The man in the white parka had a name—Dominic—but his employers didn’t know it. Maybe they had a nickname for him, or more likely a number, but if so they never addressed him by it. They didn’t address him at all. They just called and gave him instructions. They were the only ones who knew the number for the blue cell phone.
That phone had rung last night while Dominic was painting the den in his condo in Santa Fe. A nice rich green that contrasted well with the white trim and the walnut desk. Dominic set the roller in the tray and answered before the ringtone reached the first drumbeat of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Dominic listened as the caller spoke, committing everything to memory, then hung up and went to his closet and opened the cavity behind the back wall. He selected a white parka with battery-powered heating good for twelve hours of lying still in the cold, and a matte-white Remington 700 with a four-power scope. Two minutes later he was in his car en route to the private terminal at Santa Fe County Municipal.
Now he was lying prone in the snow five hundred feet above and half a mile east of Ouray, Colorado. He lay at the pinched, far end of a valley that rose from the town’s outskirts. The town looked like a snow globe village, its streetlights casting cones in the big papery flakes that were coming down. A halo of light-bleed surrounded Ouray itself—a barrier of visual warmth against the dark.
Dominic lay far outside that warmth, out in the deep, empty night.
So did the cabin he was watching.
He put his eye to the scope and panned across the windows. A pale glow rimmed the blinds at one of them—maybe a fluorescent light in a laundry room left on all night. Every other window was dark. There was a mercury lamp on a post in the front yard, though its glow served only to make the cabin appear lonelier. Only two other structures stood in the valley: a low-slung ranch and a mobile home, both tucked in close to town. The cabin was on its own.
Dominic raised his eye from the scope and looked at his watch. Not quite five in the morning. He’d taken position just after midnight. Nothing about the cabin had changed since then. Daylight was two hours away, but it would present no problem when it came. Dominic would remain invisible, and so would the five-man team he knew was lying much closer to the place—probably within forty yards of the front door.
Chapter Seven
They landed at Telluride Regional and rented a Jeep using the perfect false identities that, in recent years, all Tangent personnel traveled under. Travis drove. They rolled into Ouray from the north at a quarter to six in the morning, the still-dark streets of the town all but empty.
Travis swung left off of Main Street onto the valley road that led to Rebecca Hunter’s address. He thought he could see the place already, high in the darkness above town. A cabin in a little pool of light, seeming almost to float in the void. The emptiness around the place disquieted him on some level. His hand went to the shape of the SIG Sauer P226 holstered beneath his jacket. In his peripheral vision he thought he saw Paige do the same.
There were entities they could’ve brought along to make this trip less dangerous, but Tangent rarely sanctioned taking Breach technology outside Border Town. The risk was obvious: if things went badly, the entities could end up in someone else’s hands. It’d happened before, with one of the most dangerous things ever to emerge from the Breach: a full-body suit that rendered its wearer perfectly transparent in every kind of light. The resulting misery and violence had plagued Tangent for years before they recovered the damned thing—no one wanted to go through it again.
“Wonder if she’s an early riser,” Paige said.
“She is today, like it or not.”
They pulled into the cabin’s drive sixty seconds later, the headlights sweeping over a landscape of low evergreen shrubs and scattered pines, all shrouded by a four-inch layer of snow. Travis killed the lights and the engine and they got out. Their feet crunched on gravel beneath the powder.
The cabin was single-story, closer to small than big. Maybe two bedrooms in there, depending on their size. No sign of movement yet. There was a light at one window, but Travis had seen that long before they pulled in. If Rebecca—Carrie—had noticed their arrival, it wasn’t evident from out here.
There was an older model Ford F–150 nosed up against the place, matching the description in the DMV registration. Its tire tracks, all but erased by the night’s snowfall, led back out to the road.