“Okay.” Tessa stood. “I think I’m gonna go wait for him in the lobby.”
As Tessa passed her, Amber touched her arm gently. “I’m telling you the truth.” Tessa could hear a tiny tremble of pain in Amber’s voice, an unsettling fragility.
She’s been dealing with this for a long time. It’s not just seeing Patrick again.
“Okay.” Tessa managed a half smile.
“Don’t say anything to anyone, Tessa. Please. Especially to Sean. I’m the one who has to tell him.”
Yes, you are.
“Okay.”
Solstice watched the trail groomer’s headlights disappear into the tenebrous, snowy night, turning north along the trail.
Since she and her team had arrived in the field, the trail groomer had systematically covered each of the main trails surrounding the old ELF site. Agent Jiang had stepped out a few times to look around, but that was all. Eventually, as the day grew dim and then gave way to night, they must have decided there was nothing here to see.
Now the forest was nearly pitch black.
After the trail groomer left, Solstice waited a few minutes to make sure they weren’t coming back, then, with everyone using headlamps to find their way through the storm, she led her people to the maintenance building.
They buried their skis and poles in the snow, she picked the lock, everyone entered, and she snapped on the lights. Three lines of high fluorescents illuminated the vast, windowless building. She heard the sheet metal roof crinkle uncomfortably above her in the wind.
The air was thick with the smell of motor oil, grease, and dust.
A few chainsaws hung on the wall beside her, a cluttered tool bench lay just past them. Three forest service signs in need of repair leaned languidly against the wall in the southwest corner of the room.
The maintenance building had a concrete, oil-stained floor checkered with thick seams in large, neat rectangles, sectioned off almost like sidewalk partitions. An old John Deere tractor sat at the far end of the building. Beside it, a brown rusted Toyota sedan rested on cement blocks.
All in all, the building looked like someone’s vision of how a maintenance building was supposed to look.
A caricature of the real thing.
It’s a set.
Solstice studied the uniform grid of cracks in the concrete, each rectangular section about four feet wide and six feet long.
Typhoon and Eclipse grabbed their slings and cable cutters and headed outside. Solstice didn’t expect that it would take them more than a few minutes to ascend the telephone pole and take out the power lines stretching to the building, but she ordered Tempest to cover them. “In case the Feds decide to come back and have another look around.”
He swung his AR-15 assault rifle into his hands. “Absolutely.”
As far as the rest of the crew, Cane stood guard beside Donnie, whom they’d forced to ski over here but now stood handcuffed near the disabled sedan. Cyclone and Gale were bent over the radio jamming device, checking the settings. Squall and Cirrus were carefully removing their backpacks that contained the triacetone triperoxide canisters and were placing the packs gently on the concrete. Equator, the rotund hacker, was looking vacantly around the room, awaiting further instructions.
“Everyone get ready,” Solstice said into her headset mic so that the three people outside would hear her as well. “We move in five minutes.”
66
I arrived at the Moonbeam Motel.
Just a few minutes ago Torres had called to let me know that Margaret was on board with the SWAT team coming up to help out. He and his men were just finishing packing and would be on their way shortly.
When I entered the lobby I saw Tessa waiting for me, half scoping out the guy behind the desk, half watching the front door. When she saw me, she made her way toward me, but the lobby was packed with ten people I hadn’t seen before, not even when we searched the motel room by room. Two men were pleading with the clerk, trying to finagle a room. A cluster of young children clung to the pant legs of their mothers or moped around the lobby looking as exhausted and beleaguered as the adults did.
Tessa circumnavigated the crowd. “What’s up?” she said.
“How are you?”
“Hungry.”
One of the men at the counter pulled out his wallet. “We can all share one room,” he offered. “And we’ll pay you for two.” But the dark-haired guy who’d caught Tessa’s eye just shook his head apologetically. “There’s nothing available. I’m sorry.”
I nodded toward them. “What’s the story here?”
“They were stranded in the storm, I guess. Agent Jiang said she wanted to talk to you about that. She just got back a little bit ago.” Tessa looked at me expectantly. “Mostly I’ve been hanging out with Amber.”
“So you two got a chance to get to know each other?”
“We seemed to hit it off. We talked for a while.”
I sensed she was hinting at something. “And what did you talk about?”
“Movies. God. Drugs. Guys.”
“You talked about drugs?”
“She’s a pharmacist,” Tessa explained, then added suggestively, “It was mostly guys. Relationships.”
If this had anything to do with my past with Amber, it was not something I wanted to chat about. “Fair enough.” I gazed around the lobby. “So where’s Lien-hua?”
“Follow me.”
Squall was staring at the building’s cement floor. “You’re sure they’ll still have electricity down there?” he asked Solstice.
She could hardly believe she was hearing this. “Everything is run by the generators on the command level.” She said into her mic, “Cyclone, Typhoon, Eclipse, on my mark.”
“Roger that,” came back the replies.
The people inside the building turned on their headlamps.
“Five,” she began. “Four… Three… Two… One-”
The overhead lights cut off.
“Outgoing and incoming radio signals are jammed,” Cyclone said beside her. “Once we’re down the shaft, I’ll take care of the unit-to-unit comm inside the base.”
A moment later Tempest’s voice came through Solstice’s headset. “It’s done.” But since the interior of the building was already dark, it wasn’t exactly a noteworthy announcement.
“Good,” Solstice told him. “Come back inside and let’s get ready to go down.”
With the electricity out, the maintenance building was now illuminated only by the streaks of light shining from her team’s headlamps.
Solstice aimed hers at the sedan.
Their means of getting into the base.
I stepped into Natasha and Lien-hua’s room while Tessa waited for me in mine. Lien-hua was there, Natasha was gone.
“I had no idea that Jake was going to do that,” Lien-hua said apologetically, “to follow you. When he left he just told us he needed to check on something.”
“Honestly, I don’t really blame him. If I was in his place, I probably would’ve done the same thing. I’m just glad Alexei’s behind bars, but I hope it didn’t harm our chances of finding Kayla.”
For a moment neither of us spoke; it seemed to be a way of honoring Kayla’s plight. Then I told Lien-hua about Torres and the SWAT guys, we exchanged cell phones so that we each had our own once again, and I returned her Glock to her. “What else do we know?” I asked.
She ticked off the items one by one on her fingers. “Natasha’s with Linnaman at the morgue. Jake’s in his room making some calls. I didn’t see anything unusual out there by the ELF site.” She sighed. “Doesn’t surprise me, though. If there is anything there, it’s not going to be sitting out in the open.”
“True,” I acknowledged, “but we needed to have a look.”
“It’s possible that the ELF connection is just a red herring.”
Yes, it was possible, but the farther we moved into this case, the less likely that seemed. “I’d like to visit the area myself in the morning.”
A nod. “Listen, some state troopers found two families of stranded tourists out on the highway. They brought ’em here to the motel.”