Brenna looked at Jerricho, and she felt the tears in the back of her eyes. “It feels shitty to be duped like that.”
He nodded. “But I already got a trace and a location for them,” he said, looking up at her. “So it’s not over yet.”
She stared at him in shock. “Let’s go get him.”
“Too easy,” he warned. “You need to stay behind.”
“Bullshit,” she snapped. “I might have been a victim up till now but no longer,” she said. “This involves me, and I was the dupe who took her over there. I went to bat for her. She was this idealistic young woman, who wanted to prove herself, and I fell for it,” she said, “so this is my fight as much as it’s yours.”
Jerricho understood how angry Brenna was, and it was a betrayal that would eat at her, but she had to keep it in check. While she’d been talking to Jessie, he’d been triangulating the location. Even now Diesel was getting blueprints of the building, where Jessie and her husband were traced to, and Killian was working on analyzing what the building was, how to get in, and how to get out of it safely. Diesel also recommended contacting MI6. He was never for that, and he hated working with other governments, as their agenda was usually completely different from his own.
In this case, Jerricho would need some backup and possibly some manpower, depending on what they found.
Killian sat beside him. “It’s a warehouse,” he said quietly. “We’ve got three large bays in the front for loading and a small entrance with a single door going in. At the back is another small entrance, a single door heading out to the alley.”
“Interesting that the bays are in the front.”
“Lots of shipping and value-added manufacturing, which are then turned around to be shipped out.”
“Still in business?”
“No, not at all. Hasn’t been in business for a couple years. The lease is owned by a numbered company, stationed out of Greece,” he said. “All of which could play into what we know about this couple.”
“We don’t know that they’ve done anything seriously wrong now, do we?” Brenna asked quietly.
He looked at her. “What about the betrayal?”
She shrugged. “I get it. I really do,” she said, “but is there a reason to go after them? That’s what I’m confused about.”
“Yes,” Jerricho said quietly. “If nothing else, I have to know if he’s had anything to do with the capture of the women and does Jessie have anything to do with the terrorist activity. Because, at all costs, we protect our country.”
She frowned at that. “I see.” And then she nodded slowly. “She didn’t sound like she gave a damn, did she?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“I don’t even know what information she could have taken,” she said. “It’s not as if our offices have anything.”
“No. And maybe that’s not where she took the information from. It could have been handed off to her, and it was her job to get it out of the country.”
“And, of course, we did that for her, by giving her entrance through our media passes, which has a much higher clearance,” she said, with a nod. “But, even if we do catch her, that doesn’t mean that she’ll have the item with her.”
“No,” he said, “it doesn’t. But I think we need to follow through.” When his chat window beeped, Jerricho quickly looked down at his laptop.
Diesel had sent a message. You have full authorization to go after Jessie.
Jerricho sighed and looked at Brenna. “They want us to go after her and to make sure that whatever she’s trying to get out of the country doesn’t leave.”
“I still think it would have been easier on the cloud,” she said in exasperation.
“Easier, yes, but then very traceable.”
She winced at that. “Right. So secrecy is everything.”
“Exactly. For all you know, this is just a simple little thumb drive full of pictures that she’s trying to take out.”
“It’s what she has hanging around her neck, then quite possibly,” she said, “and that’s depressing in itself.”
“I don’t think so. It is what it is.”
“Do you think she’s actually pregnant?”
Both men looked up at her. “Does it matter?”
“No, maybe not,” she said quietly, “just makes me sad if she is.”
“Why?”
“Because of what life the child will have.”
“The child, if Jessie escapes, would be completely fine, I imagine. I doubt that this is a lifestyle that she would willingly want to maintain,” Jerricho said. “She’s probably been tagged or had to do this to prove her worthiness of joining his group. I can’t tell you the details because I don’t know them, but I imagine that, if she’s truly pregnant, she’s doing this as much as anything to get away and to have a life on her own.”
“And yet maybe it’s the same life that she had hoped to find by doing this in the first place,” she argued.
“I won’t argue with you about it,” he said, “because I can’t tell you any of the ups and downs that went with it. All I can tell is, from her behavior and the number of times I caught her sitting there with her hands on her belly, that she’s likely thinking about her child now, even if she wasn’t before.”
“That’s the thing about pregnancy. All of a sudden it’s not just about you. It’s about more than you.”
“Right. And whether her boyfriend could have gotten her out of that nightmare faster is up for discussion because she still had to contact him, and he would have found out that she’d been taken by a dissident group. It would have been much easier if he had come alone, just to take her. But we got in the way.”
“So she said,” Brenna said, with a note of humor. “I’m totally okay with you getting in the way.”
He nodded. “And you are welcome.”
She burst out laughing. “And I’m okay if she gets away too, to be honest. I would like this over with. And, if that’s who she is, then I don’t want anything to do with her.”
“And if she would leave behind whatever information was worth stealing, then that would be fine,” he said. “But, if it was her doing all this, somebody wants it badly.”
“And it’s probably nothing,” she said.
“What about other media correspondents?” he asked. “Do you have any heavy hitters in your group?”
“John Maxwell,” she said. “He just came back from a visit in China.”
“I’m surprised he was allowed in.”
“China is, at the moment, being courteous,” she said. “I’ve never been myself. But anyway he did a couple tours, and then he managed to sneak out and take a couple helicopter rides, where they were looking at what he thought were secret concentration camps.”
“If he happened to get any of that on film,” Jerricho said, “the Chinese government would pay handsomely for it. None of that information is ever allowed out to the Western world.”