She stood up cautiously, saw Ned lying on his side by the couch. His eyes were open but glassy, and his breathing looked shallow.
“We’re clear!” she shouted to the FBI agents upstairs as she ran to Mahoney. “Get your men out!”
Kneeling by Alex’s old FBI partner, Bree refused to cry. “You with me, Ned? Talk to me.”
Mahoney nodded and blinked. “Gut shot.”
“I can see that.”
Sampson came up behind her. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital, and the jamming’s still going on.”
“Help me get him up,” Bree said.
They lifted Ned to his feet. Mahoney passed out from the pain, becoming deadweight, and Sampson got him up on his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Bree ran in front of him to the front door and stepped out into the falling snow, shouting, “Alex? Agent Batra?”
A flashlight went on. Keith Rawlins called timidly, “Just me, Chief Stone.”
Sampson came out the door with Mahoney over his shoulder.
The snow fell in big flakes and coated the pavers as they hustled across the courtyard to the Tahoe Mahoney had driven into the estate. Rawlins stood outside it, looking as bedraggled as a cat in the rain.
“Drop the rear seat backs, would you?” Sampson said.
Seeming grateful to have something to do, Rawlins sprang into action, saying, “The jamming system is remarkable.”
“We know,” Bree said impatiently. “Where’s Batra’s car?”
“When the jamming started and then all the shooting, she decided to drive out, try to call for reinforcements.”
“Good,” Bree said as Sampson put Mahoney in the back of the Tahoe. “Where’s—”
“Don’t leave yet!” an FBI agent yelled down in the courtyard.
He carried a badly wounded man. They’d gotten blood-clotting agent into a chest wound, but his breathing was ragged and harsh.
“Get him in,” Bree said. “And the next one.”
“I’ll drive,” Sampson said, going through Mahoney’s coat pockets and finding the keys.
Everything was moving fast, and Bree was still in semi-shock from the ambush, so it was not until she saw Sampson throw the Tahoe in reverse and fishtail back down Edgars’s long driveway that she realized the snow had stopped.
She felt confused and overwhelmingly tired. She looked up at the sky, saw the clouds parting and a shaft of moonlight shining through, making the frosted courtyard look like a movie fantasy.
“Did Alex go with Agent Batra?” she asked Rawlins.
“Uh, no.”
She turned to look at him. “What? Where is—”
Thaa-wumph!
Bree felt the ground tremble. The muted explosion sounded like it had come from deep inside the mansion.
“What was that?” Rawlins said, backing away.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I... where is Alex?”
“Dr. Cross? He—”
A second, much louder explosion cut him off; it lit up one of the second-story bedrooms like aluminum in the sun, blew out the windows, and ignited a fierce blaze. Yellow, orange, and ruby flames billowed out of the mansion and licked at the shake-shingle roof.
Bree moved back fast, feeling dread grow in her stomach. “Where’s Alex, Rawlins?” she shouted. “Where’s my husband?”
Chapter 108
The heavy camouflage curtains flapped shut behind me. My eyes adjusted. I was in a storm-drain culvert, a good ten feet in diameter. Either the potential existed for extreme flash-flooding in the creek or Edgars had put the culvert in place as an escape route. I was betting that the smudge I’d seen on the satellite view was dirt from an excavation.
Forty yards ahead of me, the culvert ended, and gray light was building.
If Edgars and Pratt knew I was trailing them, they could be waiting at the other end of the culvert. But by my reckoning, the culvert had to pass beneath the dirt road that ran along the estate’s eastern boundary, which meant the other end would leave me somewhere inside the Michaux State Forest.
They’re not waiting to ambush me, I thought. They’re getting out of here and as far away as possible.
I gunned the throttle and shot out of the culvert, feeling exposed, a target.
But no shots rang out as I left the creek bed for a trail through hardwood trees. With dawn nearing, I could see tire tracks, obscure at first but growing more distinct the farther I followed them.
As I drove, I tried to anticipate Edgars’s next move. Either he was in full flight mode, in which case I would find his UTV abandoned and the tracks of a car leaving the area, or he had something more sinister planned.
In my mind, I saw Gretchen Lindel writhing in the truck bed. I began to fear that Edgars did not intend to take her or any of the other women with him. If he was as ruthless as I thought he was, he would kill Gretchen and the other blondes. Maybe he already had.
No witnesses, I thought. He’ll want no witnesses.
It was full daylight when I reached the rim of a bluff that looked out over a broad patchwork of farmland a good five miles from the estate. Looking down the steep trail, almost a quarter mile below me, I could see a farm, or at least the roof of a ranch-style home, most of a steel building, and definitely Edgars’s side-by-side Honda Pioneer 1000 parked in the snow beside it.
I switched off the Kawasaki and left it. Carrying my pistol and my phone, I sidestepped down the hillside, staying tight to the brush, hoping no one would spot me from below. I kept checking my phone for service, but there was none.
My ankle and shin were swollen and unhappy, but I refused to stop.
Snow was starting to melt off branches when I reached the rear of the farm. I stopped behind a tree, listening, watching. Nothing moved in the yard. Nothing showed in the windows of the ramshackle ranch house.
The three overhead doors on the long side of the steel building were closed. The porthole windows in the doors looked covered. The small sash window twenty feet to the right of the back door, however, was not shaded. I could see bright, glaring light inside.
I checked my phone. Still no service. But the fact that Edgars was a master coder, a creature of the dark web, made me check to see if he had Wi-Fi. He did, a password-protected access called Pharm, and another, Pharm Guest. I tried to log in to that one, thinking I could e-mail or text Bree, but it too required a password.
Inside the steel building, someone let loose with a heart-wrenching scream.
I clenched my jaw and went over the fence, moving with a stiff, painful gait. The scream faded and died. When I reached the rear window, I ducked beneath it, got to the right side of the sash, and turned to face the back door.
“No!” a woman screamed.
“Please!” another yelled. “Just let us go!”
I snuck a peek through the window and saw a John Deere tractor and some other farm equipment parked around a large open space in the middle of the building. Running down from pulleys attached to a steel beam overhead, seven taut cables were clipped to leather restraints around the wrists of Gretchen Lindel and six other women, who dangled in a line, arms stretched overhead, their toes barely brushing the floor.
I couldn’t tell exactly who was who among the other six at first or second glance. They were soaked in dark blood that dripped and pooled beneath them. Only Gretchen was clean.
Six others? I thought. Seven all together? I thought there were only six blondes missing.
In any case, three of the women looked unconscious, their chins sagging to their chests. Gretchen and the other three had their heads up, were focused on the two men in black clothes moving around them.