Code Name: Aries by Janie Crouch

21

Ian

Sarge hadn’t been kidding when he’d said this lab was hard to get to.

We were scaling a cliff wall to make it up to where the lab was located, cleverly hidden as part of a high-end nursing home off the cliffs of the Tieton River in Washington state.

This place hadn’t been on our radar before Sarge had brought it to our attention, and there were a lot of unknown variables in this situation. Our current circumstances were far from what any of us would’ve called ideal, but time was the most critical factor.

We had a six-man team, including myself. Not the six I would have chosen under ideal circumstances, but both Zac and Finn could pull their own weight.

Finn was currently scaling the cliff wall with Sarge and me. I’d agreed to allow them on the team because they’d agreed to take orders from me. I appreciated that both men had Special Forces training, but no mission would be successful without a clear leader.

Isaac and Zac had gone up the wall a few minutes before us. They were responsible for blowing the power at the same time we blew the door. Both had to be done at exactly the same moment or the backup security measures would lock us out.

That didn’t mean we wouldn’t get in, but it did mean that the bad guys would have an opportunity to kill everyone inside before we got in there.

That was not an option.

The sixth man had already been inside the nursing home for a couple of hours—Landon doing what he did best: charming people. He was a concerned son looking for a place to put his wealthy, elderly father. If anyone tried to make it out through the nursing home, the legitimate front to the facility, Landon would be there to stop them.

A shit ton of things could go wrong with this mission, so many that we weren’t aware of all of them. It was a risk I was willing to take. It was dusk. It would have been better to come in under cover of night, but waiting any longer wasn’t an option. Getting anybody out the same way we were coming in was going to be nearly impossible.

That was assuming Wavy was mobile. She’d been in Erick’s clutches for eight days now. I had no idea what shape she was in. And if Bronwyn was in there, she could be in bad shape too.

Alive. We just needed them to be alive.

We silently scaled the rest of the way up the cliff wall and got into position.

“Everyone ready?” I spoke into my comm unit and got affirmatives from everyone involved. “Isaac, Zac, you guys in place?”

“Two minutes,” Isaac responded.

“Roger that, we’re moving to the outer security door.”

Isaac and Zac would shimmy through ventilation shafts to get to where they could cut the power. It would be a tight fit for the big men. Two were going because if one got taken out, hopefully the other could complete their part of the mission. None of us knew exactly what type of security we’d be facing here, but we all knew it would be armed.

“Aries, we’re in place. Over,” Isaac said.

“Roger that, Pisces. Blow the power on my mark.”

Sarge had already set up our charges, and we stepped back. “Sarge and I will go in high. Finn, you guys go in low. Tranq anything that moves, and we’ll sort them out later.”

We were using tranquilizers rather than real bullets in case an innocent got caught in the fray. I wasn’t going to take a chance on Wavy being injured by friendly fire.

“Detonate on my mark. Three, two, one. Mark.”

We all pulled down our night-vision goggles and rushed through the hole where the metal door had been. Finn dropped low to cover Sarge and me as we dove inside, then followed on our flanks.

But it didn’t take us long to realize there was nobody here. The large room held no one, nor did any of the smaller rooms branching off of it. The place was empty.

“Goddammit. We’re too late.” I pressed a button to talk to Landon. “Libra, we have nothing down here. Anything up where you are?”

“That’s a negative,” he replied. “Business as usual here. Got a full tour, didn’t see anything that would make me think twice. I don’t think anybody here is aware of the lab.”

Fury tasted like death in my throat, followed by a huge chaser of fear. We were too late. “Everybody spread out. See if we can find anything useful. Isaac, see if you can get power back on for us.”

“Aries, I have two dead bodies left behind out the west door here. Wrapped in a tarp,” Zac said. “I can’t see their faces, but it’s two females.”

Cold sweat broke out along my spine as my eyes met Sarge’s. We ran to Zac’s location where Finn had beat us by a few seconds. He cut through the tarp covering the women’s faces.

“It’s not her,” Finn said. “It’s not Wavy.”

I finally felt like there was enough oxygen to breathe.

Sarge pushed his way past both of us. A few seconds later he said, “It’s not Bronwyn either.”

“Okay,” I said.

We all stood in silence for a moment. There were two dead women here, but they weren’t our women.

But our women were still missing.

“Okay,” I said again. “We’re going to have to let Callum’s team in on this because of the bodies, but let’s sweep and see if we can find anything else before we turn it over to them. I’m not going to slow down for bureaucracy.”

Not that it was bureaucracy slowing us down. We’d been too late on our own timetable. Erick and Mosaic remained a step ahead of us.

A few minutes later, Isaac had rerouted the power so we were able to look around with the lights on. Landon was already talking to Callum. I’d be getting an earful from him later.

It would’ve been worth it if we’d gotten Wavy and Bronwyn back.

How long before we’d gotten here had they cleared the building? It couldn’t have been too long; those women’s bodies hadn’t been in rigor mortis. We’d have a more accurate window of when they’d left once the coroner gave us an estimated time of death.

Ultimately, it didn’t really matter. Whether we were too late by a day or only a couple hours, we were still too late.

There were no traffic cameras out in this remote area of Washington, but I’d get the tech team on it in case we got lucky.

Even with the lights on, there wasn’t much to see in the big room. One gurney along the south wall held both arm and leg restraints.

Had Wavy been restrained in that thing or something like it? I scrubbed my hand down my face. Hopefully, we’d get some answers when the crime lab went through here—both Zodiac’s and law enforcement’s, but I wasn’t sure what they could tell us.

Had Wavy been here? Or was she already dead—a body lying somewhere else wrapped in a tarp?

I almost missed the tiny scrap of paper on the ground. If I hadn’t stopped to look at the gurney I would’ve missed it completely. I knelt to retrieve it.

“She was here. Wavy was definitely here.”

“How do you know?” Finn asked.

“She gives me these Post-it-sized paintings all the time, and this is a portion of one of them.”

It was so small, less than a quarter of its normal size. It was crumpled, worn.

And it had blood on it.

Despair sliced through me once more.

I slipped the tiny piece of canvas into an evidence bag, although I wouldn’t be giving it to law enforcement. That was part of Wavy, and I was keeping it with me.