Page 22 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

Sawyer

The alert hits like a fist to the throat.

Rae’s voice cracks over comms from the command room: “Trip-click SOS from Cam’s watch. South garden cam just went to snow. I’m rolling back ten seconds—three shadows—white panel van. Blind spot… fuck .”

The south lawn is a smear of emerald and sunlight. The fountain burbles obscenely calm. Beyond the rose arbor, tire dust hangs in the air in a thin, shimmering ribbon. In the service cutout at the curb, faint rubber crescents mark where a van scrubbed hard, reversed, and punched it.

I inhale, and taste diesel.

“White panel, no markings,” Andersson’s voice clips. “Gate six shows outflow. LPR didn’t pop—plate covered.”

“Check the overflow cam,” I rasp, dropping to my knees in the grass. There—by the hedge—two inches of plastic like shark skin, a torn tail of a black zip tie. A silver smear on a blade of grass—duct tape adhesive. A phone case face-down under the lip of the drive—hers. Rage detonates.

“Code Black,” I say flat. “Internal lockdown. Push out BOLO to SPPD: White panel van, 2014 to 2017 body style, high roof. Three male suspects. Last seen south exit, eastbound.”

Rae: “Copy. Dispatch notified. Watch ping got one location before it went dark—jammer kicked in. Last hit is on Dutton near the 115 on-ramp. I’m scraping SP-trans cams.”

Riggs thunders up, breath hard, eyes harder. “Where?”

I point to the grass. He sees what I see—the scuff marks, the heel divot where she fought. He picks up the zip tail, palms the tape scrap with gloved fingers, and bags them fast. “She fought ’em,” he says, like a prayer that doubles as a war cry.

I force my lungs to steady. “Rae, pull the south garden feed for twenty minutes prior. Did we get a face at any approach?”

“Negative—someone blasted it with a narrowband jammer and angled the lens with a hook from the blind spot. They knew the grid.”

“Inside help,” Riggs growls.

“Yeah.” My jaw grinds. We were hunting a mole, and the mole just bared its teeth.

I scan the hedges, the service lane, the angle of sunlight, making a mental model I can walk backward in my mind.

I taste metal. I pocket the phone case, and stand.

“Rae, pull every van rental contract within a three-mile radius from this morning. Andersson, expand perimeter—check drains, alleys for dropped items. Hartley’s unit? ”

“Rolling,” Rae says. “ETA four.”

“Launch the drone,” I say, already running back into the house. “Vector down Dutton and 115—we’ll lose altitude near the freeway, but give me what you can.”

“Bird up in sixty seconds.”

12:12 — Command room is ice-cold and humming.

I slam the door, yank the Faraday cage panel closed behind me—no phones, no bleed.

Rae’s up on four monitors, fingers flying.

A dot blinks—Cam’s last watch ping—then dies.

A second screen fills with SP-trans feeds: blurs of concrete and steel, streaks of light on asphalt.

“There,” Rae says, stabbing a frame—an overhead lane camera catching the tail of a white van ducking behind a box truck near the on-ramp. Plate smeared with mud or covered. “No hazard triangle visible. Could be it, could be any of twenty lookalikes.”

“Angle me a reflection,” I mutter. “Pull the windshield glare from the truck’s chrome.”

Rae grins—teeth bared. “Now we’re cooking.

” She magnifies a six-by-six patch of glare, inverts, filters.

The universe cooperates: a spectral smear resolves into the faintest ghost of a van profile with a dent low on the passenger door and a sticker—tiny orange triangle—half peeled. “Gotcha,” she whispers.

I key my throat mic. “All teams, this is One. We have a unique—orange hazard triangle on the back door, passenger-side dent knee-height. Notify CHP. Priority. Van took 115 south. Last ping minute twelve.”

Riggs: “I’ll swing south on the causeway. Andersson keeps the house tight.”

“Negative,” I snap. “We don’t split. We feed the net and we hunt the leak.”

Silence. Then: “Copy,” Riggs says with a clipped tone.

My tablet hums with incoming: CHP acknowledges, BOLO broadcast to patrol units along 115. Hartley chimes in: “We’re on the freeway now. Tell me if your drone gets eyes.”

“Bird is overhead—altitude down to legal. We’ve got twenty white vans. Filtering.”

Out of the corner of my vision, a little pink sticky note flutters on the edge of the console—the one she pinned to my chest last night: Trust your gut. My hand shakes once as I anchor it on the desk.

“Dean?” I say, stabbing the satphone.

He picks up in a breath. “Talk.”

“Cam’s grabbed. White panel van, three male perps, inside assist probable. They jammed our cam and sprinted south. Last ping at the 115 on-ramp.”

