She looked up. Ben’s burning car was facing her on the opposite side of the road, and although the foam blocked some of her view she could see enough of the tire marks to tell that it had spun through a hundred-eighty degrees and come to rest where it was.
The sedan, on the other hand, was sitting nose-first into the shoulder, its passenger-side front fender mangled and warped but otherwise undamaged.
And there were no tire marks on the road. No attempt to avoid a collision.
‘It swerved deliberately toward Ben,’ she went on to herself, voicing her thoughts aloud. ‘Hit him, then stopped here.’ She walked to the driver’s side of the vehicle. ‘The driver gets out, and does what?’
The soft earth of the verge bore a couple of footprints heading back onto the road. Which meant that the driver had gotten out and walked back to Ben’s vehicle, then presumably vanished.
Natalie didn’t need to think about it anymore. Ben had been the victim of a deliberate attack, one probably meant for her. But for anybody to have known he would be coming out here and would in fact pass this spot meant that the killer must have been told about it. Natalie felt a chill run down her spine as she realized that only one person could have known about this, the same person that had been blocking her investigation from the very start.
Guy Rikard.
Natalie rushed across to the Virginia state troopers standing guard near the wreck. Out here, she felt confident enough that they were far enough removed from the Capitol to not be in the thrall of the CIA or anybody else. She showed them her phone and the pictures of the blue sedan from earlier in the day.
‘This guy followed me for almost an hour this morning, and it was me who was supposed to come out here this afternoon,’ she explained. ‘I work for Congress on a team investigating illegal activity by the intelligence community, and we’ve learned that we’re being followed day and night by government agencies that presumably want to prevent us from uncovering too much about their activities.’
The trooper looked at the photograph of the car.
‘I appreciate what you’re saying, ma’am, but that car could have been driving quite innocently across the Potomac earlier in the day. It could have been stolen since. There’s nothing to link it to this accident.’
‘No there isn’t,’ Natalie agreed, and then flicked to the next picture on her cellphone. ‘But you guys can’t trace the car to a driver.’
Natalie held the picture up to the two troopers, that of the sedan’s driver from the previous day. The long, gaunt face was half in shadow but the features were clearly recognizable.
‘Good enough for you?’ she asked them.
‘Damn straight,’ the trooper said, and pulled out his own cell. ‘Send me the images you have to my cell and we’ll get them distributed.’
Natalie did as she was asked and then looked at Ben’s burning car. Her cellphone started ringing in her pocket. She looked at it, and frowned. It wasn’t a number she recognized. She looked at the cops: if there was ever a place that she was safe, this was it. She shut off the call.
‘This was a deliberate attack,’ she said to the officers, ‘and I think I know who orchestrated it.’
The troopers looked at her expectantly.
‘Two men,’ she said. ‘Guy Rikard, my boss and the only person who knew that Ben would be here this afternoon, and Douglas Jarvis, a senior security specialist at the Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s my belief that they’re working together to silence anybody who gets too close to whatever they’re up to.’
48
The interior of the mine was an inky black void that smelled heavily of mold and dust. Ethan glanced behind him to the last pale light from outside that was visible through the entrance some fifty yards away.
In front of him, Kurt Agry and the soldiers advanced with their rifle-mounted flashlights cutting through the dank darkness like strobes in a damp, cold nightclub.
‘What would this thing be doing coming in here?’ Lopez wondered out loud.
Her voice sounded hollow and rolled back and forth in the tunnel. Ethan looked up at the roughly hewn walls around them.
‘Shelter, maybe,’ he replied. ‘A nest, some kind of lair?’
Ahead, Kurt Agry’s voice cut through the darkness.
‘We’ve got a door up ahead,’ he said.
Ethan looked up in surprise as the flashlight beams bounced and reflected off a steel panel that blocked the mine ahead. A thick blast door hung on its hinges, the handles smeared with blood that had dried long ago.
‘It went in there?’ Lopez asked.
Duran Wilkes peered into the gloom within, the flashlight beams reflecting off metallic objects but nothing that appeared to have fur or eyes.
‘I ain’t sure,’ he replied. ‘Lot of tracks comin’ in and out, but nothin’ I can be certain is fresh. No weather underground.’
‘No,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but that doesn’t hide the smell.’
The odor was faint but unmistakeable, the taint of unwashed skin and fur drifting in the darkness.
‘Jesus, now what?’ Proctor asked. ‘You want us to actually go in there?’
‘You can do what you goddamned want,’ Duran said, and got up to move forward into the gloom.
He was stopped by Kurt Agry’s firm hand on his shoulder. The soldier looked at him.
‘You can go in, but how about we make things a little safer first?’
Kurt hefted a flash-bang grenade in front of Duran’s face, and the old man nodded and covered his eyes.
‘Fire in the hole,’ Kurt whispered urgently, then pulled the grenade’s pin and tossed it into the darkness. The device clattered on what sounded like a tiled floor as Ethan and the entire group covered their eyes.
A bright flare of light and a deafening bang shuddered through the mine as the grenade detonated, and in a rush Kurt and his soldiers charged into the darkness ahead, followed by Duran and Ethan.
Flashlight beams sliced through the gloom and the smell of decay became stronger as they moved into the room. Ethan glimpsed what looked like multiple glass doors, all of them shattered, the soldier’s boots crunching on broken glass that littered the floor.
‘Some kind of hazardous materials facility,’ Kurt Agry said as he swept the room with his flashlight. ‘Those glass doors were a pressure barrier, to keep air in and prevent toxins from escaping.’
Ethan watched as Lopez glanced back at the steel wall and hatch, and then approached it. The hinges were bent outward as though warped by an incredible amount of pressure. She touched her hand to them as Ethan looked at the twisted metal bolts and the warped edges of the doors, and then Lopez realized what had happened.
‘This wasn’t a break-in,’ she said. ‘Something broke out.’
Duran squatted down and looked at the glass on the floor.
‘She’s right. It came through here,’ he said. ‘Picked up bits of glass on its feet as it went. But all of the rest of the glass is on the outside of the pressure hatch, not the inside. Something crashed through here and killed everybody that got in its way.’
Ethan looked back out of the doors to the open mineshaft entrance fifty yards away.
‘We should seal these doors shut, keep our tail clear.’
Kurt Agry nodded, and together the soldiers heaved the warped doors closed, then picked up the bent and battered steel bars that had secured the doors and wedged them back into their holders. A thin gap in the battered doors allowed the cable from Jenkin’s camera outside into the room.
The soldiers glanced nervously at each other. Kurt Agry pointed ahead. ‘We push on.’
Ethan followed as they stepped through the shattered glass doors and entered a narrow corridor of modern-looking paneled walls. The combined flashlight beams illuminated the corridor with shards of white light that reflected off the polished panels.