Chapter Twenty-Nine
", you're in charge of this until we get there," Cece said tossing me her phone as she headed toward TriCorp. "I can't afford to get pulled over, but I need to know what's going on."
Her phone was buzzing like crazy with messages from people who wanted things and men who were offering things that she'd obviously indicated she needed. I shook my head as I watched the messages scroll by without stopping.
"How in the hell do you keep up with this thing?" I asked as I tried to identify any messages that had to do with our mission.
"It's not hard once you decide to let the technology work for you rather than you working for it," she said as she made a right onto Broadway. "There's a lot that I don't pay attention to, honestly."
"It's overwhelming, but it looks like you have a lot of ardent admirers," I laughed as I read a message from someone who was offering to do things that made me look away. "Holy shit, Cece! This guy just..."
"Yeah, ignore him," she said shaking her head. "He talks a great game, but there's no follow through."
Her phone continued to vibrate as we drove through the streets of Manhattan on our way to try and find what we needed to rescue Echo. Halfway there, Cece snapped her fingers and looked over at me with a gleam in her eyes.
"Call Echo!" she shouted.
"What?"
"Call Echo!" she repeated. "Do it! Now!"
I pulled up Echo's contact info in Cece's phone and punched the dial button. The number rang and rang until the call went to voice mail. I looked over at her confused until it dawned on me that it was possible that Echo still had her phone on her.
"Holy shit! We can locate her phone!" I yelled as I pulled mine out and called Echo's number again. The phone rang many times before being dumped into voicemail again. This time I waited for the beep and said, "We're coming for you, Echo. Don't loose hope. We're going to find you and bring you home."
"What the—," Cece started before a grin spread across her face. "Good thinking! Either she hears it and knows we're looking for her or the bastards who took her hear it and know we know she's being held."
"I'm going to see if she's got the Find My Phone app set up," I said as I reached in back and pulled out Echo's computer. I turned it on and began typing in the information. "Are we almost there?"
"Just a few blocks," Cece replied as she turned left on to 16th and hung a right on 6th Avenue. "We're almost there. You ready?"
"As ready as I'll ever be," I said a holding out my hand. "Keys, Echo, lab, cypher."
"Keys, Echo, lab, cypher," she repeated and slapped my palm. "Let's roll, Seal!"
We exited the van and quickly walked up 19th and headed down the back alley to a door that led to the building's generator. Cece stopped and aimed her spray paint can at the camera pointed out into the alley and quickly covered it with silver paint before picking the lock on the door. I pushed through and led the way to the back stairs. Cece hit each camera with a shot of paint as we made our way up to the fifth floor where we snuck into the records offices and hit the elevator up button.
"So far, so good," she whispered after painting the cameras. "I don't think anyone's seen us yet."
"Don't count on it," I warned. "It's possible that they've seen us and are just waiting to see what we're going to do."
"Keys," she whispered as the elevator doors whooshed open and we stepped in. Cece hit the button for the sixteenth floor and quickly headed for my father's office once we reached it. She picked the lock on the door and we made a beeline for the door to my father's office.
"Where sentient beings display emotion," she whispered. "Where the hell is that? I've already torn most of this office apart."
"Shhh, let me think a minute," I said holding up a hand. Cece went silent as I thought about what that line meant. Where did sentient beings display emotion? Feelings? When it came to me, I let out a laugh before covering my mouth and heading out to the closet in the outer office. I thought of my mother and smiled as I remembered her trying to give me insight into my father on her deathbed. I yanked open the door and started rummaging through the clothing hanging in the closet running my hands over every inch of every coat and jacket. I finally found what I was looking for in an old windbreaker that had been shoved to one side of the closet. I pulled it out and unzipped the pocket on the sleeve. Inside were two keys on a small heart shaped key ring.
"What the hell?" Cece said.
"Wearing your heart on your sleeve," I whispered. "It was one of those things my mom told me about my dad. She said he might not wear his heart on his sleeve, but he cared just the same."
"Um, okay," Cece shook her head. "If we're done playing emotional family trivia, can we please find Echo?"
"You're such a hard ass," I said as I shoved the keys in my pocket and pulled out Echo's laptop. I opened the cloud program on her desktop, typed in her password and hit enter.
"Seal, I don't have the luxury of being anything but a hard ass," she said as we held our breath and waited for the program to tell us where Echo was. The compass swung wildly on the screen as it waited for a signal. When it finally pinpointed her location on the map, Cece and I both gasped.
"She's here," Cece said gripping my arm. "She's in this building."
"Hold on. Are we sure it's her?" I asked as my heart pounded wildly in my chest. "What if they stole her phone and are holding her somewhere else?"
"That's a really good mystery twist, Seal," Cece said. "But we don't have the luxury of spending a lot of time trying to calculate the odds. We need to go big or go home."
"That's good," I said with a wry grin. "What movie did that come from?
"I cobbled it together from a variety of sources," she grinned as she tapped a few keys on the laptop and got the map to magnify the location of Echo's phone. Cece turned and looked at me, "It's on the upper floors of this building. What do you want to bet that it's on the seventeenth floor?"
"That would be way too easy," I said shaking my head. "It's a trap."
"What if it's not?" she asked. "What if the kidnappers didn't know we were planning to break in and get the hard drive? What if they thought that Echo already had the drive and now they're trying to recover it?"
"It sounds like a whole lot of what ifs," I replied as I started at the computer screen.
"When have you SEALs ever been about playing it safe?" Cece asked.
"Lady, we're all about safe," I said. "We never go in unless we know we've done everything we could to ensure the safety of our team members and the people we're rescuing."
"Uh huh," she nodded telling me that she was completely unconvinced. "Well, I'm not a SEAL, so I vote for taking a risk and going in."
"Cece, this is not a fucking movie!" I exploded. "We're talking about someone's life! You can't play fast and loose like you're in some gangster video! What if the kidnappers are holding her somewhere else and we go bursting into whatever it is they're doing and they decide to kill her? Have you thought about that? Or what if they decide to kill us? Did you think about that?"
"I did not," she admitted. "Then what do we do?"
"We plan out our attack," I said as I visually measured the distance between the stairway and the door to the office where the signal appeared to be coming from.
"And then what?"
"And then we slip in and take them by surprise," I said looking up at her grinning, "And if things don't go our way, then we go out guns blazing."
"You're crazy, Seal," she laughed.
"No, just determined," I said as I clenched my jaw and explained the plan to her.