She pulled him down for another kiss, about to ask what he thought of making out in a field of hops, when she heard Caleb calling them from the loading dock.
“Stop making out and get back in here. Yegor made his move on the Gravelines plant.”
Chapter 18
Sawyer picked up the scent of blood long before he led the way around the corner and saw the three bodies lying twisted in the hallway of the Gravelines Nuclear Power Station. The large pools of blood near each told him everything he needed to know, even if his ears hadn’t picked up any heartbeats. Rory must have realized the same thing because he didn’t bother to check for a pulse. Misty couldn’t stop herself from at least making an effort. Then again, she hadn’t been doing this job long enough to recognize when it was too late for someone. If she was lucky, she’d never get to that point.
“These people were unarmed. There was no need to kill them,” Misty whispered as they kept moving, stealthily heading in the direction Sawyer hoped would take them to the facility’s main security office. “Yegor’s men could have locked them up in a room.”
Sawyer didn’t say anything. They’d caught sight of some of the armed men herding whole groups of people into various room and locking them in, so he wasn’t sure why the three they’d just passed had been killed while others hadn’t. Maybe because people like Yegor didn’t need a reason to kill. They did it simply because they could.
It had taken Sawyer and the rest of the joint STAT-MI6 team less than fifteen minutes to get to the plant after they’d gotten the call, but in that time, Yegor’s crew had taken control of the power plant, including the two hundred or so people who normally worked the night shift. As far as Sawyer could tell, no one had been able to get away and no one had been able to get a call out for help. In this age of cell phones and smart watches, that was saying something.
They moved through the large complex quickly but carefully, avoiding both people and security cameras. It was actually harder to get past the people than the cameras, since it seemed like Yegor had brought a small army with him.
“We’re almost at the security offices,” Sawyer whispered over his radio. “The place is crawling with Yegor’s men and they’re all heavily armed.”
He, Rory, and Misty had to duck into a supply closet to avoid a group of armed men—five of them moving fast toward the front of the building. As hard as it was to resist the urge to take them down, Sawyer wasn’t there to engage. It was his job to get Misty to the facility’s security offices without Yegor knowing they were here. Once there, they’d take control of all the facility’s cameras, so Harley and the others could slip in more easily. After that, hopefully, Misty would be able to jump from the security computers to the system that controlled the reactors. If she could take all the reactors offline before Yegor got around to doing whatever the hell it was he had planned, they’d be halfway home. Then it would simply be a matter of taking down Yegor and his crew.
Sawyer hesitated as he reached the open door of the facility’s security room, his nose picking up four distinct scents. He turned to Rory and Misty, holding up four fingers before motioning Rory to the right and Misty to the left. Then he pointed at himself and held up two fingers. Rory and Misty nodded, then stepped forward at the same time he did.
Misty might be a technopath, but she could pull the trigger when she had to. All four of the bad guys in the security room went down without a sound.
“The security room is clear,” Sawyer said into his mic, taking in the twenty monitors covering the far wall, each showing a different part of the facility and flipping through scenes that changed every few seconds. “You’re good to move.”
“Roger that,” Jake replied. “We see lots of movement outside one of the containment bunkers—reactor five, I think. Can you confirm that’s where Yegor and his people are headed?”
“Give me a second to figure out what I’m seeing on all these monitors,” Sawyer said. “There are a lot of them.”
He scanned the images on the screens, noting the labels positioned to the lower left of each one. Unfortunately, they were meaningless words and numbers to him. It wasn’t hard to understand what he was seeing when a large room full of nervous-looking people popped up on one of the monitors, though. There had to be sixty or seventy of them, some bleeding from cuts across their faces and heads, others bruised and battered.
As the monitors continued to flip through other cameras, he saw more captives locked away in other windowless rooms.
“Misty, can you get control of these monitors?” Sawyer asked. He was tired of watching the pics flip through so fast he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. “Maybe figure out where Yegor and his crew are and what they’re up to?”
“I’m already on it,” she said.
Pulling out a chair by one of the desks in front of the monitors, she quickly sat down. But instead of clicking on the keyboard, she reached out and put her hand on the closest mouse. Then her eyes went white. Her face went completely still, too, like she simply wasn’t there anymore. If Sawyer hadn’t heard her heart beating, he’d swear Misty was dead.
It was beyond weird. And more than a little unsettling.
Within seconds, the camera views changed to scenes of armed men walking around and vehicles moving outside. One camera froze on what Sawyer knew had to be the reactor room. There was a number 5 on the lower left of the screen, meaning Jake had been right. The place didn’t look nearly as menacing as Sawyer thought it
