, but we will find out.”
“Good enough,” Sophia replied and watched her screen, as the men headed down the road. “And they’ll go find these two guys?” she asked.
“Yep, they were paid by somebody.”
“If I’d have really thought about it, I could have taken them down myself and maybe brought them back in.” She looked around the room. “I just didn’t think that’s what I was supposed to be doing.”
“It wasn’t,” Tasha agreed. “And you probably could have, but it was more important that we follow protocol.”
“Yeah.” Sophia still felt like she had missed out on an opportunity though. And she felt disappointed in herself that she didn’t take any proactive measures. Why the hell hadn’t she thought of that? That was just BS that she’d missed that chance. She felt herself getting angrier by the second.
Finally she got up and walked over to make herself a sandwich, and when she came back, Tasha was staring at her.
“Feeling better?”
She groaned. “I guess you guys are all supersensitive to how people are feeling, huh? I suppose you have to be, living in close quarters like this.” She shrugged. “I’m mostly just angry at myself.”
“It’s normal to react that way, especially after the fact, but it really wasn’t the thing to do at the time, so it’s good that you didn’t.”
“Says you,” she muttered. “I feel like it’s something they might have expected me to do.”
“Nope, not at all.” Tasha really wanted Sophia to understand that it was not only not expected but it wouldn’t have been desired, if she’d pulled it off. “Listen. Right now these guys aren’t used to having any help at all,” she explained, as Sophia looked at her sharply. “It’s not that they don’t want our help.” She shrugged. “They have their team, and that’s all they’ve been used to having for a very long time,” she stated. “Anything other than that is just gravy.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to be thought of as gravy,” Sophia stated. “I’ve done a lot of missions. Not full-on heavy action, like maybe they would expect if I were to say that, but, at the same time, I wasn’t sitting there twiddling my thumbs either.”
“Good,” Tasha replied, “because right now we’ll need all hands on deck.”
“You think those kids were bad news?”
“What do you think?” Tasha asked. “You met them.”
“I think they were punks, who could be pushed to do a whole lot more, but they were uncertain. As they gain confidence, they will become a pain in the ass to whatever law enforcement is around here.”
“Right,” Tasha agreed. “Well, let’s see how the guys do with them.”
“And what about Terk?” she asked, as she looked around.
“He’s gone to lie down.”
“Can he really just recharge like that?”
“Nope, not necessarily. He’s burning through an awful lot of energy right now.”
“Yeah, Wade was evasive about it, something about the other guys,” Sophia stated.
“So the answer to that question is maybe, but it would potentially be much more difficult right now.”
“Which really means, you have no idea.”
Tasha laughed. “You know what? That’s not a bad assessment,” she agreed. “I can speculate, since I’ve worked close to Terk for a long time, but I really don’t know. This situation is completely unprecedented.”
“Yep.”
Together, they watched the satellite feed as Damon and Wade drove, but they didn’t go very far. When they did pull off into a side area, Sophia immediately marked it and started assessing ownership of the properties in the area and who was registered at the halfway house. “We have two guys,” Sophia noted, “who checked in just two days ago.”
“That’ll be them,” Tasha stated cheerfully. “If you’ve got names, send it in a text to the guys.”
Sophia did that immediately. When she got a response back from Wade, asking if anybody else had been there long-term, she immediately assessed the rest of the residents. She sent him the information that she had and waited to hear a reply. When nothing else came, she shrugged. “They’re not big on talk, are they?”
“Nope, they sure aren’t.” Tasha laughed. “But they are as loyal as the day is long.”
Sophia frowned at that. “Maybe … but only if you actually get accepted into that inner group.”
“It’s not about any inner groups. It’s about being one with them,” she stated. “You’ve already got an in with them.”
“Not likely,” she muttered. “I forced my way into this, when you think about it from their perspective.”
“Wade let you stay, didn’t he?” Tasha asked, with a smirk. “Nobody is forcing Wade to do that. Totally his call. And believe me. If Terk or Damon didn’t want you here, you wouldn’t be.”
“Interesting,” Sophia murmured, as she looked at her friend. “Do you have a say in any of this?”
“It depends on the topic of course, so not a whole lot in a tactical sense, but, if I feel strongly about something, you can bet I speak up,” Tasha stated. “I’ve been part of the team long enough that, when things don’t feel right, you can bet I squawk.”
At that, Sophia burst out laughing. “Squawk, huh?”
“Yeah, nice terminology, I know.” She grinned. “But you can’t really say anything about what’s going on here until you’ve been here for a while, until you understand more about how the team operates,” she stated, “and some of it can be pretty rough.”
“I believe you,” Sophia agreed. “It seems like a lot of this can be pretty rough.”
“Absolutely, but we’re getting there, and, as soon as we get this bullshit done with,” she stated, with a confidence that she obviously believed, “I’m sure they’ll set up shop again, one way or another.”
“And you’ll stay with them.”
“I go wherever the hell Damon goes,” she stated, looking over at her friend. “For me that’s nonnegotiable.”
Sophia nodded. “Well, if I was on better footing with Wade, I might say the same,” she agreed. “At the moment it just feels very much like I’m on sufferance.”
