Page 70 of Remade

“Take twenty minutes to read the information we gave you, and feel free to discuss things with your teammates.” With that said, he strode out.

I exhaled and dropped my gaze to the paper again.

Code: EchoZeroTwoFive

Scenario: Your unit has broken in to an armored truck in downtown DC, where you retrieved a box with a code inside. The interrogators have footage of the unit being within 25 meters of the break-in. You and your unit are prime suspects.

Use your training to get through 72 hours without revealing the code.

Seventy-two hours without revealing the code…

We could last that long without food, no sweat, but preferably not without water. So that was at least one thing we’d need to bargain for.

We could go without sleep, too, but it would lower our guards, slow us down, and possibly fuck with our heads.

Then there was pain. We were about to discover our thresholds for pain.

“EchoZeroTwoFive,” I heard Gabriella whisper behind me.

I cleared my throat and looked up, ready to address the others. “We need to create fake details that we can give up in exchange for water, some rest, and hopefully less pain.”

Jones looked up too, and he eyed the other trainees.

Miguel spoke. “And we gotta make it simple. Just enough details—and they gotta be decent in terms of what the intel is worth—but nothing else.”

“We’ll expand the scenario,” Montgomery suggested. “For instance—a getaway vehicle. An escape route. The location of our headquarters, et cetera.”

I frowned. “I like the first two, but nobody would divulge their headquarters for some water. Whatever intel we surrender needs to be believable and realistic.”

“Agreed,” Gabriella said. “In addition, with the getaway car…? We need to be careful there too. I’m all for a silver Camry, but no flashy military-green Porsche. The car needs to be somewhat difficult to find—and we can’t remember the license plate or something.”

Valid point, except?—

“It needs to be a car the whole unit fits into,” Lawson pointed out.

Yeah. That. There were seven of us. It had to be a decent-sized SUV. Inconspicuous.

“Hold on, we’ll settle this right now,” Miguel said. I looked back at him, and he was on his phone. “Let’s see… We have, uh… Okay, here. The Hyundai Palisade has sold over 500,000 units at this point. Common enough?”

“It’s a fairly affordable make too,” Lawson added with a nod. “It doesn’t stand out.”

Jones cleared his throat. “Just mentionin’ that we have plenty of time to map this out after we’re done here.”

Okay, true.

March 27th, 2025

Bo Beckett

I checked my watch. Almost midnight. I nodded to the two junior operators on watch before I left the room, and I headed down the hall. It was time to see how Echo was doing, and I couldn’t help but feel nervous. Partly because I wanted Leighton to ace this part of the training, and partly because it’d been rougher than I’d anticipated to see him with a hood over his head.

After decades of feeling dead inside, I suddenly cared about everything? Was I gonna freak the fuck out if he got a splinter too? Huh? It was batshit crazy.

I opened the door. It had a piece of tape that Danny had written Echo on, and he was the first one I saw inside. Followed by Em and Doc.

Danny was busy writing notes at the desk in front of the window that overlooked the hostage room. All concrete, no furniture. Just the trainees on the ground, wearing nothing but underwear. And those hoods over their heads.

Checking my watch again, I noted that we were going on almost forty-two hours.

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