He put the butt of the weapon to his shoulder, took aim at the target in the distance and sighted down the barrel, picturing Torres’s face in the center of it.
Letting out a deep breath, he stared at the target and squeezed the trigger.A burst of semi-auto fire erupted from the barrel.Each round struck within inches of the center of the target a split second later.
He moved to kneeling position.Fired another burst.Then laid down in prone position to finish off the magazine.Imagining every single round punching holes in Torres.
Feeling only mildly better, he rose, glanced behind him as Greg’s truck came into view.He waited while the other man parked and got out.
Greg’s expression was anxious.“Well?What happened?”
“He knows about the militia.And he said he’s got a map with all the other cache locations on it.”Was it true?It made him want to shoot something else.“How is that possible?”
Greg blinked at him in horror.“I dunno, I just returned the book the other day—” He stopped, his face turning ashen.
“What?”Darren said impatiently, pulse quickening.
“Willow works at the library.”
Darren stared at him.Since when?“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her in there.”He shifted his stance, ran a hand over his chin.“Maybe she found the bookmark and recognized the symbol from the sheet in the cache...”
Fucksake.He didn’t know if it was true, but he couldn’t say it wasn’t.“You think it’s possible she cracked the coding?This fast?Because I find that hard to believe.”
“She’s smart.I don’t know the specifics, but I heard she worked for some big museum or something in New York as an archivist.She’s got a Master’s degree.”
“In cryptology?”he said in a bland voice.
“No, but...Maybe someone she showed it to broke the code.”
“So you’re telling me that she could have found the bookmark, realized it was linked to the ammo cache, somehow had it decrypted, and whoever did that figured out it listed coordinates to put on a fucking map?”
“It’s possible.”Greg ran a hand through his hair.“Shit, this is bad.There’s no way we can move everything in time if the sheriff actually has all the locations.”
No.Fuck.“We need to find out how much they know.”
“How?”
“Willow.”
“Okay,” Greg said slowly, frowning at him in growing concern.“What are you thinking?”
“I’ll handle it.”He would handle this personally.Take her when she was alone.Drug her and interrogate her until she’d spilled everything she knew about the code and map.Only then could he implement some kind of damage control.
“You sure?”Greg asked, looking relieved.
“Yeah.But I need eyes on her, and it can’t be me now that the sheriff and I have been personally introduced.”
“Okay, I can do that.”
“Find her and watch her.She might be with Tripp.Report back once you’ve got a location.And in the meantime, we need to organize individual teams to move the caches.”The clock was ticking.They had to get it done before Torres got there.
“On it.”Greg turned and strode for his vehicle.
Darren pulled in an unsteady breath, trying to block the trickle of fear seeping into his gut.Greg didn’t realize that this situation was much worse than he imagined.
If this got back to the people Darren was working with, he and a handful of others would wind up in an enforcer’s crosshairs.
