And then there’s the mountain. A mountain covered with long slopes of pines and redwoods where they could be doing god knows what to Luke far from anyone who could hear.

“Why did they take him, Tommy?” she asks.

“They want to find out what he knows.”

“And then what?”

“Make sure he never tells anyone.”

She was about to release the top of Tommy’s skull, but this news keeps her hand in place.

“How are they going to do that?” she asks.

“I don’t know. But you better get there before they do. Milo’s . . . intense.”

“Intense?”

“Sick. He’s . . . sick. On the inside.”

“You better hope I do, too, Tommy, because we’re not the police.”

She gets to her feet, backs away, and pulls the bed away from the door by one hand.

When she steps into the hallway, several flashlight beams hit her face at once. They outline the barrels of at least two guns she can see; one’s real big.

“Looks like someone has a secret stash,” Cole Graydon says.

“Back up,” Charley says.

Cole says, “Why don’t we take a breath and just—”

“Back the fuck up! Right now!”

Just then, the lights throughout the house flicker back on. There are hums and whirs, and even a few warning beeps, as power meets appliances in every room of the house. Now she can clearly see Cole and two of the security team members who brought him to the boat launch earlier today. They’re standing just a few feet away from her. The younger of the two holds a formidable-looking shotgun aimed right at her chest, but his stance makes clear he’s more interested in defending his boss than taking her down. The older balding guy’s got his Glock out.

In the sudden glare, none of them looks as confident as Cole first sounded in the dark. As for the man himself, he’s winded and glassy-eyed. It’s the first time she’s seen him truly frightened.

“They have Luke,” she says, as if she’s speaking to dumb children. “They have Luke because you either fucked up or lied to us. You told us we were safer here than anywhere, and now those sick fucks have Luke, and they killed Lacey Shannon a few hours ago.”

Nobody says anything.

“Get out of my way,” she says. “Get out of my way or I’ll blow this whole thing apart.”

“What are you going to do, Charley?”

“I’m going to get him back.”

“What are you going to do to get him back?” Cole sounds gentle, conciliatory. She gets his meaning. He’d probably show her a picture of Richard Davies’s corpse right now if he could. But he can’t. So he better get the hell out of her way.

“Whatever it takes,” she says.

Cole nods, reaches out to the shotgun held by the guy next to him, and encourages him to lower it with several quick taps on the barrel.

“No matter what happens, I’ll clean up the mess,” he says quietly. “It’s the least I can do.”

She takes a step. Shotgun Guy lowers his weapon. The older man with the Glock takes a few steps back, but he keeps his aim on her. His right shoulder looks like it’s magnetized to Cole’s left one. She takes another step, then another, then at the last second, she spins, bringing her face as close to Cole’s as it’s ever been. To his credit, he doesn’t flinch or look away.

“The very least,” she whispers.

Then she’s out of the house. Outside, everything seems normal, except for the fact that the driver’s side door is missing from her car. The two plainclothes security guards are both engaged in cheerful-sounding conversations with different neighbors, probably delivering some bullshit story about what all the fuss was about earlier.

She slides behind the wheel of her Volvo and peels off into the night.

39

Jordy’s willing to die for this, he realizes. He’s been crouching in the brush for a while when this realization sweeps over him with the quiet, bone-filling certainty of God’s truth.

Before he started on the road to righteousness, he had nothing but disdain for the suicide bomber’s rush toward martyrdom. He thought it vainglorious, lazy. Arrogant. Who was he to determine that God only had one job for him? Strap a bunch of explosives to your chest the first time out, and you were just letting yourself off the hook for a lifetime’s worth of ministry. To be truly faithful, he was sure, was to lead the longest and most productive life you could.

But now he gets it. It isn’t arrogance. It’s pure faith meeting desperation. Hidden in the shadows just uphill from the seismic stations and the storage shed, waiting for possible invaders, Jordy Clements feels like he’s inhaling the suicide bomber’s despair, their sense of being cornered, of having no time left to enact God’s will on earth.

The only thing he can be proud of in this moment is that he made all his foot soldiers abandon the clearing and the storage shed after Tommy Grover didn’t come back from the Prescott snatch. That was a smart move, even if Milo thought he was overreacting.

He also ordered Bradley Kyle, their best driver, to evac with the black Econoline van that’s been their main transport all day. Bradley’s the one who brought all the foot soldiers up from town before Jordy and Milo went and picked up Henricks; he’s also the one who brought Jordy and Milo back up the mountain after they dropped off Milo’s truck. Now he’s heading over the mountain and then south on PCH, putting as much distance between him and Altamira as possible.