Authors: Dean Murray
"Yeah,
the same way I feel before walking into a biker bar all by myself
with my badge showing. The kind of bad vibe that usually means
extreme danger."
"Okay,
we'll keep that in mind. Thanks for calling to let us know what's
going on."
"Yeah,
try not to get yourselves killed. I'm starting to think that I'm
going to need your help a lot more than I was thinking a couple of
hours ago."
She
hung up on us and I finally got to find out why Isaac had spent the
last few seconds looking so concerned.
"That
text was from Heath. He and Dominic just saw an SUV leave the
building we've been watching. I think the cop is right. We've got the
right building, but they just split your family up, which makes our
job much tougher."
Alec Graves
Pinnacle Hotel
Cloquet, Minnesota
We'd all known that we could be going in against overwhelming numerical
odds, but that kind of thing is less of an issue when you had someone
like Heath on your side. With him making us effectively invisible it
would be easy to sneak up on the building, and possibly even to get
inside and start taking out some of the vampires before they knew we
were there. Once the fighting really got started then he would have a
harder time keeping everyone shrouded in invisibility but even if all
he could do was keep a few people invisible it would go a long way
towards keeping the scales tipped in our favor.
It
was a simple, brute-force kind of plan, but it wasn't half bad
considering just how little in the way of information we were going
to have access to before we went into the building. That plan had
been seriously threatened when we were told that they were splitting
up Adri's family, but it went completely by the wayside when Dominic
finished tailing the SUV in question over to the other side of town
and texted us back with the results of what she'd found.
The
SUV did in fact have Cindi inside of it, along with a total of five
other individuals, all of who were probably vampires based on the way
that they moved.
Dominic's
revelation threw the group into chaos, chaos that Isaac was having a
hard time getting back under control.
"Guys,
you all need to calm down! This isn't helping anyone. The situation
has changed, but it's not hopeless."
Adri
collapsed into her chair and buried her face in her hands. "It's
pretty dang close to hopeless if you ask me. If Detective Belarose is
right, then five people being in the van means there's somewhere
between twenty-five and thirty people back in the building where my
parents are being held. There isn't any way that we can take out two
groups that size at once. There just aren't enough of us."
She
wasn't wrong. Heath could only be in one place at a time, which meant
that wherever he wasn't, needed pretty close to even numbers of shape
shifters to vampires if we were going to win.
Isaac's
group, plus Jenners, Taggart, Adri and me just wasn't big enough to
field two groups of the size we needed. Heath could probably offset
two-to-one odds. In a pinch he might even be able to successfully
help the rest of us go up against three-to-one odds, but if we
detached five shape shifters to go after the group holding Cindi then
whoever went in after her parents was going to be up against way more
than three-to-one odds.
Isaac
held his hand up to rein in everyone else. "You're right, we
can't take both groups at the same time, but it might turn out to be
a good thing that they are splitting up like this. It means we have
the possibility of dividing and conquering against much better odds
than we would have faced if we'd been up against their entire force
at once."
Taggart
frowned. "Once upon a time I would have agreed with your
assessment, but in the modern age it is simply too difficult to keep
people in the dark as to what is going on with the rest of their
group. In a combat situation sometimes that doesn't matter, but in a
hostage situation it is the ultimate trump card. If we attack the
groups separately and the first group gets off a single phone call to
the other group letting them know what is happening, then the second
group will execute the hostages."
Isaac
nodded. "I know, but maybe I can construct a jamming device and
use it at the first location to make sure that they can't get a call
out to the second group."
"What
if they have a landline?"
Adri
obviously wasn't trying to be difficult. It was a legitimate
question, but just the way that she asked it indicated that she'd
given up hope.
"Okay,
I admit, my idea isn't perfect, but it significantly ups our chances.
People these days naturally go for their cell phones first. That's
going to cost them time. Then when you throw in the fact that nobody
memorizes phone numbers anymore, our chances get even better. We go
in after Cindi first, which means we'll have an edge in raw numbers
as well as the benefit of Heath's powers. All we have to do is kill
all of the vampires before one of them can pull out his cell, realize
he doesn't have a signal, use his cell phone to look up the number he
wants to call, and then dial it on the landline.
"If
they still outnumbered us then I'll admit it would be a long shot,
but we'll outnumber them. Really, when you get down to it, we don't
have to
kill
them before they can make it to the landline, we just have to
engage
them before they can make it to the landline."
Taggart
looked over at Adri, who still hadn't looked up, and I could see his
heart breaking, but that didn't stop him from making the next point
that needed to be made.
"I
would agree, but if it was me over there I would have regularly
scheduled check-ins between the two groups. If that's the case then
we would have to time our attack very carefully. We would need to be
able to attack the first group, eliminate all of the vampires and
then make it all the way across town and attack the main group before
the next scheduled check-in. Anything less will result in the
vampires executing Adri's parents."
Isaac
shrugged. "It would help if some of you would throw out some
ideas of your own rather than just poking holes in my idea. I'll hack
whatever they are using to communicate between the two groups and
we'll find out how often they are checking in with each other. Maybe
it's far enough apart that we can pull off both operations like we
would need to."
Jenners
shook his head. "We're going to end up rushed. That's a good way
to have something like a hostage extraction blow up in your face.
Besides, what if they are using earpieces?"
It
was the most words I'd heard out of Jenners at one time since he'd
arrived. Based on what Carson had indicated before I left LA, it
might be the longest speech that Jenners had ever given. More
importantly, he was right. There was every possibility that these
guys were in constant communication with each other via some kind of
voice-activated radio earbud.
