Cease Fire

“Roger that,” the team echoed back.

Roman wasn’t sure what he was expecting, maybe ninjas falling out of the sky or a bomb under the conference room table.

But nothing like that happened.

Maybe, like he’d told Derek, this was an exercise in restraint, to make sure the team was ready to handle a situation that required less brawn and more finesse.

But it still sucked.

The team entered the office building at the same time Lillian dropped from the air duct. She rolled as she landed, and shot the suspect in the shoulder, causing the simulated gun he held in his hand to fall to the ground.

Within moments the rest of the team had “cuffed” the bad guy so he could do no further harm to anyone.

Mission over.

“Okay,” Liam said. “That was almost as relaxing as getting a beer.”

Fitzgerald laughed. “Honestly, I thought the floor was going to turn to acid or something.”

“My bet was on flesh-eating zombies,” Lillian said.

Roman went over and took the sack off the “victim’s” head. But where a realistic robot face should’ve been was some sort of television screen.

With the picture of a woman, also wearing a dress, also tied to a chair, also with a sack over her head.

“What the hell?” Roman said. The rest of the team rushed over.

“So glad you could defeat one single perpetrator.”

Curses flooded the training center as the team watched Damien Freihof come into view on the screen.

“You have such a difficult time catching me, I thought we better see if you could catch a single bad guy in the simulator.” Freihof smiled for the camera.

“Where is he?” Roman muttered to the team.

“Not here, that’s for sure,” Lillian returned. “That’s a real office, not the simulator.”

Freihof’s face took up the entire screen once again. “Before we continue, let’s make sure we have everybody at Omega on board.”

A few seconds later, Roman felt his cell phone buzz in his pocket. He grabbed it, only to see Freihof’s picture come up on that screen, too. It looked like the same thing was happening to the rest of the team on their phones.

“I want to apologize to you,” Freihof said, looking impossibly genuine. “I’ve been toying with you, and the people who I’ve been working with haven’t always been successful in the tasks they’ve been given.”

“Is there any way to trace this?” Roman asked quietly to the side.

“Not from here,” Derek responded. “But if he’s broadcasting this to everyone in Omega, then somebody’s tracing it.”

“I realize,” Freihof continued, “that my colleagues’ failures to kill the people we targeted may cause you not to take me so seriously. And again, that’s my fault. Never trust someone else to do a job you really should do yourself.”

Freihof, showman that he was, slowly removed the hood from his victim’s head.

Grace Parker.

Roman looked into the eyes of the older woman he’d spent so much time talking to these last few months. The one who’d gotten him through not only the explosion that had almost killed him, but sorting through the feelings he had for Keira Spencer.

“Damn it, where are they?” Lillian said.

“I think that’s Grace’s home office. I met with her there a couple of times when I had required visits,” Roman said.

Derek was already calling it in.

But Freihof was too smart to waste time now that he’d let his location be known.

“I’ll make this lesson quick,” Freihof said, nodding sincerely. “You call yourself the good guys, but that’s not always the case, is it? It’s time for you to pay for your sins.”

The entire team rushed toward the screen as if they could do something when they saw Freihof take out a knife and stand behind Grace Parker.

“It’s time for you to know the pain I’ve known.”

Everyone watched helplessly as, with his words, Freihof slashed the knife across Grace’s throat. She died in front of them, none of them able to do a single thing about it.

Chapter Six (#u0d840a4b-a91f-59ee-8331-2a2acd4a7195)

An odd mixture of devastated silence and barely concealed rage permeated the air of the Omega conference room two days later. The mood inside the building reflected the weather outside.

A deadly storm was brewing.

Another one of their own was dead. This time murdered in cold blood right in front of their eyes.

Steve had called an all-hands meeting, knowing the team needed firm leadership now more than ever. Brandon Han stood at the front of the room with him. They both looked like everyone else in the room did: as if they hadn’t had a moment’s sleep since Grace’s death and wanted to break something with their bare hands.

Preferably Damien Freihof’s face.

Lillian sat next to Roman in the corner near the back. Tension fairly hummed through her small body.

“I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to sit through a meeting,” she whispered to Roman.

“I know. And Steve knows. Don’t worry.”

The room was pretty evenly divided between investigative agents and SWAT, with a few crime lab scientists and computer experts thrown in. You could tell who the SWAT team members were even if they weren’t all similarly dressed in black cargo pants and formfitting dry-weave shirts.

They were the ones—like Lillian—with a furious energy flowing through their bodies. They didn’t want to sit around having a meeting about how to catch Freihof, they wanted to be out there doing it.

But they couldn’t do that, because once again, they had no idea where Freihof was located.

“Grace Parker was one of our own,” Steve Drackett began. “A vital member of the Critical Response Unit and a personal friend to many of us. She’ll never be replaced.”

Steve waited in silence for a moment.