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“I don’t know,” Jen whispered. “Maybe a dozen. Maybe two dozen. I’ve never gotten inside before.”
“I didn’t see anyone besides Butler and Rolfe.”
“Trust me. They’re here,” Jen said, her tone certain.
“Did you recognize Rolfe? Is he Butler’s second-in-command?”
Jen frowned. “No. Not him. I’ve never seen Rolfe before tonight. But I recognized the one driving the truck.”
Evelyn leaned closer. “Who was he?”
“I’m not sure.” She sounded frustrated. “I know I’ve seen him before, and he doesn’t belong here. He’s not a survivalist. I’m sure I know him in connection with work. I can’t remember exactly where I’ve seen him. But it’ll come to me.”
“Okay. Well, do you think the fact that you recognized him had anything to do with Butler freaking out? Or was it just because we’re on his land and we saw him carrying illegal weapons, something we could charge him on?”
“I honestly don’t know. Let’s talk about it later. Right now, we need to go.” She peeked out the doorway again, then nodded at Evelyn and stepped through it.
Holding in a curse, Evelyn followed. She squinted in the dim light of the hallway, before glancing back.
“Wait,” she told Jen, noticing bottles of bleach and other cleaning supplies in the cabinet. Maybe there was something in there they could use.
But Jen must not have heard her whisper, because she was still moving. And she was moving in the wrong direction. Farther into the compound instead of back toward the exit.
Evelyn hurried after her, running on her tiptoes to avoid clicking her heels on the wood slat floors. A pair of sconces, mounted on the walls and giving off less light than a twenty-five-watt bulb, cast shadows as she hurried forward. Grabbing hold of Jen’s sleeve, she demanded, “Where are you going?”
Jen tried to shake her off. “I’ll never get another chance to be inside this place. We have to see what’s in here.”
Evelyn gripped the older woman’s sleeve tighter. “Butler wants to kill us. We need to get out of here. And we need a plan, because driving out the gate seems like a long shot.”
“I’m not leaving,” Jen insisted. “I already told you. I’m not going to be the person who missed a threat inside our borders. This is my chance to get real intel on these people. And this is your chance to get a close-up look and give me a profile.”
“Damn it,” Evelyn muttered as Jen pulled free and darted through the doorway ahead.
Was this how her own colleagues felt working with her? Evelyn knew she had a reputation as someone who wasn’t a team player, and she could admit to herself that it was deserved. But Jen’s tunnel vision was ridiculous.
This was a really bad idea. Why the hell had she agreed to come with Jen? She should’ve left the prison, gotten some dinner while she wrote up her report about yet another worthless assignment, then gone home.
She could’ve been asleep on the plane now, getting a little extra rest so she could stop by the nursing home where her grandma lived on the way to work in the morning. Instead, she was sneaking around inside a damn cult. Chances were, if they came across Butler without his more even-tempered friend, he’d use them as target practice.
Controlling her frustration, Evelyn followed, still on her toes and cursing her low-slung heels. She couldn’t leave another agent behind.
When they turned the corner into a larger room, Jen thrust out her arm and blocked Evelyn from moving any farther.
Jen put a finger to her lips and nodded toward the other end of the room.
Evelyn blinked, urging her eyes to adjust faster. This room was even darker than the short hallway, but it was big. She looked around at the three large tables, the shelves stacked with canned goods, water and MREs and a big lockbox near the back. The kind of lockbox meant to hold weapons. Unnerving, but not exactly unexpected for survivalists who carried around AK-47s.
She squinted at Jen, trying to figure out what she’d seen—and then she realized. Voices from somewhere beyond this room. Evelyn strained to make them out.
“—for bringing the supplies, Rolfe,” someone said.
“Not a problem,” Rolfe returned.
“I saw that feeb drive up again,” the first guy said. It wasn’t Butler, so Evelyn assumed he must be one of the cultists.
She glanced at Jen, who was frowning at the slur.
“It’s taken care of,” Rolfe replied.
“It’s a sign,” the first guy said, anticipation in his voice. “She’s the first of them, isn’t she? A Babylonian.”
Swear words lodged in Evelyn’s throat and she clamped her teeth together to keep them in, but she couldn’t stop herself from shaking her head at Jen.
The other agent’s jaw had gone slack with surprise.
This group was deeply mired in cultist philosophy; taking a page from the Book of Revelation, they subscribed to the idea that the end times would be heralded by the arrival of “Babylonians.” It wasn’t the first time Evelyn had heard of a cult twisting the Bible, claiming that “Babylonians” were law enforcement officials and a sign of the apocalypse. This was the clearest indication yet that they were dealing with a regular cult, and possibly one that would fight to the death to protect its land.
“No,” Rolfe said, sounding exasperated. “She’s an enemy, but she’s been handled.”
A weird response if Rolfe was the second-in-command and expected to follow Butler’s preaching, which apparently included a focus on the end times.
Evelyn frowned. This place was full of inconsistencies. But if Butler believed their arrival heralded the end times, she wasn’t going to give him any excuse to take action.