Tristan
cleared his throat from over in the corner where he'd been sitting in
his wheelchair ever since I'd paid to move our group to a larger,
more comfortable conference room across town.
"What
if we tricked them somehow? Could we make them think that they lost
contact with Cindi's group because of somebody other than us? Then
they wouldn't execute Adri's parents, they would just send over
backup and you could ambush the backup."
Isaac
shook his head. "It feels awfully complicated to me. I could
probably hack the local power grid in the time we have left, but I
don't even know if it's possible to manually simulate the kind of
brownout that werewolves cause. Not only that, power is a pretty
critical system, they'll have people watching it at this time of day.
I'm not sure how long I can keep it down for."
"It's
a good try, Tristan, but even if everything else went perfectly it
still wouldn't work. The vampire in charge over there isn't an idiot
and if there's one thing she doesn't lack it's ruthlessness. The
timing will just be too suspicious. If anything happens to put her
out of communication with her people she'll just order one of my
parents killed."
Adri
still looked so despondent that it was hard to believe that she'd
been able to bring herself to even respond to Tristan's idea. It
broke my heart to see her look like that, but still I held my peace,
hoping against all odds that someone would be able to come up with a
viable alternative to the path I saw.
I
wasn't any kind of tactical genius. I'd never had the chance to
acquire the kind of experience that made Jack so effective, but that
didn't mean I couldn't see the solution to something this simple.
Really, everyone else should have seen it by now too. The only reason
that they hadn't was the fact that they hadn't finished processing
the full meaning of our recent run-in with the gang in LA.
Isaac
looked around at everyone, obviously hoping that someone else had a
viable alternative to his plan, but nobody did. Some of the people in
the room couldn't bring themselves to meet his eyes.
"Okay,
we'll go with my plan then. I'll hack into their communications
system and figure out how frequently they are talking to each other.
Once we know that then we'll know how much time we'll have before
operations. Then I'll get started on the cell phone jammer…"
The
time had come. I couldn't remain silent any longer, not if I wanted
to cushion Adri from the loss she was about to experience.
"How
long will it take you to hack their system, Isaac?"
"It's
hard to say. It all depends on what kind of safeguards they have in
place."
He
was hedging and it was obvious to everyone in the room.
"Given
what you've seen so far out of this group, would it be fair to say
that you expect the hack to be of above-average difficulty?"
Isaac
closed his eyes and sighed. "Yeah. These guys are the real deal.
They've somehow managed to get their hands on the kinds of resources
that a guy like me can only dream about."
"I
suspected as much. And once you hack their communications system how
long will it take you to construct the signal jammer that your plan
calls for?"
"I
don't know. It will depend on what kind of components I can get my
hands on here in town. If they've got the right stuff then maybe I
could put one together in half an hour."
"What
about if they don't have the components you're looking for?"
"Then
I'll have to build those components out of more basic stuff.
Depending on what I find it could take a while."
"Longer
than two hours?"
"Yeah,
a lot longer."
"We
haven't accounted for the time it's going to take you to go shopping
for the equipment you need yet, Isaac, but I think it's safe to say
that will take at least half an hour. If we give ourselves fifteen
minutes to get onsite and set up for the first assault, then that
means you'll need to be able to hack their system in less than forty
minutes."
Adri
looked up at me with despair in her eyes, and I wished there was
another way. I didn't like to rip away her hope, but my plan only
worked if she was in a mental state to grab onto the hope it
represented without stopping to think about it too carefully.
Jenners
held up a tiny radio transmitter designed to fit snugly in the
wearer's ear, exactly the kind of transmitter that we were worried
the bad guys might have.
"None
of this matters if they are using these."
I
nodded. "Exactly. We're outlining a plan that would require
everything to go perfectly to have even a hope of working. That's
never going to happen, and frankly I'm doubtful that a group like
this is going to be using anything other than top-of-the-line
communications equipment. We need a different plan."
"So
what's your play?"
Isaac's
question could have been challenging. He hadn't liked his own plan,
had known that it was unlikely to work, but he'd been too worried
about what Adri was about to go through to do anything other than
grasp at whatever straws presented themselves.
"All
of you go set up for an attack on the main building. I'll go to the
building where Cindi is being held and we'll launch a simultaneous
attack."
Adri
shook her head. "Alec…no, it's suicide."
"Yeah,
once upon a time you would have been right. No normal hybrid could
hope to take down five vampires at once in any kind of standup fight,
but I'm not planning on a standup fight and I'm not a normal hybrid
anymore. I finally manifested my ability during the fight in LA. I
single-handedly took down the two most powerful vampires I've ever
heard of anyone running across. I can do this. I should have
volunteered back at the start of the conversation, but I didn't want
to just come in and crash your party."
Every
shape shifter in the room twitched at the same time as they realized
that I'd just lied, but Adri was too focused on me to notice.
"You're
right. It's the perfect solution. It's the only way that we can be in
two places at once and still hope to get the attack off before I'm
supposed to call the vampires back. I can't believe none of us saw it
before now."
I
managed what I hoped was a suitably disarming smile despite the fact
that it felt like doing so ripped my heart out of my chest.
"Well,
sometimes it takes an outsider's viewpoint to see those kinds of
things. If you'll excuse me for just a couple of minutes, I have a
few things that I need to do. Besides, that will give all of you some
time to plan your half of the operation."
I
shot Isaac and Taggart warning glances that I hoped conveyed the fact
that I didn't want them running their mouths off to Adri, and then
stepped out of the conference room with Brindi less than a foot
behind me.