Dead air. Then: “We’re spinning up. Orange-Plus Team is in the air in thirty. You’re lead, Sawyer. Don’t do anything stupid alone.”

I stare at the monitors, at the emptiness that is a screen without the person you love on it, and feel something in me go diamond hard. “No promises.”

The house turns into a hive. PD locks lanes near the on-ramp as they chase phantom vans. Drone hops feed towers, catches pieces. Every piece mocks me. Cam’s last breadcrumb is that ping and the way the grass bent where she fought. She fought—that helps—but every passing minute is a mile of road.

We tear the inside of Kingsley House apart with a polite smile. Rae traces the text that pinged Cam to the garden. “Spoofed,” she says, frowning. “Sender masked under a known contact, rerouted through a bot farm. Whoever did this borrowed trust to open the door.”

“Inside,” I grind. “They knew the number to fake that would get her moving.”

Who? A friend? A staff member?

I need to move or I’ll put my fist through a screen. I stride into the hall, intending to sweep contractor comms for the fifth time, and almost plow into Gregory Kingsley.

He looks ten years older than this morning.

His tie is loosened; one shirt sleeve is rolled, the other still buttoned; his hair is finger-combed, not perfect.

He’s carrying a glass he probably meant to drink but hasn’t.

He lifts his head at me, and the relief I want to see doesn’t arrive.

Something else does: dread, then guilt, then the kind of iron I only saw in platoon leaders right before they confessed to ordering a thing that went sideways.

“Mr. Kingsley,” I say, keeping my voice neutral.

“Come,” he says, hoarse. “My office.”

I follow, shutting the door. He stands at the window overlooking the drive where press vans have clustered like vultures and swat aside my urge to rip them in half.

He doesn’t turn when he speaks. “I never wanted her hurt.”

It’s such a non sequitur that for a heartbeat I miss it. Then my blood runs cold.

“Explain,” I say. Not a question.

He doesn’t immediately. He taps the glass with one knuckle, watching the distorted reflection of his own face. When he finally looks at me, the father is gone; the CEO is there, but cracked.

“Do you know how many IPOs die because the story is boring?” he asks.

“We are building aircraft that change how the world moves. Clean. Quiet. Safer. But it’s not enough.

The market is a god that wants blood.” He laughs, but there’s zero humor behind it.

“And so we fed it a ghost. A crisis that looked like danger but never was.”

I stare at him, motionless.

“Publicity,” he says, as if tasting the word and finding it rancid now.

“Momentum. A narrative. Our PR firm connected me with… with a firm that specializes in manufacturing urgency. They proposed something ‘controlled’—mild threats, online chatter, security ‘concerns’ that would put us on screens as a company that takes safety seriously. We agreed to precisely defined boundaries. No weapons. No contact. Ever.”

My heartbeat is a bomb timer—beep, beep, beep—slowing, growing louder.

“What firm,” I say.

“Kestrel Risk Solutions,” he says. “Marcus Vale introduced me—he’s my partner on the roadshow. The fired COO—Spencer DeLuca—put us in the same room as Kestrel’s fixer. We were promised the narrative would elevate the share price by twenty percent.”

Every muscle in my neck turns to wire. “The letters. The cardstock. The staged break-in.”

He nods once, miserably. “The paper came from a list Kestrel gave us—obscure boutique stock, distinctive for recognition by… by your people.” He swallows.

“It spun out. After the mural incident, I throttled it and said we were done. Vale insisted the ‘arc’ needed one more crescendo. I refused. He… he found someone else.”

“Who?” I whisper, even though I know. The partner who wants red.

“Vale engaged a freelancer Kestrel had blacklisted. Name I heard was Rourke. Ex-military, fired for using live rounds on a drill.” He grips the edge of the desk until his knuckles bleach.

“Yesterday I told Vale if anything else happened I’d burn his funds live on CNBC.

We shouted. He laughed. Today… Camille is gone. ”

The room tilts. My promise to Cam— keep you whole —burns like a brand.

“Why tell me now?” I ask, and it’s not kind. “Why not before my team risked their lives for a lie you helped start?”

He drops into his chair as if his legs gave out.

When he looks up his eyes are wet. “Because I love my daughter. Because I thought I could control a fire and instead I lit one under a monster. Because I needed someone capable of ending this who wouldn’t waste time lecturing me on ethics while my child was taken. ”

I want to break him. I want to walk around the desk, take him by his tie, and tell him what it feels like to watch a woman fight in a patch of grass while you arrive sixty seconds too late. But that won’t bring her back.

I put my palms flat on his desk and lean in. “You are going to give me everything. Every email. Every burner number. Every contract. Every payment. Every Kestrel address.”