“Yes. Exactly.”
“So where do you want me to start?”
“I see you’ve been working on something. Why don’t you bring me up to speed on that?”
She hesitated, and he waited calmly. “I was trying to track down the Iranian team from that mission, to see if I could find any sign that they are alive.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Interesting. I was thinking the same thing, wondering if anybody was left. We were pretty sure there wasn’t at the time.”
“But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a B team,” she murmured. He glanced at her. “Just like there was talk about creating one here.”
“That’s true, but it’s much harder to come up with more like us than you’d think.”
“But the fact that there’s already eight of you,” she argued quietly, “means that there are others. You’re not the only people in the world.”
“No, I know that,” he agreed. “Iran proved it. It’s just a hard pill to swallow.”
“Sure,” she replied. “We were always of the opinion that we were the best of the best. But that won’t wash right now, since somebody was able to attack and to take down our team.”
“Something else I thought of. Can you start facial matching from any of the cameras around Wilson’s place?”
“That’s a good idea. I only tracked the vehicles so far.” She was mad at herself for not having thought of it. “I’ll see if I can get anybody the same from Mera’s place and mine too. And, yeah,” she added, with humor, “just to make sure that we’re not being followed now. Where was the team when you were all taken out?”
“Different places, but all in the general area around our old Paris headquarters.”
“In that case,” she noted, “I’ll start tracking out in that area too.”
“You think that’ll work?” he asked in surprise.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “What I do know is we have to find something that will work.”
Cameras were all around the city, and she had them all linked up to her previous equipment, accessible under quick keystrokes, but she didn’t have that available to her anymore. She would have to hunt them all down again. Swearing now that she hadn’t done a backup, yet, even if she had, it still wouldn’t have been available to her now, she got to work.
It was a good forty minutes later when she spoke again. “I can track the same person at Wilson’s and Mera’s, but I’m not seeing any sign of him at my place. And remember. We already knew the killers were using stolen vehicles.”
“I went in through the back door of your place,” he murmured.
She nodded. “And I don’t have any camera access back there,” she confirmed. “So I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, it is what it is. What about around the old headquarters?”
“Cameras were along the corner,” she noted. “I picked up two suspicious vehicles, but then I lost track of them at the car parks.” She pointed out on a map that he had laid out. “Depending on how many people they had with them, it might have been enough to have taken down the team. And then whoever went after all the admins on their own.”
“Yeah.” Damon nodded. “That’s possible. We all had stayed behind, pretty unsure as to just what was going on in our own lives because the end had come so fast.”
She nodded. “I know. I felt the same way.”
“Which is one of the reasons I was going to contact you,” he murmured, “but then everything happened at the end of the day that Friday. They hit us, knowing exactly when we were supposedly done, when everything would be locked down, cleared off, and cleaned out.”
“We were the last tidbits to go.”
He nodded. “That’s how I feel this went down too. Can you get any license plates off those two suspicious vehicles?”
“I’ll try.” She brought up the cameras quickly, did a check on several, enlarging the photos as she went, looking for bits and pieces of license plates. “I can give you a few,” she noted, “not that they’ll help necessarily because I’m not sure the license plates were even valid, but I’m writing them down anyway.” By the time she was done and had something printed off for him, she carried it over to the main table and asked, “Hey, what happened to the food?”
“Right, you wanted something fresh this morning, didn’t you?”
She checked her watch. “It is eight o’clock in the morning.”
“You want to do a run?”
“Yeah, besides, I need to move around a bit.” She turned and looked at Terk to find his steady gaze staring back at her. She walked over and squatted down in front of him. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine.” He slowly rose and stretched.
“And the rest of the team?”
He gave her a ghost of a smile. “Holding.”
“Is that what you were doing?”
“How did you know?” he asked, a quizzical glance her way.
“I haven’t worked with you all this time without understanding some of what you can do,” she murmured.
“What I can do and what I can do when I have strong receptive bodies is a totally different story,” he explained. “I do have some of them on tap, but the other two in comas are not doing as well as I would hope.”
She frowned at that. “Keep pouring that energy into them,” she ordered.
He gave a slight low chuckle. “Yes, ma’am.”
She shuddered. “Now that makes me seem old.”
“Well, you’re certainly old in spirit,” he confirmed quietly. “You’ve come a long way since you started with us.”
“It was such a shock,” she acknowledged. “It’s a long way from my teenage years and the hacking freedom that comes from being utterly unaware of the potential repercussions of your actions. I was young and stupid.”
“And now?” Damon asked.
She shot him a hard look. “A whole lot older, a whole lot more experienced, and without a whole lot of trust left to give.”
He winced and looked over at Terk, handing him a cup of coffee. “Have some coffee. We’ll run out to the bakery. She wants bread and cheese.”
Terk smiled. “Sounds good. I’m starving. I’ve been through a lot of energy, so make sure we have lots of protein.”
“There’s still leftovers from last night, some deli meats,” she replied. “Everything is over on that table there. You know that we’ll have to find better accommodations soon. We can’t keep doing this for long.”
He looked at her steadily. “We’re used to it.”
“I’m not. I demand a bed, a real one.”
There was a ghost of a smile, and the corner of his lips twitched. “Duly noted.”
She turned to Damon and asked, “Are you driving?”
“Yes, I am.”
And, with that, they headed out to the truck.
*
They exited, leaving Terk locked in the warehouse.
“Even if we had another warehouse,” Tasha muttered to herself, “we could at least put beds in there.”