Page 84 of Until the End

Alistair flashed a lopsided grin. “Only to spare you.”

Castle injected him in the leg. “I’ll call the chief, have you airlifted out of here.”

He deliberately hadn’t requested air transport to Cambridge. Reaper, their only pilot, had been out along with the others working a mission. Regardless of how hardcore his friend was, the man needed sleep. But a more complicated reason was that Castle didn’t want to deal with any scrutiny from Sanborn where Kit was concerned.

That was unavoidable now. No way Alistair would make it nine hours in the Hummer to get back to Virginia. At least Kit had led them to the hard drives. The win had to count a little toward changing the chief’s mind about her.

Within a minute, Alistair’s eyelids grew heavy, his gaze turning detached and floaty. “That’s beautiful. You’re a good chap. Can’t remember…the last time…” He was out.

Castle prodded the wounds, pressing around the edges. No sign of any fragments. “Clean shot. No vascular damage.”

Lucky. But Alistair would have a solid week of throbbing discomfort and a couple more before he’d lose the limp.

Castle tore open a packet of Celox and poured the gray granules into the injuries, ensuring they got deep into the holes to stop the bleeding. Then he bandaged them.

“Is he going to be all right?” Kit asked.

“Yeah. Alistair is always all right.” He’d been through dark, terrible things and lost more than any of them in the Gray Box. But that smile still stayed on, hiding pain that ran deep. “I’m going to change his clothes.”

Kit took the hint, leaving the room, and went upstairs, taking the package with her.

Castle cut Alistair’s bloody things off and put the sweatpants on, adjusting him into the most comfortable position possible, considering.

By the time Castle found Kit in one of the bedrooms, she’d opened the box and set the hard drives on the bed. Three of them were dark gray, four inches wide, two inches thick, and six inches long with Sentry written across the top. The other was a commercial external hard drive. A couple of cables lay beside the laptop that she hadn’t yet turned on. “What’s with the external drive?”

“It’s blank. It’ll hold a terabyte of data. I got it with the little cash I had left. I’d thought about copying some of the files and sending the drive to friends in Romania. But I didn’t feel right releasing it out in the world without the ability to monitor what happened to the information. Not when I had no idea what it was. I didn’t want to inadvertently make the situation worse.”

Smart call. While on the run for her life and desperate for answers, she’d kept her wits about her, used prudent judgment. No easy feat for a civilian with no training.

Kit opened his encrypted laptop. “Copying everything the Outliers worked on for those two days will take time. I should get started.”

“You should copy more than that.”

She recoiled, her eyes narrowing. “We had an agreement.”

“You said the Outliers were asked to pass some test. When did that happen?”

“About a week ago by now.”

“And you don’t know how Jasper found Bravo?”

She shook her head. “He never said. I think he hid it to make himself seem like an irreplaceable team member who could bring in a seven-figure payday.”

“What if Jasper met him online? If he did it at the Lair, there’d be a record of it, wouldn’t there?”

“There might.”

“Give me everything from the time Jasper walked into your life.”

Kit considered what he’d said, her gaze never leaving his. “Okay. You’re right. I want to make sure you—your team—has everything they need to catch those men.”

She slid her hand across his thigh, derailing his thoughts, filling him with a wild desire that electrified him ten times better than adrenaline. Heck, they weren’t even having a verbal sparring match.

He corralled his libido and forced himself to focus. “Can you show me the video you decrypted?”

“Of course.” She inserted a cable into the laptop and connected the other end to one of the hard drives from the Lair. It took her less than a minute to scroll to a media file and bring it up on the screen. She hit play.

The video was what Kit had described. A man wearing a balaclava spoke to the camera in Arabic with an Islamic State flag in the background.