Marcus

Chapter Two

Marcus ~

"You realize what this could mean right?" Marcus said, more anxious than excited.

The team had split into two vehicles, but Lexi and the girls had decided it would be best to drive themselves so the team could ride together and discuss what the hell was going on.

"Let's slow down for a sec and think this through," Declan said as he barreled down the freeway back toward Knight Security Headquarters.

"You went to the funerals right?" Declan asked.

"Yes, but none were open casket." Marcus confirmed.

Caleb rubbed the back of his neck nervously with a skeptical look on his face.

"But it was a bombing Mac, those usually aren't open casket...especially if the bodies aren't fully intact." Caleb offered slowly from a medic's point of view.

"Yeah, but it's possible right? What if they all went to a fake funeral for me too? I had a damn head stone in that cemetery just like theirs and I've got air in my lungs."

"It's a stretch, Mac. A long fucking stretch." Pierce added.

"Why fake the deaths of an entire team? What's the play?" Caleb asked the group.

"We were in the middle of an intel exchange, maybe it had something to do with the op we were working. Shit was starting to get way above my teams pay grade and clearance level which is why Red was working with us so frequently. She wouldn't have been assigned if it was a high profile job."

"Maybe your team stumbled into something they shouldn't have...you keep up with the op progress after your recovery?"

Marcus thought about op carefully and how it had morphed and transformed from a simple rescue job to a terrorist take down. His team had originally been contracted to rescue a foreign dignitaries daughter named Talora who had been kidnapped and sold at a slave bazaar in Iran. Red was the intelligence analyst that was monitoring the terrorist outfit that ran the human trafficking ring so she joined forces to give them aid, but the longer they searched for Talora the more they started to uncover about the inner workings and locations of the terrorists that ran the sex trafficking operations. Red had discovered that one of the men that served beneath the Leader had purchased Talora and the intel Red was bringing to them the day of the bombing was the location of the terrorist leaders.

But the reason behind faking a death is to continue working on an op undetected and the terrorist outfit was taken down after their leader was killed, three months later. If that was the purpose for faking my teams deaths, they would have come out of hiding once the op had been successfully completed. And why wasn't I filled in on the purpose of my own fake headstone? Something isn't right.

"Terrorist Leader that we were tracking was killed three months after the bombing. No reason for continued op for seven years...This shit doesn't add up." Marcus grumbled, trying and failing to find a logical conclusion.

"How was he killed?" Pierce asked.

"Press said, random airstrike got him by chance, but we all know that's bullshit." Marcus scoffed.

"Let's get Nate on this. He'll be able to have answers for us by the time we get there, maybe even sooner." Declan said, dialing Nate's number and putting it on speaker for the team to hear.

"What up Boss?" Nate said after the first ring.

Being the technology and analytics lead at Knight, Nate was used to getting calls at random times when one of the teams needed intelligence or surveillance assistance.