“Yes, math. How good are you at it?”
The General smiled and shrugged. “Good enough to know your odds of making it out alive are decreasing with every second you keep me tied up here.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Hawk said as he began to pace around the General. “Let’s start first with some basic questions, like how many fingers do you have?”
The General started laughing and ignored the question.
“I’m serious, General,” Hawk said. “How many digits do you have on your hands.”
“Ten,” the man finally said.
“Now, we’re going to play a little game,” Hawk said. “I ask a question, you tell me the answer. If you don’t tell me the answer, we do a little subtraction problem.”
“What’s one idiot minus a brain equal?” the man said. “Give up? A dead idiot.”
Hawk glared at him before picking up the man’s gun off the floor that he’d lost during their initial struggle.
“I’ll never tell you anything,” the man said.
“I can be persuasive when I want to be,” Hawk said, tapping the barrel of the gun against the palm of his hand. “So, let me ask this one more time—where is my friend?”
The man spit in Hawk’s face again.
Hawk shook his head. “Subtraction it is then.”
He knelt down behind the man’s chair and grabbed his pinky finger. “Ten fingers minus one finger equals …”
The man’s shoulders slumped as he said nothing.
“Nine fingers,” Hawk said as he ripped into the man’s hand, slicing off his right pinky. “Or seven if we’re being technical and classify thumbs as different appendages.”
The man let out a guttural scream.
“Now where is she?” Hawk asked again. “I can do this all day long if necessary.”
The General sucked in a breath through his teeth and exhaled, his face grimacing. “Okay, okay, I’ll talk. She’s in the building next to this one.”
“I swear if you hurt her, I’ll come back and kill you.”
“She wasn’t the target. You were.”
“Me?”
“I don’t even know who she is.”
Hawk grabbed the man’s hand again. “Who sent you?”
“I don’t even know the guy’s name.”
Hawk narrowed his eyes. “Is that so?”
“Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.”
There was pounding on the door.
“Sir, are you okay?” a man shouted through the door.
“Don’t say a word,” Hawk said, training his gun on the man.
“I’ll tell you what you want to know, but I’ve got to say something or my guards will come crashing through the door, and you won’t have a chance.”
Hawk sighed. “Fine.”
The man took a deep breath and shouted. “This maniac has me. Help!”
“Wrong answer,” Hawk said before shooting the man in the head.
A pounding began against the door. Hawk scanned the room for the lone remaining exit—the window.
Two more thumps against the door. Hawk hustled up to the window and pushed up. It refused to budge.
He then backed up halfway across the room.
Another loud thump at the door.
Here it goes.
Hawk broke into a dead sprint for the window. He hadn’t taken more than ten steps before the lock gave way and the door flung open. Despite the commotion, Hawk didn’t look back, instead leaping and diving head first through the window.
As he hit the ground outside, shattered glass rained down all around him. Blood trickled down his face while the sounds of gunfire echoed from the room above. He scrambled to his feet and tried to get his bearings.
Looking around the compound, his concern for Emily grew.
There was no other building.
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FACING ALEX was finding the location of the storage device. She inspected the camera lodged in the light fixture and determined it was wireless, leading her to believe it was likely still in the room. She checked the room’s lone closet to find nothing but clothes strewn about, most drooping halfway off hangers. She paced around the room, looking for a spot in the floor where McGinn could hide the device. But there wasn’t anything readily apparent.
Alex then resorted to tapping the wall in search of a hollow area. When that yielded no results, she removed the two pictures from the wall.
There you are.
Alex smiled and found a black metal box with blinking lights that was plugged into a special electrical outlet built into the hidden area. She carefully rotated the box toward her and found a small screen on the back. After a few seconds of fiddling with the controls, she managed to turn on the screen. A navigational bar appeared at the top, allowing her to scroll through previous day’s recordings. The fact that the device was motion activated made it easy for her to eliminate the images of her without drawing too much suspicion.
Alex deleted all the images up until the day she first walked into the room. In a perfect scenario, she would’ve deleted more so that it didn’t seem so coincidental that the camera stopped recording the day she arrived there. However, she knew that if she deleted a few weeks prior to when she and Hawk came to Berera and McGinn had checked the footage during that time, she would’ve been busted for sure. At least the current situation gave her the chance to talk her way out of a situation.
She was about to put the box back in place but decided to snoop around on it for a few more minutes. Refusing her curiosity was next to impossible, no matter how dangerous the situation, which was why she was hacking into the security feed in the first place. She smiled and shrugged before continuing to poke through the device. It wasn’t long before she discovered a large archive with little of interest. Then she pushed another button that opened another archive—at least that’s what she thought it was at first. Alex quickly realized it actually wasn’t another archive; it was a live feed, and she could see McGinn.
“What are you up to, you little weasel?” she asked aloud.
She pushed another button, revealing a different camera angle. Another button and then another camera.
Alex leaned close to the screen and squinted. The
