team would eventually come at her from both sides, outflanking her.
That must not happen.
Besides, she had to keep the commando team's attention on her while Gray freed Monk. So she sprinted toward the window on this side of the cabin. She raised her rifle and fired three rounds at the panes, striking the glass in a perfect triangle pattern. With the glass weakened, she leaped up, kicked out with her boot, and hurdled through the window. The rest of her body followed. She landed smoothly inside, sliding and skating atop the broken glass, keeping on her feet.
She raised her rifle while still moving.
She had burst into the cabin's main room and had a clear view to the window on the far side. A soldier stared at her, momentarily frozen. She fired-
She dove to the side, seeking the shelter of a cast-iron stove.
A rifle barrel shoved through the broken window and blindly strafed inside. Seichan ignored it, merely waited, centering her aim. A head poked into view, checking for damage. She fired only once this time. A body tumbled past the window.
With her back to the wall and the stove for shelter, she readied to make a stand. Hopefully she'd bought Gray the time he needed.
Then a grenade flew into the room and bounced across the floor.
It looked like she'd overstayed her welcome.
7:09 A.M.
Bent to peer under the raised front bucket, Gray rode past the cabin as an explosion blew out its windows and tore the door off its hinges. Smoke rolled out. He fumbled with his gears in surprise and worry.
Silence fell over the battlefield for a heartbeat-then the noise resumed. Two men popped around the cabin's corner. Monk strafed from his advantage atop his steel castle tower, balancing the front of his rifle between two teeth of the front loader. A third assailant threw a grenade from where the commandos were hiding, lobbing it over the roof toward the backhoe.
But they didn't know that Monk was an expert sharpshooter-or how pissed he was about getting tagged in the gut. Monk swiveled his weapon and pinged the grenade as if he were shooting skeet. It fell back behind the cabin. Another explosion blew back there, casting up dirt and smoke. A helmet rolled into view. It wasn't empty. Screams followed.
Then gunfire.
It sounded like a brief firefight-a one-sided firefight.
After a moment, through the smoke, a figure appeared.
Seichan, covered in blood and with her clothes still smoldering, crossed into view. She must have dived out a back window as the grenade inside the cabin blew. She pointed toward the parking lot. She wasn't indicating that it was time to go. A single figure remained, standing next to a Humvee.
Mitchell Waldorf.
The traitor turned toward the vehicle, but Monk was one step ahead of him. From his perch, he took out the truck's tires and drove Waldorf back from the vehicle. If they could capture him alive-a Guild operative buried deep in the government-he could prove to be invaluable, a resource capable of exposing much about the workings of the organization.
Waldorf must have realized the same thing.
He lifted a pistol to his chin.
Gray swore, goosed the backhoe for more speed. Seichan ran toward him. Waldorf smiled and shouted at them cryptically: 'This isn't over!'
The single pistol shot rang brightly.
The top of the man's head erupted in a blast of skull and brain matter. The body slumped to the pavement.
Still, the sight of the man's last smile stayed with Gray. A cold fear settled in his gut. What did the bastard mean?
7:19 A.M.
Ten minutes later, Gray and the others were speeding down the Natchez Trace Parkway in the second Humvee they'd stolen that day. They'd taken one of the assault team's vehicles, figuring they'd be less likely to be bothered that way. Plus, they needed the extra room.
Monk lay sprawled across the backseat, stripped to the waist, his belly bandaged in a pressure wrap from an emergency medical kit Gray had found in the back of the Army vehicle. Apparently the assault team had been expecting some injuries. He'd also found a morphine stick and jabbed Monk in the thigh with it.
His friend's eyes already had a happy glaze around their edges.
Seichan, with her cuts and lacerations taped, manned the wheel, leaving Gray to examine the buffalo hide. He'd fetched it from the grave before leaving. The leather was brittle, but he was able to unfold it, revealing an image of a riotous battle dyed into the skin, showing Indians in the midst of waging a great war. Thousands of arrows flew, each delicately but indelibly tattooed into the skin. Elsewhere, pueblos tumbled from cliffs. Faces, feathered and painted, screamed.
Gray remembered Kat's report from Painter, about the destruction of the Anasazi following the theft of sacred totems from the
This raised a larger question.
Gray had the buffalo hide open to the middle, spread over his lap. A large section was missing. He felt the surface with his fingers. It was much rougher.
'Lewis scraped this part of the artwork off the hide,' Gray said.
'Why?' Seichan asked.
'He's written something here in the blank space.'
He stared down at the meticulous lines of script, flowing in a large swatch down the middle. While everyone was tending his or her wounds, he had sponged off the old blood that still covered most of the hide. The iron in the hemoglobin had stained the skin, but the words he found there were still legible.
'Only it makes no sense,' he said. 'It's just a jumble of letters. Either it's a code, or Lewis really had gone mad.'
Seichan glanced down at the hide, then back to the road. 'Didn't Heisman say Lewis and Jefferson communicated in code? That they exchanged messages in their own private cipher.'
'That's true.'
Gray pictured Lewis dying over that long night, waiting for Mrs. Grinder to find him. He had plenty of time to write this last message to the world, but what did it contain? Did it name his killer? Was it his last will and testament?
Gray's fingers again rubbed the tough hide, where it had been crudely abraded. What did Lewis erase here? Along the edges, bits of what looked like a map remained: a corner of a river coursing down a mountain, some pass through another range, a piece of a lake. Was this a more detailed map of the terrain around the lost city of the
Gray put the bits together in his head. 'I think the traitor, General Wilkinson, killed Lewis for the gold tablet in
