Free In the Grey by Claudia Hall Christian Page A

back.”
    “ But he will come back?”
Leena asked.
    “ Oh, he’ll be back,” Alex
gave a curt nod to show her complete certainty. “He’s a Fey Team
member. We don’t leave our teammates behind.”
    “ So, he’s not alone?”
White Boy asked.
    “ Think about it,” Alex
said. “When has Andrew Ramirez ever been alone?”
    White Boy looked confused
for a moment and then smiled.
    “ Never,” He
nodded.
    “ Exactly,” Alex said. “If
you need me, let me know. I’ll be back tomorrow early.”
    She put her hand on Troy’s
arm. He nodded and left the room. She followed him out the door.
Five minutes later, Ben appeared in the doorway. He looked over the
team and walked to the front.
    “ I need some help,” Ben
said to Joseph and Matthew.
    “ It’s up to Captain
Mac Clenaghan,” Joseph said.
    “ With what?” Matthew’s
voice carried his deep distrust of Alex’s former mentor.
    Ben gave Matthew his
intimidating “need-to-know” spy look.
    “ Yeah, that’s what I
thought,” Matthew said. “We have a full plate today,
sir.”
    Ben laughed.
    “ Oh, you were fucking with
me?” Matthew’s eyebrows shot up. His eyes held his disdain for the
man. “Fine, what are you working on?”
    “ How ‘bout if I show you?”
Ben smiled.
    Matthew glanced at Joseph.
He nodded. Matthew followed Ben out of the room. They walked down
the hallway to one of the smaller conference rooms across from the
team’s offices. Ben opened the door. Matthew glanced at Ben and
stepped inside.
    The walls had been covered
with white paper. Raz and Sergeant Dick Mead, Patrick Hargreaves
last military assistant, were writing on the paper with sharpies.
Matthew walked to the wall next to the door to take a closer
look.
    “ This is Alex’s life,”
Matthew said.
    “ Just the major events,”
Raz said. He nodded hello to Matthew.
    “ What are you doing?”
Matthew asked.
    “ It’s something Alex got
from Wyatt,” Ben said. “He told her that it looked like a master
plan, but really it was a lot of individual problems solved by the
same problem solvers.”
    “ She told me,” Matthew
said.
    “ I got to thinking,” Ben
said. “What if everything was connected?”
    “ What do you
mean?”
    “ I wanted to see what was
going on in the world when these events happened,” Ben said. “For
example, what was going on when Alex finished Special Forces
training; or when she was assaulted by the Boy Scout the first
time; or when the Boy Scout started working on the Fey Special
Forces Team; or they were stuck in the desert by Cee Cee Joiner;
or . . .”
    Ben shrugged. Matthew
touched one event and then another.
    “ It might be nothing,” Ben
said.
    “ It doesn’t seem that
way,” Raz walked toward Matthew. “It’s hard to accept, but for some
reason, someone wants Alex out of the way at regular intervals.
Look.”
    Raz went to the
paper.
    “ The brown markings are
Cee Cee Joiner,” Raz said. “They’re easy to document, because we
have good data on exactly when they happened and how long Alex was
out of the way. You see the brown?”
    Matthew nodded.
    “ Now step to the center of
the room,” Raz said. “Dick? He needs a look.”
    Sergeant Mead nodded and
moved to the door.
    Matthew stood near the
center of the room. When he looked for the brown he noticed that
the color was spaced on the timeline at regular intervals. There
was only one gap that was longer than the others.
    “ What’s that?” Matthew
asked.
    “ That’s when Alex came to
get you,” Ben walked to the timeline. “She was working on finding
and retrieving Joiner when she received the call about
you.”
    Ben pointed to a brown “X”
on the wall.
    “ She stayed with you in
Costa Rica,” Ben said. “She didn’t pick up Joiner until a month or
so after she’d originally planned to collect him.”
    “ But we’ve been going on
the assumption that they took us to get to her,” Matthew said.
“Didn’t they attack the Fey Team?”
    “ They