“Then you have to make sure that sufferance becomes a whole lot more,” Tasha replied.
“And I’d like to. I really would. I just don’t know how to make that happen, especially under these circumstances.”
Tasha smiled at her. “You’ll find a way.”
And, with that, Sophia headed back to her computer. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Your job right now and your only job,” Tasha stated firmly, “is to track our guys and to let me know if anything happens.”
It wasn’t what Sophia was used to, and the inactivity was definitely not her usual thing, but she could get behind this. As Tasha looked on, Sophia brought the satellite feed up close, zooming in on the location. “That helps a lot,” she muttered.
Tasha leaned over. “Yeah, that’s much clearer. What did you do?”
As Sophia explained the adjustments she made, the two men split up. “Oh, no, no, no, don’t do that,” she cried out to the empty screen.
“Yep, like I said, it’s your job. Looks like now you’ve got two of them to track separately.”
“Shit. That’s not cool.”
“Cool or not, that’s the deal because these guys will be heading off, looking at two different targets, so they’ll split up, and what we have to do is make sure that they both get back home again.”
Groaning at that, Sophia sat back down and watched. She thought she could tell which one was Damon and could separate out Wade. They were different heights, different densities. And that seemed like kind of a foolish way to describe it, but it was how it felt.
As the men moved forward, she watched, and then they went into the building, and she wished she could do something with that. Now all they could do was wait to see who came out. And that wouldn’t tell her jack, until there was actually a problem. She tried to search for a network that she could hack into to access cameras around the location. The halfway house was a low-rent, pay-as-you-stay place, so probably not much of anything high-tech to access, and that would be worse for the guys. They were going in blind.
Surprised, Sophia did find a security system, which she quickly hacked into and brought up the feed. Two men walked through the second floor hallway. “Well, they split up for a minute,” she noted, “but they’re back together again now.”
“Interesting.” Tasha glanced over her shoulder. “Oh, good, you got into the security feed. Nice work.”
“Yeah, I did,” she replied. “Now it looks like they’re heading for one room. Is it possible these guys are sharing?”
“Absolutely, wouldn’t you?”
“Only one reason why they would share one room, so they probably don’t have money,” she noted. “I hadn’t considered that, but it is a viable point.”
As soon as Damon and Wade reached the door, Sophia tuned the picture a little more, checking out and writing down time stamps at crucial points. When the door opened, one of the young men stepped out. She immediately sent a text to Wade. That was the one who talked the most. “They shouldn’t be going in there,” Sophia stated.
“You can’t stop this,” Tasha replied. “You just have to watch and to trust them to do their job.”
“Oh, I trust them. I just don’t trust the rest of the world that seems to have absolutely no regard for their well-being.”
“That’s our job.” Tasha pointed to the monitors.
And, of course, Wade’s vitals were still calm and steady. Sophia groaned. “I’d really rather be out there with him.”
“Yeah, I hear you, but, right now, as shorthanded as we are, we need you here.”
“You could do this without me,” she argued.
“I could, but, at the moment, I also have to track all these.” Tasha nodded at her multiple monitors.
Sophia frowned. “What’s all that?”
“It’s the feeds from the rest of our team,” she explained. “Whenever Terk needs to go down—as in, really power down—he has to shut off his internal surveillance systems. It’s the only way he can really recharge at this level. But, when there’s a need to keep an eye on the others, he sets up this surveillance for me to use.”
“Are we expecting more attacks?”
Tasha just looked at her.
“Okay, stupid question, sorry. Why is that one so much livelier?” she asked, pointing to one particular section of Tasha’s nearest screen.
“That’s Gage. He’s coming out of the coma. I have to watch him carefully because, when he regains consciousness, I’ll need to alert Terk quickly, since Gage is likely to be pretty upset, disoriented, and unable to figure out what the hell happened to his life,” she stated. “So that’s bad news.”
“Got it,” Sophia replied, “but wow, I’m seeing a lot of movement there.”
“Yeah,” Tasha agreed. “It’s just not necessarily the movement that we need yet.” And, with that, she wouldn’t say anything more.
Sophia figured it would be one mystery after another, until she either proved herself or until they decided that it was worth telling her all the ins and outs of whatever the hell was going on. Really this was all about trust, which in a way was understandable, since they had been so horribly betrayed.
She got that, and, as she turned to look back at Damon and Wade on her monitor, she wished they all trusted her more. But it would be a process. Frustrated, she settled back to watch the screen.
*
Wade stepped forward and introduced himself to the second guy, who sat in front of a gaming system. “I hear you had a meeting with an older woman today.”
The young man looked at him blankly. “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?” he asked. The guy they’d shouldered inside the room from the doorway was still rubbing his arm.
“Well, we can keep playing games if you want, but you harassed somebody I know about the groceries she bought,” he explained, and, at that, the two young men stiffened. Wade nodded. “Yeah, and you should be scared right now. I’m surprised you’re even alive.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t we be?” the belligerent one snapped.
“Well, did you get any information to tell the guy who paid you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he replied a bit nervously.
“Yeah, you didn’t have enough information to make him happy, I’ll bet. When are you supposed to go out again?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “Man, you’re just like the rest of this bloody place. You’ve lost it.”
