Smoke

She was feeling disoriented and her heart was still chugging. But something was bugging her, nudging at her consciousness. She could see the look on Jeffrey’s face, too. Blank but eyes slightly narrowed, trained on Dax.

How did Dax know where they were? Was it her imagination or did he seem to know where they were going?

“About a half an acre west of here, there’s a wall that we can get over and get out of here,” said Dax.

“No,” she said. “We’re not leaving without Lily.”

He looked at her. “Do you understand what’s happening here?” he asked her. There was something cold in his tone she’d never heard before. She didn’t like it.

“No, I don’t, Dax. Why don’t you tell me?” she said, turning to him, moving in closer.

She felt Jeffrey’s hand on her arm. “We should do this later,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

“We have to find Lily,” said Lydia.

“Look at the reality here,” said Dax. “The place is burning. Every building in this compound is on fire. FBI and ATF are all over the place.”

The sky exploded with light and the chopping blades of a helicopter. Lydia felt her hair whip around her, and she covered her eyes, squinting against the brightness of the spotlight that shone through the trees directly on them.

“Drop your weapons and get down on the ground.” It sounded like the voice of God coming down from the sky. But it was really just someone in full body armor with the big letters ATF printed on his chest. Still, Lydia figured it behooved them to listen. He had a gun trained on them-a very big scary-looking gun much like the one Dax was carrying. A moment later, four other men in body armor emerged from the trees around them, their faces obscured behind the Plexiglas masks of their helmets.

Jeffrey and Lydia exchanged looks and did what they were told.

What? I can’t hear you?” Lydia yelled. She wasn’t trying to be obnoxious; she really couldn’t hear very well. Maybe she was trying to be a little obnoxious, but given what the FBI was trying to pull she figured they deserved it.

The young agent who was questioning her looked annoyed. They sat together in the back of a van that was mercifully air-conditioned, just the two of them, on two metal chairs he had provided. She didn’t know where Dax and Jeff were; she imagined they were in two other vans somewhere close by. The agent had given her an ice pack when she’d complained of a pain in her ribs and then he’d started questioning her. She wasn’t worried until he started acting like he didn’t know Agent Grimm.

“Did he show you any identification?” the kid yelled at her. He was a kid, maybe not even twenty-five. He had the fleshy, earnest face of the very young and wore the look that milk-fed people have before they’ve experienced the rest of the world, before they’ve realized that 95 percent of people are living in poverty and chaos, that hatred reigns and justice is in short supply. But maybe Lydia was just feeling bitter.

“Yes,” she said more quietly. “He showed us his shield and identification.” He’d flashed it, actually. She hadn’t inspected it closely, mainly because they had guns that she recognized as Glocks, pretty standard law-enforcement equipment.

“You got a close look at it?”

She shrugged. “Close enough.”

“Close enough?”

“Close enough to be convinced. He was out of shape and wore a bad suit. He had a crappy attitude and a kind of annoying self-righteousness to him that just screamed FBI.”

Agent Gary Hunt ignored her comment, to his credit, and scribbled something in a black notebook.

The doors to the van were closed but through the rear windows she could see that the fire at the New Day Farms still raged; she could smell burning wood and hear the hiss of the chemical spray firefighters were using to quell the blaze. They were a safe distance from the scene now, but the occasional shout and bursts of gunfire carried through the air. The New Day compound was a war zone, another Waco in progress, and they were a part of that. Maybe the biggest part, since the Feds were using them as their reason for invading the compound. And for all Lydia knew, Lily Samuels was somewhere inside. Failure sat in her stomach like a piece of lead. Lydia still felt herself start to shiver slightly from a cold that seemed to come from deep inside her center and spread out through her veins to the rest of her body.

The kid ran a hand through a thick, silky shock of jet-black hair.

“Okay,” he said. “You, Mr. Mark, and Mr. Bond are private investigators. You were following leads on the disappearance of a girl.” He stopped and checked his notes. “Lily Samuels. You were planning on gaining entry to the New Day Farms to search for her when someone claiming to be an FBI agent named Grimm approached you and your associates. He told you that Lily Samuels was working for him when they lost contact with her. He wanted you to go in and try to retrieve Lily Samuels and provide proof that The New Day was stockpiling weapons so that the resultant publicity would make it possible for them to take down an illegal organization that was being protected by highranking members of the government.”

“She could still be in there,” said Lydia. “There could be an innocent girl in there.”

Her desperation was making her loud but Agent Hunt didn’t say anything; he just looked at her like he was trying to figure out what her angle might be.

“A lot of the people in there could be innocent. Brainwashed, trapped. Do you understand?” she said when he remained silent.

He shook his head, wrote something in his little notebook. She took a deep breath, tried to chill out a little, trying to quell the combination of anger and anxiety doing battle in her chest.

“Okay,” she said, trying to sound calmer. “If he wasn’t a federal agent the way you seem to be implying, then how did you know we were in there? Why did you come in after us?”

“We’ve had the compound under surveillance for about six months, gathering evidence in preparation for a raid scheduled next month,” he said. “We heard gunfire and explosions, then a fire broke out. We had to move in tonight or never.”

“How convenient. So you’re claiming that the gunfire, explosions, and fire all started before you ever stepped foot onto the farm.”

“You’re saying different?” he asked, and something in his voice sounded cold as steel to her. He suddenly didn’t seem so young.

She paused, looked at the ceiling above her.

“I fell down a hole, lost consciousness, and woke up in a concrete cell,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes. “I don’t know what happened.”

“So you say,” he said, returning her gaze.

Uh-oh, Lydia thought. Time to shut up.

“Lawyer,” she said quietly. The kid gave her a look.

“Give me a break,” he said, like she was asking him to fetch her a cup of coffee.

She pressed her mouth into a thin, tight line and crossed her arms in front of her chest, causing herself a surprisingly sharp pain in her ribs. She shook her head to indicate that she wouldn’t be saying another word.

He held her eyes for a moment and was too young to hide his exasperation. He got up suddenly and marched away from her, exited the rear of the van and locked the doors behind him.

She leaned back in her chair and suddenly wished she had a better knowledge of the Patriot Act. How long could they hold them without evidence and without charge? She started to wonder if maybe “stubborn smart-ass” wasn’t the best tack to take. She wondered what Dax and Jeffrey had said and how much trouble they were all in. What she needed to do, she figured, was to call Striker and have him send down one of the firm’s lawyers. Or maybe more than one. Three lawyers. They were going to need three.

These were the things on her mind when the chrome handles on the rear door of the van started to turn and one of them opened, letting in a swath of humid air. Lydia sat up in her seat and was about to start getting loud about wanting to call her lawyer, when she saw a face she didn’t expect step into view. All the words she had been planning to say deserted her, died between her throat and her mouth.

“Hi,” said a painfully thin young girl with her hair shorn close to her head.

Something came alive in Lydia, something that was hope and elation, anger and confusion in one ugly tumble.

“Lily,” she breathed. Her lost girl found.