Chapter 184 CLXXXIV

Chapter 184 CLXXXIV
Levi's POV

The profile had been built from what Aria had described the drive time, approximately forty minutes from where she had been on the pavement. 

The smell she had registered, which she had described to Xavier with the specificity of a child with Aldric bloodline sensitivity that was more developed than her age would suggest. 

Industrial chemical undertones combined with the flat recycled air quality that came from specific filtration systems.

That combination narrowed the seventeen to six.

Jack and his partner eliminated two of the six through direct surveillance within the first day. Too active, too publicly accessible, inconsistent with an operation designed for concealment.

Xavier's physical trackers eliminated a third through scent work that traced the vehicle route from the pavement where Isabel had been taken. 

Vanessa's car had gone east, which cut the remaining three to two, both on the eastern side.

Marcus's intelligence channels produced border crossing logs that nobody had been looking at because nobody had thought to look for non-pack vehicles moving through the neutral zone in the early hours of that morning. There had been two. One was accounted for. The second was not.

The second had gone northeast that left one facility. An abandoned pharmaceutical research compound northeast of the territory, forty-three minutes from the pavement.

We were building the extraction plan when Xavier's tracker came back on the fourth day he came into the kitchen where Xavier and I were going over the facility blueprints that Xavier's analysis team had located through municipal planning records, and he put his phone on the table between us with a photograph on the screen.

I looked at the photograph Vanessa.

She was in what appeared to be a service area behind a petrol station, sitting in a car that was not the one she had used the night she took Isabel.

Different plates, different models, she had changed vehicles at some point during or after the operation but she had not changed her face.

"When was this taken?" I asked.

"Forty minutes ago," the tracker said.

"She's been stationary at that location for approximately two hours. She is alone in the vehicle."

I looked at the photograph.

Vanessa is sitting alone in a car at a petrol station, two hours stationary, doing nothing visible, not moving, not meeting anyone, just sitting.

"She is waiting," Xavier said beside me.

"For what?" I asked.

"Possibly for confirmation that the operation with Isabel is progressing," he said. 

"Or for collection. If she delivered Isabel to the Assembly and is expecting payment or extraction, she might be waiting for contact."

I looked at the photograph for another moment.

Then I looked at the tracker. "Can you get to that location and maintain surveillance without her knowing?"

"There are already two people there," he said.

"If she moves, I want to know immediately," I said. 

"If anyone contacts her, I want to know. And if she stays stationary past the point where it's obvious she's been stood up, I want her contained."

"Contained meaning?" the tracker asked.

"Meaning brought to me," I said. "Alive, unharmed, able to talk."

The tracker nodded and left.

Xavier looked at me. "She may not know where Isabel is being held," he said. "She handed her over. She may have had no knowledge of the destination."

"She knows something," I said. "She knows who she handed her to. She knows the contact point. She knows enough to move us forward."

"And then?" Xavier said.

"And then she answers for what she did," I said. "But not until after she's given me what she knows."

Xavier looked at me steadily. "Don't let the Lycan drive that conversation," he said.

"If you go into a room with Vanessa in the state you're currently in, you'll have her too frightened to give you accurate information."

"I'm aware of that," I said.

"Are you?"

I looked at him. "Yes," I said. "I'm aware."

He held my gaze for a moment, then went back to the blueprints.

Two hours later, the tracker called. "She's moving," he said. "Heading northwest. We're following."

"Don't lose her," I said.

"We won't."

Twenty minutes after that, he called again.

"She's stopped again," he said. "Rural roads, no facilities, no buildings nearby. She's out of the car. She looks like she's been standing up and she knows it."

"Take her now," I said.

A pause while I heard movement through the phone, then the specific sounds of a containment, muffled and brief.

"We have her," the tracker said. "She didn't resist."

I looked at Xavier across the kitchen table. "Bring her to Blackwood mansion," I said into the phone. "Not the pack facility the mansion."

"Understood."

I ended the call Xavier was watching me.

"I know what I'm doing," I said, before he could speak.

"I hope so," he said quietly.

I looked at the photograph of Vanessa still on the tracker's phone on the table. At the face of the woman who had stood on a pavement at four-thirty in the morning and shot Isabel with a tranquilizer gun while Aria watched.

I picked up the phone and looked at the photograph for a long moment then I set it face down on the table and went to tell Marcus we were moving to the next stage.