Braking, he turned his head and looked at her. There was no anger in that stare, but no kindness, either. Instead it was the stare of a seasoned apex predator, hard and flat and utterly without mercy. It didn’tscare her. She’d seen the same look in Peter’s eyes as he readied himself for a fight.
“You got one minute,” he said. “Then we go get our people.”
She typed the next number and hit return. She got the blue circle that meant some server somewhere was thinking. But the circle kept circling. She wasn’t getting a result. She pulled her cell modem from her bag. The indicator light was off. They were too deep in the mountains.
“No signal,” she said. “Fuck it.” She knew enough. She opened her notepad to a fresh page and wrote a few lines, then added her master password and showed the whole thing to Lewis. “If something happens to me, use my computer and find those fucknuts.”
“Roger that.” Lewis glanced at his phone. “We ’bout three miles out.”
He took his foot off the brake and the Tahoe rocketed uphill toward the camp.
—
After another mile of bad logging road, the forest rising steeply on one side and falling away on the other, they came to a derelict turnoff where scrub brush grew up between the tire tracks. Lewis hit the brakes and killed his lights. June had already put her laptop, her notebook, and the paper maps in her work bag. She got out and ran down to the Lexus and handed her bag to Manny through the window, quickly explaining what she’d found and how to keep looking, just in case. Then she returned to the Tahoe while Manny threw the Lexus in reverse and backed up the turnoff until the big white SUV was out of sight behind a curve.
Two minutes later, he and Faraday materialized out of the falling snow with their gear and hopped into the Tahoe. Nobody said a word. June’s heart was pounding hard.
Headlights still off, Lewis put the vehicle in low gear and began to climb again, slower now, into the darkness.
56
A mile from the camp, they came to a wide point in the road where a stack of cut logs stood nine feet tall. Lewis reversed the Tahoe behind the pile, tucking the back end into the underbrush until the big SUV was fairly well hidden. The dashboard clock read 10:47. June’s nerves were stretched tight as piano wires.
They gathered at the front bumper as Manny unpacked the duffels he’d brought, handing out body armor, weapons, ammunition, radios, and night-vision gear. The night was completely black and the wind had picked up, blowing the heavy wet snow sideways into their faces. The snow still wasn’t really sticking, which meant their tracks wouldn’t show. A lucky break, June thought.
Lewis left the Tahoe unlocked with the keys above the visor. After a quick look at the downloaded map to get their bearings, they pulled on their packs and Lewis led them single-file across the road and into the trees.
June’s armor was heavy on her shoulders as she climbed, the landrising steeply beneath her boots. The forest was dense with towering pines and smaller firs and cedars beneath them. The air was perfumed with evergreens and the smell of decomposing mulch. June’s night-vision goggles turned the world a surreal and grainy green. Without them, she would have turned her ankle on a rock or impaled an eyeball on a branch in the first dozen yards.
After forty minutes of rising terrain, the slope leveled out and the shades of green began to brighten as new light filtered through the overgrowth. They were coming to a clear-cut. Still inside the shelter of the forest, Lewis lifted a fist. They stopped, sank to a knee, and raised their goggles.
They looked out on a chaos of ankle-high stumps, evergreen seedlings, and high slashing tangles of bare blackberry canes, dense and tough and studded with thorns. Beyond that was a line of eight-foot chain-link that stretched to each side until it disappeared into the mist. Coiled razor wire gleamed at the top. The light came from a row of pole lights inside the fence, pointing outward.
Faraday pulled out his phone. They gathered closer. The downloaded satellite view glowed faintly, showing the overall layout. “We’re here,” he said. “This line of buildings stretching away from us, those are the workshops. At the far end is the armory. It’s stone, and a fortress. Running parallel to the workshops on the right is a gravel road, then a row of greenhouses. On the left is the remains of the ground they cleared when they stood up the workshops, with raw forest after that. Ahead, past the armory, is an open green space they call the meadow, with the lodge on the left and cabins on the right.”
June’s hands were cold and wet on the rifle. Manny didn’t have any gloves that fit her. The climb had warmed her, but now that she had stopped, the wind chilled her to the bone. “Where do you think they’ll put Peter, Ellie, and Carlotta?”
Faraday put two fingers on the screen and zoomed in. “Just past thearmory, off the right corner, there’s a small cinder-block building. They said it was an old generator shed, but the window openings had bars on them. I didn’t ask too many questions, but my guess is, that’s their jailhouse.”
It was in the heart of the compound. The muscles flexed in Manny’s jaw, the only outward sign of his distress. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear some thoughts about how to do this.”
“Any cameras?” asked Lewis. “Perimeter guards?”
“Not that I saw the last time I was here,” Faraday said. “Might be different now.”
“Either way,” Lewis said. “We shoot out the closest light, cut an opening in the fence, and slide up the outside of that line of workshops, head for the jailhouse.”
Unspoken was the fact that they were four people. Inside the compound were several hundred.
“And if the jailhouse is empty?” Faraday was playing devil’s advocate, gaming it out.
“We try the lodge,” Lewis said. “If they’re not in the lodge, we try the armory.”
“We’re going to bump into somebody,” June asked. “What do we do when they realize we don’t belong?”
“Pull a trigger, but only if we got no choice,” Lewis said. “That’s how Peter would do it. So that’s how it is.”
“I’m good with that,” Manny said. “Most people won’t be out this time of night, anyway. Especially in this weather. Not unless they’re seriously hard core.”