She gripped Jen’s sleeve again and tugged, gesturing back the way they’d come. If Rolfe was telling the cultist that Jen had been handled, it could mean more than just locked in a closet. It might mean that, despite his words to Butler, he expected them to be dead soon.
Jen took one last look around the huge, well-stocked room they’d entered. To Evelyn, it seemed like the domain of a group who planned to ride out a rough winter in hard terrain, not a terrorist plot in the making.
She nodded and the two of them spun back toward the hallway. In a pair of gym shoes and with longer strides, Jen made it down the hallway and to the back door faster.
Evelyn was still a few feet behind her, heart thudding and toes aching as she tried to run silently, when the back door opened from outside.
Framed in the open doorway was Ward Butler, holding his AK-47 in one hand and Jen’s car keys in the other. There was shock on his face, followed by rage.
As Evelyn slid to a stop in the center of the hallway, Butler calmly shook his head. Then he lifted his machine gun and fired.
* * *
“We’ve got a problem.”
The words echoed through Kyle McKenzie’s earphones as he slithered through the hole they’d cut at the bottom of the six-foot fence surrounding the Butler Compound. That definitely wasn’t what he wanted to hear at 6:00 a.m. as he snuck up on a group known to have stockpiled weapons.
Dampness seeped through his HRT-issued flight suit, and he fought back exhaustion. After arriving in Montana after a last-minute flight from Quantico, they’d joined the rest of the team in setting up an immediate perimeter around the Butler Compound. Now he and his partner, Gabe Fontaine, were tasked with getting closer.
“A problem. What else is new?” Gabe muttered, close behind him.
It had been nonstop since they got to Montana. They couldn’t confirm that Special Agent Jennifer Martinez, a twenty-three-year veteran with the FBI, was in the Butler Compound at all. The place had no working phone, and the leader, Ward Butler, had no cell phone registered in his name. So far, the cultists had ignored the battle phone the negotiator had tossed over the fence, as well as the requests to talk through the bullhorn.
For all they knew, no one was even here. The place looked like a ghost town, with the compound shut tight and no response at all to the FBI’s arrival.
Basically it was a clusterfuck. No one knew anything useful, they couldn’t talk to the cultists—who might or might not be terrorists—and they couldn’t storm the place.
As he stood, Kyle swept the area in front of him, using his night-vision goggles. Fog had crept in, meaning his NVGs were set to Active, so they could bounce an infrared light off any objects in front of him.
Without that, he couldn’t see much of anything. But if the cultists had their own NVGs—which was entirely possible with a group of survivalists—they’d be able to see the beam. They’d be able to see him.
Worry about what you can control, Kyle reminded himself as he inched slowly forward through the dry, stiff pine needles and a layer of frost. Every step was precise, careful, silent. The survivalists might have the equipment, and they might be practiced at living off the land, but they didn’t have his training.
Snipers were in position on the peak behind the compound, with eyes on the tower, which had remained empty so far. HRT was acting on the assumption that no one knew they were trying to get a closer look.
“We think we’ve got another agent inside.” That was the voice of Sam “Yankee” McGivern, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge who ran HRT. His tone was dire and he paused long enough that Kyle froze.
“Mac,” Yankee continued, “the warden over at the prison just called BAU. Evelyn’s rental car is still in the lot. One of his guards saw her get in Jen’s vehicle hours ago. She never made her plane.”
Dread rushed over him, but he shoved it back and kept moving, until he was behind the cover of a pathetic-looking fir tree. “Anyone been able to reach her?”
“No. We’re not getting anything from Jen’s phone, but Evelyn’s cell pings off a tower around here, and we’ve got a lock on Jen’s vehicle, a few miles away from the compound. We just sent agents to check it out.”
“Okay,” Kyle said, instead of the string of curses he wanted to let loose. Mind on the mission, he reminded himself.
He understood why Yankee had wanted him, in particular, to know. Every one of his teammates, listening on the call, would realize why Yankee was telling him, too. From the second he’d met Evelyn, a year and a half ago, he’d been drawn to her. Initially it was because she was so serious, so focused on work and nothing else, that he couldn’t help teasing her. But her allure had soon become very different.
It had gotten so bad that even his boss knew he was interested—how could he not, when Kyle found regular excuses to jog over to the BAU office at Aquia to see her? What none of them knew was that, finally, Evelyn was interested in return.
She was the one who’d wanted to keep the fact that they’d started seeing each other three months ago a secret. Agents in the Bureau could date, but they couldn’t date and work in the same squad. And although BAU and HRT were different units, they traveled together regularly for critical missions.
The rules there were murky; Evelyn’s determination to protect her job above all else was not.
Or at least it hadn’t been, for most of the time he’d known her. Ever since they’d returned from solving her friend’s case, she’d slowly begun to lose the intense drive that had drawn him in from the second he’d met her. Her boss had been giving her bullshit assignments, but the old Evelyn would have fought him on it. The new Evelyn just took them. Lately, he hardly recognized her.
“Keep us updated,” Gabe said into his mic, which reminded Kyle that he’d gone silent for too long.
