went to find him.”
“But they caught him.”
“Yes,” Tucker said.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know yet. He wouldn’t give us his name. My men are bringing him here right now.”
“Into the facility?” Mr. Rose did not sound happy.
“I can question him here, and we can run his prints through the system.”
“Do a complete scan of him before you bring him down,” Mr. Rose said. “Understand me? We can’t chance anything jeopardizing the operation.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Not ‘okay, sure’! It should not even be an option. You should have already thought of that.”
“Of course,” Tucker said. He’d known his mistake even as he’d spoken the words. He tried to do a little damage control. “It’s standard operating procedure is all I mean. We’ll definitely do it.”
“That’s not what it sounded like.”
“I apologize if I was unclear.”
“You were,” Mr. Rose said.
No one spoke for several seconds.
“Was there more, Mr. Tucker?”
“No,” Tucker said. “That was it.”
“Give me a full report when you are done talking to him.”
“Of course.”
“Come on, come on, come on.” The words were more in Quinn’s head than spoken.
He and Nate had crawled to within a foot of the gate. It was built like the fences, horizontal wires about half a foot apart. And while it looked like it could also be electrified, it wasn’t humming like the double fence that converged to meet it.
“Come on,” he whispered again.
Getting to the other side should have been simple. They should have been able to slip through the deactivated fence while the others were inside with their prisoner. The problem was that one of the guards had decided it was a good time to take a leak. And even though he had finished, he was taking his sweet time zipping up and rejoining his friends inside.
Each second longer meant it was a second closer to more of the guards coming back outside. Perhaps they would take the prisoner through the gate and to the Yellowhammer facility. Maybe even after they were gone, someone would flip a switch turning on the power to the gate. Quinn’s best chance was to move now, before any of that could occur, but the son of a bitch seemed to be enjoying a little alone time.
Finally, the guard finished up and went back inside.
He glanced at the window. No one seemed to be keeping tabs on the outside. What was inside was more interesting to them at the moment.
He gave Nate a quick nod, then crawled forward into the pale light that illuminated the gate. Once he was moving he didn’t stop. He pushed his backpack to the other side first, then squeezed between the wires. They were pretty taut, but they gave enough to let him through. Nate followed right behind him.
Once they’d both made it, they ran in a crouch down the road until they found a good spot from which to keep an eye on the gate. Turned out their precautions were unnecessary. It was another ten minutes before the door to the guardhouse opened again. This time, though, it wasn’t another pee break. It looked like the whole squad had come out, and with them the prisoner.
The gate opened and the group passed through. They continued down the road, passing less than a dozen feet away from Quinn and Nate’s position.
Once they’d gone by, Nate looked at Quinn, his eyebrows raised in a question.
Quinn nodded.
Without a word, they began to follow.
The elevator let Tucker out in a secure room at ground level. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, they were all concrete, and at least two feet thick, built to withstand a direct, pre–nuclear era attack. Of course, these days you wouldn’t need an atomic bomb to do the job. A single bunker buster would destroy the whole facility.
Tucker pressed his palm against the security-release pad next to the door, and was greeted with the gentle whoosh of the lock releasing.
Tucker entered the main part of the structure. From the outside it looked like a small one-room cinderblock hut built in a small clearing between piles of boulders. Most people would mistake it for something left over from one of the handful of failed mines that were spread through the Alabama Hills.
Inside, there was another palm reader near the exterior door, and on the wall above it, a ten-inch television monitor. Tucker touched the power button on the monitor, and the feed from a camera mounted on the cabin’s roof appeared. It provided a wide shot of the entire visible area in front of the cabin, and since it was in night vision mode, everything was in tones of green.
Tucker’s men had just come out of the dry wash to the left and were seventy-five feet away, on the other side of the road. Tucker scanned the hills behind them. He didn’t expect to see anyone, but he had a hard time believing
