‘Landlord?’
‘It’s a woman. She spends most of her time down in Baja.’
‘Huh.’
The pit bull started barking. Reaper walked over to its run and knelt down. It came over and licked at his hand through the wire mesh. ‘I know how you feel, brother,’ he said to the dog. Then he turned back to Chance. ‘Some guard dog.’
Chance smiled. ‘Never seen him do that before.’ She turned towards the house. ‘We’ll have to go in the back way.’
He glanced at the front door. ‘You rigged it?’
She nodded. ‘There’s an old fire road about four hundred yards back. I have another truck parked back there. Keys are in the ignition.’
He smiled. ‘Man, I taught you well.’
‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’
They headed round to the back of the property. Chance opened the door and they walked straight into the kitchen.
‘If you want to get some rest, there’s a bedroom through there.’
Reaper stretched out. ‘No, I spent enough of my life sleeping.’
Chance crossed to the refrigerator, reached in, came up with a six-pack of Coors and tossed it over. He caught it one-handed, ripped off a can and held it up against his forehead, just like in a commercial.
‘You know how long it’s been since I had me a cold one?’
Chance frowned, her throat tight. ‘Ten years. Three months. And fourteen days.’
Reaper studied the floor. ‘I’m sorry, Freya.’
She forced herself to perk up. Here was her father, a hero to the cause who’d sacrificed the best years of his life, and on his first day of freedom she was busting his balls.
‘You’ve got nothing to apologize for,’ she said.
‘Wasn’t a day went by that I didn’t think of you.’
Her father ripped the beer open and offered it to her.
‘I’d better not,’ she said.
‘That’s right. I forgot. You been getting sick yet?’
‘First couple of months. I’m over it now.’
Reaper sat down at the small circular kitchen table. He took a sip. ‘You have no idea how good that tastes. Listen, I ain’t been around and you’re a grown woman, but the daddy…’
Chance could feel herself flush. ‘One-night stand. He was white. That’s all you got to worry about.’
‘I wasn’t worried.’
‘Hang on there for a second.’ She walked into the living room, reappearing a moment or two later with a couple of Gap bags. ‘I got you some clothes. Everything you asked for.’ He started to empty them, laying out a selection of pants and underwear. He unfolded a couple of casual business shirts. ‘Long-sleeved. Perfect.’ It was the same uniform the members of the AB had worn to court — dress-down office casual, verging on the geeky.
‘And nothing blue,’ Chance added. ‘I figured you might be sick of blue.’
Reaper drained the last of his beer. ‘You got that right. I’m going to jump in the shower. Then I’m going to try on some of these brand-new duds.’
‘I’ll show you your room.’
In his room, the TV was on with the sound down. There was a live update from outside what was left of the Federal Building in Medford. The reporter was the blonde. It had to be that asshole Lock’s girlfriend, Carrie something.
‘Hey, turn it up.’
Chance picked up the clicker which was resting on the arm of a chair and maxed out the volume.
Onscreen, Lock’s girlfriend was talking with someone back in the studio.
‘So far, authorities are staying tight-lipped, but it’s believed that the group which last night staged the most violent and audacious jailbreak in America’s history are also the same people responsible for the death of ATF agent Kenneth Prager and two subsequent bombings of the Federal Buildings in Los Angeles and San Francisco.’
The guy in the studio cut in. ‘Let me interrupt you for a moment there, Carrie. Do the authorities have any idea who these people are?’
Lock’s girlfriend shook her head. ‘Not as yet. But they are saying that because of the tactics they deployed they believe at least some of these individuals are well equipped and highly dangerous, perhaps even former members of the military.’
Reaper clicked the mute button with relish. ‘Big bang. Helicopter. Lot of guys with guns. That’s all they’ve got.’ He hit the button again.
‘It’s now clear that what we face in the hours and days ahead will be the largest ever manhunt to take place on American soil.’
Reaper clicked off the TV. ‘With what I’ve got planned, they’re gonna have bigger problems than finding little old me.’
Chance frowned. ‘What you got in mind?’
‘A holy war,’ he said, solemnly. ‘Blood flowing through the streets. It’s gonna make ’68 look like a picnic.’
Part Two
40
The van was gone, spirited away for forensic investigation. Four pads of melted rubber from its tires marked out the rectangle where Jalicia had died. Spent shell casings and shards of broken glass lay scattered among tree limbs torn away by the storm. The building itself was still standing, though showing visible scars from the events of the previous night. Blinds dangled from glassless windows and charred, sooty tongues licked up its external walls where small fires had taken hold, discoloring the structure’s normally white facade.
The media were here too, in even greater numbers than the night before, their satellite vans, honey wagons and production trucks making up a small village across from the Federal Building. Lock could see Carrie among them, delivering a piece to camera, still awake, running on the adrenalin of the night before.
Accompanied by Coburn, he stepped back into the lobby. The morning light had offered up one final surprise from last night’s events, and he wanted to see it for himself.
They worked their way up the stairs towards the penultimate floor, which contained the prison’s main holding area. Construction workers were already busy sifting through the debris and shoring up what was left of the roof and internal ceiling with heavy-duty props. Forensic techs flitted among them, or stood chatting in huddles, seemingly unsure of where the hell to start.
This wasn’t your typical crime scene, Lock reflected, where a single fiber or hair would offer up a debonair and otherwise flawless killer. This had been a bold, brazen, in-your-face massacre-slash-hostage extraction, the tactics copycatted from similar jailbreaks staged by groups like the Taliban.
‘They’re in here,’ Coburn said, nodding towards a door on their left-hand side. ‘I should warn you, it’s pretty grisly.’
Lock shrugged. Seeing Ty shot on the yard and Jalicia’s charred corpse sitting upright in the van hadn’t exactly been a bundle of laughs. Grisly he was used to. Grisly he could cope with. It was losing that he struggled with.
And that, sure as hell, was what this felt like. Reaper had played all of them, yet he was the one who’d sensed it coming, and chosen not to be more strident about his concerns. You could call it gut instinct, or a sixth sense, but he knew that what it really was was the mind putting everything together, but not in a clear enough way that you could articulate it. You just knew that things were off, and he had known this ever since Jalicia showed him the footage of Prager, that they were all — her, Coburn, Ty, him — being drawn into a web. He had also sensed that