“Let’s move,” he whispered, treading carefully from the cover of one scraggly, snow-dusted tree to the next. They didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with here, but what they did know was that survivalists were talented at making booby traps, and cultists were notoriously paranoid. Not a good combination.
Kyle kept up his painfully slow, steady pace until they were close to the large building at the back of the compound. Behind him, Gabe moved just as silently; the only reason Kyle knew he was there was from years of working together.
Finally, Kyle’s hand grazed the solid exterior of the building. Was Evelyn in there? Was she okay?
“Technical coverage coming up,” Gabe whispered into the bone mic at his throat. He slipped a hand into one of the pockets in his flight suit, and then pressed it against the building wall, leaving behind a sophisticated eavesdropping device that actually looked like a fly.
The communications technicians who worked with HRT were not only geniuses, they also had a sense of humor. Too bad that, right now, Kyle didn’t find much of anything funny.
Gabe tapped his arm and Kyle moved around the corner, toward the side where they’d be at the highest risk of being spotted. Kyle watched every step, and nodded his NVGs at a set of deep tire tracks that rounded the bend and stopped near a steel door. Big tracks, probably from a large truck.
He couldn’t keep himself from looking back at the door, and his desire to test the lever made his hands tense around his MP-5. His feet seemed stuck in place as his need to search for Evelyn intensified.
Then Gabe was beside him, pointing forward because this close to the compound they didn’t even want to whisper.
Forcing himself to move, Kyle passed the door, rounding another corner. He almost wished someone would appear outside and engage, so he’d have an excuse to go in there and get Evelyn out.
But the compound remained eerily silent.
Still beside him, Gabe pressed another bug to the wall, moving a little faster now. They needed to place two more bugs, then go back the way they’d come. It would start getting light soon, and they had to be out of here before anyone inside woke up.
Assuming anyone was in there at all. So far, they had no indication of it. There’d been no response to their calls, and the snipers hadn’t been able to pick up anyone at the windows. Shades were drawn over all of them, and it was dark inside, with no hope of spotting even shadows.
Was it possible they’d fled before HRT had landed in Montana?
As Kyle moved away from the building and behind the cover of a tree, Yankee’s voice came over his radio again. “The technical coverage is picking up voices from the building. Head back here, guys.”
Desperate for information on Evelyn, Kyle moved even faster. He told himself to slow down, but he couldn’t seem to do it as he darted from the cover of one tree to the next, following their original route.
Then a hand slapped him hard on the shoulder, and Kyle spun around, his heart thudding a tempo that sounded like stupid, stupid, stupid.
But it was just Gabe. “Sorry,” he mouthed.
In return, Gabe whispered, “Don’t move.” He lifted a fallen tree branch off the ground and held it out a few inches past Kyle’s foot. When he pushed it down, a piece of metal snapped over it, breaking the branch in two.
Bear trap, Kyle realized, nodding his thanks at Gabe. That would’ve done irreparable damage to his foot. And ended his career in HRT.
Keeping watch for more booby traps, Kyle slowed down, feeling antsy every second he wasn’t back in the Tactical Operations Center—TOC—set up outside the fence.
Finally, finally, he followed Gabe back under the fence, then jogged over to the temporary post that would manage tactical decisions. Inside the large tent, his boss looked up, expression grim, at Kyle and Gabe’s entrance.
“What is it?” Gabe asked from behind him as Kyle’s voice refused to work and fear stampeded through his veins.
Yankee put down his earphones and stood, his head skimming the top of the tent. “We’ve got at least a dozen voices inside the compound.”
He moved forward and placed a hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “We don’t know any details right now, but they just talked about a dead federal agent.”
4 (#ulink_34a9a86f-2e80-5497-a75c-db08ec7e38f0)
“You brought this on yourself.”
Evelyn focused hard, trying to bring the world into focus, but pain sliced through her head and Ward Butler seemed to sway in front of her, wavering as if they stood on the bow of a ship. He was still holding his AK-47, and Evelyn felt nauseated as she touched the side of her face, where he’d smashed her with that gun, knocking her out. But first, he’d taken a shot.
The memory rushed over her, the panic of seeing Butler appear in the doorway, having no time to run, nowhere to hide. The horror of watching him spray bullets, of seeing Jen go down. The fear of thinking she was next.
She’d run for Jen, anyway, slipped in her blood and hit the ground hard. That had probably saved her life, because Butler’s next barrage of bullets had gone over her head.
Then he’d strode to her side, and just when she thought it was all over, there’d been a yell and he’d slammed the butt of his AK-47 into her face instead. She had no idea how long ago that had been.
“Where’s Jen?” she managed to ask. Moving her jaw made pain travel down her neck, but she kept blinking and eventually Butler came into focus.
The compound was dimly lit, either darker than it’d been before, or her vision was compromised. The coppery smell of blood was in her nose, the residual taste of fear in her mouth.
“Martinez is dead,” Butler replied, no remorse in his voice.
Evelyn gulped in a deep breath, even though she’d known. Blood clogged in her throat and Evelyn choked on it, realized the inside of her mouth was bleeding badly, that her jaw might be broken.
