Page 82 of Delta Force Defender

“Are you going to buy a drink or not?” came the belligerent response.

Caradine ordered whiskey. Neat.

And they waited.

Templeton muttered updates. Jonas moved on from football to baseball. Blue told stories purely to irritate the rest of the team—like the time Templeton had gone to rescue Kate and she’d announced, very audibly over his comm unit, that she’d had to rescue herselfagain—and Caradine sat at the bar.

No one came near her.

After a while, the bartender pulled out his phone and typed into it.

Everyone got ready, assuming whatever text he’d sent would bring the people they were waiting for into play. But nothing happened.

And Isaac, who had made stillness an art form and himself a master, found it almost impossible to keep his agitation at bay.

Jonas was soundly abusing the Yankees, and anyone listening to him would have been surprised to learn that when in New York, he could be just as comprehensively insulting about the Red Sox. Templeton was joining in now and again, mostly to laugh and plant a few seeds about how maybe the two of them were construction workers.

Blue was making note of any cars that slowed down out front.

Isaac was going slowly insane.

“She’s hitting the head,” Templeton reported in a mutter.

And the agitation inside Isaac—all those alarms and gut-level warnings—exploded.

He thought about Caradine, who had trained herself to climb out of a second-story window in Grizzly Harbor, steal a boat, and change her appearance to get out of Alaska. Caradine, who carried three tiers of weapons on her at all times.

Would she really wander off in the middle of this thing to use the bathroom?

He heard an odd, scraping sound.

It all flashed through him then. The schematics of the bar he’d studied. This was Boston, an old, historic city, where history asserted itself by building on top of what had come before. Especially in this part of town, where no one was overly concerned with the historic register, because it usually had something to do with Old World criminal organizations.

He thought of that look on her face from the passenger seat, the speech she’d tried to make.

And he knew.

“She’s not going to the bathroom,” he bit out. “She’s making a move.”

But he was already out of the SUV. At a dead run toward the back door no one had tried to go in or out of. No one would, he understood then.

If this was happening, it wasn’t happening here. Not as planned.

Four flat-out seconds later he threw open the back door to Sharkey’s and found himself in a small, shabby hallway that smelled like stale cigarettes and old beer. He scanned it, finding two empty bathrooms, one utilitycloset, and two locked reinforced steel doors that didn’t budge when he tried them.

The only other thing in the hallway, tossed to one side, was the wire he’d carefully attached to Caradine’s back.

The one he’d heard her scrape off her back only seconds ago.

“There’s no one outside,” Blue reported, his voice terse. “No one’s gone in or out in over fifteen minutes. There are minimal pedestrians, and cars haven’t even slowed down out front.”

“Put the bar on lockdown,” Isaac gritted out.

In the hall, he bent and picked up the wire with the tape still attached. He could see the plans Oz had sent them in his head. More than that, he could see Caradine on the plane next to him, pointing at the buildings across the street and across the alley. He could hear her talking about that long two-block walk she would have to take, and what if there were spies in all the windows?

She’d been diverting his attention.

Something he should have recognized, but she’d planned for that, hadn’t she? She’d softened him up at that waterfall.

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