“Nothing stirring over here,” Black said softly in my ear. We used satellite technology for operations like this, and our headsets linked to each other as well as to Alaric and the team at Blackwood’s headquarters.
“Quiet here too.”
“Pale’s going in for a closer look.”
I switched my scope to thermal and saw his shadowy form melt out of the treeline. It seemed unlikely Ridley would have access to the same technology—jacking a car was one thing, but finding a handy-dandy military-grade scope right after he escaped from jail? Surely not.
Even so, I was tense as Pale approached the building.
Why didn’t we just use thermal imaging to see who was inside, you ask? Because this wasn’t the movies, and that shit didn’t work in real life. Infrared couldn’t see through walls. It couldn’t even see through glass. For that, we’d need a handheld radar system, something like a RANGE-R or a Xaver. Did we have one? Yes. The problem was that they had a limited detection range—twenty metres max, depending on what kind of barrier was between the target and the device—and they worked best if you were right up next to the wall. Pale couldn’t use it, not right away. He couldn’t afford to get distracted so close to potential danger.
“Someone’s been here in the last day or two,” he said, pausing at the corner nearest to me. “There’s flattened vegetation. Syringes too. Could’ve been junkies.”
“Any sign of life?”
“No. I’ll try the radar, but there’s a basement.”
Which we’d have to check out in person. Another quarter-hour passed before we considered it safe to approach, and the only signs of life we’d seen were the aforementioned rats, skittering across the front steps and running up the walls.
We’d drilled through building clearances a thousand times in the kill-house at HQ, and it seemed Pale had a training facility somewhere too. The four of us stacked up outside the front door, a pair on each side. When we went in, two of us would break left, two would break right, and we’d sweep the building, being careful not to cross fields of fire. Our primary goal at that point was to neutralise Ridley.
And we’d have achieved it if he’d been there.
There was evidence of his presence—food wrappers, empty drinks bottles, a sleeping bag—but no sign of the man himself.
Black and Pale materialised through the basement door. While Ana and I had searched upstairs, they’d done downstairs.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Somebody was imprisoned down there, and recently. We found empty jars, water bottles, a copy of today’s Washington Post, and a sweater that looks the right size for Bethany.”
Shit. Had we just missed them? If so, where were they? Ridley hadn’t moved them by car. Not only was the Toyota still there, but we hadn’t seen any fresh tyre tracks and our campsite buddies swore they hadn’t seen another vehicle heading in this direction.
“They must be in the forest,” Ana said, coming to the same conclusion as me.
Black waved a hand at Pale. “After you.”
Picking up a trail was hard enough in daylight, and to this day, I didn’t know how Pale managed to find the spot where our quarry had gone into the woods. He’d just stared at the trees, at the barely penetrable wall of black and grey and said, “There.”
I saw the occasional footprint, half washed away in the mud, but for the most part, I just followed, staying alert for Ridley and careful to leave a ten-metre gap between Pale in front and Ana behind. Black brought up the rear.
“Three people came through,” Pale said. “Two females in tennis shoes, one male in boots. They were all running.”
“Do the sizes of the women fit Bethany and Rune?” Black asked.
“I’d say so, yes.”
The going was slow. Rain hammered down, splashing through the tree canopy in big, messy drops, reducing visibility and threatening to wash away any clues. It was a race against time. We took several wrong turns and had to backtrack, and although I didn’t let on to anyone else because Alaric was still listening in, I began to worry that we were too late. The Smokies covered hundreds of thousands of acres. If we lost the trail, it’d be like hunting for a contact lens in the ocean.
Pale stopped at the top of a near-vertical slope. Even I could see the broken branches, the crushed leaves where someone or something had crashed through. Fucking hell. They went down there?
He responded to my unasked question. “Pass the rope.”
We hadn’t gone much farther when Pale stilled. Not the “let me work out which way” hesitation I’d seen from him several times, but the instant rigidity of “fuck, there’s a problem.” I raised my scope and looked past him.
What the…? Was that Ridley? Judging by the size and body shape, it was definitely a man, and who the hell else would be running around in the wilderness at this time of night? Well, not running, exactly. He was just lying on the ground face up, arms by his sides. A ploy to lure us closer? Or was he injured?
I followed Pale’s lead and faded back into the trees, and we covered the last forty metres at a snail’s pace, careful not to make the slightest sound. I could feel Black and Ana behind me, but I couldn’t hear them or see them.
A branch cracked. I resisted the urge to whip my head around and turned slowly instead, gun raised, finger hovering over the trigger. Did Ridley have an accomplice? After he’d killed two of his men, I’d kind of figured the rest would bug out.
Two eyes stared back at me. The interloper shared many characteristics with Ridley’s goons—he was ugly, hairy, and he
